The Christian significance of dreams

This may not be helpful to you in terms of the particular dream you had, but you might be interested in this letter I wrote to a friend a couple of years ago. * * * I don't give up easily. Though I was shaken by your earlier statement that you don't believe that your dreams have any connection with the divine, I couldn't help but continue feeling that mine do, and so today I plowed through the books on religion and dreams at the University of Maryland. Pessimistically, I expected only to find books on non-Christian interpretations of dreams, and indeed, the first two books I turned up were on the Dalai Lama's view of dreams and on dreams in indigenous and Eastern religions. Then, much to my delight, I discovered a book devoted to the history of dreams in Christianity: "Dreams: The Dark Speech of the Spirit," by Morton T. Kelsey. I thought you might be interested in these excerpts from it, particularly the ones on Orthodoxy. Kelsey starts by saying that the modern view that "a dream is 'nothing but' the rehash of yesterday's half-forgotten experiences" was universally accepted in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and by many in the twentieth century, "but it was accepted without ever being subjected to scientific inquiry." This view, he says, is connected with a theological view: "The greatest thrust of mid-twentieth-century theology is to maintain unequivocally that man has no direct or immediate contact with any non-physical or 'supernatural' realm, and so there is no natural religion. This is the point of view of Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Barth, and Robinson, and a host of lesser lights. These are strange bedfellows, but they all maintain this as almost axiomatic truth." Yet when Kelsey began to examine earlier Christian writings, expecting to find support for this view, he found instead that the early Christians strongly disagreed with this view. He starts his book by examining the Old Testament: "Throughout the Old Testament we find the belief that Yahweh is concerned with human beings and makes direct contact with them in order to give them direction and guidance. Dream and vision experiences were one medium of this communication. Through this means, which were not subject to ego control, God brought men special knowledge of the world around them, and also knowledge of his divine reality and will. Dreams and visions were an avenue of revelation that Yahweh continued to use from time to time because they were the best, or even the only way he could make connection. Because of their importance, false prophets and charlatans sometimes manufactured false dreams and false interpretations of dreams in order to meet their own needs, or the needs of those who hired them. And so the Bible does not express only reverence for dreams; it also offers critical evaluation of them so that men will not be duped by false religions and false religious leaders." Kelsey notes that this exalted view of dreams was shared by almost everyone else in the ancient world, from Philo to Plato. The rational Greeks were especially interested in the spiritual worth of dreams. Even Aristotle thought dreams were important, though his view of their nature contrasted sharply with that of most other classical thinkers: "According to Aristotle man is in contact only with the world of sense experience, which he comes to understand through his reason. Since there is no experienceable non-physical world from which dreams may emerge, they cannot be seen as anything but residual impressions left upon the soul by the previous day's experience." Kelsey goes on to show how dreams and visions (which he refers to as waking dreams) permeate the New Testament, including the life of Jesus, and he points to the many Gospel passages that show Jesus demonstrating a belief in angels and demons. Kelsey notes that angels usually appear in visions, and he says, "There is hardly a reference in the New Testament in which angels can be seen as anything but visionary contents, beings without physical reality which are still powerful and very real and significant." In summary, he says, "These earliest Christians believed that the meaning and purpose of the outer world originated in this inner, spiritual world and was deeply influenced by it. They believed that God speaks and works through this inner world, using such non-material media as dreams and trances, visions, and appearances of angels. To them this was one of the regular ways in which God works, one which is complementary to his action through the material world and through history. They saw that through the death and resurrection of Christ there was a spirit of creative power, a new life that was available to men and could come from this invisible world. Christianity, then, offered not a devaluation of the importance of dreams or visions, but a new way of understanding them, and a new, supremely significant content for them to manifest. "It is unfortunate that the visions and trances and even the dreams of the Bible have come to be regarded as purely religious and supernatural. These experiences are still quite common. And while they do sometimes manifest a 'more than natural' content, they are still natural experiences that can be observed and analyzed. They come from the world that is natural for men to encounter. In fact, the authors of the New Testament had a far more sophisticated view of these experiences than people seem to realize. They had a consistent theory about man in which dreams and visions had a definite place. Man, they saw, was in contact with both a physical world and a non-physical one, both of them necessary to him. Neither could be avoided if man was really to live, if he was to live with reality as it is. Dreams and visions, then, were important because this was one way in which the non-physical world intruded directly into man's psyche. This was basically a Platonic point of view." Kelsey quotes passages from the New Testament which seem to indicate that Paul expected that all Christians would have these sort of experiences, and that the Epistle writers believed that Christians would be in direct communication with "a world of dark and evil forces . . . and also with God and his angels and his Spirit." He adds, "Outside of Revelation [in which there are many more references] there are hundreds of these references, which clearly reveal the belief that man had some kind of direct contact with these realities. As the eminent Dominican scholar Victor White pointed out