On the Soul 43–52

Let us first discuss sleep, and afterwards how the soul passes through death. Sleep is certainly not something outside nature, as some philosophers hold, when they ascribe it to causes that seem to be reckoned contrary to nature. The Stoics affirm that sleep is a relaxation of the vigour of the senses; the Epicureans, a diminution of the animal spirit; Anaxagoras with Xenophanes, weariness; Empedocles and Parmenides, a cooling; Strato, a separation of the connate spirit; Democritus, a lack of spirit; Aristotle, a withering of the heat around the heart. I do not presume that I have ever slept in such a way as to recognize any of these. For we must not believe that sleep is weariness; it is rather the opposite of weariness, which it removes, since a man is refreshed by sleep rather than tired. Moreover, sleep is not always brought on by fatigue, and yet when it comes from fatigue, the fatigue is already gone. Nor shall I admit a cooling, or any withering of heat, since bodies grow so warm in sleep; and the distribution of food during sleep would not readily go forward—heat hastens it, cold slows it—if we were cooled by sleep. More: sweat too is a sign of digestion working hot. Indeed we are said to “concoct” 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 lack of spirit, or a separation of the connate spirit. The soul perishes if it is lessened. It remains, if at all, that with the Stoics we define sleep as a relaxation of the vigour of the senses, since it provides rest for the body alone, not for the soul too. For the soul, being always in motion and always active, never gives way to rest, which is foreign to the state of immortality; for nothing immortal admits an end of its activity, and sleep is an end of activity. So to the body, to which mortality belongs, to it alone rest will bring an end of activity. Whoever, then, doubts that sleep is natural has indeed the dialecticians, who call into doubt the whole distinction between natural and extranatural things, so that he may know that even what he thought beyond nature can be claimed for nature, from which they received their being such that they seem to be held beyond it; and surely either all is nature or nothing is. With us, however, what can be heard is what the contemplation of God suggests, the author of all the things under inquiry. For we believe that whatever is nature is some rational work of God. Now reason presides over sleep—so fitting, so useful, so necessary that without it no soul would suffice: the refresher of bodies, restorer of strength, tester of health, peacemaker of labours, physician of toils, for whose rightful enjoyment day gives way, and night lays down the law, taking away even the colour of things. If, then, sleep is vital, healthful, helpful, nothing of this kind is not rational, nothing not natural. So the physicians too banish everything contrary to what is vital, healthful, and helpful outside the hinges of nature. For in judging the illnesses that rival sleep, frenzy and heart disease, to be beyond nature, they prejudged sleep to be natural; and in marking the sleep of lethargy as not natural, they answer with testimony to the natural, when sleep is in its right balance. For every nature is broken down either by defect or by excess, and preserved by its proper measure. So what can be made unnatural by falling short or going beyond will be natural in its state. What if you exclude eating and drinking too from nature's lot? For in these lies the greatest preparation for sleep. Certainly man was imbued with these from the beginning of his nature. If you learn from God, that fountain of the race, Adam, drank in slumber before he thirsted for rest, slept before he laboured—indeed before he ate, even before he spoke—so that they may see that sleep is a natural sign more primary than all natural things. From this we are also led to think that he was already then rehearsing an image of death. For if Adam gave a figure of Christ, Adam's sleep was the death of Christ, who was to sleep in death, so that from the wound in his side, in like manner, the church, the true mother of the living, might be figured. So sleep, so healthful and so rational, is also fashioned as a pattern of the public and common death. For God—who in other matters too has built nothing in his arrangement without patterns—willed to trace with us daily, more fully than the Platonic paradigm, the outlines especially of man's beginning and end, stretching out his hand to help our faith more easily through images and parables, of things as well as of words. So he sets before you the body struck down by the friendly force of slumber, laid low by the pleasant necessity of rest, motionless in position, as it lay before life and will lie after life, as a testimony to its formation and its burial, waiting for the soul as though not yet given and as though already snatched away. But the soul too undergoes it in such a way that it seems to act elsewhere, learning future absence by concealing its presence. We shall know about Hermotimus. And yet meanwhile it dreams: whence, then, dreams? It neither rests nor grows wholly idle, nor surrenders the nature of immortality as a slave to slumber. It proves itself always in motion: on land and sea it travels, trades, is busy, labours, plays, grieves, rejoices, pursues things lawful and unlawful; it shows that without the body it can do a great deal, and that it is furnished with its own members, yet nonetheless has need of moving the body again. So when the body awakes, restored to its functions, it affirms to you the resurrection of the dead. This will be both the natural reason of sleep and its rational nature. Even through the image of death you are initiated into faith, you practise hope, you learn to die and to live, you learn to keep watch while you sleep.

