Gripla - 01.01.1990, Síða 260

256
GRIPLA
liturgy,20 and with this prayer orientation the Christ symbolism of sol
iustitiae and sol salutis2' naturally aligned itself through exegesis. Hon-
orius Augustodunensis, a popular exegete in the northern Church,22
summed up the threefold reason for praying to the East in his Gemma
Animae I, 95:M
Una [sc., causa] est, quia in Oriente est patria nostra, scilicet
paradisus, unde expulsos nos dolemus. Orantes ergo contra
paradisum nos vertimus, quia reditum illius petimus. Alia est,
quia in Oriente surgit corpus coeli et lux diei. Ad Orientam
itaque nos vertimus, quia Christum, qui est oriens et lux vera,
nos adorare significamus, cujus debemus esse coeli, ut eius lux
in nobis velit oriri. Tertius [sic] est, quia in Oriente, sol oritur,
per quem Christus sol iustitiae exprimitur. Ab hoc promissum
habemus, quod in resurrectione ut sol fulgeamus. In oratione er-
go contra ortum solis vertimus nos, ut solem angelorum nos ad-
orare intelligamus, et ut ad memoriam nostrae gloriam resurrec-
tionis revocemus, cum solem, quem in Occidente quasi mori
conspeximus, tanta gloria resurgere in Oriente videmus.
To this syncretic complex of beliefs one ought to add the Church prac-
tice of facing the dying to the East, which in Antiquity was coeval with
praying to the East.24
Now, if with Björn M. Ólsen25 one reads stanzas 39^15 of Sólarljóð
as a description, pure and simple, of the sun setting in the western
ocean, stanza 41 will be discrepant from the Christianized solar myth
‘Quod fieri [i.e., bowing to the rising sun] partim ignorantiae vitio, partim paganitatis
spiritu, multum tabescimus et dolemus.’
20 Sol salulis, p. 256, with reference to Alcuin’s De Fide Sanctae el Individuae Trin-
itatis I, ii, 5, and Walafrid Strabo’s Liber de Exordiis et Incrementis Quarundam in Ob-
servationibus Ecclesiasticis Rerum 4.
21 As in two hymns quoted in Sol salutis, p. 381, the older of which may date to the
sixth century.
22 On his Scandinavian influence, see Paul Lehmann, Skandinaviens Anteil an der
lateinischen Literatur und Wissenschaft des Mittelalters II in Sitzsb. d. Bay. Ak. d. Wis-
sen., Phil.-hist. Abt. H.7, Munich 1937, p. 19, and Gabriel Turville-Petre, Origins of
Icelandic Literature, Oxford 1975, pp. 137-38.
23 MPL CLXXII, col. 575B, quoted by Dölger, p. 257.
24 Sol salutis, p. 260.
25 Sljð. II, pp. 41-44.