Pagans and Christians

To us, “epiphany” and visionary experience seem a constant part of Christian life, from the first vision of angels at the Tomb to the continuing appearances of the Virgin Mary in the modern Catholic world. Great religious art has sanctioned and ennobled the connection; we can still share contemporaries’ shock over Caravaggio when he broke with the tradition and chose a rougher idiom for the contact of angels with men. We are heirs, above all, to the Counter-Reformation, when visions were exploited in high art and literature as an advertisement for faith. The experience is still lively.² In the past thirty-five years, the Virgin has made 352 “appearances” which the Catholic Church has accepted as genuine, quite apart from her continuing attendance on non-Catholic Christians in Syria and Egypt. The period since 1900 ranks as a golden age of visions in Spain, for whose equal historians must go back as far as the years from c. 1400 to the 1520s. In 1947, the Virgin appeared, crowned with roses, in Stockport, in the north of England. Since 1981, she is claimed to have appeared more than two thousand times to a small group of adolescent visionaries in the village of Medjugorje in western Yugoslavia. Her most recent site for a visit was a gardener’s potting shed in Poland. Perhaps it is proof of her good taste that she has not been sighted in St. Tropez since October 1954.

Historians of the early Church have tended to overlook that they, too, are living in this golden age of visions: encounters and sightings have not yet occurred in scholarly libraries. Whereas the beneficiaries may take Christian visionary experience for granted, historians can still ask questions of its forms, occurrence and literary expression. Among contemporary pagans, we have studied the enduring sense of the gods’ presence: how, if at all, did the Christians’ sense differ and did the pagan pattern influence its newer companion in the Gentile world? Visions differ according to the piety of differing groups and periods, for they lie in the beholder’s eye: does the emphasis in known early Christian visions differ in kind or degree from pagans’? There is, indeed, one new dimension, affecting all we will study. While pagans could reflect on Homer and the myths, enhancing what they saw in life, Christians looked to past appearances which were recorded in their Scriptures. They were not myth, but “revelation.” Among Christians, “epiphanies” thus related to distinctive ideas of authority and heresy: in Spain, “it is apparently because of the activities of the Inquisition that only a handful of visions occurred between 1525 and 1900.”³ Reports of modern “epiphanies” tend to claim that they are something special, even unique. Is there, nonetheless, a continuity of imagery and response, running from Homer, or at least the Gospels, to the current sightings of the Virgin in Herzegovina, pointing to something basic in religious experience which existed before any revealed religion and which Christian stories thinly clothed?

Already in Jesus’s own lifetime, epiphany and visionary experience accompanied his baptism and commission and recurred in the Transfiguration. No pagan had been granted such an experience, seeing a change from the human to the supernatural and back to the human. However, the response to it conformed to the familiar pattern. Knowing the awe in such intimacy, the chosen Apostles were scared at what they saw; the mark of transfigured divinity was a radiant white-robed presence, as so often in previous encounters; by an age-old reaction, Peter wanted to build some little monuments to mark the spot. Once again, “not to everyone do the gods appear…” As Origen remarked, the degree of the vision depended on the piety of those who saw it. Only three disciples were picked by Jesus for the experience.⁴

It is tempting for a classical historian to turn from the Greek world to the Gospels in Greek and match these continuing patterns directly with pagan antiquity. Homer, however, was unknown territory to the first Christians, and behind their stories lay a third tradition, enhancing their experience and perhaps even influencing their Lord’s decisions. The Transfiguration was understood in terms of the epiphanies of Jewish Scripture and apocalyptic texts. In the Old Testament, God was not seen personally. He was manifest in darkness and clouds, voices, thunder and the tremors of nature: these beliefs surface in the scene in John’s Gospel when “there came a voice from heaven” to Jesus on Palm Sunday and some of the bystanders “said that it thundered, while others said an angel spake to him.”⁵ The Jewish prophets’ and seers’ books of revelation hint at their authors’ physical visionary experience: the supernatural was met through sounds and heavenly voices, brilliant light and angelic helpers on earth. These descriptions do resemble the Greeks’: the Greek translators of the Old Testament sometimes used language and details which went beyond the Hebrew and increased the similarity.⁶ However, Jewish visions were closely attached to history, unlike the pagans’ “encounters.” The two traditions’ similar details do not blur this essential difference of form. It is to the Jewish tradition and its historical depth that the Gospels’ “epiphanies” looked.

This tradition helped to express, but itself it did not create, the central Christian experience, an encounter with the risen Lord. In the pagan world, visions of a person soon after death were not uncommon. Epicrates’s inscription recorded publicly how his son was still appearing to him in “visitations and visions”; the ancients had their ghost stories, the Roman love poets their reproachful mistresses who appeared from beyond the grave.⁷ Christians, however, advanced the extreme claim that the object of their visions had risen physically from the dead. Visions of him abounded. Some ten years later, Paul was taught in Jerusalem that Christ had been “seen” by Peter, then by the Twelve, then by more than five hundred brethren at one time, then by James, then by all the Apostles.⁸ Of these copious appearances, only those to Peter and the Twelve can be closely identified with any in the Gospel tradition. Although much has been lost from the visionary record, and what survives is often at variance in its details, the gaps and inconsistencies do not undermine Paul’s tradition. To critics, however, some of the stories of visions do seem to have developed as defensive legends, taking forms which countered obvious objections. When the women returned from the Tomb, said Matthew, they saw Jesus and “came up and took hold of his feet.” At other times, he asked them to feel him or to poke fingers into his wounds. They “ate salt with him” and watched while he ate or cooked their breakfast over a campfire. These stories were very explicit and had no pagan counterpart.⁹ They countered the criticism that, like so many others, the disciples had merely seen a vision of their dead, beloved companion. The seers were not simply recorded as believers. The events at the Tomb had already occurred, but in Matthew’s Gospel, some of the Apostles still doubted, even when Jesus “appeared” and was worshipped: is this unexpected note of doubt historical, or was it contrived to answer the charge that the beholders had been convinced too easily?¹⁰

Among pagans, no god had been concerned to prove his bodily reality; in Jewish texts, God never appeared in person on earth. In both traditions, divine beings appeared more discreetly, in dreams or in disguises, ways sanctioned by the angels of the Old Testament or the exquisite range of Homeric imagery. It is particularly interesting that some Christian “appearances” did take this form, despite their interest in asserting a bodily Resurrection: they remain, as a result, the most beguiling.¹¹ In the Garden, Mary Magdalene mistook the Lord for the gardener, until he merely spoke her name: unlike the gods of pagan myths, he revealed himself by no greater power. By the Sea of Tiberias, he conformed to the older pattern: he was only recognized by his disciples when he helped them with their fishing. On the road to the “village called Emmaus” two of the disciples met Jesus, but were denied recognition of him. As he walked beside them, the “stranger in Jerusalem” heard their disappointed hopes, their tale of the empty tomb, the women’s vision of the angels. He expounded the Scriptures “concerning himself,” until his companions’ “hearts burned within them.” Entering with them, he shared their room, and when he blessed their bread, their “eyes were opened.” They knew him by a characteristic action, whereupon, like a god in Homer, he prepared to depart. The story obeyed old patterns of epiphany, and although there is great art in its invention and telling, there is no mistaking the feeling behind the form.

Nonetheless, like all the “appearances,” these stories raise famous problems. Only in Luke are the Apostles told to stay in or near Jerusalem: in the other texts, Jesus orders them to go ahead into Galilee, where the “appearances” occur.¹² How, if at all, can the road to Emmaus fit this discrepancy? The appearance by the sea has been suspected as an addition to John’s Gospel: were these stories legends, shaped, perhaps, by Greek traditions of the “gods in disguise” which might have been known to their two Evangelists, the most open to Greek ideas? However, the first Christians had an ample tradition of epiphanies in their own Jewish Scriptures, whose angels had visited mortals “unawares”: it was on this angelic pattern that the Gospel authors drew to express their stories of jesus in disguise. These stories, it so happened, were those which a pagan could best accommodate.

There is an interesting range, too, in the reactions of the beholders. In John’s Gospel, those who see are not afraid, not even at first, when beholders traditionally had to be reassured. They know the intimacy, not the awe, in a “Christ epiphany” on earth: they are greeted with their name or the familiar word of peace. In the Jewish Scriptures, however, beholders were as aware as any pagan of the fear and terror when first they saw an angel or a heavenly light, and in the other Gospels, the witnesses conform to this pattern of description. The text of Mark ends abruptly with word of the visitors’ fear at the Tomb, a point which has been thought to lay deliberate emphasis on “human inadequacy, lack of understanding and weakness in the presence of supreme divine action.”¹³

In many pagan cults, “epiphany” had led to a wish to publicize the event and set up a permanent shrine or priesthood. Stones were vowed in Lydian villages to record the gods’ manifest power and appease it by open advertisement; cults of Isis or Serapis led to the publication of the gods’ “good deeds” in inscriptions, with rules for worship or texts on the divinity’s power. Early Christianity was also born from visionary experience, but it responded to it with special vigour. The experience caused conversion, a faith in only one God, not a favour for one among many. It also fired a sense of mission with which no pagan cult could compete: Christians’ visions impressed their seers with the added force of history and fulfilled prophecy. All the while, they seemed to say, this was what had been meant. At Jesus’s baptism or Paul’s blinding moment of vision, a heavenly voice and an appearance marked the start of a new career. The Apostles’ own missionary impulse derived from their visions of the Lord after his death. Although Luke’s Gospel implies that he specifically commanded the mission to the Gentiles, Acts’ history of the hesitations and subsequent uncertainties makes such a specific vision unlikely.¹⁴ At each turn in the subsequent journeys, however, further words of the Lord, dreams or actions of the Spirit encouraged the major changes of direction. The author, Paul’s companion, knew some of them on good authority. In language which was common to pagans and Greek scriptures, angels “stood beside” Christians by night and day. Like gods to pagans, they appeared at moments of tension, in the dark anxieties of prison or on ships during storms at sea.¹⁵ During the first crisis of martyrdom, God and Christ were seen by Stephen, about to die. As among pagans, so among Christians: moments of extreme anxiety brought divinities into view.