As for Hermotimus: in sleep, they say, he was without his soul, as though it set out from the body taking the opportunity of the man's being unoccupied. His wife betrayed this. His enemies, finding him asleep, burned him as though dead. The soul, returning too late, I suppose, imputed the murder to itself. The citizens of Clazomenae console Hermotimus with a temple; no woman enters it, because of the wife's disgrace. To what end is this? So that, because it is easy for the crowd to think that sleep is the soul's withdrawal, credulity may be furnished by this argument of Hermotimus too? It was some kind of heavier slumber, as is presumed of the nightmare, or of that disorder of health which Soranus sets against it, ruling out the nightmare; or some such fault as drove Epimenides too into a fable, drowsy for almost fifty years. Suetonius says of Nero, and Theopompus of Thrasymedes, that they never dreamed—except that Nero barely did, at his very end, after his terrors. What if Hermotimus too was such that the idleness of a soul doing nothing in sleep was believed to be a divorce? Guess anything rather than such licence of a soul to run away without death, and that continually, according to the story. For if something like this were said to have happened once, like an eclipse of sun or moon, so also for the soul, I would indeed be persuaded that it was done by God; for it would be fitting for a man to be warned or terrified by God, as by a swift thunderbolt, with the blow of a momentary death—unless it were more natural to believe it a dream, that which should rather happen to one awake, unless it had rather to be believed a dream.

We are bound here to set out the Christian view of dreams too, as accidents of sleep and no small agitations of the soul, which we declared to be always busy and active by the perpetuity of its motion, which is the mark of divinity and immortality. So when rest comes to bodies, whose proper comfort it is, the soul, free from a comfort not its own, does not rest; and if it lacks the working of the bodily members, it uses its own. Imagine a gladiator without weapons or a charioteer without a chariot, going through every posture and effort of his art: there is fighting, there is contest, but the agitation is empty. Nonetheless things seem to be done which are yet not seen to be done; they are done in act, but not in effect. This power we call ecstasy, a going out of the senses and a likeness of madness. So too in the beginning sleep was inaugurated 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 from then on the pattern mixes sleep with ecstasy, and nature follows the pattern. So we are delighted, saddened, and terrified in dreams—how affectedly, anxiously, and passionately—whereas we would be moved in no way by empty images if we dreamed in possession of our senses. So good deeds done in dreams earn nothing and sins are safe; we shall no more be condemned for a vision of debauchery than crowned for one of martyrdom. And how, you say, does the soul remember dreams, when it cannot be in possession of itself? This will be the peculiarity of this madness: that it arises not from a corruption of health but from the principle of nature; for it does not banish the mind but calls it away. To shake is one thing, to move another; to overthrow is one thing, to stir another. So that memory is available is soundness of mind; that the soundness of mind, memory being preserved, … is stunned, is a kind of madness. And so we are not said to rave, but to dream; so we are also sensible, if we ever are. For our wisdom, though it may be overshadowed, is still not extinguished—except that this too may seem idle at that time, while ecstasy works this too from its own, so that it brings us images of wisdom just as of error.

