While Gregory could be described as father to the whole family of medieval Christian otherworld journey tales, his influence is especially marked in what I call the Drythelm line, a literary tradition that can be traced back to the Vision of Drythelm related by the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.[13] As Bede informs us, Drythelm was a pious Northumbrian family man who died one evening after a severe illness but revived the next day at dawn, terrifying his mourners by sitting up abruptly on his deathbed. He related what he had seen in the other world to his wife, and later to a monk who repeated the story to Bede.

Though similar in many respects to the narratives we have already considered, the Vision of Drythelm is far more developed as a journey and gives a fuller account of otherworld topography, even foreshadowing the purgatorial landscapes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It therefore serves well as an introduction to the medieval form of the otherworld vision. At the beginning of the story, Drythelm meets a man "of shining countenance and bright apparel" who escorts him to an enormous valley, one side of which roars with flames while the other rages with hail and snow.[14] Countless misshapen souls are tossed to and fro between fire and ice. Appearances suggest that this is hell, but Drythelm's guide explains that it is a place of temporary torments, reserved for deathbed penitents who can be released from their punishments by masses, prayers, alms, and fasts performed by the living on their behalf.

To reach the mouth of hell, the two travel through a land of darkness, in which Drythelm can make his way only by keeping his eyes fixed on the bright silhouette of his guide. Hell is a bottomless, stinking pit. From it leap tongues of fire (in diabolic parody of Pentecost, perhaps) on which damned souls are cast upward like sparks only to fall back again amidst mingled sounds of laughter and lament. Drythelm sees malign spirits dragging the unhappy souls of a priest, a layman, and a woman into the abyss. The demons threaten Drythelm with their tongs, but are put to flight by his guide, who appears just in time in the form of a bright star.

They travel southeast to a realm of clear light, where they encounter a vast wall. Suddenly they are on top of the wall, in a bright, flowery meadow. Here Drythelm meets "many companies of happy people" and supposes that he is in heaven, but learns that it is only an antechamber for the not quite perfect. As he approaches the kingdom of heaven, he hears sweet singing and enjoys a fragrance and light even more glorious than before. Despite his longing to remain, Drythelm is dispatched back to his body, with the promise that a life of vigilance will eventually win him a place among the blissful spirits. Upon revival, he tells his astonished wife: "Do not be afraid, for I have truly risen from the death by which I was held fast, and have been permitted to live again among men; nevertheless, from now on I must live not according to my old habits, but in a much different manner."

Accordingly, he distributes his property, retires to a Benedictine monastery, and takes up a life of austerity and devotion, fasting, and cold baths.

For Bede, the most impressive part of Drythelm's story is its ending; like Gregory, Bede holds that "it is a greater miracle to convert a sinner than to raise up a dead man."[16] And it is a greater miracle yet if the tale of a dead man's recovery and spiritual transformation changes the hearts of its hearers; these authors value the otherworld journey narrative primarily for its power as a model for conversion and its usefulness in advertising the cause of particular religious institutions and ideas. Whatever role Drythelm may have played in the development of the narrative, Bede's account of the vision can be read as a manifesto for Benedictine monasticism, ascetic discipline, and intercessory masses for the dead. The vision also reflects the eschatology of the Anglo-Saxon church of Bede's time; by intimating a purgatorial state distinct from hell, it departs from earlier Celtic Christian traditions and conforms to the orthodoxy of Rome.[17]

All of these features recommended the Vision of Drythelm to Anglo-Saxon spiritual writers and homilists of the ninth to eleventh centuries, who faithfully retold or creatively embroidered the return-from-death stories related by Gregory and Bede and whose endorsement contributed to the success of visions of the Drythelm line. The full flowering of this tradition, however, occurred in the period from the tenth to the mid-thirteenth centuries, which saw both the development of long; almost novelistic accounts of journey to the beyond and back, and increasing mention of otherworld visions in chronicles, sermons, and books of exempla for preachers. During that time, the otherworld journey found favor with monastic and clerical authors as a way of expressing their views on penance, intercession, and religious vows. It also played a part in what Jacques Le Goff calls the "spatialization" of purgatory, which went hand in hand with standardization of the rites by which the living purged their faults, prepared for death, and petitioned for the welfare of their departed kin.[18]

Despite such changes in its social function and eschatological content, however, in many respects the return-home-death story remained the same, preserved by literary imitation, by the pious conservation of traditional forms of expression, and by the universality of its themes. Thus it is possible to make some generalizations about the Christian otherworld journey to identify groups or types that cut across regional boundaries and persist throughout the long centuries that we loosely call the Middle Ages.

