Plenty, Portents and Plague: Ecclesiastical Readings of the Natural World in Early Medieval Europe
Sarah Foot
Noli pater Father do not allow thunder and lightning, Lest we be shattered by its fear fire. We you, the terrible one, believing there is none like you. All songs praise you throughout host of angels. Let summits heaven, too, with roaming O most loving Jesus, righteous King Kings. (Thomas Owen Clancy Gilbert Márkus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry a Celtic Monastery , 85) Early medieval attitudes to natural world were distinctly ambivalent. At one level represented marvel God’s creative power; filled beauty, it supplied everything necessary for human existence, meriting praise, as in hymn sung herdsman from Whitby, Cædmon:
Studies in Church History