Like the gift of the Spirit or the ideal of virginity, this angelic presence was not unknown to some of the Christians’ Jewish contemporaries. In the sect whom we know in the Dead Sea scrolls, the presence of angels had already become a lively feature of community life.¹⁶ Also expecting the end of the world, the first Christians had a strong sense of angelic companionship.¹⁷ Here, their belief in “epiphany” differed scarcely from the simple Lystrans’. When Peter escaped from prison and was reported to be at the door in Jerusalem, the Apostles could not believe it: they thought that it must be his angel. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, Christians could be told “to show love unto strangers: for thereby, some have entertained angels unawares.” As in Homer or in the Old Testament, so in Christian company there was no knowing who an uninvited guest might be. In the epistles, the Christians’ type of experience begins already to be defended and defined against false imitations. The author of “Peter’s” second letter assures his readers that he himself witnessed the “glorious appearance in power of Jesus,” heard the heavenly voice and was present at the Transfiguration: he was not relying on mere fables. Among the Colossians, by contrast, there were people who trusted other visions, worshipping angels and “vaunting the things which they have crossed the threshold and seen…”¹⁸ Whatever their identity, these people were reproached in language which echoed contemporary pagan cult. Paul’s word for “crossing the threshold” is the word for visitors who “entered” a temple like Claros’s and penetrated its tunnels. The “angels” are perhaps the pagan “angels” who had long been worshipped near Colossae inhabiting its local springs and waterfalls, seats, eventually, of the Christian angel Michael.

Meanwhile, there was much more to the rise of Christianity than met the eye. In Paul’s opinion, the birth of Christianity accompanied a huge, invisible upheaval among the powers in heaven.¹⁹ This great supernatural revolution was mirrored in an inner change in every believer, an “illumination of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of jesus Christ.” Unfamiliar ideas of God’s “glory” and a constant inner change in each believer entered the older Greek tradition of a spiritual vision of God.²⁰ In Paul himself, this spiritual change led to heavenly revelations and a personal tour of the upper heavens.

What, meanwhile, did visionaries see and describe to win such esteem in the early Church? Paul himself nowhere described what he witnessed in heaven, and instead we look nowadays to the trumpeting and thunder of the Book of Revelation and its debt to Jewish apocalyptic texts. Like the Jewish seers, the author left hints of his own experience: he was “in the Spirit”; he saw and he heard; once, he wept, for fear that no one would read out the scroll which he had seen in heaven.²¹ There is, however, another text, which stops short of this open door into Paradise. Known as the “Shepherd” of the visionary Hermas, it was set near Cumae in Italy at a date which probably falls in the 90s: it names Clement as a leader of the Church, most probably the church in Rome.²² This jewel of the non-canonical writings nearly earned a home in the canon of Scripture, and the early papyri continue to show how it found a Christian readership.²³ It has not been so honoured since, as no full Greek text of it survived from antiquity: modern study and scholarship have touched it lightly. Yet its author is the early Christian whom we know best after St. Paul. His use of language conforms to the very gift of simplicity which the angels praised in his person. He combined the symbolic power of a visionary with the self-awareness of a sinner who had learned the errors of his past.

Appreciation of Hermas and his book has not progressed beyond two blind alleys. Like Revelation, his writing has been studied for literary precedents, as if traditional details in small parts of his visions disprove the authenticity of the entire work.²⁴ Visions, however, are not “fictitious” because they draw on their seer’s own learning: like any Apollo, Hermas was only as wise as his personal culture. The contrast between traditional imagery and “original” truth is misplaced. Nor is his book an “artificial allegory.”²⁵ Symbolic allegory was part of the Jewish prophetic tradition and, in turn, it influenced what prophets saw. Hermas combined it with a personal history which ought to be taken at face value.²⁶ He began his book with a personal statement, like the “confessions” of a witness in a modern Church of the Spirit. He tells us who he was, a slave who had been sold by “the man who brought me up” to one Rhoda, in Rome. He does not tell us what modern scholars have conjectured, that he was a slave from Judaea, a captive, perhaps, in the Jewish revolt. Nor does he mean that he was brought up by God. His wording suggests a foundling who had been brought up, like so many in antiquity, for subsequent sale. In Origen’s view (c. 240), he was the Hermas greeted by Paul at the end of his letter to the Romans. Probably, this idea was only a guess, but we cannot altogether exclude it.

“After many years, I recognized Rhoda,” he continues, “and I began to love her as a sister.” These words are more cryptic, but it emerges that Rhoda had become a Christian, hence the “recognition,” and therefore that Hermas “loved her as a sister,” the Christian mistress of his household in which he was a Christian slave. Revelations have sometimes been seen as characteristic of the socially distressed and excluded. As a slave, Hermas might seem to qualify, but his visions did not derive from social protest or the notion that the world would be set to rights for those who joined his group. They began from a personal awareness. One day, he had seen Rhoda, his mistress, bathing in the Tiber. As he helped her from the water, he thought how fortunate he would be if only he had such a wife. “I only thought of this, nothing else…” His scene must be read as it stands, the contact of a slave with his mistress while she bathed in the Tiber, like many before and since.²⁷ It might not have been so bad, but Hermas was already a married man.

After a while, he was walking towards Cumae, “praising God’s creations, how great and powerful they are.” While he walked, he “went into a slumber,” or trance, and seemed to be seized by the Spirit, which lifted him beyond rough country to a level plain.²⁸ There, as he prayed, he seemed to see Rhoda, his owner, who told him “she had been taken up,” presumably by death, “to denounce his sins against her.” Hermas wondered what these sins could possibly be, until she reminded him of the “wicked desire in his heart.” The heavens shut, and Rhoda disappeared: Hermas, not unnaturally, was thrown into alarm. How could he ever propitiate God for his sin? Jesus’s words on “adultery of the eye and heart” lie behind this fear, the cause, we might feel, of the entire vision in a “subconscious mind” which was beset by the Christians’ new ethic of perfection.²⁹ He had not seen a dream; he had gone into a trance, imagining a landscape with no exact reference.

While Hermas pondered, he saw a second vision, a white chair, covered with fleeces of white wool, on which sat an elderly lady in white reading a book. “Why so downcast?” she asked. “Hermas the long-suffering, the never-angry, Hermas who is always laughing?” Hermas’s sin had been bad, especially from the “master of self-control,” but it was not on that account that God was so angry with him. Hermas’s household, she explained, lay at the root of the trouble: he should consider his unbelieving children and even the behaviour of his wife. The woman began to speak, saying things which so scared Hermas that, unlike the author of Revelation, he could not bear to listen to them. But she ended on a brighter note, promising the imminent rule of God. While she was speaking, four young men appeared and lifted her by the elbows, whisking her away to “her seat, the East.” “She left, looking glad, and on parting, said to me, ‘Courage, Hermas…’” The men, we may conclude, were the four angels of the inner host of heaven, while the East was the seat of Paradise. If a god departs to the East in a dream, said Artemidorus, it is a propitious sign.³⁰

For a year, Hermas published nothing; then, while walking to Cumae at the same season, he was reflecting on his vision and felt himself transported in the Spirit to its former place.³¹ On waking, he seemed to pray and see the same woman. When she asked if he could still preach her message, he told her that he could not remember it, but must be given the book to copy it out. The idea of a written copy is conventional in visions, whether pagan, Jewish or Christian: the “book from heaven” guaranteed the message, not least in the seer’s own mind.³² In this case, however, Hermas could not understand the message. Only when he had fasted and prayed for fifteen days was its meaning revealed. As he read it, it told him to reprove his family and to discipline his wife and her lying tongue: “in future, you are to live with her as with a sister.” On a matter of more general interest, it promised Christians one last chance. Every Christian who repented wholeheartedly would be forgiven his sins up to the day on which Hermas made known his book, but afterwards, they would have no further opening.³³ As for Hermas himself, his ascetic self-control and simplicity of heart had saved him, despite his “bad dealings and neglect of his family.” Somewhere, too, there lurk local problems which we hardly see: “Tell Maximus,” said the book, “affliction is coming on you, if you deny a second time…”Hermas was ordered to quote to him the words of “Eldad and Modat,” a lost prophetic book which reminds us of his wide knowledge of Jewish aprocryphal texts.³⁴ The “denial,” perhaps, was denial during persecution, possibly the persecution in Rome in the early 90s.

