The Sentences On The Incarnation Of The Word

This volume makes available for the first time in English full translations of Book 2 of the Sentences. It consists of forty-four Distinctions and contains an introduction to Book 2, a list of the major chapter headings, and a bibliography.

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Book 3 of the Sentences deals with the mystery of the Word made flesh: Christ's incarnation, passion, and death, the consequent restoration of humankind, and the virtues to be practised in imitation of Christ.

This book presents an argument for the thesis that Jesus is the incarnation of the divine Son of God. This argument is based on the philosophical arguments (1)that God would become incarnate in order to make it possible for human persons to become sons of God, (2) that God would confirm that the divine Son of God had become incarnate in a specific individual human person, (3) that God would confirm this by an appropriate manifest miracle, (4) that the human person in whom the divine Son of God has become incarnate would claim to be the divine Son of God, (5) that the teaching and character of this human person would be consistent with what it would be reasonable to believe the teaching and character of God incarnate would be and the justified historical claims that (6) Jesus claimed to be the Son of God incarnate, (7) that his teaching and character were appropriate to God incarnate, and (8) that God raised Jesus from death, and thereby confirmed (9) that Jesus was the divine Son of God incarnate.

This rich study takes Insular art on its own terms, revealing a distinctive and unorthodox theology that will inevitably change how scholars view the long arc of English piety and the English literary tradition. Drawing on a wide range of critical methodologies, Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain treats this era as a “contact zone” of cultural clash and exchange, where Christianity encountered a rich amalgam of practices and attitudes, particularly regarding the sensible realm. Tiffany Beechy illustrates how local cultures, including the Irish learned tradition, received the “Word that was made flesh,” the central figure of Christian doctrine, in distinctive ways: the Word, for example, was verbal, related to words and signs, and was not at all ineffable. Likewise, the Word was often poetic—an enigma—and its powerful presence was not only hinted at (as St. Augustine would have it) but manifest in the mouth or on the page. Beechy examines how these Insular traditions received and expressed a distinctly iterable Incarnation. Often disavowed and condemned by orthodox authorities, this was in large part an implicit theology, expressed or embodied in form (such as art, compilation, or metaphor) rather than in treatises. Beechy demonstrates how these forms drew on various authorities especially important to Britain—Bede, Gregory the Great, and Isidore most prominent among them. Beechy’s study provides a prehistory in the English literary tradition for the better-known experimental poetics of Middle English devotion. The book is unusual in the diversity of its primary material, which includes visual art, including the Book of Kells; obscure and often cursorily treated texts such as Adamnán’s De locis sanctis (“On the holy lands”); and the difficult esoterica of the wisdom tradition.