I have sensed for some time now that
a sort of desolation has befallen us. Why would I call this an age of
desolation? This is an age of desolation because we are trying to
laugh everything away that is not anchored in rational thought and can be seen or touched. Yes,
the economy is limping and there is much violence but that is not the reason for the desolation I feel– not directly. In order to explain myself, I feel it necessary to take
a journey through history in which dreams and visions became
controversial within society as well as the Church and why.
To begin, in
ancient times, dreams and visions were viewed as one and the same.
These phenomenons were part of anyone's life, a way God spoke to
people. The ancient Hebrews and many cultures looked at dreams and
visions as a breaking through of God into the human plane. Even the
Ancient Greeks believed that dreams and visions came from the gods.
In that time, there were two ideas about dreams floating around. One
was that dreams are an intrusion from the gods. The “Pythagoreans
believed that during sleep the soul left the body and communed with
other spirits, took trips, or visited with the gods.
Their ideas about dreams and visions were certainly interesting whether God is breaking through or our souls are traveling at night to another world.
However, something happened that brought our understanding and attempt to explain them to a stand still. It was the Greek Philosopher
Aristotle ( 384-322 B.C.)
whose new view would shape the future up to this day. According to
him, man is in contact only with the world of sense experience, which
he comes to understand through his reason. Since there is no
experience-able non-physical world from which dreams may emerge, according to him, they
cannot be seen as having significance.
Aristotle's reasoning was that gods are rational. He reasoned that
gods would only communicate with intelligent people. However, since also simple people had dreams and
visions he did not think that any god was communicating with them.
His conclusion followed, that dreams were not divine.
This view unfortunately took over and grew over the centuries until it became almost unquestioned
authority in western culture, in modern times for Christians as well
as for the entire Muslem world. Cicero, a Roman philosopher,
statesman, lawyer and orator, who lived a couple of hundred years
after Aristotle (106-43 B.C.) was a supporter of Aristotle's
philosophy. He wrote: “...let divination by dreams be jeered off
the stage, along with the other tricks of the sooth-sayers...”
However, Cicero, unlike Aristotle who still respected dreams,
belittled them holding the position that, in his view, humans did not
need any direct contact with spiritual elements, any intrusion of the
non-physical or supernatural.
That is, however, a strange view considering that he, Cicero, was
lead through a dream to make a major political decision..
The Early Christian Fathers
held for quite some time that dreams and visions are a communication
from God. Justin Martyr (c.100 – c.165), agreed with this view.
Also Irenaeus
( c.115 an c.202), another Early Church
Father and Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, which is today Lyons in
France, commented on the dreams of Peter, Paul and Joseph and
believed that God manifests himself not only through mighty works,
but with both visual and auditory visions as well. Origen, Clement
and Tertullian who were Church Fathers dating between the 2nd
and 3rd century as well as many others, were in support of
the idea that God revealed God-self through dreams and visions. The
church at large acted on the belief during that time, thinking “that
God continued to chide even young men and bring them to their sense
in visions of the night, just like Job.”
Doubtfulness is not new to the world.
There were some leaders among the Early Christian Fathers who let
fear dominate their doctrine. “Athanasius (c.296 – c.373) who was
Bishop of Alexandria, Confessor and Doctor of the Church and a
prolific writer was one of them. Even though he shared the Early
Christian attitude toward dreams and visions as revelations of an
unseen world, he also admonished his people to beware of those who
use dreams and 'false prophecies' to lead men astray. Basil (c.329 –
c.379), an influential theologian and Bishop in Asia Minor (Turkey
today)
was the first Early Christian Father whose attitude started to slowly
chip away on the idea of God's revelation through dreams and vision.
Actually, “he believed in them, but he found them a source of
embarrassment. He learned that he could not control the human psyche
by his rational mind – fear set in – and he warned
Gregory of Nazianzen that it is better not to sleep too hard, because
this opens the mind to wild fancies.”