Until now, Hermas had been victim of a fascinating error. He believed that he had been seeing the Sibyl, the deathless prophet of pagan and Jewish tradition, one of whose pagan seats, after all, was at nearby Cumae. This mistake was corrected that same night. A “beautiful young man” explained in a dream that the woman was the Church and that she looked so old because she had existed since Creation. Thereupon, she appeared again, and told Hermas to send two copies of his writing, one to Clement, presumably the bishop of Rome, the other to Grapte, who could teach it to the widows and orphans. He must also read it out “to this city” in the presence of the presiding Elders. We do not know where this city was, but it is proof of Hermas’s early date that as yet it did not have a single recognized bishop.

No Christian visionary was ever more loyal to the Church than Hermas.³⁵ He thought that he met its figure; he learned that the Church had existed since Creation; he revealed his visions to its proper authorities. Hermas saw and heard revelations for the sake of the community through which he had his visionary gifts: no pagan prophet or dreamer had ever worked in such a context. The elderly Church promised him a further vision, and after constant fasting, Hermas prayed to the Lord for its fulfilment. That night, the woman “was seen” again, and after rebuking his importunity, she agreed to meet him at his chosen place, “a remote and beautiful field.” When Hermas arrived, he first saw an ivory bench, clothed with linen rugs and cushions. Like so many subjects of a divine “epiphany,” Hermas began to take fright. Being Christian, he confessed his sins repeatedly to God.

Soon the Church’s figure appeared, touched him and dismissed her six angelic companions. She asked Hermas to sit on the bench beside her, and when he replied that only Elders should sit there, she corrected him and seated him on her left hand: the right hand, she said, was reserved for Christian martyrs. What does this vision say for Hermas’s own status? He was not himself an Elder, yet the Elders, not the bishops, were the group to whom he deferred. As a virtuous Christian perfectionist, he ranked next after the martyrs, but his rank was not based on any title or office: any penitent Christian, it seems, could aspire to the same honour. The woman raised her shining staff and showed him the vision she had promised. On a surface of water, it seemed, a Tower was being constructed from stones of varying quality. The Tower, she explained, was the Church, whose building was nearing completion, and the stones were the varying classes of Christian sinners and penitents.³⁶ Some of them were unusable in the Tower’s masonry, and soon the building would cease. Meanwhile, Hermas had good news: he need not ask for forgiveness, but for righteousness, in which his family could share.

Hermas, the Church remarked, was not especially worthy of these visions, for there were others who were more deserving. He could, however, publish them to help the wavering Christians, those “in two minds.”³⁷ His superiors, evidently, were the martyrs whose visions, as we shall see, were a recognized gift: the Church’s remark is one of their earliest witnesses. As she left, she told Hermas to publish his vision when three days had passed. She then warned Christians against “eating” excessively while others went hungry: the reference, surely, was to spiritual food. As a parting shot, she denounced the leaders of the churches and those who took the most honoured seats; they were like sorcerers, she said, with poison in their hearts. Then she disappeared, only to return by night and tell Hermas to fast rigorously in order to find answers to his further questions.

That night, a young man appeared and explained the continuing changes in the Church’s person. Each time Hermas had seen her, she seemed to be younger and fairer: the reason, the angel stated, was that Hermas himself had improved and progressed. Once again, we meet the theory that visions vary with their seer’s capacity. As if to prove it, a final vision followed, in which Hermas escaped from a fearsome monster and the Church appeared as a fair virgin. The monster was a symbol of future “affliction,” the torment, it seems, which awaited all Christian sinners at the imminent end of the world.³⁸ Saved by his faith, Hermas then returned home. There was, however, to be no respite. After praying and taking his seat on a couch, he saw a figure, “glorious to behold,” who was dressed in the garb of a shepherd. The figure explained that he was the angel of repentance, who had been sent to dwell with Hermas for the rest of his days.

Can we really believe the sequence of these visions, the chair and the angels, the rendezvous in the country, the Church and these visiting strangers? Hermas was not raised up to heaven: he sought most of his visions by prayer and fasting and understood them by long and careful dialogues. Each of his visions arose out of the one which he had seen before, but their connection is no argument against their reality: Jewish prophets sometimes began their visions by pondering a book, and Hermas began his by pondering the visions which he had had previously. His fasting is particularly noticeable.³⁹ In pagan cult, fasting had been a preliminary to dreams of the god, prayers, spells and oracular statements at Didyma or Claros; in the Old Testament, the example of Daniel was often cited. Modern studies of prolonged fasting stress their subjects’ apathy and irritability, introversion, emotional instability and marked lowering of sexual interest: if Hermas continued to take very little food, he would, on the Christians’ own reckoning, find life with his wife “as a sister” more easily attainable. In Hermas’s own view, fasting was an ally for prayer and prompted God to attend to its requests: we will have to explore this conscious motive, but it does not exclude the unconscious psychological effects which we, too, recognize. Here, Hermas’s pattern of vision also owes an obvious debt to Jewish apocalyptic texts. Jewish seers, too, were enjoined by God to fast: in the “apocalypse of Esdras” the seer is told to go to a meadow and eat nothing but the flowers of the field. The book, the angels, the sensations of fear and trance are all traceable to apocalyptic texts, but as we shall see, they do not explain the particular, personal quality of Hermas’s visionary odyssey.

The arrival of the angel of repentance marked a new phase in Hermas’s revelations. It is a commonplace in early Christian history to distinguish spiritual experience from moral obedience. Hermas, however, united both. The angel began by instructing him in twelve new commandments. The commandments were not rules of thumb, and it is a travesty to call Hermas a “formalist, to the backbone.”⁴⁰ The new commandments urged virtues, not mere obedience. They enjoined simplicity and a pure heart, faith and self-control: they were discussed between the two of them in terms which bring Christians’ peculiar problems to the fore. “Sir,” begged Hermas, “allow me to ask you a few more questions… If a man has a Christian wife who commits adultery, does he sin if he continues to live with her?”⁴¹ He must divorce her, said the angel, at once: angels agreed with a hated law of the Emperor Augustus. What if he then remarried, or if a widowed Christian married a second time? It took an angel to define the priorities in an ethic whose complexities were already bothering the Church.

One by one, the commandments took shape. They repeated the teaching on the last repentance; they described the continuing presence of two conflicting angels in Christians’ lives; when Hermas became aware of the lies in his sinful past, he wept bitterly, like that other seer, the author of Revelation. The idea of these “commandments” owes an obvious debt to contemporary Jewish teaching: in this form, they helped Christians who wished to live by clearer rules. When their sequence finished, Hermas was granted a series of symbolic visions in each of which the angel explained problems. Once, the angel found Hermas fasting, but belittled this routine practice: abstinence must be joined, he said, with fasting from evil desires and with the gift to the poor of the goods which would otherwise have been consumed.⁴² The advice is frequent in later Christian texts, giving a new context for the fasting which assisted “visions.”

In one such vision Hermas seemed to be travelling on a plain where angelic shepherds were guarding sheep. One angel stood forward with a knotted staff and a huge whip, and whenever a sheep was frisking and well fed, he would take it and put it down a sheer ravine, thick with thorns and briars. “And his look was very sour, and I was afraid of him because of it.” This angel, the angel of punishment, was promptly commissioned to dwell with Hermas and chasten him for his household’s sins. “Sir,” he asked, “the glorious angel is embittered with my household, but what have I myself done wrong?” “They cannot be afflicted,” said the shepherd, “unless you, the head of the house, are afflicted too.” This hideous note of collective punishment was alien to the company which pagans recorded with their gods in dreams.⁴³

Other parables taught Hermas other lessons, how the rich should support the poor in a Church and how the poor should intercede for the rich man’s soul, a balance between social classes which was to persist for centuries in Christian teaching.⁴⁴ Finally, the angel explained that Hermas had progressed so very far in virtue that he could now see his visions directly: their source throughout had been the Holy Spirit. To complete his earlier revelation, he was whisked in the Spirit to Arcadia, a fascinating choice of location for revelations in a shepherd’s company.⁴⁵ Arcadia was the landscape for Virgil’s pastoral poetry: had Hermas known of it, or perhaps its long-lost source? Amid twelve mountains, he saw a huge white rock on which six men were handing stones to an attendant troupe of virgins. They, in turn, were building the Tower. While Hermas watched, he learned the fate of the stones, until a huge inspector came to examine the progress. The inspector ordered the shepherd to sort the Tower’s materials: Hermas was left to spend the night in the company of the virgins, the holy powers and virtues of God. He spent it, he wrote, as “their brother, not their husband… and they began to kiss me and embrace me, to lead me round the Tower and to sport with me. And I seemed to become a younger man…”

As for a virgin, so for a visionary: Christian images of discipline and correction had this powerful obverse, a stress on simplicity and a return to childlike innocence, man’s state in Paradise before the Fall. Among pagans, said Artemidorus, it was auspicious for an old man to dream of becoming slightly younger, but to dream of becoming a child meant death.⁴⁶ In Christian company, it signified something else, a return to a childlike state of “single-mindedness.” After a night of prayer in the virgins’ company, Hermas discovered more details of the building and returned home. The Church, he had seen, was almost finished, but completion was being delayed to give Christians a final chance to repent. Then his angel bade the shepherd and the virgins leave him, having promised that he would prosper if he continued blamelessly in their company. Hermas’s book was written and the angel rose from the couch. “He told me, however, he would send the shepherd and the virgins back once again to my house…”⁴⁷

Perhaps this text is its own best commentary, an insight like none other into the mind of a visionary in the earliest Church. How, though, should Hermas be placed? His personal history cannot be turned into allegory, as if his “household” was really a Church which he led.⁴⁸ He makes it plain that he himself was not a dignitary, an Elder or a bishop. Though married, he practised “self-control” and was known for his exertions. He prayed and fasted, enlisting two potent allies of visionary gifts. Although he nowhere calls himself a prophet and refers throughout to his simple frailty, his visionary odyssey is surely the work of a “prophet” as the early Church orders knew one: a Christian, gifted with the Spirit, who deserved the community’s highest respect. New teaching on Christian repentance could only be given through the Spirit’s authority: nothing less had the power to “bind or loose.” While Hermas was sending his book to the churches, it is apt that a fellow Christian visionary, Elchesai, was publishing a similar message of one last repentance to Christians in the East. The angels whom he saw in Mesopotamia were larger and more awesome, but in East and West, the setting was the same.⁴⁹ By c. 112, a lifetime after Jesus’s death, the churches were so beset with sin that they needed a chance to wipe the slate clean and begin all over again.

