Ebook: For the Love of Right Angles: Bedan Archetypes of Ethnicity as a Mystical Map of the Human Condition Integrated in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church [PhD thesis]]

The Venerable Bede (673–735) was an Anglian priest-monk who appreciated the human condition as a multifaceted reality; and it was the fullness of his appropriation of Christianity that enabled him to admire many types of saint and to project salvific harmony upon Britain. Analysis of his corpus suggests that Bede essentialises Britain’s peoples, interpreting their relations as the interplay of archetypes bearing salvific traits. One may link these traits to Bede’s treatment of religious roles through a heuristic whereby inherited Israelite institutions reflect a Christian hermeneutic. In this way, Bede interprets the apostate and the warmongering isolate, the egalitarian prophet, the network about the rightful king and the priestly hierarchy in sacred idiom as anagogical, tropological, historical/literal and allegorical ways of being. Corroborated by his life’s experiences, and by sources of varied provenance from his own library, Bede assigns literal kingship to his own people as Israel de novo; the prophetic role to the tropological Irish abbots; and the priestly teaching office to transnational Rome, which discerns sound dogma through allegory. The British, as his own people’s mortal enemies, become isolated apostates who so thoroughly embody the death-dealing side of anagogy that they serve as a multifaceted foil to all other archetypes. Finally, as the English mature, they take up the salvific functions of the other peoples to attain the fullness of the life-giving side of anagogy. Deeper analysis of Bede’s treatment of ethnicity further suggests that Bede aspired to the salvific harmony within himself also. For, in secular idiom, a corrollary appears between types of brain function and those psychical states and social structures that Bede associates with the peoples collaborating to attain sublime knowledge. Such a corollary illustrates the infusing and incarnating nature of holiness that completes the saint, who becomes a concretisation of oneness, catholicity and apostolicity. Interpreted this way, one can discern and describe several profiles of Bede in scholarly literature. As prophetic moral reformer, he is the righteously indignant, imperative Bede. As apocalyptic harbinger of judgement, he is the aptly apprehensive, subjunctive Bede. As kingly minded missionary statesman and advocate for local identity, he is the nobly cheerful, optative Bede. As priestly doctor of the church and as master of the churchly sciences, he is the sensibly sorrowful, indicative Bede. One also discerns, by contrast, a non-activist profile of Bede as a contemplative soul who admires St. Cuthbert of Farne Island. Bede’s admiration of the anchorite appears rooted in the intuited sense that Cuthbert harmonises ethnicities, religious roles and the antimonies of the human condition as a whole person on intimate terms with the transcendent God. Meditating upon the fullness of Cuthbert’s life in God, Bede actualises within himself Irenaeus’ memorable dictum, Gloria enim Dei uiuens homo: uita autem hominis uisio Dei, as Jesus Christ would have it, who asserts, Ego ueni ut uitam habeant et abundantius habeant. In sum, Bede finds in the interactive demesne of Britain’s peoples a resolution to his own inner yearnings for shalom so that his love of right Angles provides a mystical map of the human condition integrated in the Holy Church, which is also One and Catholic and Apostolic.