Download PDF | Jesse Keskiaho - Dreams and Visions in the Early Middle Ages_ The Reception and Use of Patristic Ideas, 400-900-Cambridge University Press 2015.
342 Pages
INTRODUCTION
In the second half of the seventh century Abbess Hild of Whitby (d. 680) convoked a panel of learned men to examine Caedmon, a layman who had started composing hymns in the vernacular after reputedly receiving an angelic apparition. Bede (672/3–735), our source, does not tell how the panel determined that Caedmon’s gift was of divine origin.1 We are better informed about the criteria Pope Hadrian I (772–95) used when Charlemagne (d. 814), probably in the late 780s or at the turn of the 790s, asked him about a troubling dream: according to Hadrian it could not be a true dream because its imagery departed from that of the Bible.2 Composed at this same time or only few years later by Theodulf, later bishop of Orléans (d. 821), Charlemagne’s official response to the council of Nicaea II (787) has a fundamentally different approach: it appeals to patristic teachings to argue that sense could be made of dreams only by using spiritual discernment.3 These authorities may not have agreed on how to judge the truth of dreams, but they all thought that it was important to do so and applied methods they found in Christian traditions. In this book I shall examine the processes that produced authoritative Christian teachings on dreams and the different contexts in which they were applied.
This is a study of the reception of patristic theological opinion on dreams and visions in early medieval (400–900) learned cultures. It thus focuses on one area where some of the formative characteristics of the early middle ages, the consolidation of past learning and the creation of new Christian learned cultures, meet. Although these cultures were in many ways characterised by the reception of patristic thinkers, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Gregory the Great (c.540–604) among the most important, this reception was not automatic nor did it take place in a vacuum. The study shows how the reception of authoritative opinion was conditioned by contemporary concerns, and delves into particular situations to avoid easy and at the same time often meaningless generalisations. The present book explores the way processes of transmission and different contexts of reception gave rise to different emphases regarding the nature and value of dreams and visions, and how the same traditions of opinion could be used both to argue for and to challenge the reality of individual dreams. It therefore has general implications for the study of early medieval learned cultures. This study focuses on early medieval Latin Christendom, especially on Francia and Anglo-Saxon England. The period under study stretches from Augustine and his thought on dreams and visions to the waning of Carolingian power and reforms.
The formation of orthopraxy and the condemnation of ‘pagan’ beliefs and practices, and the concomitant monopolisation of religious authority, was an ongoing and in many respects a difficult task for the Church. As it proclaimed belief in God who had not only created the universe but taken unique interest in the affairs of man, it could not deny what we would term the supernatural, but instead had to devise ways of distinguishing divine messages to man from the non-divine. The early Church sought to distinguish between the phantasms, delusions and lies they said were perpetrated by fallen angels, assimilated to the daemons of the mid-air of Platonic cosmologies, and the real miracles wrought by God and his saints. On the other hand, motivated by practical pastoral concerns, many contemporaries sought to integrate individual religious experiences into common cultic frameworks.
The early middle ages was likewise a time of consolidation of learning. Patristic (not to mention secular Classical) texts, not always commonly available, were re-appraised and re-interpreted to fit new contexts, different from those in which they first saw the light, and were slowly incorporated to form new canons of knowledge. This process of rebuilding extended to definitions of what it meant to be a Christian in new postRoman situations, a process which peaked in the reforms and innovations of the so-called ‘Carolingian renaissance’. 4 In response to needs both temporal and spiritual the early medieval churches and monastic establishments employed a fascinating diversity of readings and practical applications of the Bible and theological authorities. The result of these processes of consolidation and change was, instead of a Western Europe unified by Christianity, rather what Peter Brown has termed a variety of ‘MicroChristendoms’.
classical and early christian views on dreams and visions Dreams and visions represent by definition a break with the everyday perception of man, and allow him perhaps the most concrete experience of the other, whether he calls it God or his subconscious.6 Even in Christianity, which holds that God has become a man in a historically unique event in the person of Jesus Christ, visions and dreams as experiences of the divine have retained a place, although this place has not been constant, nor self-evident. In Ancient Jewish tradition both dreams and visions were accepted, if with certain reservations, as varieties of religious experience.7 The Old Testament includes narratives of dream interpretation and prophetic visions, and at places offers opinions – mostly negative – on the worth of dreams. Books of what became the New Testament tell likewise of a number of dreams and visions, and while the latter seem to be generally preferred, the Gospel of Matthew includes a number of prominent dreams.8 And although the Gospel accounts of the life and resurrection of Jesus are narrated as eyewitness accounts, the first and probably most influential theologian of Christianity, the Apostle Paul, based his experience of Christ not on personal contact but on visions.9