Hermas’s visions did not only draw on the tradition of Jewish angels and prophetic imagery. They were distinctive because they owed something, too, to the imagery of divination and pagan inquiry, in which a man, whether Jew or pagan, could ask the gods and angels for advice.⁵⁰ It is this tradition which explains details of his visions of the Church. The chair and the ivory bench, their coverlets, the sitting position, the use of a staff, the words of greeting and inquiry: these features can all be matched with the patterns of inquiry which we find in pagan texts of oracular spells and in questions to an attendant divinity. In one of his visions, Hermas was shown a false, proud diviner, seated on a bench and misleading his Christian clients. Plainly, these consultations were known to him, as to Jews and perhaps also to fellow Christians versed in the “neutral technology” of prophecy. This pattern of inquiry gives Hermas’s visions their particular quality and tone. They are not awesome glimpses of lightning and destruction, falling demons and punishments in hell. They pose personal questions and receive answers suited to their questioner’s spiritual merit.

Like the clients at ancient oracles, Hermas does not only know the terror of a divine encounter: he is also rebuked by the Church and his angel for cheekily trying to know too much. He could only know what was good for him and he could only see what he was good enough to behold. His visions were so clear because they rested on near-perfect piety, on fasting and exceptional virtue, prayer and a marriage which was to continue without sex. Only then could the Spirit reveal answers to a Christian’s questions and cross the wide abyss between God and sinful man. Hermas’s visions were beset with Christian hopes and fears, sin and “double-mindedness,”⁵¹ punishment and forgiveness, childlike virginity and adultery, social distinctions and the imminent end of the world. They are a printout of Christianity’s impact on a sensitive Christian soul. If they share some of their origins with pagans’ dreams and Jewish visions, it is because the sources of these experiences are constant in human nature: Hermas prayed and fasted intently. He then saw the Sibyl, the Church and the angels whom his own culture and training disposed him to see in a trance.

The teaching on one further chance of repentance was enough to ensure Hermas a lasting readership in the Church. After him, we continue to hear of prophets and prophetesses in the Christian churches: in the 170s, pagan critics knew of their high esteem.⁵² None, however, has left such a text, perhaps because none spoke with authority on a point of such general importance. Perhaps, too, none had Hermas’s particular genius or winning way with words. The idea of questioning God and the angels gives way in our evidence to texts of pure revelation. Only Hermas drew on the ancient imagery of divination and met his heavenly companions with more curiosity than fear; the imagery occurs in no other text, except for a curious passage in the legendary “Acts” of Thomas. Already, Hermas knew there were “true” and false prophets: by c. 200, the “true” prophet had been more closely defined and there was less scope for Hermas’s type of writing.

What, then, was the sequel to this exceptional intimacy with the divine? We can approach it through the same categories which we used for pagans and which are as old as the history of epiphany: the encounter with a stranger in disguise; the unseen presence; the dream; the waking vision. Then we can consider how Christians responded to the idea of oracular questions and inspired answers, the classic conjunction of “canny persons with uncanny places.”

After Hermas, the “close encounter” with a heavenly stranger fades from the literary record. Through Scripture, Christians lived with memories of angels on earth in the past, like the divine “spies” who stalked the myths and poems of their pagan neighbours. Yet nobody encountered Christ in disguise, after the scenes at Emmaus: nobody recorded their own “entertainment of angels, unawares.” There were sound theological reasons. Among Christian authors, the very word “epiphany” was referred to a future event, Christ’s promised Second Coming. What need did he have to appear meanwhile? God’s Son, said Athanasius, had taken a human form as part of God’s plan for Redemption: if God wished “only” to appear, he could have revealed himself in. other ways.⁵³

While Christians awaited the last act of history, they could not expect to see the principal actor in the intervening scenes. As the drama was fixed, there was no cause to send warners and watchers to study and alter its direction. Since the Ascension, Paul and Stephen had seen Christ in heaven, a “Christophany,” as modern theology calls it, not a “Christ epiphany” on earth. For the time being, Christ’s own person had withdrawn. Meanwhile, Christian authors turned back to the past epiphanies and angelic visitations in the Jews’ Old Testament. By the oak tree at Mambre or the Burning Bush, Christ was detected in the episodes of ancient Scripture.⁵⁴ Epiphany gained a longer Christian prehistory, while believers waited in an interlude before its final episode.

Among pagans, the gods still “stood beside” mortals and “held their hand” over individuals and their cities; among Christians, meanwhile, an unseen presence was a guide and guardian.⁵⁵ Each church had its angelic protector, while Matthew’s Gospel had sanctioned the idea of a guardian angel, watching over every child: on the small Aegean island of Thera (Santorini), inscribed epitaphs honour the “angel” of this or that person and are best understood as Christian texts, dating from the third century onwards. An “angel of baptism” attended each Christian’s immersion, although it is too simple to claim that afterwards each baptized person was freed from the conflicts between heavenly powers.⁵⁶ Hermas learned otherwise, and his angels of punishment and repentance are a reminder that Christian angels, too, had harsher, opposing aspects; the richest exponent of guardian angels, Origen, makes it clear that a conflict between good and bad angels continued during every Christian’s life. Meanwhile, for every angel, there was the potential presence of a demon, equally impenetrable to mortal eyes.

“You stand before the heavenly Jerusalem and its mighty host of angels; you are in the presence of the joyous assembly,” the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews had written. From the start, Christian worship on earth matched angelic worship in heaven, and the one, thought Origen, attended the other.⁵⁷ Just as gods “stood by” the meetings of a city, so angels, thought Origen, attended church with each of the Christians whom they guarded. They took pleasure in the reading of Scripture, although Christians were too sinful to see them with their own eyes. Before Constantine, therefore, the idea of a double Church, human and angelic, was known, although it was not emphasized in Christian ritual. As yet, there was no large Christian architecture, no art to enhance this idea of “presence” at a service. Rather, Christians looked forward to the final “epiphany” of Christ; as yet, there was no January festival of Epiphany in the Church’s year.⁵⁸

At night, as Artemidorus recorded, the pagan gods used to cross the open frontier between their world and the world of men. Did Christians also dream freely of their God and his angels as the nightly companions in their sleep? Without a Christian Artemidorus, the question is hardly answerable, but enough survives in written literature to suggest a certain difference. Christians were especially wary of the validity of dreaming.⁵⁹ Not only did they share pagans’ awareness that daytime anxieties and physical discomforts could cause dreams of no significance. To it, they added a keen sense of the demonic.⁶⁰ How could pagans be seeing true dreams, or dreams of their “gods” and statues, unless the demons were deceiving them at night? Sexual dreams were unavoidable facts of life, but Christians ascribed them, too, to demonic intervention: if demons inspired these two frequent types of dream, might they not cause every other type of appealing vision? Inconsequential dreaming had made good business for Artemidorus and his art. Among Christians, it was classed as demonic, not significant, and its unformed and unconnected images were dismissed as rubbish. They were printouts from the demons’ system, that pathetic “information bank” which could confuse or rearrange, but not create.⁶¹ To search for meaning in these incoherent fragments was to turn away from Jesus’s words against attempts to “know the times and seasons.” Dream interpreters, therefore, were banned from Christian baptism.⁶² For Christians, the only true dream became the clear dream whose symbolism was thinly grounded in Scripture. In these significant dreams, the characters spoke a direct message, warning, correcting and disciplining.⁶³ The dreamers themselves shared in the action, obeying a heavenly command, to “come” or “follow me.”⁶⁴ No interpretation was needed. Following their Latin translations of Scripture, Christians in North Africa described significant dreams and visions as a “showing” (ostensio). Unlike pagans, they worked with an ideal of “revelation,” whose characteristic, said Augustine; was its clarity, appealing to the mind as well as the eye.⁶⁵

This difference of emphasis had consequences for Christians’ inner psychology. By several pagan philosophies, the soul had been credited with a natural power of divination. As man’s reason and body were at rest, the soul retired into itself and apprehended truths of the higher realm, the “home” from which its immortal nature had descended.⁶⁶ Christians reduced this natural power to a vague and imitative striving; in it, Tertullian said, the soul acted out a mime, like a driver or gladiator gesticulating without his equipment. In most Christians’ view, the soul retained no pre-existent knowledge.⁶⁷ The only significant dreams were those which God sent through angels, yet here, too, Christian dreaming had a quality of its own. Unlike a pagan’s, it lacked the ubiquitous aid of art.

