The influences on the acceptability of Dreams and Visions during Enlightenment

There are quite a few interesting Enlightenment thinkers and Philosophers, but I will only mention a few in the setting of this blog in brief summary (I will further explore these with you in my book).

John Locke argued against several schools of philosophy, including Plato's, which maintained a belief in an innate knowledge. (Something I would call God-given knowledge) Locke argues against innate knowledge, asserting that human beings cannot have ideas in their minds of which they are not aware. He concluded that people cannot be said to possess even the most basic principles until they are taught them or able to think them through themselves.¹ He develops the idea of the tabula rasa, or blank slate which means born with no knowledge at all.

Tabula rasa leaves several things out, however. Locke assumes that after people were taught, that which they learned would be able to equip them with enough knowledge to be self-aware. In addition, concluded that only that taught knowledge would make them proper moral and intelligent human beings. This would leave out and negate any original thought and creative ideas. If one were to build only on what humans come up with, our knowledge would indeed be very limited. In order for humans to have creative ideas there needs to be inspiration from another source, the Cosmos, a higher power, God. Inspirations come through dreams, a vision, or sudden insightful thoughts, which have no basis in any human thoughts but are a God thought given to a receptive human.

My theory is that the human can only be receptive if there is an innate predisposition already present. According to my understandings, a human comes from the God realm, they bring a piece/or spark of that realm with them and with that their soul can stay in communication and receive inspiration.

Locke's idea that there is no innate knowledge does not work unless he would think that there is nothing else out there, no Creator or Sustainer. We all have an innate knowledge, even animals. They know when to breed, where to find their food. Baby animals that are of a species in which the parents are not present at their birth can do that.

In humans, this innate knowledge does not pertain to food and shelter but to other areas. Mainly, those consist of finding happiness and one's life work and life mission. If one has found one's life mission such a person is incredibly happy. That is connected with remembering our source. This innate knowledge might have been educated out of us, beaten out of us, but what is left is still a deep longing for more, for something higher. It is the longing or the dissatisfaction with life, which gives the innate away. We know there is something else. If we cannot reconnect with our innate knowledge given by our Our Creator,  we become depressed and dissatisfied. It is that innate knowledge, which we may not be able to name, which will propel us forward until we find what we need to know and know what we need to find. Once we answer the call of our innate knowledge, we will become whole and truly happy. We will find our life's work.

Locke claims that the only “innate knowledge” he can see is in the drive of humans to want to be happy or an aversion to misery.² That is exactly true. Locke thinks of a material happiness that in the long run is not happiness. True happiness is (or actually joy which is a much higher form of happiness) a happiness in the fulfillment of purpose, happiness that brings wholeness and is inspired and can overcome aversion. Locke leaves out the inspired realm.

Without the awareness of an inspired realm, or God realm, one would have to assume that babies are tabula rasa. Yet I myself observed innate knowledge in my children, things I have not taught them yet and still they were able to do those things.

Immanuel Kant challenged the assumption that the mind is actually a blank slate. “The mind does not simply receive information, according to Kant; it also gives that information shape.”³ Kant does not talk about a divine or inspired realm from a point of revelation. He tiptoes around this subject. He concludes that pure reason is capable of knowing important truths. “However, Kant does not follow rationalist metaphysics in asserting that pure reason has the power to grasp the mysteries of the universe. “⁴

“Kant, along with Hume and Hegel, played a central role in the development of philosophy of religion as a matter of inquiry. One important function of this kind of inquiry was to determine the extent to which human reason, operating without assistance of divine revelation, could by its own power establish the meaning, validity and truth of concepts and claims about God.”⁵

It may be understandable that Kant and many others distrusted revelation. The Catholic Church had a questionable history by then (selling indulgencies, relics, some of which were fake etc.). However, I believe that it was this distrust and the inquiry into religion as a human phenomenon, which contributed to undermine the acceptability of dreams and visions as revelation.

Darwin moved even further away from the idea that God is our creator and influences human life. He wrote in length in his essay Natural Selection-Survival of the Fittest, about the adaptability and variability of species when conditions change. Obviously those who do not adapt die out – hence 'Survival of the Fittest'. He goes on to explain in his essays: Descent of Origin of Man that humans are such a variability coming from lower forms of life; or simply said, the human evolved from the animal. The thing is, even if natural selection or evolution were to be true, we must consider that such adaptability of a species, allowing them to survive, is an act of mercy. One can see God's hand in this process.

 Darwin says in his essay: Struggle for Existence: “Natural Selection is a power incessantly ready for action and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.”⁶ He did not mention God; that is a problem later on for us humans. He did however admit that there is a great power at work; he called it Nature. Obviously, he did not see that Nature itself does not have that power. He did not see that there must be something that gives Nature that power.

Through Darwin’s theory, the higher intellectual and spiritual human becomes degraded. Even though humans have at times acted like animals, they have the power of the mind and spirit to make choices and reason right and wrong. They have feelings and the ability to have compassion and love.

The three possibilities I see: (1) If man evolved, we may either have mistakenly thought that he evolved from the animal but had a parallel evolution, (2) man, if he truly evolved from the animal, has been divinely bestowed to move beyond the animal qualities, which if true, these animal qualities may haunt him. Nevertheless, he has available to him reason, intellect, and higher feelings such as love and compassion, or (3) the third option is creation of the human by God, who is however sinful and stoops to animal qualities; not something Darwin shared. Reason makes it necessary to conclude divine intervention and even revelation for man to move forward. By degrading man to an animal, dreams and visions as revelation, of course, are not even considered.

