________________ Introduction ________________
“MADMEN and dreamers believe what is false.”1 So Socrates thought, and many in the contemporary world might well agree. To believe in the ephemeral fancies of dreams is a mad enterprise, a slap in the face of logic. If reason and unreason are the only categories available for judging our perceptions of the world and ourselves, then Socrates was undoubtedly right: dream knowledge is false knowledge.
However, across the centuries, a dreamer’s “belief in what is false” has been understood otherwise. Rather than placing dreams within a binary framework that opposes logic to illogic, dreamers from Artemidorus to Freud have situated dreams neither in logic nor in illogic, but in imagination. For this tradition of thinkers, dreams can be occasions not for “belief” but rather for reflection on constructions of self-identity. Oneiric literature has been remarkable for its recognition, whether implicit or explicit, that the self is an imaginal construct—that we are ourselves ephemeral fancies, continually in the process of further fabrication.
In the current postmodern climate of critical discourse, which has heralded the “death of the author” and the decentering of a once-dominical self, it is probably risky and potentially misleading to use such terms as “self,” “self-identity,” and even “individual.”2 When I use such terms in the following studies, I do not mean to imply that Graeco-Roman people conceptualized the self as a stable essence beyond the reach of cultural construction, nor do I mean to imply that they were just like contemporary theorists, preoccupied with dismantling a centuries-long construct of a unitary, objectifying ego that blinks its own vulnerability to change. What I do mean to point to by using such terms is that, in their interaction with dreams, late-antique people revealed their understanding of the human person as possessed of an interiority, indeed of a lively interior “space” in which analysis of very particular aspects of the person’s life was conducted. Whether one is dealing with such disparate figures as a moody lover staring at the flame of a candle or a monk asleep in his cave, still the function of the dream as a form of self address, as an agent of insight into a life conceived as truly individual, seems clear.
In the essays on particular dreamers that follow, I will argue that, through their metaphors and tropes, dreams extended the consciousness of the dreamers by provoking engagement with matters of intimate significance: Perpetua’s painful memories of her young brother, Hermas’ battle with adulterous desires, Jerome’s struggle with his elitist literary tastes, the two Gregorys’ coming to terms with asceticism, Aristides’ ambivalence toward cultural norms of masculinity. As signifying moments in the formation—or deformation—of identity, dreams will be viewed as projections of desire that alter existing frameworks of self-understanding. My interest in this section lies in exploring how the oneiric imagination acted as the spur to a process of reconstructing what an individual experienced as real, as significant.
Dreams will here be read as a lexicon of self-expression that entailed a rereading of experience in light of the dream, a re-reading in which the dream has the effect of the twist of a kaleidoscope; the pieces of a life’s experience throw themselves together in a new pattern, a new way of picturing or visualizing one’s self in one’s own context. As an interpreter, I have tried to match my method of presentation with the synchronic dynamic that I see at work in the effect of dreams on these ancient dreamers. Thus the studies that follow are not biographical in the sense of charting the linear unfolding of events in a life. Instead, they are “snapshots” that attempt to represent the moment when a fortuitous event—in these cases, a dream or set of dreams—forces a reconfiguration of the elements that compose a life.
Further, I am interested in the way in which a focus on dreams leads to insights into a person’s life and culture that might not have been possible otherwise. Dreams lead not only inward but also outward, opening surprising connections to and perspectives on other facets of the dreamer’s experience and cultural situation. Following the tracery of dreams has led me to investigations of other topics of significance in the Graeco-Roman world (for example, the body) as well as to the adoption of interpretive strategies that differ from the historical-philological model (for example, French feminist hermeneutics). Dreams have constituted a “semiotic wonderland” not only for the subjects of this discussion, but also for this interpreter.3
The dreamers who are the principals of these studies were chosen either because they were prolific dreamers who left written records of their dreams (Hermas, Perpetua, and Aelius Aristides), or because of the striking qualities of individual dreams (Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus). The religious affiliations of these dreamers did not influence my selection of them, because part of the argument of this book is that dreaming was a cultural discourse that cut across lines of difference in religious belief and practice. Of course the forms of dreaming varied: Asclepian dreaming took a different form from magical dreaming, for example. As I have pointed out, dreaming was a “language” with many “dialects.” The normative character of dreaming as a cultural phenomenon lies rather in its widespread practice, irrespective of the forms it took in specific religious traditions and institutions.