Then something else occurred that would bring a great change. Jerome, who in general
was favorable toward dreams and visions, translated scripture.
“Leviticus 19:26 and Deut. 18:10 with one word different from other
passages, a direct miss-translation as we shall show, Jerome turned
the law: 'You shall not practice augury or witchcraft (i.e.
soothsayings)' into the prohibition: 'You shall not practice augury
or observe dreams.' Thus by the authority of the Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible), dreams
were classed with soothsaying, the practice of listening to them with
other superstitious ideas.'”
That mistake has had a profound affect ever since.
We can see how fears and
anxieties over dreams continued within the church as we look at Gregory the Great
(c.540 – c.604), Pope, Doctor of the Church and founder of a
monastic order in Italy. He acknowledged the validity of dreams
somewhat, but also feared them and by that warned in strong words of
their danger. For the first time in the Church Fathers, the passages
of Leviticus 19, Ecclesiastes 5:3 and Ecclesiasticus 34, which have
several passages against dreams, were emphasized again and again.
Jerome's mistranslation had done its work.
Gregory talked about six ways dreams occur and proceeded in his
writings to cite Jerome's mistranslation calling dreams detestable
since they were classified with divination. Gregory admits that
saints have dreams and are the ones who can discern truly revelation
from all those other “evil dreams.”
Gregory generated even more fear about dreams, the very tool through
which God communicates. Gregory's letters to Theoctista, the
Byzantine Emperor's sister, reveal how he tried to get rid of “all
phantasms of the body” and to find God through faith rather than in
visions of him.
Being a Pope and Doctor of the Church of course, he had clout and who
could question him? He contributed much to the church through his
writings,
but not all were helpful. Obviously various thinkers picked up this
attitude on dreams and visions and we still can find it in the
reformed churches and also the Catholic church.
“When skepticism about supernatural
dreams and visions began to grow, the lack of a religious approach
and study left only superstition to oppose the growing doubt. In the end the
attitude of the skeptic became so generally accepted in western
culture that people were embarrassed to hold any other belief.”
This embarrassment has grown into the current attitude that someone
who sees visions is most likely mentally ill or has some sort of
problem. Such a person would have to prove against all odds that they
actually receive revelations.
Some
saints in the Catholic church have been given the benefit of a doubt,
and the Vatican has rigorously investigated their visions. Other
denominations have limited resources for such a support system.
For that matter,
most churches do not want to talk about this kind of thing. There are
some rare exceptions; however, they are viewed as strange and unusual
within the body of Christ. One NT scholar told me: “You don't want
to go there, if you want to be taken seriously.” The commonality
is found in the statement, “The church adhered to the prohibition
against observing dreams which Jerome had written into the Old
Testament law.”
Of course, people still experienced visions and dreams, after all God
is not going to stop for a trend or the church. However, that was a problem for the church.
Therefore, the medieval church told people that dreams came from any place but
God and that there was little need for them.
“So the Church's position to this day became:
God's truth had been laid down and men didn't need direct contact
with God anymore.”
That of course created the problem of the stagnant church,
and one of the current results is that many mainline denominations loose
more and more members. For what is the church without the deep experience of God's presence?
The influence of Aristotle and his
followers of rational thought upon the church is well documented.
With Thomas Aquinas a major theologian of the thirteenth century,
dreams were placed in an Aristotelian context, filed away and ignored
and forgotten by the Christian church.
He wrote very little on dreams and even addressing the dreams
of the Old Testament prophets he came to suggest that dreams were a
lower form of prophecy. In general, he left this subject by the
wayside.
“He struggled to make sense of
numbers 12:6 If there be among you a prophet of the Lord I will
appear to him in a vision, or I will speak to him in a dream.” But
Aquinas could not fit this into the philosophical system of
Aristotle, and so in the end the PHILOSOPHER won and the Bible lost.