with such care in *God and the Unconscious*, these descriptions of a 'spiritual world' in Christian tradition are actually very similar to the 'complexes' and 'archetypes' that are described today by Dr. C. G. Jung and others; the two sets of descritipons, in fact, seem to refer to the same basic reality." Kelsey then goes on to show how this view of the spiritual value of dreams was shared by the Church Fathers: he quotes passages from (take a deep breath) Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tatian the Assyrian, Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Thascius Cyprian, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius, Julius Africanus, Peter of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Arnobius, Lactantius, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Synesius of Cyrene, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great (whew!). Most of these were more than passing mentions: Tertullian devoted eight chapters of *On the Soul* to sleeping and dreaming, and he concluded, with flat finality, that "almost the greater part of mankind get their knowledge of God from dreams." (Interestingly, Kelsey notes that there's almost an exact correlation between the writings of the Church Fathers on dreams and visions and the writings of the Church Fathers that have *not* been translated in modern times.) Kelsey spends a lot of time talking about Eastern Orthodox beliefs on the subject, and he says that the work of Synesius were especially influential: "Although almost forgotten in the West, it was highly valued throughout the centuries in the Eastern Empire . . ." He also notes that the decline of Christian interest in dreams was largely due to the effect of the Dark Ages, while in the East, "where Greek culutre continued to flourish, there was no interruption in the tradition of the fathers. The same kind of dream experience the fathers had spoken of continued to be described by the spiritual leaders of the Eastern church, and same thinking persisted." Kelsey claims that the Orthodox have continued to be fascinated with dreams right up till modern times. In the West, though, the decline in classical thinking had a devastating effect on Christian understanding of this subject. In addition, as you'd suggested earlier, "the medieval church feared any questioning of its authority, and confidence in a direct contact with God through dreams was just such a threat. The church thus gradually came to a position about such experiences which made it unnecessary (even unseemly) for most of us to take notice of them at all. All necessary truth about God had been laid down and men didn't need direct contact with him any more." Kelsey believes, however, that the greatest influence on the development of this theory was the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and that Aquinas was concerned, not with heresy, but with reconciling Christianity with Aristotelianism. Aristotle, as you'll recall Kelsey mentioning, held the very unclassical view that dreams had no spiritual origin. "There seemed to be no choice but to translate Christianity and the Bible point by point into the language of Aristotle," says Kelsey. "It did not seem to bother Aquinas that this created a theology based upon only half of the Christian story, or that a large part of the New Testament was played down. He simply ignored not only dreams, but the experiences of angels and demons, the healings, tongue speaking, and miracles in general in most of the New Testament, particularly in the Book of Acts. "Indeed, there is no place for dreams either in the philosophic system of Aristotle or in the theology of Aquinas. According to both of these men we receive knowledge only through sense experience, and the only thing peculiar about dreams is that we become more sensitive to sense experience at night. . . . Because of his philosophic background it was impossible for Aquinas to believe that the human psyche could communicate directly with any reality that was not physical, not just an angelic or demonic abstraction, a 'thinking thought.' He criticized his predecessor Augustine just because he did believe in dreams and in the ability of the soul to experience spiritual reality directly . . . Aquinas then concluded that dreams were really not significant or sure, because he believed that we have no direct, immediate contact with spiritual reality. A rather important conclusion, with all sorts of implications for modern theology. . . . "In the end Aquinas' life contradicted what he had written. He did come into direct relationship with God, and ceased to write and dictate. When he was urged to go on, he replied, 'I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.' But that is not what the Western world knows of Aquinas. Our view of dreams might well be different today if the church had paid attention to his experience. Instead, Catholic and Protestant alike have taken the treatment of dreams in his writings seriously, and the influence of his works has grown in the church until, as a practical matter, there is room for no other view." After noting that even Christian thinkers during the Reformation and Counter Reformation were divided on this matter, Kelsey concludes: "Can we actually afford to neglect the theological foundations of our church? It never occurred to the early Christian fathers to doubt the validity and value of dream experiences as expressions of God's providence and as a way of communicating with the more-than-human world. In ignoring the value and significance of dreams, the church today is denying not only the biblical and Greek tradition, but also the sophisticated thinking of several centuries of hard-fought pioneering. These men, writing in the period of the church's greatest vitality, recognized the deep and mysterious communication of God with man. Dreams and visions were an important part of that communication. Is it possible to believe that these men simply suffered from an illusion common to their age and not, in the same breath, cast doubts upon the entire theological foundation of Christianity? "Jesus, the Bible, the early church - all speak from essentially the same point of view. They all say essentially the same thing. And what they say simply does not get across in a purely Aristotelian hookup. If Jesus speaks to the whole of life, as the church still says that he does, then it is worth trying his whole point of view, and dreams are an important part of that whole point of view." 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