The fact that five of the six dreamers who have been singled out for special attention were Christian should not be construed as an implicit affirmation on my part of the view that Christianity fostered a new or deeper or more comprehensive view of the self. The issue of how “self’ and “person” were conceptualized in classical and late antiquity is a thorny one with a large bibliography.4 I raise the issue here because a perspective advanced at the turn of this century by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch, which argues that an authentic concept of an inner life, and hence of personality, did not exist before Augustine wrote his Confessions, has recently been revived.5 This argument in its revived form, which continues to focus on Augustine’s writing as the locus of clearest expression, credits to Christianity the creation of “a newly reflexive self, that is, a subject turned back upon itself in ways unknown before.”6 Arguing against Foucault’s concept of Christian, especially ascetic Christian, self-renunciation, this perspective argues that a new view of the person as a “whole self” was made possible in Christianity in part by its theological affirmation of the body, now seen to be as essential to the concept of the person as the soul.7
This argument overstates its case by privileging a particular kind of self-examination and thus denying concepts of interiority and personhood to the non-Christian “others” of late antiquity, that is, to the polytheist and Jewish traditions.8 Yet, as Foucault has shown in an extensive study, there were in late antiquity a variety of practices of self-examination, which he examines under the rubric of “the care of the self.”9 Furthermore, Arnaldo Momigliano has shown that Greek and Roman (polytheist) biographers had an acute sense of individual character.10 The discussion about late-antique concepts of the self needs to be injected with evidence from arenas other than theology and philosophy—arenas like dreams, which would, I suggest, give the discussion a more generous, because more nuanced, range. Thus I see no reason why Augustine’s Confessions should continue as the standard against which the personhood of others is judged and found wanting. In the present context, the fact of conceptualizing a person as possessed of a soul that either receives or fabricates dreams (or both) certainly suggests the presence of an understanding of inner life, and this was as true of magicians as it was of Augustine. It was Augustine, after all, who thought he had appeared as a phantom in someone else’s dream. As a phenomenon, this strikes me as stemming from the same mental climate as that of the magician who sends a dream to another person.11
In the following essays, then, the dreamers who have been selected for detailed discussion will be treated, first and foremost, as dreamers, and dreaming will be seen as one of the techniques of the care of the self that was a cultural preoccupation not aligned with particular religious persuasions. Presiding over all of these studies is an inquiry into the phenomenon of late-antique dreaming as representative of the construction of new narrative discourses of the self.
1 Plato, Theaetetus 158b (Collected Dialogues, p. 863).
2 See, for example, Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” pp. 12–48; Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” pp. 141–60; Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, pp. 80–100; M. Sprinker, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,” pp. 321–42; Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, pp. 41–89.
3 The phrase “semiotic wonderland” comes from a discussion of the biographical self as a narrative construct by William H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography, p. 36; his statement is worth quoting in full: “It no longer seems possible to treat a biographical ‘event’ as a ‘natural’ occurrence in the concrete world; rather, the contemporary theoretical crisis suggests, we must treat a biographical ‘event’ as an epistemological operation to which ontological status is frequently, if inappropriately, granted, as a transient, discursive moment in a constantly receding and endlessly replicating semiotic wonderland.”
4 The locus classicus for discussions of concepts of the self in Greek and Roman antiquity is Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 2 vols.; see also Jean Daniélou, “La Notion de personne chez les Pères grecs,” pp. 113–21; Maria Daraki, “La Naissance du sujet singulier dans les Confessions de Saint Augustin”; F. M. Schraeder, “The Self in Ancient Religious Experience,” pp. 337–59; for discussions of the corporate identity of religious sects, see Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, 3: Self-Definition in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Meyer and Sanders; for works that define the person by using socio-historical methodologies, see A History of Private Life, vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (ed. Veyne, trans. Goldhammer, pp. 5–409); and Foucault, The History of Sexuality 3:37-95.
5 For Dilthey’s theory of narrative self-revelation, see Gesammelte Schriften, 7: Der Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 191–251; for Misch’s discussion of Augustine, see History of Autobiography 2:625-67. These views appear in contemporary form (although without the appeal to mysticism that is promiment in Misch’s study) in Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Caro Solaris Cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought,” pp. 25–50.
6 Stroumsa, “Caro Solaris Cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought,” p. 26.
7 Ibid., pp. 30, 33–35, and passim.
8 See the astute observations by Arnaldo Momigliano, “Marcel Mauss and the Quest for the Person in Greek Biography and Autobiography,” pp. 83–92, especially 84–85.
9 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3:39-68, focuses on the following topics: the era’s individualistic attitude, its positive valuation of private life, and the intensity of relations to the self.
10 Momigliano, “Marcel Mauss and the Quest for the Person in Greek Biography and Autobiography,” pp. 89–92; see also his The Development of Greek Biography.
11 Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda 11.13 (CSEL 41.642, 12–643,4).