About a year after his correspondence with Evodius (c. 421), a letter from Bishop Paulinus of Nola (a town in Campania, Italy) prompted Augustine’s longest rumination on the relationship between the living and the departed in a treatise called On the Care to Be Taken for the Dead. Paulinus wanted to know if there was any merit to burying a Christian near the tombs of the saints. Would the soul benefit in the afterlife from proximity to their holy bodies? Augustine’s response challenged more than a millennium of tradition concerning the treatment of the dead. It did not matter where the dead were buried or if they were buried at all, he argued, for God would raise the faithful back to life at the Last Judgment irrespective of where their corpses lay, properly interred or scattered by slaughter. Moreover, against prevailing beliefs, Augustine flatly denied that the souls of the dead communicated to ordinary people as apparitions or in dreams. Just as the living do not know when someone dreams about them, the same holds true for the dead.
Reports of certain visions bring to our discussion a question that we should not ignore. It is said that some dead people have appeared to the living in dreams or in some other way, who did not know where their bodies lay unburied. Once these places were revealed, the dead people admonished the living to provide for them the proper burial that they had neglected. Now if we assert that these stories are false, we will seem to contradict blatantly the writings of certain faithful men and the perception of those who have affirmed that such things have happened to them. But one must reply that it should not therefore be believed that the dead know these things just because they seem to say them or indicate them or seek them in dreams. For the living often appear to the living while asleep, even though they are not themselves aware of this, and they hear from them in conversation the content of their dreams, that is to say, that they saw them in their dreams doing or saying something. Therefore, it is possible for someone to see me in their dreams indicating to him something that has happened or indeed foretelling something that will happen in the future, while for my part I am completely ignorant of this and do not care whatsoever not only what he is dreaming about, but also whether he is awake while I am sleeping or whether he is asleep while I am awake or whether we are both awake or asleep at one and the same time, when he experiences the dream in which I appear. Why then is it so strange that the dead, without their knowledge and unable to perceive these things, are seen by the living in dreams and say something, which the living know to be true when they wake up?
I might believe that these visions occur due to the intervention of angels, whether it is permitted from on high or otherwise ordained that the dead seem to say something in dreams concerning how their bodies should be buried, when really those souls whose bodies these are have no knowledge of this exchange. This may sometimes happen profitably whether for the solace of the living, to whom the dead are related, whose images appear to them while they sleep, or so that by these reminders to the human race the humanity of the burial of the dead is commended. For, even though burial does not help the dead, one who neglects this duty runs the risk of seeming impious. But men have sometimes been led into serious trouble by false visions, which it would have been better to resist. What if someone should see in their dreams what Aeneas is said, with poetic license, to have seen among the dead and the image of someone who has not been buried should appear to him and should say such things as Palinurus allegedly said to Aeneas?2 And when he wakes up, he should find the body there in the place where he heard in his dream that it was lying unburied. And then having been admonished and petitioned to bury the body he has found and because he finds this to be true, he should believe therefore that the dead must be buried so that their souls may pass to those places, from where he dreamed that the souls of the unburied are forbidden by a law of the underworld, would he not, holding this to be true, veer widely from the path of truth?
But human weakness is such that, whenever someone sees a dead person in their dreams, that person believes that he has seen the dead person’s soul. When, however, he has dreamed likewise of a living person, he has no doubt that it was not his soul or body that appeared to him, but rather the likeness of the person. This seems to suggest that the images, but not the souls, of dead men appear to sleepers in the same manner without their knowledge. For certain, when we were in Milan, we heard that someone brought forth a bill and demanded payment from the son of a man who had recently died, even though the father had already paid the bill without his son’s knowledge. The son was very sad and wondered why his dying father had not informed him what he owed, since he had drawn up a will. Then in a dream the father appeared to his son, who had grown quite distressed, and revealed to him the location of the receipt, which showed that he had in fact paid the bill. And once he had found the bill and presented it as proof of the payment, the young man not only cast off the infamy of the fraudulent debt, but he also recovered the receipt signed by his father, which his father had not received when he had originally paid back the money he owed. In this case, the soul of the father is believed to have provided care for his son and came to him while he was sleeping, so that he might teach him what he did not know and thus free him from a great deal of trouble.