 

Part II of this book will pay special attention to a group of long narratives from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that follow the Drythelm pattern of death, revival, and conversion. Among them are the visions of Adamnan, Alberic, the Boy William, Tundal, and the Knight Owen (St. Patrick's Purgatory). Although they depend on sources shared by all medieval otherworld journey narratives (the Bible, apocalypses, legends of martyrs and desert saints, Gregory's Dialogues, and classical works such as Vergil's Aeneid and Plutarch's Moralia), the narratives in this group display a remarkable similarity in their choice of which set phrases and images to borrow. Typically the visionary is told, after viewing purgatorial torments and mistaking them for the punishments of the damned, that there are far worse sights to come (Drythelm, Tundal, Owen); he sees souls tossed between fire and ice (Thespesius, Drythelm, Tundal) and rising like sparks horn the pit of hell (Drythelm, Alberic, the Boy William, Tundal); he is temporarily deserted by his guide (Thespesius, Drythelm, the Boy William, Tundal); he finds paradise surrounded by or on top of a wall, which he surmounts without knowing how (Drythelm, Adamnan, Alberic, the Boy William, Tundal, Owen); at the end, after a brief taste of heavenly joys, he is compelled against his will to return to life (Drythelm, Tundal); and after he revives, his newly austere mode of life testifies to the authenticity of his vision (Drythelm, Alberic, and Tundal borrow Gregory's phrasing for this). In addition, the test-bridge, whose history will be discussed in Chapter 4, recurs with many similarities in the visions of Adamnan, Alberic, Tundal, and Owen.

 

These and other parallels suggest the presence of a literary tradition that is at least partly deliberate in its conformities. Yet the "Drythelm line" is far from an exact designation. One cannot determine the sequence of literary transmission or discover its causal mechanism merely by arranging similar narratives in chronological order.[19] Nor would such a linear history of motifs do justice to the complexities of interpretation. Each text has a unique functional significance within its particular social milieu. Beyond that, it seems likely that at least some of these narratives reflect actual experience and as such cannot be reduced to a matter of mechanical literary dependence; I will have much more to say in future chapters concerning the experiential basis of vision literature.

3. References

[5]  My translations from this work are based on the Latin edition by Umberto Moricca. An English version, by Odo John Zimmerman, is available in the Fathers of the Church series.

[6]  Dialogues 4:37

[7]  Ibid.

[8]  Evidence for the universality of lore concerning death by mistaken identity can be found in Stith Thompson's Motif Index, vol. 3, F0-F199. In our own day, the story has come to life on the screen in "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" and "Heaven Can Wait."

[9]  Stephen who died and revived, not Stephen the blacksmith

[10]  Dialogues 4:38.

[11]  Dialogues 4:43.

[12]  On Gregory's eschatology, see Milton M. Gatch, "The Fourth Dialogue of Gregory the Great: Some Problems of Interpretation."

[13]  I am using the dual-language edition by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, but supplying my own translations of the Latin text.

[14]  Bede's Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 488.

[15]  Ibid., p. 488.

[16] In the Dialogues; quoted by Benedicta Ward, "Miracles and History," in Famulus Christi, ed. Gerald Bonner (London, 1976), pp. 70-76.

[17]  See St. John D. Seymour, Irish Visions of the Other World and "The Eschatology of the Early Irish Church." On Anglo-Saxon eschatology, see Milton M. Gatch, Preaching and Theology in Anglo-Saxon England: Aelfric and Wulfstan (Toronto and Buffalo, 1977). On the difference between a purgatorial state and purgatory as a place, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory.

[18]  See The Birth of Purgatory, p. 228.

[19]  In Tours of Hell, Martha Himmelfarb points out that studies of apocalyptic literature early in this century were flawed by the assumption that the chronology of known texts is equivalent to the history of a literary tradition; Himmelfarb maintains that this fallacy helped to support a habitual overemphasis on classical precedents for the motif of visits to hell.