See, we are pressed again to state our opinion on the treatment of dreams themselves, by which the soul is tossed. And when shall we come to death? Here too I would say: when God grants it; what is to come never has long delays. Epicurus judged dreams wholly empty, freeing the deity from affairs, dissolving the order of things, and scattering everything into passivity as exposed to chance and accident. But if so, then there will also be some chance of truth, since truth alone cannot be exempted from the chance owed to everything. Homer assigned two gates to dreams, the one of horn for truth, the one of ivory for deceit; for one can see through horn, they say, but ivory is opaque. Aristotle, declaring that they are mostly false, admits that some are true. The Telmessians make no dreams void; they blame the weakness of interpretation. And who is such a stranger to humanity as never at some time to have had a faithful vision? By touching on a few of the more notable, I shall bid Epicurus blush. Herodotus relates that Astyages, king of the Medes, saw in a dream the urine of his daughter Mandane, still a virgin, flowing into a flood over Asia; and again, a year after her marriage, a vine springing from the same parts overshadowing all Asia. Charon of Lampsacus, earlier than Herodotus, reports this too. Those who interpreted … her son for so great a work were not deceived; for Cyrus both flooded and crushed Asia. Philip of Macedon, not yet a father, had seen the womb of his wife Olympias sealed with a ring; the seal was a lion. He believed that childbearing had been shut off—I suppose because a lion is a father only once—… Aristodemus or Aristophon conjecturing, on the contrary, that nothing empty is sealed, and that a son was foretold, and one of the greatest force. Those who know Alexander recognize the lion of the ring. Ephorus writes this. A certain woman of Himera also dreamed of the tyranny of Dionysius of Sicily; Heraclides reported it. And Laodice, his mother, foresaw the kingdom of Asia for Seleucus before she bore him; Euphorion published it. I learn from Strabo too that Mithridates took possession of Pontus from a dream, and from Callisthenes that Bardylis the Illyrian ruled from the Molossians to Macedonia because of a dream. The Romans too have known dreams of such truth. The restorer of the empire, while still a little boy of private station, and only Julius Octavius, unknown to himself, Marcus Tullius already knew from a dream as Augustus and the burier of civil storms. This is recorded in the memoirs of Vitellius. Nor will this kind be a foreteller only of supreme powers, but also of dangers and deaths: as when Caesar, in the battle at Philippi against the traitors Brutus and Cassius, sick in any case but about to suffer a greater danger from the enemy, escapes, having left his tent because of Artorius' vision; as when the daughter of Polycrates of Samos foresees his cross from the anointing of the sun and the bath of Jupiter. Honours and talents are revealed in sleep, too; cures are provided, thefts betrayed, treasures bestowed. Cicero's dignity, when he was still a little child, his nurse had already seen. The swan from Socrates' bosom, soothing men, is his disciple Plato. Leonymus the boxer is cured by Achilles in dreams. When the Athenians had lost a golden crown from the citadel, Sophocles the tragedian found it again by dreaming. Neoptolemus the tragic actor, near Rhoeteum at Troy, warned in sleep by Ajax himself at his tomb, is freed from ruin, and, when he removes the decaying stones, goes home rich with gold. And how many commentators and asserters there are on this subject! Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus, Dionysius of Rhodes, Hermippus—the whole literature of the world. I shall only laugh, if at all, at the one who thought he would persuade us that Saturn dreamed before anyone else—unless Aristotle too lived before anyone else! Forgive my laughing. Epicharmus, moreover, with Philochorus of Athens, raised dreams to the highest peak among kinds of divination. For the world is thronged with oracles of this kind: of Amphiaraus at Oropus, Amphilochus at Mallus, Sarpedon in the Troad, Trophonius in Boeotia, Mopsus in Cilicia, Hermione in Macedonia, Pasiphae in Laconia. The rest, with their origins, rites, and reporters, and the whole history of dreams, Hermippus of Berytus will set out most fully in five volumes. The Stoics too prefer to hold that God, most provident for human institutions, among other aids of the divining arts and disciplines, has given us dreams too, a special comfort of a natural oracle. So much as to the credibility of dreams, which we too must affirm, though interpreting it otherwise. For as to the other oracles too, at which no one sleeps, what else shall we declare than that their working is demonic, of those spirits which dwelt even then in the men themselves or aimed at their memorials, for the whole stage of their malice, lying about divinity in this form just as in others, and deceiving with the same industry through the benefits of cures, warnings, and predictions, so as to harm the more by helping, since through the things that help they lead men away from the search for the true divinity by insinuating a false one? And this power is certainly not shut in or bounded by the limits of shrines; it roams, flies about, and is free meanwhile. So no one will doubt that houses too are open to demons, and that they beset men with images not only in inner sanctuaries but in bedrooms.

We define, then, that dreams are mostly struck into us by demons—sometimes true and gracious, but, with the industry we described, seeking to catch and ensnare—how much more those that are empty, deceptive, disturbing, mocking, and unclean. No wonder if the images belong to those to whom the realities belong. But since God has promised the grace of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, and that his servants and handmaids will dream as well as prophesy, to it will be reckoned those which will be compared to that grace—whatever are honourable, holy, prophetic, revealing, edifying, calling—whose generosity is wont to drip even upon the profane, God making his rains and his suns equal for the just and the unjust; since Nebuchadnezzar too dreams by divine agency, and almost the greater part of mankind learn God from visions. Just as God's favour extends to the heathen, so the temptation of evil extends to the saints, from whom it does not withdraw even by day, so that it may creep up on them as it can when they sleep, if it cannot when they wake. The third kind will be dreams which the soul seems to bring on itself from attention to its circumstances. But since dreaming is not at will (Epicharmus too thinks so), how will the soul itself be the cause of any vision for itself? Is this kind then to be left to the natural form, the soul keeping, even in ecstasy, the power to undergo its own affairs? But those which will seem to happen neither from God, nor from a demon, nor from the soul, and beyond expectation, interpretation, and narration, will be set apart for ecstasy alone and its own principle.