Nobody remembered what Jesus had looked like.⁶⁸ Citing Isaiah, one wing of Christian opinion argued that he had chosen a mean and ugly human form. By c. 200, he was being shown on early Christian sarcophagi in a stereotyped pagan image, as a philosopher teaching among his pupils or as a shepherd bearing sheep from his flock. To Christians, the pupils were “disciples,” and the flock, the Good Shepherd’s. These conventional images had little of the impact of a great pagan cult statue or portrait. The question of early Christian sculpture has been reopened by a group of small figures, presently ascribed to an eastern Greek workshop of the mid– to late third century A.D.: in them, scenes from the story of Jonah keep company with a group of elegant portrait busts and suggest that a cultured Christian had owned the series.⁶⁹ Jonah’s life was a favourite subject for early Christian wall paintings in the underground catacombs in Rome; it symbolized God’s power to save and grant repose. These small sculptures are not portraits or icons. Like the type of the Good Shepherd or the scenes in the tomb paintings, they are symbolic scriptural works, expressing more than they show.

As these statuettes remind us, Christian bishops and authors did not speak for everyone when they opposed all representational art.⁷⁰ The wording of their views suggests that other Christians thought differently, putting paintings on their church walls and unsuitable scenes on their signet rings. But, however much we search for this “early Christian art” and ponder the meanings of the crude paintings in the Roman catacombs, we cannot bridge the gap between its schematized, symbolic style and the artistic patronage of the upper classes in the pagan cities, which multiplied the store of fine pagan statuary and figure portraits of the gods. Only one group of early Christians, the heretical Carpocratians, are known to have owned portraits of Christ: significantly, they and similar sects were accused of courting spurious dreams. In a famous scene, the “Acts of John” (c. 300) told how a pagan convert had attempted to paint John’s portrait in Ephesus, but the Apostle had denounced him for daring to perpetuate his form in the material world. To paint an Apostle was as offensive as to photograph an early American Indian chief. The exceptions are very modest. By the mid-third century, variable figures of Christ, with and without a beard, could be seen in wall paintings of the house-church in Dura; in Rome, the souvenir trade had started promptly: small pottery objects were available, c. 250, stamped with portraits of Peter and Paul.⁷¹ By contrast, the pagan cities were crammed with forests of statuary whose powers and imaginative impact were undeniable. Christians accepted their supernatural effects, but referred them to the demons. These creatures lurked beneath the pedestals in forms which only a pious eye could see.

Early Christian art was based firmly on Scripture and used a densely compressed symbolism which expressed much more than it represented. It has been described as “signitive” art and to see its works or dream of them was not to exhaust their essential message.⁷² This “signitive” style meets us elsewhere in early Christian life, in epitaphs, prayers and especially in the early hymns.⁷³ Christians sang and listened to texts: they did not gaze on idealized forms of their God. Just as Jewish visionaries had started their visions while pondering and reading texts of Scripture, so Augustine was finally converted by reading a biblical text: the father of Gregory of Nazianzus was won by dreaming that he was singing a sentence from the Psalms.⁷⁴ The effects show in the very style of Christian visionary literature. The absence of religious sculpture was supported by the Jews’ acceptance that God could never be comprehended by mortal eyes: the result, said the Book of Exodus, would be death. Not until Origen did Christian theology begin to dwell on a possible mystical union between Christians and their God. Even then, the achievement was exceptional, requiring a long training of soul and body, and it lacked a sharp visual outline. It depended on that lasting faculty, diffused through Platonist philosophy, not the physical eye but the “eye of the soul.”⁷⁵

In the Book of Revelation we can see the consequences for a Christian’s imagination.⁷⁶ Like Hermas, the author does not see God as a person. God appears in the abstract, like a precious stone, blazing in brilliant red and white. Only in the “new heaven and new earth” is he visible directly: we may aspire, Irenaeus believed, to the vision of God, but only at the end of this world. As for Christ, he is revealed symbolically, as “one like a son of man.” He is imagined through his supernatural attributes, not through features fixed in art. The visions draw heavily on impressions which are “not visual so much as auditory and dynamic.” The seer understands what he sees through the messages which he hears: it is the “new song” of the host in heaven which enables him to understand the puzzling Lamb whom he has seen; a voice has to identify the multitudes who are dressed in white and explain the avenging angels on horseback who are to butcher a third of the human race. These figures are presented through similes and symbols, not through the clear definition of art. Christ, the Lamb, appears with seven horns, while his seven eyes shine like fire and his feet like burnished bronze: “altogether,” as Jung concluded, “it must have looked pretty awful.”

This imagery of the supernatural has prompted a powerful contrast between the minds of Jews and of Greeks.⁷⁷ To the Greeks, it is said, divine beauty was visual and harmonious, whereas Jews conceived it through sound and voice and the dynamic effects of light and colour. On one side, we have seen, the contrast is posed too sharply. In Greece, too, the gods were heard as well as seen, on the stage, in oracles, in statues. Greeks, too, could picture a present divinity in terms of the play of light. On the other side, however, the contrast is just, a fact not so much about Semitic language and its structure, for language can bend if it must, as about the absence of anything remotely comparable to the Greeks’ fine art of their gods.

Behind Revelation, as behind Hermas, stretched a different source, the conventions of late Jewish visionary literature from Daniel and Enoch to the apocalypses and heavenly tours which we meet in the books of Baruch and Ezra.⁷⁸ In Revelation, the author’s vision is strongly conditioned by what he has heard and read: what, though, of known Christian dreams which were not so dependent? In the absence of art, they tend to vaguer contours, to God as an elderly “Father” or Christ as a radiant young man.⁷⁹ The figure of Christ was capable of immense height and brightness, wearing a youthful smile and robes of intense light. These contours were shared by pagan dreams of divinity: are they, therefore, a lasting core of experience, “archetypes,” in Jung’s view, embedded in the human mind? There is no need to believe this fancy. If a person began to picture God, immense size and radiance and beauty were obvious “superhuman” features by which to imagine his presence. As these visions were written down, the tradition strengthened the pattern, influencing the dreams which others then saw.

Although Christian dreams lacked the stimulus of art, they did enlist a powerful ally: hunger.⁸⁰ We have seen how Hermas began by fasting and praying for days, even a whole fortnight. Here, there was ample scope for the overachiever. Early Christians fasted weekly on Wednesdays and Fridays, although the Western Church then added a Saturday fast, to the East’s eventual disgust. The length of a day’s fast varied, allowing overachievers to “superimpose,” as the practice was known, and continue without food until cockcrow. Fasting preceded baptism and accompanied all prolonged penance: until c. 250, and perhaps later, Christians’ one total fast ran from Good Friday to Easter morning. Yet the history of Christian fasting was a history of gradual extension. Very soon, there were overachievers who fasted throughout Holy Week: a forty-day fast during Lent was not the early Apostolic practice which later churchmen suggested.⁸¹

In the pagan world, fasting was deliberately practised at cults and oracles to elicit significant dreams and “receive” the gods’ inspiration. Even if people did not fast, what they ate was known to matter: pagan doctors were well aware that a man’s dreams and psychic experience were livelier if his diet was drier. Prolonged “dry fasts” were also observed by Christian groups who placed particular trust in continuing visions and prophecies: as for total fasting, Christians’ practice was grounded in other motives.⁸² They did not wish it to be confused with the positive aims of pagans, as if God was to be “seen” by deliberate acts of physical denial. Instead, they claimed that fasting was an act of humiliation which abased a believer and assisted his prayers before God. This motive encouraged prolonged observance: the more a Christian fasted, the more he humbled himself before his Lord. Some authors also insisted that a true fast should be accompanied by abstention from every wicked thought or deed: long fasting became a spiritual exercise whose visionary sequel might be a gift of God’s grace. Believing in man’s sinful nature and “humility,” Christian perfectionists starved their bodies and directly provoked their powers of vision. To the same end, chastity was a magnet. As at the pagan shrines, God was particularly drawn to virgins and to celibates like Hermas. Among older women, he favoured dependent widows.

As fasting and celibacy assisted visions, it is not surprising that we read most about “epiphanies” in the apocryphal texts of overachievers, especially the “Acts” of Apostles which preach the value of sexless living.⁸³ In these texts, they fall into two broad groups. Some of the visions motivate turns in the story, and perhaps they are merely based on the genuine Acts, their model. There are others, however, which occur at particular moments, after prayer or fasting or at baptism. Here, their descriptions seem more personal. An angelic presence did attend baptism, an event which also took place after long fasting and confessions. In the Eastern churches, it occurred at night by torchlight, for candidates who were celibate. In the “Acts,” baptisms are said to be accompanied by heavenly voices and by visions of light or of Christ himself. In the “Acts” of Peter, one such baptismal vision suggests the author’s own experience. If, like his characters, he had fasted systematically, he was probably familiar with what he described.