But right around the same time that we heard this anecdote, a similar story reached us in Milan about Eulogius, an expert in rhetoric at Carthage, who has been a student of mine. He related it to me himself after we returned to Africa. When Eulogius was teaching Cicero’s rhetorical treatises to his students, he was reviewing the lesson that he was going to teach the next day and came upon a complicated passage. His inability to understand it troubled him so much that he could barely sleep. That very night I appeared to him in a dream and explained the passage he could not understand, well, not me, but my image, for I had no knowledge of it as I was very far away across the sea either doing or dreaming something else and worrying not in the least about his troubles. How such things happen, I do not know, but in whatever way they do. Why do we not believe that they happen in the same way, so that whoever in his sleep sees a dead person, it is the same as when he sees a living person? Neither the living nor the dead know or care when someone dreams of their likenesses nor do they know or care when or where this takes place.
Similar to dreams are the kinds of visions sometimes seen by people who are wide awake, whose senses have been disturbed, like those who are mad or prone to fits of raving. For they talk to themselves as though they were in fact talking to someone who was present. Indeed, they are more likely to converse with people who are not there, whose likeness they can see, whether they are living or dead, rather than those who are actually present. But the ones who are living do not know that they are seen by those who are mad or that they converse with them. They are not really present nor are they really conversing at all, but people with troubled senses suffer from these kinds of imaginary visions. In this manner, those who have departed from this life seem as though they are still present to people thus afflicted, when they are in fact absent and altogether unknowing whether someone sees them in their imagination.
Similar to this is the case when men take leave of the senses of the body more deeply than when they are sleeping and experience these kinds of visions, for images of the living and the dead often appear during their trances. And when they have returned to their senses, they report that they have seen certain people who have died, for they truly believe that they have been with them, but those who hear that images of the living, absent and unaware, have been seen in the same way by these people pay no attention to this whatsoever. There was a certain man named Curma from the township of Tullium, which is near Hippo Regius. He was a senator modest in means, a simple man of the country who had achieved the position of magistrate only with some difficulty. After he had become sick, he was deprived of his senses and for many days he lay prone as though he was almost dead. There was the faintest breath in his nostrils, which you could barely feel when you brought your hand close, and this was the only indication that he was alive; otherwise he would have been buried like a corpse. He made no movement, took no nourishment, and neither his eyes nor any other sense of his body responded to any stimulus whatsoever. Yet he saw many visions as though in his dreams, which at length he finally reported when he woke up a few days later. And as soon as he opened his eyes, he said, “Someone should go to the house of Curma the smith and see what has happened there.” When someone went there, they found that Curma the smith had died at that very moment when Curma the magistrate had returned to his senses and come back, as it were, from the dead. And to those who were present, Curma the magistrate indicated that Curma the smith had been ordered to be delivered up at the very moment when he himself had been dismissed. In fact, as his spirit returned to his body, he said that he had overheard that it was not Curma the magistrate, but Curma the smith, who had been ordered to be brought to the dwelling places of the dead.
Therefore, in these visions, just like in his dreams, among the dead whom he saw treated according to the diversity of their merits he also recognized some people he knew were still alive. Indeed, I might have perhaps actually believed him, if during those so-called dreams of his he had not seen certain individuals who are still very much alive, some of whom are priests from his own district, one of whom he heard say in the vision that he should be baptized by me at Hippo Regius, which, he replied, he had already done. Thus in that vision he had seen a priest, some clerics, and me myself, not yet dead, of course, in which afterward he did in fact see dead people. Now why do we not believe that he saw the dead in the same way he saw us, both absent and unknowing, and by extension he did not actually see them, but rather likenesses of them? The same principle applies to the places he saw. For he saw the place where the priest was in the company of the clerics and he saw Hippo Regius, where he thought he had been baptized by me. He was certainly not in these places at the time when it seemed to him that he was there. For he did not know what was going on in these places at that time, which he would have undoubtedly known if he had truly been there. Therefore, these visions have no basis in reality, but rather they have been sketched in shadow on certain images of things that are real.