They affirm that dreams are more certain and clearer toward the end of the night, as the vigour of souls emerges when slumber has been drawn out. Among the seasons of the year, sleep is calmer in spring, since summer relaxes souls, winter somehow hardens them, and autumn, otherwise a tempter of illnesses, dilutes them with the very winy juices of fruit. Likewise from the position of rest itself: if one lies neither on the back nor on the right side, nor with the internal organs turned back so that the station of the senses floats as in overturned compartments, nor with the mind choked by pressure on the liver. But I would think these things are cleverly estimated rather than firmly proved, even though it is Plato who estimated them; and perhaps they happen by chance. Otherwise dreams would be at will, if they could be directed. As for the rule for dreams which now presumption, now superstition prescribes about distinguishing or abstaining from foods, that must be examined. Superstition, as when fasting is enjoined or chastity imposed on those about to sleep at oracles; presumption, as when the Pythagoreans reject the bean for this reason too, as a heavy and flatulent food. Yet those three brothers with Daniel, content with vegetables alone so as not to be defiled by the king's dishes, obtained from God, besides the rest of their wisdom, especially the grace of dreams, both of receiving and of interpreting them. For my part—whether I am the only one, I do not know—when fasting I mostly dream in such a way that I am not aware of having dreamed. Does sobriety, then, contribute nothing to this, you say? On the contrary, as much to this as to everything; if to superstition, much more to religion. For so the demons too demand it of their dreamers, as a lure of divinity, because they know it is familiar to God; since Daniel too again went without food for a station of three weeks—but to win God by acts of humility, not to build sense and wisdom for a soul about to dream, as though it would not be acting in ecstasy. So sobriety will not help to remove ecstasy, but to commend that very ecstasy, so that it may happen in God.

Those who think infants do not dream, when everything of the soul is fulfilled in life according to the measure of age, should notice their starts and nods and smiles in sleep, so as to understand from the fact that the motions of the dreaming soul easily break out to the surface through the tenderness of the flesh. And that the Libyan people, the Atlantes, are said to pass the night in blind sleep does not impeach the nature of the soul. Either report has lied to Herodotus, sometimes slanderous toward barbarians, or a great force of such demons 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, it will also lie in the whims of demons as much to take dreams away as to bring them, so that the notable case of Nero, a late dreamer, and of Thrasymedes may have come from this. But we also derive dreams from God. Why then would the Atlantes not dream from God either—especially since no nation is now a stranger to God, with the gospel flashing into all the earth and to the ends of the world? Either report has lied to Aristotle, or it is a scheme of the demons, so long as no nature of the soul is believed immune from dreams.

Enough about the mirror of death, that is, sleep, and also about the business of sleep, that is, dreams. Now to the origin of this digression, that is, to the order of death—for it too is not without its questions, though it is the end of all questions. By the common verdict of the whole human race we declare death to be the debt of nature. The voice of God stipulated this; everything born has pledged it. So from here let not only the stupor of Epicurus, who denies that this debt concerns us, be put to shame, but let the madness of the heretic magician Menander of Samaria be spat upon, who says that death not only does not concern his followers but does not even reach them. For this purpose, of course, he says he was sent from the supreme and secret Power: that those who put on his baptism should become immortal and incorruptible and at once partakers of the resurrection. We read of many wonderful kinds of waters indeed; but either the winy spring of the Lyncestae makes men drunk, or the demonic fountain of Colophon makes them mad, or the poisoned water of Nonacris in Arcadia (it happened to Alexander) kills. There was also a healing pool in Judaea before Christ. The poet, of course, tells of Stygian marshes that wash away death; yet Thetis mourned her son. And even if Menander plunges one into the Styx, one will nonetheless have to die to come to the Styx; for it is said to be in the underworld. What and where is this blessedness of waters, which neither John the Baptist administered beforehand nor Christ himself showed to his disciples? What is this bath of Menander? A comic one, I suppose. But why so rare, so hidden, where very few wash? For I shall make suspect such rarity of a sacrament so secure and safe, at which the law is not even to die for God himself—when on the contrary all nations now go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, who demands death even by martyrdom, which he required even of his own Christ. Nor will anyone grant so much to magic as to exempt one from death, or re-trench life, like a vine, with renewed age. This was not permitted even to Medea in the case of a man, though it was in the case of a ram. Enoch was translated, and Elijah, and their death was not found—it was deferred, that is. They are reserved to die, so that they may extinguish Antichrist with their blood. John too died, whom it had been vainly hoped would remain until the coming of the Lord. For heresies generally spring out on our examples, taking from there the defences with which they fight. Finally, in short: where are those whom Menander himself drenched, whom he plunged into his Styx? Let those perennial apostles come and stand by. Let my Thomas see them, hear, touch—and he will have believed.

