So true is it that scarcely any birth is clean — at least among the heathen. For hence the Apostle also says that saints are begotten from either sex when sanctified, as much by the prerogative of the seed as by the discipline of upbringing. 'Otherwise,' he says, 'they would be born unclean' — wishing the children of believers to be understood as marked out nonetheless for holiness, and thereby also for salvation, so that by the pledge of this hope he might give support to those marriages which he had judged should be retained. Besides, he was mindful of the Lord's own definition: 'Unless a man be born of water and the Spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of God' — that is, he shall not be holy. (40) HOW THE FLESH IS SAID TO BE SINFUL.
Thus every soul is reckoned in Adam until it is re-reckoned in Christ — so long unclean as it is being re-reckoned, and sinful because unclean, receiving disgrace also from its partnership with the flesh. For although the flesh is sinful — the flesh according to which we are forbidden to walk, whose works are condemned as lusting against the spirit, on account of which men are branded as carnal — yet the flesh is not infamous in its own name. For it neither judges nor perceives anything of itself so as to counsel or command a little sin. Why should it? It is a ministry, and a ministry not such as a slave or a lesser friend — living names — but such as a cup or some other body of that kind, not a soul. For a cup too is the ministry of one who thirsts;
yet unless he who thirsts applies the cup to himself, the cup will minister nothing. So true is it that there is no personality of man in the earthy element (the choicum), nor is the flesh a man as though it were another faculty of the soul and another person, but it is a thing plainly of another substance and another condition, yet assigned to the soul as its furniture, as an instrument for the offices of life. The flesh, therefore, is upbraided in the Scriptures, because the soul does nothing without the flesh in the working of lust, gluttony, drunkenness, cruelty, idolatry, and the other carnal things — not by senses but by effects. Finally, even without the effects, the mere sensations of transgressions are wont to be imputed to the soul: 'Whosoever shall look upon a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery in his heart.'
But what does the flesh do without the soul, likewise, in the working of uprightness, righteousness, endurance, chastity? Moreover, how is it that you would fasten crimes upon the very one to whom you would not credit even its own good deeds? But that through which the sin is committed is arraigned, so that she from whom the sin comes may be burdened — even in an accusation touching the ministry. Heavier is the odium against the governor when his officers are struck at; more is he beaten who commands, since not even he who obeys is excused. (41) ON THE EVIL AND GOOD OF THE SOUL. The evil of the soul, then, besides that which is built up upon it by the incursion of the wicked spirit, precedes from the fault of its origin, being in a manner natural.
For, as we have said, the corruption of nature is another nature, having its own god and father — namely, the very author of corruption — yet so that there is present also a good of the soul, that principal, that divine and genuine and properly natural good. For what is from God is not so much extinguished as overshadowed. It can indeed be overshadowed, because it is not God; it cannot be extinguished, because it is from God. And so, just as light hindered by some obstacle remains but does not appear, if the density of the obstacle be so great, so also the good in the soul, oppressed by the evil, either — according to the quality of that evil — lies wholly idle, its salvation hidden, or shines out where it is granted, when freedom is found. Thus there are some who are worst and some best, and nonetheless all souls are of one kind;
so also in the worst there is something of good, and in the best there is not a little of the worst. For God alone is without sin, and the only man without sin is Christ, because Christ is also God. So too the divinity of the soul bursts forth into presages out of the prior good, and the consciousness of God comes forth in testimony: 'God is good,' and 'God sees,' and 'I commend it to God.' Therefore no soul is without fault, because none is without a seed of good. Accordingly, when it comes to the faith, reformed by the second birth from water and the power on high, then, the veil of its former corruption drawn back, it beholds its whole light. It is received also by the Holy Spirit, just as in its former birth it was received by the profane spirit.
The flesh follows the soul as she is wedded to the spirit, as a dowry-slave, and now no longer the handmaid of the soul, but of the spirit. O blessed wedlock, if it admit no adultery! (42) ON DEATH. Concerning death it now remains that here the subject should lay down its matter, where the soul herself brings things to completion — although Epicurus, by common enough opinion, has denied that death pertains to us. 'For what is dissolved,' he says, 'lacks sensation; what lacks sensation is nothing to us.' But it is not death itself that is dissolved and lacks sensation, but the man who suffers it. Yet he has attributed the passion to that to which the action belongs. But if it is the man's part to suffer death, which dissolves the body and destroys sensation, how absurd it is that so great a force should be said not to pertain to man!
Much more forcedly does Seneca say, 'After death all things come to an end, even death itself.' If this is so, then even death will pertain to itself, if it too comes to an end; and all the more to man, in whom, among all things, in its own ending, death itself comes to an end. 'Death is nothing to us — therefore life too is nothing to us.' For if that by which we are dissolved is outside us, then also that by which we are put together is outside us. If the taking-away of sensation is nothing to us, neither is the acquiring of sensation anything to us. But let him do away with death as well, who does away with the soul; by us, just as concerning the after-life and concerning the other province of the soul, so also concerning death shall the discourse be conducted — a death to which we ourselves indeed pertain, even if it does not pertain to us. Finally, sleep too, its mirror, is no alien matter. (43) ON SLEEP.
Let us first discuss sleep, and afterward how the soul runs its course in death. Sleep is by no means outside nature, as it pleases certain philosophers, when they reckon it among those causes which seem to be held beyond nature. The Stoics affirm sleep to be a relaxation of the sensual vigor; the Epicureans, a diminution of the animal spirit; Anaxagoras, with Xenophanes, a weariness; Empedocles and Parmenides, a cooling; Strato, a separation of the implanted spirit; Democritus, a deficiency of spirit; Aristotle, a wilting of the heat around the heart. As for me, I do not presume ever to have slept in such a way that I could recognize any of these.
For it is not to be believed that sleep is a weariness — it is rather the contrary of weariness, which of course it removes, seeing that a man is more refreshed by sleep than fatigued. Moreover, sleep is not always conceived from fatigue, and yet when it does come from it, that fatigue is already no more. Nor will I admit any cooling or any wilting of the heat, since bodies grow so warm with sleep, and the distribution of foods would not proceed easily during sleep — the heat hastening it and the cold retarding it — if we were cooled by sleep. It is more to the point that even sweat is a sign of surging digestion. Finally, we are said to 'cook' our food, which is a work of heat, not of cold.
Likewise the immortality of the soul does not allow us to believe in a diminution of the animal spirit, or a deficiency of spirit, or a separation of the implanted spirit. The soul perishes, if it is lessened. It remains, if perhaps, that with the Stoics we should define sleep as a relaxation of the sensual vigor, because it procures the rest of the body alone, and not also of the soul. For the soul, being always mobile and always exercised, never sinks down into rest — a rest alien, that is, to the state of immortality; for nothing immortal admits an end of its own working, and sleep is an end of working. Finally, it is only to the body, to which mortality belongs, that rest flatteringly offers an end of its working.
He, then, who will doubt about the naturalness of sleep, has indeed the dialecticians who cast into doubt the whole distinction between the natural and the extra-natural, so that even what one might have supposed to be beyond nature he may know can be claimed for nature — the nature from which it has so drawn its lot that it seems to be held apart from it; and assuredly either all things are nature or nothing is nature. With us, however, that may be heard which the contemplation of God suggests, the author of all the things about which the inquiry is made. For we believe that, if anything is nature, it is some rational work of God.
Moreover, reason goes before sleep — a thing so fitting, so useful, so necessary, that without it no soul would suffice: the restorer of bodies, the renewer of strength, the tester of health, the pacifier of labors, the physician of toils; to enjoy which lawfully the day yields, while night makes the law, taking away even the color of things. But if sleep is vital, healthful, helpful, nothing of that kind is not rational, and nothing is not natural that is rational. So too physicians consign everything contrary to what is vital, healthful, and helpful to beyond the natural hinges. For, judging even the conditions that rival sleep — phrenitis and cardiac disease — to be beyond nature, they have thereby prejudged sleep itself to be natural;
and even in the case of lethargy, when they mark it as unnatural, they answer with a natural testimony, since it is in its own excess of proportion. For every nature is broken down either by deprivation or by excess, and is preserved by the propriety of measure. Thus that will be natural in its due state which can be rendered unnatural by defect or by excess. What, moreover, if you should except both eating and drinking from the lots of nature? For in these too there is very much preparation for sleep. Certainly man was imbued with these from the very beginning of his nature. If you would learn from God, that fountain of the race, Adam drank in slumber before he thirsted for rest, slept before he labored — nay, before he even ate, nay, before he even spoke — so that men may see that sleep, the index of nature, is more principal than all natural things.
Hence we are led also to consider that even then he prefigured the image of death. For if Adam was a figure of Christ, the sleep of Adam was the death of Christ, who was to sleep in death, that from the wound likewise in His side the true mother of the living, the Church, might be prefigured. Therefore sleep, so healthful, so rational, is fashioned into a pattern even of that death which is now public and common. For God willed — He who wrought nothing without patterns in His arrangement, more fully than the Platonic paradigm — to trace out daily with us the lines especially of the human beginning and end, stretching out His hand to a faith more easily to be aided through images and parables, as of words, so also of things.
It sets before you, therefore, a body struck down by the friendly force of slumber, laid low by the coaxing necessity of rest, motionless in its posture, such as it lay before life and such as it will lie after life, as a testimony to its molding and to its burial — awaiting the soul as though not yet bestowed and as though already snatched away. But she too so suffers this that she seems to be acting elsewhere, learning by the dissembling of her presence her future absence (about Hermotimus we shall know), and yet in the meantime she dreams: whence then come dreams? She neither rests nor grows wholly idle, nor does she subject the nature of immortality as a slave to slumber. She proves herself always mobile;
she travels over land and sea, does business, is stirred, labors, plays, grieves, rejoices, pursues things lawful and unlawful, shows that she can do very much even without the body, that she is furnished with her own members, but that she nonetheless has need again of the body to set in motion. Thus, when the body has awakened, restored to its offices, it affirms to you the resurrection of the dead. This will be both the natural reason of sleep and the rational nature of it. Even through the image of death you are initiated into faith, you rehearse hope, you learn to die and to live, you learn to watch, while you sleep. (44) ON HERMOTIMUS. But now concerning Hermotimus. His soul, they say, was absent in sleep, as though setting out from the body during the leisure of a man about to be vacant. His wife betrayed this.
His enemies, finding him asleep, cremated him as one dead. His soul, returning too late, imputed the homicide to itself, I suppose. The citizens of Clazomenae consoled Hermotimus with a temple. The woman does not approach it, on account of the wife's disgrace. To what does this tend? Lest, because it is easy for the common crowd to think that sleep is a departure of the soul, credulity should be suborned by this argument of Hermotimus too. It had been a kind of somewhat heavier slumber, such as is presumed of the nightmare (incubo), or of that defect of health which Soranus opposes, excluding the incubus, or some such fault as also drove Epimenides into fable, drowsy for nearly fifty years. But Suetonius says that Nero, and Theopompus that Thrasymedes, never dreamed — except that Nero scarcely dreamed at his very last exit, after his terrors.
What, if Hermotimus too was such that the leisure of a soul doing nothing in sleep was believed to be a divorce? You may conjecture anything sooner than that licence of a soul playing truant without death, and indeed continuously by its very form. For if some such thing were said to happen once, like an eclipse of the sun or moon, so also of the soul, I should indeed be persuaded that it was done by divine power; for it is fitting that a man should be either warned or terrified by God, as by a swift lightning-flash, by the stroke of a momentary death — if it were not rather [more fitting] that a dream should be believed, which ought rather to happen to one awake, if it were not more fitting that it be believed a dream. (45) ON DREAMS.
We are here obliged to set forth the Christian view concerning dreams also, as being among the accidents of sleep and no small agitations of the soul, which we have declared to be busy and ever exercised out of the perpetuity of its motion — which is the principle of divinity and of immortality. Therefore, when rest comes to bodies, whose proper solace it is, the soul, being void of an alien solace, does not rest, and, if she lacks the working of the bodily members, she makes use of her own. Imagine a gladiator without his weapons, or a charioteer without his chariots, gesticulating every posture and effort of his art: there is fighting, there is striving, but the tossing is empty. Nonetheless, things seem to be done which yet are not seen to be done; for they are done in act, but in effect are not done.
This force we call ecstasy, an excess of sense and the likeness of madness. So too at the beginning sleep was dedicated together with ecstasy: 'And God sent an ecstasy upon Adam, and he slept.' For sleep came to the body for rest, ecstasy came upon the soul against rest; and thence already comes the form mingling sleep with ecstasy, and nature from the form. Finally, we are both delighted and saddened and terrified in dreams — how affectingly and anxiously, how passibly, whereas we should be moved by nothing, being moved of course by empty images, if we dreamed in full possession of our senses. Finally, good deeds too are gratuitous in dreams, and offenses go unpunished; for we shall no more be condemned for a vision of fornication than we shall be crowned for one of martyrdom.
'And how,' you ask, 'is the soul mindful of dreams, seeing that it is not permitted to be in full possession of itself?' This will be a property of this madness, because it does not arise from a corruption of good health, but from the principle of nature; for it does not exterminate the mind, but calls it aside. It is one thing to shake, another to move, another to overturn, another to agitate. Therefore, that memory is at hand is a sign of the mind's soundness; that the mind's soundness is stupefied while memory is safe, is a kind of madness. And therefore we are not said to rave, but to dream; and therefore we are also, if ever, prudent.
For our power of understanding, though it be overshadowed, is nevertheless not extinguished — except that this very thing can seem then to be idle, while ecstasy works this too of its own proper account, so as thus to bring in upon us images of wisdom, just as it does images of error also. (46) Behold, again we are pressed to express, from the very handling of those dreams by which the soul is tossed, [what we hold]. And when shall we come to death? Here too I would say: when God shall have granted it; there are no long delays of that which will come to pass. Epicurus judged dreams to be wholly vain, freeing the divinity from occupations and dissolving the order of things and scattering all things in passivity, as though exposed to chance and fortuitous.
Moreover, if this is so, then there will also be some outcome of truth, because it is not admissible that truth alone should be exempted from the outcome owed to all things. Homer divided two gates for dreams, the horn one for truth, the ivory one for falsehood; for it is possible, they say, to see through horn, whereas ivory is opaque. Aristotle, reckoning the greater part to falsehood, acknowledges the true as well. The Telmessians empty no dreams of meaning, but blame the weakness of interpretation. But who is so alien to humanity as never at some time to have felt some faithful vision? Touching briefly on a few of the more notable ones, I will impose shame upon Epicurus. Astyages, king of the Medes, saw in a dream that the bladder of his daughter Mandane, still a virgin, flowed forth into a flood over Asia, as Herodotus relates;
likewise, that a year after her marriage, a vine sprang up from the same parts and overspread all Asia. This too Charon of Lampsacus, earlier than Herodotus, records. Those who interpreted her son as destined for so great a work were not mistaken, since Cyrus both submerged and pressed down Asia. Philip of Macedon, not yet the father of Olympias his wife, had seen in a dream that he had sealed her nature with a ring: a lion was the seal; he had believed the birth foreclosed, I suppose, because a lion becomes a father only once. But Aristodemus, or Aristophon, conjecturing rather that nothing empty is sealed, [interpreted] that a son was portended, and one indeed of the greatest force. Those who know Alexander recognize the lion of the ring. Ephorus writes this. But also a certain woman of Himera dreamed of the tyranny of Dionysius over Sicily. Heraclides reported it.
And Laodice, the mother of Seleucus, foresaw the kingdom of Asia for him before she had yet borne him. Euphorion published it. I learn also from Strabo that Mithridates gained possession of Pontus from a dream, and from Callisthenes I learn that Bariteles the Illyrian ruled from the Molossians all the way to Macedonia from a dream. The Romans too have known dreams of this truthful kind. Marcus Tullius knew from a dream, while he was still a little boy and of private station — only Julius Octavius and unknown even to himself — that he would be the reformer of the empire, the very Augustus and the burier of the civil whirlwinds. It is recorded in the memoirs of the Vitellii. Nor will this be the only kind that foretells the highest powers, but also of dangers and destructions:
as when Caesar, sick at Philippi in the battle against the traitors Brutus and Cassius, and otherwise destined to suffer an even greater peril from the enemy, escaped by the vision of Artorius, having abandoned his tent; and as when the daughter of Polycrates of Samos beheld a cross for him, from the anointing of the sun and the washing of Jupiter. Honors too are revealed and talents through rest; remedies also are afforded, thefts betrayed, treasures conferred. Cicero's dignity, in fact, his very nurse had already beheld while he was yet a tiny child. The pupil Plato is the swan that came from the bosom of Socrates, caressing men. The boxer Leonymus is healed by Achilles in dreams. When the Athenians had lost a golden crown from the citadel, Sophocles the tragedian recovered it by dreaming.
Neoptolemus the tragedian, warned in dreams at the tomb of Ajax by the Rhoeteum of Troy, saved it by Ajax himself from ruin, and when he removed the wear of the stones, returned thence rich with gold. But how many commentators and asserters are there upon this subject? Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus, Dionysius of Rhodes, Hermippus — the whole literature of the age. Only, if perchance, shall I laugh at him who supposed he could persuade us that Saturn dreamed before all others — unless indeed he also lived before all others. Aristotle, pardon me for laughing. For the rest, Epicharmus, with Philochorus the Athenian, even exalted dreams to the very topmost peak among divinations.
For with oracles too of this kind the world has been thronged: as that of Amphiaraus at Oropus, of Amphilochus at Mallus, of Sarpedon in the Troad, of Trophonius in Boeotia, of Mopsus in Cilicia, of Hermione in Macedonia, of Pasiphae in Laconia. The rest, with their origins and rites and reporters, together with the whole subsequent history of dreams, Hermippus of Berytus will most abundantly set forth in five volumes. But the Stoics too prefer that God, most provident for human instruction, among the other safeguards of the divinatory arts and disciplines, has also implanted dreams rather especially, as a peculiar solace of the natural oracle. So much for what pertains to the faith in dreams, which is to be attested by us also, and interpreted otherwise.
For concerning the other oracles as well, in which no one sleeps, what else shall we pronounce than that they are the demonic operation of those spirits who, even then, dwelt within those very men or affected the memory of them, for every scene of their own malice — in this same manner lying about divinity, and by the same industry deceiving even through benefits of medicines and admonitions and predictions, so that they may the more injure by helping, while through the things that help they lead men away from the search for the true divinity by the insinuation of a false one? And assuredly their power is not shut up, nor is it circumscribed by the boundaries of shrines: it is roving and flitting about and for the time being free.
Whence no one would doubt that houses too lie open to demons, and that men are beset by images not only in the inmost sanctuaries but even in their bedchambers. (47) For we define that dreams are for the most part inflicted by demons, even though sometimes true and gracious, but — with that industry of which we have spoken — designing and ensnaring; how much more, then, when they are vain and frustrating and turbid and mocking and unclean. Nor is it any wonder if there are images of those whose realities there also are.
But from God — who has of course promised the grace of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, and that His servants and His handmaids should both prophesy and dream — there shall be reckoned those dreams which are to be compared to that very grace: whatever is honorable, holy, prophetic, revelatory, edifying, calling; whose liberality is wont to distil even upon the profane, since God makes His rains and His suns fall equally upon the just and the unjust; seeing that even Nebuchadnezzar dreams by divine power, and almost the greater part of mankind learn God from visions. As, therefore, the condescension of God is even toward the heathen, so also the temptation of the evil one is even toward the saints, from whom he does not desist even by day, so that he may creep upon them even while they sleep, where he can, if he cannot upon them while they wake.
A third kind will be those dreams which the soul seems to induce upon itself out of an intent upon its circumstances. But since it is not within one's choice to dream (for Epicharmus also thinks so), how will she be a cause to herself of any vision? Is this kind, then, to be left to the natural form, which preserves the soul's continuing to experience its own affairs even in ecstasy? But those things which will seem to happen neither from God nor from a demon nor from the soul, and which are beyond opinion and beyond interpretation and beyond the account of any faculty, shall be set apart to ecstasy itself, properly so called, and to its principle. (48) They affirm that dreams are dreamed more surely and more sifted in the last watches of the night, as though the vigor of the souls were now emerging, slumber having been driven forward.
And of the seasons of the year, spring is more quiet, because summer dissolves the souls, and winter in a manner hardens them, and autumn — otherwise a tempter of health — dilutes them with the most wine-like juices of fruits. Likewise, from the very posture of rest: if one lie neither on the back nor on the right side nor with the inward parts turned upward, as though the little chambers were poured out, the station of the senses will fluctuate, or the seat of the mind be troubled by the compressed surfeit of the liver. But I would think these things are cleverly estimated rather than steadily proved, even though it is Plato who estimated them; and perhaps they proceed by chance. Otherwise dreams would be a matter of choice, if they could be directed.
For we must examine the fact that dreams prescribe a rule concerning foods to be distinguished or refused, now out of presumption, now out of superstition: superstition, as when a fast is enjoined upon those about to sleep at oracular shrines, so as to induce ritual purity; presumption, as when the Pythagoreans reject the bean, on this account too, as a burdensome fodder that causes flatulence. And yet that threefold brotherhood together with Daniel, content with pulse alone lest they be defiled by the royal dishes, obtained from God, besides their other wisdom, the special grace of dreams, both of receiving them and of interpreting them. But I, when fasting, do not know whether I alone dream so very much that I do not perceive that I have dreamed at all. 'Sobriety, then,' you say, 'has nothing to do with this matter?'
Nay, it has all the more to do with this, as much as it has to do with everything; if it bears upon superstition, much more does it bear upon religion. For even the demons demand it from their own dreamers, namely for the pandering of their divinity, because they know it to be familiar with God, because Daniel again, by the station of three weeks, grew lean in diet, yet in order to allure God by the offices of self-humiliation, not in order to build up sense and wisdom in a soul about to dream, as though it were not going to act in ecstasy. Thus sobriety will avail not to remove ecstasy, but to commend that very ecstasy, that it may take place in God. XLIX.
Let those who think that infants do not dream—seeing that all the functions of the soul are discharged in life according to the measure of age—observe the starts and nods and smiles of infants during sleep, so that from the fact they may grasp that the movements of the dreaming soul readily burst out to the surface through the tenderness of the flesh. But as for the report that the Libyan people, the Atlantes, are said to pass their nights in dreamless sleep, they are certainly being reproached in the very nature of the soul. Moreover, either report has lied to Herodotus, being at times slanderous against the barbarians, or a great power of demons of this kind holds sway in that region.
For if Aristotle too notes a certain hero of Sardinia who deprives those who sleep in his shrine of visions, this also will lie among the caprices of demons—to take away dreams as well as to bring them on—so that from this quarter proceeded the notable case of Nero also, a late dreamer, and of Thrasymedes. But we also derive dreams from God. Why then would the Atlantes not dream even from God, seeing that now no nation is a stranger to God, since the Gospel flashes over all the earth and to the ends of the world? Has report then lied to Aristotle, or is there still some reckoning of demons? Provided only that no soul be believed by any nature to be exempt from dreams. Chapter L. ON THE POWER OF DEATH AND ON MENANDER THE HERETIC. Enough about the mirror of death, that is, about sleep, since we have also treated of the business of sleep, that is, of dreams;
now we pass to the origin of this digression, that is, to the topic of death, since not even this can be dealt with apart from questions, although it is the end of all questions. By the universal verdict of the whole human race we declare death to be a debt owed to nature. This the voice of God has ratified, this everything that is born has pledged; so that from here on no stupor of Epicurus may be spread abroad, who denies that this debt pertains to us, but rather the madness of the heretical sorcerer Menander the Samaritan may be spat upon, who says that death not only does not pertain to his followers, but does not even reach them: namely in this respect he is a legate sent from the supernal and hidden power, so that those who have put on his baptism should become immortal and incorruptible and straightway partakers of the resurrection.