“I have known it colder”: The vision of Dryhthelm and the dead as witness

In his Historia Ecclesiastica (HE), Bede tells of an Englishman brought back from the dead to tell of what awaited the soul in the afterlife. Dryhthelm describes two places where souls are purified as well as the borders of hell and heaven. Bede says Dryhthelm’s vision was a miracle to “arouse the living from spiritual death” (HE 5.12), and this paper will show how the narrative connects with Bede’s moral reform agenda.

      This paper focuses on how, in Bede’s presentation of the dead as witness to the afterlife, we see a discourse over moral and monastic reform as well as the nature of judgement. Otherworld journeys are a feature of apocalypse literature, and this paper will examine how Bede uses the image to inspire contemporary reform: the vision has been seen by recent commentators such as Andrew Rabin as part of a process to make the reader an active witness in the conversion process. 

      This paper will explore how Bede’s use of journey imagery was intended to make his readers believe the afterlife was a real place, and that this is rooted in his belief, detailed in his Letter to Ecgbert, that the English had become spiritually corrupt. We will note the significance of Bede’s dating of the vision and the symbolism with which he invests Dryhthelm’s return to life. This will include its reflection of entering monastic life, as well as relating it to how Bede saw Christ’s raising of the dead as regenerating people dead in sin. 

Bede and the pastoral function of the vision of Dryhthelm

The eighth-century historian Bede tells of an Englishman who came back from the dead and told of what awaited the soul in the afterlife. Dryhthelm describes two places where souls are purified as well as the borders of hell and heaven.

In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede states that Dryhthelm’s resurrection was a miracle to “arouse the living from spiritual death”, and this paper will focus on how Dryhthelm’s vision is used by Bede to teach his audience about divine judgement and its aftermath. It will connect the Dryhthelm narrative with Bede’s wider moral reform agenda and his concerns regarding the end of the world. The paper will note the significance of Bede’s dating of the vision and the symbolism with which he invests the resurrection, as well as relating it to how Bede saw resurrections carried out by Christ as regenerating people dead in sin.

The paper will also explore if Bede’s use of journey imagery was part of his effort to make his readers believe that the afterlife was a very real place, and if it is rooted in his belief that the English had become spiritually corrupt and needed a second, deeper conversion to Christianity.

‘“The allegory of so lamentable a history”: The Old Testament influence on Bede’s understanding of apocalypse’

‘Judgement and history: Bede’s warnings to the English and their Old Testament parallels’

In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede presents the Anglo-Saxons as a new Israel. However, in his Letter to Ecgbert, Bede warns that the English have become spiritually corrupt and are in danger of destruction. The paper examines how Bede’s warnings of Northumbria’s potential devastation at the hands of barbarians parallels with how, in the Old Testament, the Israelites are judged and punished through historical, as opposed to cosmic, agents. This is often through invasions by outsiders or other such events.

Old Testament prophets such as Amos argued that social injustice and religious hypocrisy were enough to invite God’s wrath. But Bede would have known that Gildas, a British historian in the seventh century, had presented a similar cycle of sin and punishment in British history, and Bede would also have been aware that the Anglo-Saxons were perceived by Christian writers as God’s punishment for the sins of the Britons. The paper focuses on how Bede presents the English as having fallen into a similar condition as the Israelites before
judgements and the Britons before they were supplanted. It will explore how, based on his understanding of history as being influenced by God, Bede fears the same fate for his people.

The paper draws attention to how Bede puts the decline of Northumbria as following an ill-advised attack on the Irish and a disastrous campaign against the Picts. The kingdom’s borders had shrunk and it had lost many soldiers, but Bede presents us with a people who are nonetheless spiritually complacent, not unlike the Britons of Gildas’s history or the Israelites in Amos. As the Israelites were judged by God  through the Assyrians and others, and as the Britons were judged through the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, so could God judge the English by sending an invading people.