The work of death is plain: the separation of body and soul. But some, in defence of the soul's immortality—which they defend weakly, not having been taught it by God—beg for arguments in such a way that they would have it believed that even after death some souls cling to their bodies. To this end Plato too, although he dispatches the souls he pleases to heaven at once, yet in the Republic sets before us the corpse of a certain unburied man preserved for a long time without any decay, because, of course, of the soul's indivisibility. To this end Democritus too notes the growth of nails and hair in graves for some time. But the quality of the air may have protected that body. For what if the air was drier and the soil saltier? What if the substance of the body itself was juiceless? What if the manner of death had already spent the corrupting matter beforehand? As for the nails, since they are the beginnings of the sinews, they rightly seem to be pushed out further as the sinews are stretched in their relaxing, and as the flesh daily fails. The hair too is nourished from the brain, which a secret protection causes to last for some time. Indeed, in the living too the hair either flows abundantly or deserts us according to the richness of the brain. You have the physicians. But neither does any small part of the soul remain in the body, itself to depart at some time when time has abolished the whole scene of the body. For this too is in the opinion of some; for that reason, they say, the dead should not be cremated, sparing the remnant of the soul. But the reason for that piety is different: not flattering remnants of the soul, but turning away from cruelty even for the body's sake, since a man certainly does not deserve that even his body be given over to a penal end. Rather, the soul, indivisible as immortal, requires us to believe that death too is indivisible, befalling the soul indivisibly, not as immortal but as indivisible. But death too will be divided if the soul is, the remnant of the soul being, of course, to die at some time. So a portion of death will remain with a portion of the soul. Nor am I unaware that there is some trace of this opinion. I have learned it from my own people. I know of a certain woman, born in the church, who died in the bloom of form and age after a single short marriage. When she had fallen asleep in peace, and the burial was still delayed, while she was being composed with the prayer of the presbyter, at the first breath of the prayer she moved her hands from her sides into the posture of supplication, and, when the peace was concluded, returned them to their place. There is also that story among our people, that in a cemetery a body made room by withdrawing, to share the space with a body placed beside it. If something of the kind is also told among the heathen, God everywhere sets forth signs of his power, for comfort to his own, for testimony to outsiders. For I would rather believe it done by God for testimony than by any remnants of the soul, which, if present, would have moved other members too, and, if only the hands, then not for the purpose of prayer. That body too would not only have yielded to its brother but would also have refreshed itself by changing its position on other occasions. Certainly, wherever these things come from, they are to be reckoned signs and portents rather; they cannot make nature. Death, if it is not total at once, is not death. If anything of the soul remains, it is life. Death will no more be mixed with life than night with day.

This work of death, then, the separation of flesh and soul—setting aside the question of fate and chance—human feeling has divided into two forms, the ordinary and the extraordinary: ascribing the ordinary to nature, that is, every peaceful death, and judging the extraordinary to be beyond nature, that is, every violent end. But we who know man's beginnings boldly determine that death did not follow man from nature but from fault—and that fault itself not natural; though it is easy for the name of nature to be usurped for things that seem to have clung to us from birth by accident. For if man had been directly made for death, then indeed death would be ascribed to nature. But the very law proves that he was not made for death, suspending the event of death by a conditional threat and assigning it to man's choice. In short, if he had not sinned, he would never have died. So that will not be nature which happened through the will, from the power of going astray, not by necessity from the authority of the institution. Accordingly, although the ways of death vary, as the conditions of causes are manifold, we say that none is so gentle as not to be done by violence. That very principle that works death, simple though it is, is violence. Why not? It tears apart and severs so great a partnership of soul and flesh, so great a joining together from conception of sister substances. For even if someone breathes out his spirit for joy, like Chilon of Sparta while embracing his son, victor at Olympia; even if for glory, like Clidemus of Athens while being crowned with gold for the excellence of his histories; even if in sleep, like Plato; even if in laughter, like Publius Crassus—much more violent is the death that proceeds through things foreign to it, that drives out the soul by means of good things, that brings death just when it is sweeter to live, in exultation, honour, rest, and pleasure. It is violence too that befalls ships when, far from the rocks of Caphareus, assailed by no whirlwinds, shaken by no great waves, with a flattering breeze, a gliding course, a merry company, suddenly struck from within they sink in complete security. Not otherwise are the events of even a tranquil death shipwrecks of life. It makes no difference whether the ship of the body goes down whole or broken, when the soul's voyage is overturned.