Two related themes do suggest a degree of personal awareness in their authors. When Christ is seen by characters in these stories, his appearance varies according to the nature of his beholders. From Homer to Hermas, the theme, by now, is familiar. If nobody knew what Christ looked like, some such variation was anyway a fact of Christian experience. At other times, Christ’s figure varies in itself, being seen in opposing shapes and stages, now great, now small, now an old man, a youth or a child. In modern visions, the small size of a saint or the Virgin Mary has been related to the smallness of the particular icon or image which influenced the seer’s eye.⁸⁴ In an age of few, or no, images, this variability had a different sense. In the “Acts” of John, the Apostle explains how Jesus had appeared to James as a child, then as a youth, but to himself, as a handsome, balding figure with a thick beard. “Never at any time did I see his eyes closed, but always open…”: we may recall the Egyptian, in Heliodorus’s novel, and his views on the “unblinking” eyes of gods. Sometimes, Jesus’s body had felt hard, sometimes soft: John could not always feel it, or see its footprints.

This changeable type of vision was connected to John’s knowledge of the Transfiguration, an event which seems to have attracted visionary Christians’ particular interest. It is exactly this episode which introduces a notable scene in the “Acts” of Peter.⁸⁵ In Rome, an audience of “women and widows” are listening to this very text, when Peter stands forward and begins to expound it. He describes how, at the time, “each saw, as he was able” and how God, meanwhile, is a union of opposites,” now great, now small, now young, now old…” “At the ninth hour,” the blind widows in his audience ask him to heal them, and after his prayers, are rewarded with an indescribable light. They regain their sight, and each describes what she has seen: some saw a handsome old man; others, a young one; others, a small child. Peter then praised God, “who is constant and greater than our thoughts…”

This variability occurs in other religious traditions and has been connected with the problem of God’s relationship to time and change: like eternity, he unites all contradictory times and ages in one and the same person, whereas “many-shaped Satan” changes merely from one beast to another.⁸⁶ Here, the point may only be that God’s power transcends opposing qualities: the perception may be grounded in the experience of select Christian readers.⁸⁷ The “Gospel of Philip,” a third-century work, also describes how Jesus varied in size, according to the varying eye of those who beheld him.⁸⁸ It then reminds its readers: “You saw the Spirit, you became Spirit; you saw Christ, you became Christ…” Perhaps they enjoyed this varied experience at baptism: the “secret teaching” of John, a second-century work, also agreed that Christ’s experience was multiform. Although Christian authors agreed that the nature of a vision varied with the moral capacity of the beholder, unorthodox sects, it seems, did experience rather more, in contrast to the churches’ low view of their moral worth.

Their texts, however, observed careful limits. They did not write up their visions in their own person or cast them as dialogues between themselves and a prophetic “other half.” They ascribed them to figures whom the Gospels had sanctioned: Peter and Paul, James and John, prophetic Philip and Mary Magdalene, who had sighted Christ in the Garden. It is wrong, then, to claim that the early Gospel tradition had deliberately narrowed the number and type of Christ’s “appearances” in order to exclude this type of heresy.⁸⁹ No such exclusion was possible: heretics attached their texts to the few visionary figures whom the Gospels had to include. Heretics, too, accepted that “revelation” needed a higher authority than personal experience. If their own visionary life showed through the text, essentially it was passed off as what the Apostles had seen but the Gospels never revealed.

In the orthodox Church, there was no concern, initially, to put up personal monuments to dreams or visions. There was also no continuing connection between dreams and new missionary ventures. It was not that dreams were no longer an impulse to conversion: Origen claimed to know many people like Paul, whom a vision had turned from hatred of the Gospel to a willingness to die for it.⁹⁰ Inside the Church, however, continuing dreams were not worthy of special credence or commemoration. By c. 400, Christians in North Africa were indeed putting up altars and memorials to martyrs as seen in a dream or vision: their bishops then ordered that these monuments should be overthrown, unless people resisted their demolition, and that altars should not be spread about on the authority of dreams or “empty revelations.”⁹¹ In the earlier Church, the cult of the martyrs had been essentially a matter for the community as a whole. Visionaries belonged to a wider group which awaited God’s return. They spoke on its behalf, and in this expectant company there was no strong reason to put up a monument to an individual’s personal experience. The reticence extended to dreams of innovation or missionary significance. In early modern Europe, a familiar type of dream revealed “miraculous statues” in a remote place and encouraged Christian missions and piety in distant rural areas. In the early Church, no dreams encouraged the founding of new house-churches or missions into the countryside. There are no known missionary visions in the orthodox Church between the age of the Apostles and Constantine. This silence in our evidence connects with the churches’ relative lack of missionary endeavour. It gains significance against what we know of the heretics: visions and dreams marked a turning point for them, the persistent founders of “new” groups. The greatest heretical missionary, Mani, was propelled by dreams and visions, as we shall see, and by his sense of a constant angelic presence.

The apocryphal visionary texts and this connection between visions and heretical missions can only have encouraged the churches’ opposition to casual visionary claims. We can follow their concern from debates, once again, in the long Christian novel The Recognitions, and the accompanying homilies, ascribed to “Clement.” At length in these fictions, St. Peter inveighs against “mendacious” dreaming, refuting the heretic Simon Magus, who set visions above mere reality.⁹² In a dream, Peter argues, we cannot use reason or ask a question aptly. How, then, are we ever to know if a dream is from God or a demon? As unrighteous men see “true” dreams too, we cannot simply judge by the moral nature of the dreamer.

These texts derive from Jewish-Christian circles and were written, most probably, c. 200. Their emphasis falls on two aspects of wider significance, which many Christians accepted. The vision of God was the gift of the “pure in heart,” yet who could be so pure as to attain it since the Apostolic age? Pagans, too, had connected visions with a virtuous nature, from Homer to the Neoplatonist texts: Christians had greatly raised the threshold for human virtue by their views on sin and perfection. Faith in “appearances,” meanwhile, was the faith of Simon Magus, the father of Christian heretics. Here, Peter’s sermon corresponded with the view of the orthodox Church: visions might convert Christians, but they continued to impel and “instruct” heretics only.

The distancing of orthodox Christians from dreams and visions was helped by the Christians’ view of their community and by their hopes for its history; nonetheless, it could not bring down an iron curtain on patterns of the unified mind. As among pagans, so among Christian contemporaries, visions still occurred, not least because the same anxieties and tensions beset minds in a similar culture pattern. Among pagans, the gods were never more manifest than in times of storms and sickness, battles and collective fear. Where pagans saw gods at sea, Christians saw angels, “standing beside” them already in Acts, the book of Paul’s companion on his tempestuous voyage to Rome.⁹³ Although Christians waged no battles, instead they feared persecution, an anxiety which was more personal and hardly less acute.

In pagan Miletus, the gods had stood beside man and woman, young and old, in dreams whose root cause escapes us; in Carthage, c. 250, the young and old were equally affected in the Christian Church. Uneasy dreams abounded, seen by Cyprian the bishop and by the “innocent boys” in his company, Christian children who received revelations in an hour of need.⁹⁴ As in Miletus, so in Carthage: God “stood by” the young as well as the old. He spoke clearly to the simple, childlike mind, just as the Virgin has “spoken” recently in Portugal and Yugoslavia. Unlike a pagan priestess, a bishop needed no oracle to explain these visits’ meaning. In Miletus, we do not know the dreams’ purpose; in Carthage, their cause is only too plain, a fear that persecution was about to beset the Church.

Among pagans, too, the onset of death had induced moments of visionary insight and visits by warning dreams. In Plutarch’s lives of great men, warning dreams frequently foretell to the hero the manner or approach of his end; they have even been emphasized as one of Plutarch’s primary interests in choosing particular biographies. Among Christians, by a different route, these patterns of anxiety gained a new urgency.⁹⁵ Jewish traditions of martyrdom had already forged a connection between martyrs’ deaths and visions of heaven, and in Christian company, they were reinforced by promises in the Gospels. Jesus had foretold that the Spirit would attend those people who confessed his name. Persecution then took the form of a trial and public execution and provided martyrs with a long and intense anxiety. Prisons, meanwhile, added yet more visionary assistance. They crowded their prisoners and denied them regular food: the prison staff used to burgle much of the charity which Christians brought to the cells. Hunger and fear were joined by sleeplessness and a general mood of expectation, because a long imprisonment for its own sake was a rare and expensive punishment in an ancient town. Every inmate was awaiting trial and sentence in a setting which was hot, cramped and dark. These “sensory deprivations” are fast breeders of visions, seen with remarkable rapidity by subjects placed “in a dark room.” It is not, then, so surprising that the promises in the Gospels were freely realized. Visions abounded, and like the prisoners in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, the waiting Christians kept up morale by telling each other their dreams.

While unorthodox Christians pondered the Transfiguration and wrote safely of visionary experience, humble fellow Christians were experiencing visions directly in the interlude before their deaths. Martyrdom was an ideal which visionary “knowing” heretics tended to belittle, yet as the Church had hinted to Hermas, the martyr was the worthiest receiver of visions from the Lord.⁹⁶ Our knowledge of visions after Hermas is largely knowledge of those which martyrs and their friends preserved.

