Gripla - 20.12.2011, Page 102

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redemption, which is also what, in tropological terms, the Old German
poet has in mind.
To sum up the Vienna verse passage: the green and red of the rainbow
betoken the water and blood which flowed from Christ’s side. These cor-
respond in turn – allegorically – to the mixing of water and wine in Mass.
The tropological interpretation offered next refers to the remission of sins,
which are washed away by baptism and by tears of repentance. In point of
fact, water and blood are also mixed in relation to baptism and purification
from sins, as they were in the spring pouring from the wound in Christ’s
side: according to the Fathers, this water and this blood to gether mean
the Church’s sacraments, which lead the faithfuls towards Truth, and of
course cleanse from sins; moreover, they came to be expressely employed
in connection with the ark, where a door was opened in one side to let
in all the creatures destined to survive.101 Brian Murdoch, commenting
briefly on this passage in Wiener Genesis, rightly points out that “the whole
story of the flood is rounded off with the standard exegetical reference to
baptism”.102 But it may be worth suggesting that, exactly as in our Old
Icelandic text, baptism is here enclosed in the larger doctrinal frame of
penance, as the touching image of v. 736 (1472–73) makes clear (cf. die
riuwigen zahire gebent uns die touffe widere “the grieved drops give us the
baptism again”). This is – apart from the variation in colour-imagery – a
converging point for such apparently different traditions as the Wiener
Genesis and the Icelandic sermon fragment.
Baptism, for entering the Church community; then repentance of sins
through confession and penance, for remaining in the Church; and even-
tually martyrdom, the supreme form of penance in a full imitatio Christi,
for directly attaining eternal bliss, all together represent an easy abridged
version of every individual historia salutis, i.e. of how it is possible for
101 Cf. for example Augustinus, De civitate Dei 15, 26, in CSEL 40, 2, p. 117, ll. 11–14; Id.,
Tractatus in Ioannem 120, 2, in PL 35, col. 1935 AB; Bede, Hexaemeron 2, in PL 91, col.
90 A; Remigius of Auxerre, Comment. in Genesim 6, 16, in PL 131, col. 75 BC. Cf. also
Freytag, Die Theorie der allegorischen Schriftdeutung, 64 (especially the passage from Haymo
of Halberstadt’s Homilia 68 De tempore quoted in note 42 [223–224]). For this and for a
more general approach to the symbolic interpretations of Noah’s ark in Patristic writings,
see the whole chapter 8 in Hugo Rahner, Symbole der Kirche. Die Ekklesiologie der Väter
(Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1964).
102 Cf. Brian Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages
(Woodbridge-Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, 2003), 120.