The authors of the nascent Christian theological tradition lived in the Hellenistic world, and inevitably thought of contact between man and God at least to some extent in terms in common with the surrounding culture. There was no unified thought on dreams and visionary phenomena in antiquity that could be easily summarised. Rather, ideas on these issues were put forward in several contexts.10 Philosophers especially in the Stoic and (Middle- and Neo-) Platonic traditions devised sophisticated explanations of supposedly veridical dreams and their causes, while a naturalistic intellectual tradition, building on Aristotelian or Epicurean natural philosophy, denied the reality of divine dreams and relativised the prophetic value of dreaming.11 Dream-interpretation (oneirocriticism) and divination from dreams (oneiromancy) were distinguished from medical and philosophical study of dreams (oneirology), although in practice they often overlapped.12 Some medical practitioners (most notably Galen) looked to dreams for symptoms of humoural imbalance in the body.13 Dreams were also thought to deliver more concrete aid: incubation, ritualised dormition in or near cult buildings, was practised in the hope of a healing apparition of a divinity (e.g., Aesculapius).14 Dreams also had a role in public life, and not only in cult activities such as incubation. Although divination by dreams was not a part of the late Republican idea of Roman state religion and religious orthopraxy (religio, as opposed to superstitio), dreams and visions, centring on leaders and the fate of Rome, had a role in the political life and historical narrative of the late Republic and the Empire.15
The increased visibility of dreams and visions in our sources from the end of the second century onwards led E. R. Dodds to conclude that this was connected to a real cultural change in what he called ‘an age of anxiety’. 16 This increased visibility in both narratives and theoretical discussions can also result, however, from the increased survival of sources.17 Notions of ‘an age of anxiety’ may be ill founded, but it does seem that belief in dreams in fact became more common and intellectually respected from the second century AD onwards.18 Early Christians continued the Jewish tradition of Apocalypticism: visions or, more precisely, texts framed as visions, commented on contemporary events and eschatological expectations by posing as divine predictions of said events.19 Clearly, some of the earliest Christian congregations dealt with a living charismatic tradition, although the importance and scope of prophecy seems to have been dwindling already in the second century.20 Tertullian (c.160–c.240) is perhaps ‘the first Christian theologian of dreaming’, 21 and in his De anima we encounter a threefold classification of dreams according to their origin, very similar to those found in philosophical oneirology.22
According to Tertullian, dreams came from the daemons of the air, and these could be either empty or meaningful; directly from God, in which case they were certainly meaningful; or through the soul’s own powers, in which case they apparently also were meaningful. Besides this threefold division by origin, which appears to emphasise more the possibilities than the problems of dreams, Tertullian also posited a special kind of dream, that is, ecstatic dream that, enigmatically, is not produced by daemons, God or the soul.23 While Tertullian recognises the existence of empty and illusory dreams, the latter caused by evil daemons, his emphasis is very much on the possibilities of dreams and visions and continued revelation to the faithful. He indeed claims that ‘it is from visions that most people know God’. 24 Charismatic prophecy is often thought of as having gradually become disreputable and associated with heresy, and the decisive change in attitudes is associated with the movement led by the Phrygian Montanus in the latter half of the second century. Montanus centred religious life on the continuing revelations of ‘Spirit’ to him and his followers, and came into conflict with mainstream Christianity.25 Montanism has been seen as motivating the roughly contemporary arguments that bishops are the heirs of prophets, exercising the prophetic function by preaching and interpreting the Bible, the full and final prophecy.26 Dodds drew an arc from early Christianity, where Christian leaders tolerated dreams as a democratic and biblically precedented form of divination, to the Constantinian age, when ‘prophecy went underground’, because ecclesiastical leaders felt that such an open model of prophecy was no longer expedient.27
Such an interpretation probably both greatly underestimates the control of religious experience in early Christianities and overestimates it in late antiquity. It does seem, however, that Christian leaders tried, without complete success, to channel prophecy, including true dreams, to run exclusively through the episcopate.28 Although the meaning and role of prophecy was slowly limited, dreams and visions were a part of the rising cults of the martyrs. Already the martyrs themselves were told to have received dreams or visions as signs of their special proximity to God,29 and the veneration of their graves and remains gave communal importance also to the dreams and visions of the ordinary faithful, as the means of communication between the saint and the community.30 Vision narratives also probed the nature of the afterlife, exploring questions some of which only later found more formal theological treatment.31 Christian ascetics, in contrast, stressed the exceptional nature of significant revelations through dreams and visions. Traditions of ascetic introspection fostered a psychological view of dreams, underlining their subjective and thus difficult nature. The literature produced in late antiquity by the ascetic movement stresses the need to distinguish between true visions and false ones. Tales of monks uncovering or falling foul of demonic illusions are more frequent than narratives of true visions. Discernment could be learned by slow effort and progress in holiness, and a young ascetic or a monk was supposed to seek the advice of his elders regarding his thoughts and dreams.32 Much of the ascetic interest in oneiric phenomena centred on the problems of sexual dreams.
Evagrius Ponticus even spiritualised the diagnostic dream of humoural medicine, turning the dream into an indicator by which a superior could monitor the spiritual growth of a young ascetic.33 Many Christian ideological leaders in late antiquity were sympathetic to the ascetic movement or were themselves ascetics. Asceticism and relic cults often spread in the Latin west through the same agents.34 Specifically regarding dreams, this connection between asceticism and relic cults as fashionable models of Christian orthopraxy interestingly foreshadows the medieval situation. The men and women who imported the ascetic tradition critical of the role of dreams in the lives of individual Christians in many cases also imported the relics that communicated with the faithful in their sleep. As we shall see, while both Augustine and Gregory held ideas about the need for discernment with dreams and visions that for the most part accorded with those of the ascetic traditions, they were also interested in the cults of the saints and eschatological questions, and sensitive to the importance of dreams and visions in these contexts.35 Their early medieval readers were heirs to these same considerations and contexts for thought about dreams and visions.
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