In the end Aquinas actually went contrary to the Bible and the
fathers in this matter of revelation.”
The problem is that many educators and
students will do a devout study of Aquinas who was and still is an admired writer
and scholar, and they never question any portion thereof. With
various influences coming to Europe “there seemed to be no choice
but to translate Christianity and the Bible point by point into the
language of Aristotle. 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 the dreams, but the experiences of angels and
demons, the healings, tongue speaking, and miracles in general in
most of the NT, particularly the book of Acts.”
One should not be surprised, Aquinas was a member of the Dominican Order, an order who carried out 'inquisitional justice'. 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 supposedly the only thing peculiar about dreams is that we become more
sensitive to sense experience at night.”
Aquinas consistently claimed, “a person living in material reality
cannot know the divine essence through the nature of material
things.”
Yet, Aquinas' life was a contradiction to his writings. He said, “I
can do no more (to write), such things have been revealed to me that
all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my
life.”
With the rise and acknowledgement of
these two forces, Aristotle and Aquinas, humanity became imprisoned
in a sense-space which was of course embraced by the developing
rational mind set. Much of the church started to progressively shut
its doors to divine inspiration and revelation instead of keeping
that very venue open in what was to become a time of gross materialism.
The developing rationalism and materialism brought forth theologians
like John Calvin (1509-1564), who was a strict rationalist. In his Institutes
he did not write much about revelation of God through images of
any kind that of course also excludes dreams, after all they were
only imagery. (The dreams in Daniel which he did write about, is a
mostly unknown writing)
God's revelation through dreams and visions took another blow by a
17th Century preacher Jeremy Taylor. He passed dreams up
to the “temper of the body”, to disease, business, a restless
mind, fear and wine or passion and totally undermined any revelatory
value they might have. He quoted Artemidoris, a third century
soothsayer, in that sermon rather than the Bible or any of the Church
fathers.
Thank God, every so often a light broke
forth in this darkness and here again was someone who wrote about
dreams, a physician, Sir Thomas Browne (1402-1460). He was bold enough to conclude that Aristotle did not know what he
was talking about on the subject of dreams. There were others to
endorse dreams and revelations such as John Wesley (1703-1791) the
founder of Methodism.
However, these voices were not strong enough to counteract Aristotle
and Aquinas – nor Jerome's mistranslation. At least they kept the
idea that dreams and visions are revelations from God from becoming
extinct.
At the present, we not only do not
believe that God speaks to people through dreams, visions and in various other ways, we do not believe that our
disconnectedness is the root cause for the violence and a rampant
lack of compassion, the problems we are experiencing and even the
loss of church membership in mainline churches. Up to our age,
various church splits have taken place. Many have a diluted Aquinian
view of sensory experience of life as major experience, as taught by
Aristotle and Aquinas. A human generated brand of prophecy came
about which also brought about rigid thinking and the notion of a “I
am right and you are wrong” religiousness. Many would-be prophets
have arisen. Other churches will spout theological terms repeatedly
without ever so much explaining them or showing an avenue to
experience what they are addressing. At the same time, we have
young people seeking for a purpose in their lives.
As harsh as the
world is, many seek such a purpose in drugs or at least with the help
of drugs. Drugs will bring hallucinations – an artificial way of
dreams. Unfortunately, they are not God’s revelations – they
leave the young person in even worse shape. When I researched why
young people take drugs, there are many secondary problems listed
such as poverty, unemployment, boredom and stress yet
none lists the need to gain inner knowledge and authenticity or the search for a
higher power, things in which dreams and visions can be helpful. We also have replaced our dreams and visions with
TV-images that are pounding on us for hours. Again, they are human
generated “visions”. Most of the time people are plagued not
from inspired dreams but from nightmares dealing with those perpetual
images.
To find our authenticity and true source we must learn to live with our
eyes focused on the one who created us and accept God's 'breaking through', for we have
adopted the “dreams” of gods not of God!
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