Unfortunately, people who decide not to help someone in need also quote natural selection in many instances. That is not natural selection. Nature is not capable of being selfish. A selfish choice is not natural selection, it is immoral since we have intellect and emotion and the ability to reason.

This just shows very briefly how some of these thoughts and philosophies affect the acceptability of dreams and visions as well as our sense of morality over time.

1 Http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/johnlocke/section1.rhtml (accessed 6/23/13)

2Willian Benton, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Britannica Great Books, Vol 35. (Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc. 1952), 104.

3SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Critique of Practical Reason.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. n.d.. Web. 20 Jun. 2013.

4SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Critique of Practical Reason.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. n.d.. Web. 20 Jun. 2013.

5Philip Rossi <philip.ross@marquette.edu> on http://www.plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/supplement.html. (accessed 6/25/13)

6Darwin, The Descent of Man, in Britannica Great Books, Vol.49, Editors: Brockway and Adler, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1951), 32-47,  253-270.


© 2013 Angelika Mitchell 

Tracing history: how dreams and visions came into dishonor

This will make much more sense if you read it as continuation the previous blog entry, which is below this post since blogs go bottom up.

             Going back to the Middle Ages one finds that Centuries of religious intolerance reigned. The terrors of the Inquisition started with the medieval inquisition in the 12^th century. This lasted well through the 14^th century. Overlapping was the Spanish Inquisition that started 1478 and lasted until 1834. Special abilities brought someone easily the blame to be a witch. Visions or divinely inspired dreams known as gifts were not something people could advertise. One example is Joan of Arc. She had had visions since the age of twelve and professed to talk to saints and angels openly. She received divine instructions to help the French army in their war against the English and with her help, the French won.

Joan was imprisoned and brought before an Inquisitional tribunal where she was charged with 'cross dressing.' She wore man's clothing so she would not be raped. She also was accused of witchcraft by claiming that her banner (which had the image of the cross on it) had been endowed with “magical power”. The saints and angels, she saw, were dismissed by the tribunal as demons – despite the fact that those beings had told her to go to church. Joan was condemned to death.¹ Many saints who had visions or God-encounters were in fear of the Inquisition.

This kind of treatment, which many of us can only imagine, would cause fear of any such manifestations of Godly gifts such as dreams and visions for a long time to come. This fear caused people to hide them or even suppress them. Many people were tortured, burned alive or hanged either for heretical claims or because of such special gifts. The disagreements and heresy claims between Catholics and Protestants eventually accelerated causing a thirty-year war in Europe. 

After these desolate thirty-years, came a time when people were tired of the fighting and destruction. In 1648, complicated negotiations led to the signing of the Peace of Westphalia, which put an end to this terrible war.²  “The modern secular state began to develop. People could not help but ask the question: Could any doctrine be true that produced the atrocities of the Thirty-Year War? Was there not a more tolerant, more profound, and even more Christian way to serve God, than simply following the dictates of orthodoxy, be it Catholic or Protestant?”³ Rational thought at that time was a relief from all this 'craziness' and the time of the Enlightenment dawned. No one cared about dreams and visions. Everything that could not be seen with one's eyes or touched was relegated to superstition.

1Www.archive.joan-of-arc.org/joanofarc_short_biography.html (accessed 6/12/13)

2Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, The Reformation to the Present Day, VolII. (USA: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1985), 135-141.

3Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, The Reformation to the Present Day, VolII. (USA: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1985), 135-141.

© 2013 Angelika Mitchell

An Age of Desolation

            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.)² 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. ³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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.⁷ 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 2^nd and 3^rd 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.”⁸

          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)⁹ 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.”¹⁰

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.'”¹¹ 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.”¹² 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.¹³ 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,¹⁴ 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.”¹⁵ 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.”¹⁶ 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.”¹⁷ 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 century¹⁸, dreams were placed in an Aristotelian context, filed away and ignored and forgotten by the Christian church.¹⁹ 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.”²⁰

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.”²¹ 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.” ²² Aquinas consistently claimed, “a person living in material reality cannot know the divine essence through the nature of material things.”²³ 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.”²⁴ 

          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)²⁵
 God's revelation through dreams and visions took another blow by a 17^th 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.²⁶

         
 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.²⁷ 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 ²⁸yet 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!

SOURCES:

1Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974),55.

2Http://www.biography.com/people/aristotle-9188415?page=1 (accessed 6/7/13)

3Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 67.

4Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 68.

5Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 73.

7Http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/justin.php (accessed 6/7/13)

8Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 118.

9Http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02330b.htm (accessed 6.7.13)

10Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 136.

11Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 151

12Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 158.

13Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 161.

14www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=54 (accessed 6/5/13)

15Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 164.

16Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 165.

17Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 165.

18Http://www.biography.com/people/st.thomas-aquinas-9187231 (accessed 6/5/13)

19Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 161.

20Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 174.

21Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 175.

22Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 175.

23Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 175.

24Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 175.

25Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 178.

26Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 179.

27Morton T. Kelsey, God, Dreams, And Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams, (MN: Augsburg Publishing house, 1974), 179 – 180.

28Www.ukcia.org/research/why-take.php (accessed 6/5/13)



© 2013 Angelika Mitchell