In Carthage’s prison, in March 203, the conditions were acutely unpleasant, and felt to be so by a young well-born Christian, Perpetua. Aged twenty-two, she had been baptized in prison, where she had also given birth. She was keeping a prison diary in Greek, one of the most intimate of all early Christian texts.⁹⁷ “I was absolutely terrified,” she wrote, “because I had never experienced such darkness.” Her brother encouraged her by reminding her of the rewards: “Respected sister, you are now in great esteem, such esteem that you may ask for a vision and it may be shown to you whether it is to be martyrdom or release…” Perpetua “knew she was talking with the Lord”: the gift was the consequence of her recent arrest and baptism, not of a long-lasting strand in her nature. Awaiting death, she wrote down her famous visions, how she ascended into Paradise, where an elderly shepherd received her; how she saw her young brother who had died with a badly disfigured face; he seemed to be trying vainly to drink at an otherworldly fountain until his sister prayed and later saw that his fate had been eased. On the night before Perpetua died in the arena, she dreamed that she fought with a large diabolic Egyptian and overcame him before Christ, the heavenly umpire. When she and her companions went out on the morrow, they knew, through her visual preview, that their crowns in heaven were assured.

Is this visionary power in prison the key to Paul’s own heavenly tour of Paradise, taken perhaps during one of his many arrests? The gift was neither heretical nor denied by orthodox Christians, and the visions in Perpetua’s diary were excellent proof that a seer is only as productive as his or her previous experience. Her own visions had the simple imagery of a serpent and a ladder to heaven, an elderly shepherd and her suffering brother, pure fountains and an athletic battle with a large wrestler. Her most Christian touches of colour derive from the imagery of the baptism which she had just experienced. They were followed, however, by the visions of one Saturus, an older Christian who was more mature. He described how he and Perpetua had ascended to heaven, “floating face upwards, though lying on our backs.” His vision of Paradise owed more to the imagery of other texts of Revelation: he saw walls of light, ranks of angels, roses, even, and cypress trees inside the heavenly garden. He also heard a rebuke for the local church which the angels administered to two clerics, seen grieving outside the gate. The visions of these two martyrs are extreme examples of the Christians’ own theory, that visions varied in depth according to their beholder’s nature.⁹⁸

The visions in Perpetua’s diary were published and studied and their Latin translation influenced other martyrs in Africa.⁹⁹ The best evidence for such visions is almost all North African, preserved in Latin, but we should probably not invoke some local “visionary” temperament to explain it. The style may be distinctive, but African texts are perhaps only those which happen to survive. In 259, the African martyrs Marian and James kept company in prison with one Aemilianus, a respectable man of high equestrian rank.¹⁰⁰ He “had reached his fiftieth year, but he was still a chaste virgin” (puer): in prison, he prayed continuously and fasted by a double “super-imposition,” taking no food at all for two days at a time. It was not, then, so surprising that, while dozing at midday, he saw his pagan brother in a dream. His brother seemed to taunt him about his life in the “darkness and hunger of our prison,” but “I replied that even in a prison the soldiers of Christ enjoy a brilliant light and in their fasting have the food of God’s own word.” In his dream, his brother seemed to press him about his fellow Christians’ fate: were not some of them more special than others, and could he not say who would enjoy the greatest rewards? Aemilianus hinted that two of the company would be most honoured, though they had had to wait for the longest time: this questioning is its own best comment on the suppressed concerns of the dreamer, a high-ranking man who had abandoned his pagan family and was living as an equal among inferior fellow Christians.

The two Christians to whom he referred were James and Marian, partners in the gift of visions. While they had been travelling by a rough road to prison, their companion on the coach ride remembered how James had fallen into a slumber and seen the figure of Christ, promising the martyr’s crown. He remembered the scene with particular relish: “O sleep more intense than all our waking hours,” he wrote, “in which they were allowed to hear and see Christ, offering himself for his own at every place and every time… The restless jolting of the carriage was no obstacle, nor midday, which was blazing, then, beneath an unclouded sun. There was no waiting for the secrets of the night… by a new kind of grace, the Lord has chosen a new time for revelation to his martyrs.”

The old pagan notion, “not in a dream but a waking vision,” thus found a novel variation in the experience of Christians under arrest. Little did their captors know what was being screened before them, in the private world of their prisoners’ dreams. Yet, as we would expect, the approach of death induced a certain narrowing of subject matter. With the sole exception of Saturus, none of the visionaries addressed themselves to problems and persons in their church. Saturus was a mature Christian who had already won several converts, but generally, martyrs foresaw their own fate and the manner of their death. Being Christians, they also dreamed of their brethren and their rewards beyond the grave; they saw fellow martyrs who had been killed a short while before; they had visions of Paradise and heavenly banquets and prizes won in combats with Satan.¹⁰¹ Often, these visionary prisoners were the simpler Christians, less able to give bribes and evade arrest. There was less likelihood of bold doctrinal visions emerging from their company: unlike the heretics’ visions, their dreams were only significant for a short while before they were silenced. As their end approached, these people were less concerned with points of authority and doctrine than with their own consciences. While Aemilianus dreamed of his pagan brother and a slight social anxiety, Montanus dreamed, like Hermas, of uneasy moments in his past: “and our flesh became so bright,” he reported, “that our eyes could see into the intimate secrets of the heart. And on looking into mine, I saw some stains… And I said to Lucian, my fellow martyr, “You know, those stains are there because I did not immediately make up my quarrel with Julian…’” In the next life, the martyr expected to return to a childlike peace and a harmless simplicity of heart. “Go,” said the angels to Saturus and Perpetua, “go away, and play…”¹⁰²

These detailed visions were constructed from brief moments in their subjects’ rapidly moving thoughts. Once again, in the fragments they preserved and elaborated, we catch the impact of Christianity on individuals’ attitudes and ideals. Pagans, too, had dreams of warning and imminent death, but nothing in Artemidorus’s great collection corresponds to this compound of correction and prize combat, simplicity, triumph and consciousness of sinful thoughts.

In this area of “neutral technology” there was scope for more experiment than the orthodox texts reveal. Divination remained a sin among practising Christians, but we now have a startling reminder of the overlap between pagan and biblical ways of using it. In the highlands of Phrygia (central Turkey) we have the epitaph of one Zosimus, a man of good birth and the “Most High people,” who was praised for “writing on a tablet whatever men request and desire and telling the future on a folded tablet to wise questioners.” To this end, Zosimus used “inspired Scriptures and Homeric verses.”² In these remote villages, prophecy took various forms: the reference to the “Most High people” and “inspired Scriptures” shows that Zosimus was not a pagan. Perhaps he belonged to the sect of the Most High god, which is known inland in Asia, but more probably he was a Christian, using Homer and the Bible to answer questions by random selection or lot.

Like the old pagan almanacs, Zosimus was using written Scriptures: might not the Spirit, too, give prophetic advice? It was an option which would not, perhaps, leave Christian life until it had been fully tested. While pilgrimage to Claros had been at its height and Abonouteichos was drawing the crowds, Christians in Asia were made aware of an oracular voice which addressed their own particular problems. In the wilds of Phrygia, a Christian, Montanus, with several male helpers and two prophetesses, began to speak the words of the Holy Spirit. We cannot place the only sound evidence for the date when his prophecies began: the mid-150s or later 160s are both possibilities.³ By 177, the Spirit was very widely known. “Lo!” it said, through Montanus, “man is like a lyre, and I strike him like a plectrum. Man is asleep, and I am awake…”⁴ It posed in the sharpest terms the question of the Spirit’s access to whomever it chose to dignify.

As critics agreed, Montanus’s followers were not intellectual heretics. They parted from fellow Christians only in their acceptance of the Spirit’s new words, and they persisted far into the sixth century, suffering legalized persecution from their “brethren.” Modern study of their sect has tended to follow the orthodox Church’s perspective.⁵ Montanus has been classed as a “millennial” prophet who was merely roused by the famines and earthquakes of the 170s, and his millennial teaching has been seen as a Phrygian oddity. In one of the Spirit’s “oracles,” a Montanist prophetess was said to have seen Christ, dressed as a woman, and heard that “here” (or “thus”) the “new Jerusalem will descend.” She believed, said the critics, that the reign of the Saints would begin at Pepuza in Phrygia, a site as bizarre as little Abonouteichos before it changed its name. Unlike the new “Ionopolis,” it remained Pepuza, a site so obscure that it has eluded all attempts to find it on the map.⁶

This approach reduces Montanus to one more oddity of “Phrygian” cult whose local hopes were misplaced: he joins those worshippers of pagan angels, prophets, prophetesses and cults of an abstract divinity which we know in Phrygia through pagan inscriptions. Did not one of his critics allege that he had once been a pagan eunuch priest in an ecstatic Phrygian cult? To see him in those terms is to surrender to his critics and their wish to belittle his appeal: the strict and sober Phrygian character was regularly belittled by scornful critics who lived in the older Greek cities. Nobody remembered who exactly had seen the vision of the new Jerusalem, nor is it clear that they translated it correctly: it was good male fun to allege that Christ had appeared to the women as a female. In the 160s, it was not so very special to believe in an imminent millennium.⁷ According to one chronology, it was scarcely forty years away. We hear of no great rush to Pepuza, while earthquakes and famines were nothing new in the history of Asia. Perhaps the Spirit’s origin owed something to the surrounding prophetic culture in Phrygia, to which other Christian prophets were attached: its grave, puritanical ethic well suited the mood of the Phrygian villages. Yet the appeal of the sect exceeded and outlived its supposed local venue for a Second Coming and any local temper in its birth. Puritans were not confined to Phrygia, and by c. 200, the “new prophecy” had spread through Antioch as far as Carthage. Christians found more in it than a misplaced millennial hope.

