4 - ‘The Stones of the Wall Will Cry Out’: Lithic Emissaries and Marble Messengers in Andreas

Summary

What is the value of a graven idol, because the maker has made it, a molten, and a false image? Because the maker has trusted in a thing of his own making, to make dumb idols. Woe to him who says to wood, ‘awake’, or to the dumb stone ‘arise’. Can it teach? Behold, it is covered with gold and silver, and there is no spirit within it. The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him.

(Habakkuk 2:18–20)

Thus writes the prophet Habakkuk, in terms that were echoed throughout Christendom in the Middle Ages, and are found in abundance in law codes and other prohibitions from early medieval England, condemning the veneration of, and donation of votive offerings to, wooden and stone idols. There are numerous supposedly inanimate objects whose voices were recognised in various contexts: in riddling texts, devotional works such as The Dream of the Rood, or as objects inscribed with words that validate their existence, such as the ‘Alfred’ Jewel or the Ruthwell Cross. This study focuses on a rare instance, in the Old English poem Andreas, in which Christ himself gives the power of speech and movement to a sculpted stone – a wall carving in the temple of Jerusalem – and in doing so offers a lesson to his disciple St Andrew about the didactic properties of this material, whose permanence echoes both Christ's eternity and the permanence of the heavenly kingdom.

The incident in the temple is shown in a flashback. Andrew is dispatched by God to the city-stronghold of Mermedonia to rescue St Matthew from the clutches of its cannibalistic, devil-worshipping inhabitants, who have imprisoned and plan to eat him. The voyage to Mermedonia takes place over the open seas, in a ship piloted by Christ, who has disguised himself as its helmsman. Though initially reluctant to undertake this mission, Andrew's confidence increases over the course of the journey, and he delights in recounting the (apocryphal) story of how Christ and the apostles visited the Temple in full force, and Christ demonstrated both his divinity and his human ancestry.