The Sermon of the Wolf

As I have mentioned before, Medievalist Eleanor Parker is one of my favorite Twitter follows. She’s got a piece in Plough that’s worth your time, on a sermon by early medieval Archbishop of York Wulfstan:

This sermon is known as the “Sermo Lupi,” the “Sermon of the Wolf.” The title plays on Wulfstan’s own name, but it is also an apt characterization of the angry tone of his urgent message. In Anglo-Saxon culture, the wolf was the ultimate outsider: the archetypal outlaw, a dweller in the wilderness and on the borderlands. This title suggests that Wulfstan, at least on this occasion, embraced the wolf as a facet of his identity: it is not gentle preaching but the howl of a wild beast, coming out of the darkness. It’s meant to frighten you, to send a shiver down your spine.

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His message is simple: repent, repair, do better. There’s no pretense that it’ll be easy. “A great wound needs a great remedy,” he says, “and a great fire needs a great amount of water if the blaze is to be quenched.” The worse the situation, the more work and collective effort it will take to mend it. But the promise that it can be mended is, nonetheless, a remarkably hopeful takeaway from such a fierce and angry sermon. As a response to the threat of coming apocalypse, it’s almost optimistic. Wulfstan asserts a firm belief that doing what is right doesn’t cease to matter, even if time is running out. In fact, it matters more. Living in the shadow of the end of the world doesn’t involve giving up on life, but recommitting yourself to what is most precious about it. For Wulfstan, that means especially strengthening the bonds we share with other people – our families and communities, the vulnerable and the poor, those we trust, and those who need to be able to trust us.

Though directly confronting the problems of his own time, Wulfstan’s sermon speaks powerfully to our time as well. His picture of a society suffering from a breakdown of “truth,” in which both institutions and individuals have succumbed to corruption and self-interest, is uncomfortably familiar. So too is his warning that in the face of sustained crisis, a society can lose sight of what it values and believes to be true; fear and despair can make people do terrible things, sacrificing even what they hold most dear.

There is an emotional resonance in Wulfstan’s opening statement that the world is “in haste,” advancing towards its end at a frightening speed. Today, people often talk about feeling that the pace of life is speeding up, and we tend to attribute it to modern technology and rapid social change. Over the past two years especially, between political crises and pandemic and war, people have joked wryly that 2020–22 has felt like a decade or a century all rolled together. The problem is not really the speed at which things are happening, but the feeling that we can’t keep up with them. We struggle with the disparity between the pace at which events are unfolding around us and our ability to process them, mentally and emotionally – barely finished with one once-in-a-generation crisis, before we’re suddenly plunged into the next. It’s like being caught in a fast-flowing river, swept along by the stream, just trying to keep one’s head above water.

It seems the people of Wulfstan’s time felt the same. In their time and our own, this sense of haste can lead to feelings of helplessness or despair. If things move so fast, and they’re only going in one direction, what’s the point of trying to change what’s happening? But Wulfstan’s conclusion stresses action, the belief that there are still things worth doing and steps that we all can take. “Let us do what we need to do: turn toward the right and abandon wrongdoing, and earnestly atone for what we previously did wrong. And let us love God and follow God’s laws … and have loyalty between us without deceit.”

Here’s the text of the sermon.

And here’s a video, with the sermon in modern English, along with visuals: