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32 2 Early Christians and Their Dreams BONNELLE LEW IS STR ICKLING The attitudes of early Christians toward their dreams were spiritually and psychologically complex. Taking together positions of theologians and churchmen, visionaries and martyrs, we can see that dreams were an important but difficult phenomenon. The early Christians were surrounded by views different from their own, in many instances views that directly threatened their religious beliefs. Theirs was an emerging religion surrounded by more established views, and this included ways of viewing dreams and making dream interpretations . The period of late antiquity was rich with methods of divination about future events through dreams, beliefs about the supernatural that lived in between the worlds characterized as the daemonic (as opposed to the demonic) that might be contacted through dreams, and writers who offered methods of dream interpretation. The Christians of this period were converts and were probably familiar with these views, but the views in their original late Hellenic form were not useful to Christians, who had other things on their minds. They were not focused on knowing the events of the worldly future; they had every reason to be uneasy about the daemonic, which for them translated into the demonic, a very different matter; and dream interpretation for them began with one fundamental question: did their dreams come from God? Unless this question could be answered in the affirmative, the details of the meaning of the dream were not significant. Indeed, if the dream did not come from God, it ought not to be attended to at all. The sorts of work that dreams had done and continued to do for pre- and non-Christians—divining future events, providing omens—were in fact suspect for Christians. An examination of the work of Tertullian, one of the first Christian theologians to write about dreams, E A R LY CHR IST I A NS A ND T HEIR DR E A MS 33 demonstrates some of the Christian concerns with dreams and the origins of these concerns. In his work De Anima, Tertullian (second century C.E.) sets out his theory of the soul, which includes his theory of the significance of dreams. Tertullian holds the familiar Christian position that the condition of original sin puts the soul in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis Satan until baptism transforms it. Though he endorses the doctrine of original sin, Tertullian believes there is natural good in the soul: “Still there is a portion of good in the soul, of that original, divine and genuine good, which is its proper nature. For that which is derived from God is obscured rather than extinguished . It can be obscured, indeed, because it is not God; extinguished, however, it cannot be, because it comes from God. . . . Just as no soul is without sin, so neither is any soul without seeds of good.”1 The soul will recover as long it remains faithful to its baptismal promises, but it is subject to temptation. It is a basic assumption in Christian doctrine that Satan actively seeks to capture the Christian soul. Temptation is a basic feature in the life of a Christian. Thus the soul is continuously in peril, saved only by its devotion to Christ. It is important to remember the soul’s basic situation , because this is one of the things that explain an aspect of the Christian attitude toward dreams. Tertullian sees sleep as a mirror of death. Sleep is a temporary suspension of the activity of the senses but not of the soul, which is immortal. The soul continues in its activities, which are reflected in dreams. Tertullian describes the soul’s condition in sleep as ecstasy. When, there, rest accrues to human bodies, it being their own especial comfort, the soul, disdaining a repose which is not natural to it, never rests; and since it receives no help from the limbs of the body, it uses its own. Imagine a gladiator without his instruments or arms, and a charioteer without his team, but still gesticulating the entire course and exertion of their respective employments: there is the fight, there is the struggle; but the effort is a vain one. Nevertheless the whole procedure seems to be gone through, although it evidently has not been really effected. There is the act, but not the effect. This power we call ecstasy, in which the sensuous soul stands out of itself, in a state which even resembles madness. (60) Tertullian offers...

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