Rather than emphasize the sect’s view of the millennium, we should turn to its view of the Spirit. This view was less conventional. While playing on a passive lyre, the Spirit spoke in the first person: “I am come, neither angel nor envoy, but God the Father.” Its words were collected carefully from the male and female mouthpieces and were published, it seems, on their hearers’ testimony. Their critics and one of their supporters, Tertullian, cite fragments of the words of the Spirit which give us a feel for its interests.⁸ The Spirit, we find, spoke on vexed points of early Christian conduct which were largely familiar from the worries of Paul and his churches. Should Christians remarry? How long should they fast, and in what way? Would the Resurrection be fleshly, or in a spiritual body? Should the Church forgive sins? These questions were perennials in Church life, as old as the timing of the end of the world. Montanus was not concerned to be heretical, or to vaunt his superior knowledge. Tertullian, who accepted his words, makes this quite plain. The words of the “Paraclete” were a new and “richer” discipline, or way of conduct.⁹ They attached to Jesus’s promise in John’s Gospel that further truths would be revealed by the Spirit, as a future gift. Through Montanus and his females, the Spirit was bringing Christian “discipline” up to date. It defined a way for the higher-class Christian: no remarriage, no forgiveness of sins in church and a “dry” fast during a fortnight, five days a week.

While pagan questioners in Paphlagonia asked the prophet Alexander about their children and their prospects, Christians were turning to their Spirit in Phrygia for an ethic which defined their higher achievement. Both prophets aroused critical allegations that they were paying their staff to spread their fame.¹⁰ By very different routes, both brought notoriety to their obscure home towns. Whereas Alexander’s cult attached to the oracular culture of his age, Montanus, on one point, was less conventional. He and his Spirit gave a prominent role to those “gateways of the Devil,” women.

In Montanist groups, women were honoured as “prophets” and “participants,” as we also know from their inscriptions.¹¹ Montanists admired Eve, the source of knowledge, and praised Moses’s prophetic sister. At their meetings, seven virgins would enter, carrying torches and wearing white robes, like the Wise Virgins of Scripture, whereupon they would weep and urge repentance on their hearers. In a famous oracle, the Spirit urged Christians not to be ashamed by people’s opinions: better to die “not in soft fevers, beds and abortions, but in martyrdoms…” The text was not an encouragement to “voluntary” martyrdom: it was once argued that such provocation was an essential part of Montanus’s message, but the argument was not soundly based. Rather, by this text’s choice of examples, did not the Spirit have female martyrs in mind?¹²

To Origen, in the 240s, true prophets were male, not female, and were proven by their moral conduct, not their “possession.” In his views, we see the assumptions which Montanus had failed to overthrow.¹³ His Spirit was equated with a type of “ecstasy” which orthodox Christian opinion promptly defined out of court. Montanus claimed that in himself and his followers, the Spirit was speaking in its own person. It was this direct quality which made his “new discipline” so attractive and so dangerous.¹⁴ In reply, a cluster of pamphlets from leading Asian Christians asserted that “true” prophecy did not suspend its prophet’s faculties. It enhanced them while the speaker was still conscious, a person of proven experience and worth. “True” prophets spoke in humility, in their own person. They were people like Paul and Ezekiel, or even St. John, whose Revelation reported what “in the Spirit” he had seen.

Against these views, the Montanists asserted their novelty, and their argument, it seems, affected their use of Scripture. John’s Gospel had promised a further Spirit which would aid men’s understanding: this “Paraclete,” the Montanists said, had descended on their “new age.”¹⁵ This view had difficulties, not least with Pentecost and the Book of Revelation. From one of Montanus’s critics, we can perhaps deduce his original argument.¹⁶ To refute the “new prophecy,” critics had to insist that the Apostles had waited in Jerusalem for twelve whole years after Jesus’s death and that St. John had indeed worked wonders in the Spirit in Ephesus. What were they refuting? Perhaps the Montanists argued against former “gifts” of the Spirit and thus denied the story of Pentecost and the “ecstasy” of the Book of Revelation. Like modern Christian scholars, they may have pointed to Mark’s Gospel, in which Jesus told the disciples to go to Galilee and stay there: how, then, could they have received the gift of tongues, as they were not even in Jerusalem? Montanus is usually assumed to have accepted John’s Revelation “in the Spirit,” but critics soon pointed out that it contained some awkward remarks: it attacked “Jezebel,” a false prophetess, in one of the cities where Montanists became strong. Montanus, perhaps, implied that John had not really had the true Spirit, whereas he and his followers were the first to receive it.

The arguments rolled on for forty years and eventually came to rest on the definition of “ecstasy.”¹⁷ In the Greek Bible, said the critics, the word had never applied to true inspiration. When God created Eve, he cast on Adam an “ecstasy” which was only a deep sleep; in Acts, Peter seemed to deny that “ecstasy” was relevant to prophecy. The argument was an old one, already aired by Philo and other Jews in Alexandria; orthodox Christians added arguments from the contemporary Platonist debates on the nature of the contact between pagan gods and oracular priests. While the Platonists left the possibilities open, Christians borrowed their case for a gentle enhancement. They ranked Montanus’s “suspension” as demonic.

The result was all too predictable. Montanus became a “false” prophet, an ecstatic who was possessed by Satan. His teachings were damned by Asian bishops, and in the 170s, he was excommunicated. He did not, it seems, accept his fate. The course of the dispute runs neatly if we assume that he promptly appealed for support to the bishop of Rome.¹⁸ If so, the first invocation of Rome was by a prophet suspected of Satan: Rome, it seems, was sympathetic to his case. If we allow for this preliminary, we can then understand the sequel. Christians in Asia went higher still, to a group of Christian martyrs who were awaiting death in the prisons in Lyons. Who better to test the new words of the Spirit than these acknowledged bearers of the Spirit’s gifts? Some of the Christians in Lyons had links with Asia, the province from which the words had originated. Not for the last time, Christians in prison sided with sober orthodoxy. They wrote a sheaf of letters to Rome’s bishop and despatched a delegation with Irenaeus himself, a man whose works combined deep respect for the Spirit with an equal concern for orthodoxy. The Montanists were thus declared frauds by the Church’s highest authority. Delegations of bishops set out for Pepuza, and we have the sworn testimony of one of them that a fellow bishop tried to seize a prophetess and exorcise her.¹⁹

Five generations, at most, after “Pentecost,” Christian leaders were exorcising fellow Christians, mouthpieces of the Holy Spirit. The heart of Montanism had not lain in heresy or millennial teaching, let alone in militant apocalyptic. It lay in a faith that the Spirit could speak personally, bringing Christian “discipline” up to the mark. Thus the sect could survive the deaths of its first prophet and his prophetesses and spread back to the West with new envoys.²⁰ It returned to Rome in the bishopric of Zephyrinus (c. 198–217), when the older views had nearly been forgotten. It troubled Antioch and by this time reached Carthage, where it attracted the widower Tertullian. At first, sparks from the Asian crisis had flown from Phrygia to Rome and west as far as Lyons: the fire was then dowsed, but its embers continued to glow for several generations. The new “discipline” appealed to overachievers, to “Elect” minorities who wished to find an authority for their sterner effort. Its rebuff closed one option in the Spirit’s future and, in its wake, the third person of the Trinity went further into retreat. Random ecstasy was no longer a possible source of authority in the Church. The Spirit became a silent guiding presence, granted at baptism to each Christian and present, but not so vociferous, in Christian life.

One result of the crisis was to link the Holy Spirit very closely with the personal qualities of its bearer. The advantages are still keenly felt: “if Montanus had triumphed, Christian doctrine would have been developed not under the superintendence of the Christian teachers most esteemed for wisdom, but of wild and excitable women.”²¹ Agreed sayings from the Spirit would also have entailed an even greater orthodoxy. However, the victory by Church leaders did have consequences for their own position. The visions of Hermas and Saturus had rebuked the Christian leadership, but now it was ever more plausible to deny that such visions were genuine. In the modern Catholic Church, the problem of true or false visions and “ecstasy” has not gone away: since 1981, have three girls and a boy in Medjugorje, in Yugoslavia, really seen and heard the Virgin two thousand times? The question is still being discussed in terms of partial or total ecstasy, with credit going to the latter, “suspension,” not enhancement. The argument, eventually, has gone Montanus’s way. It has, however, been joined by other requirements; one test for a “true” trance is now to stick long pins into the young participants and watch for any awareness. Another is to weed out all references to the Church’s hierarchy. In 1965, a female visionary in Lourdes was judged not to have seen the Virgin because her vision criticized the Pope and the Second Vatican Council. A primary obstacle to acceptance of the children at Medjugorje has been their message from the Virgin, criticizing the local bishop’s treatment of the Franciscans. As Paul had warned, Satan might masquerade as an “angel of Light”:²² what Christian, except a martyr, was so pious that he could be sure of seeing Christ? If the Spirit enhanced its speakers’ minds, it was most likely to result in a true utterance if these minds were already of proven worth. From the start, Church councils were said to be guided by the Holy Spirit. “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit,” wrote Acts’ author, reporting the decisions of the first council at Jerusalem: the Spirit was most evidently true when it “enhanced” Church leaders.²³

In glimpses of the third-century Church, we can watch the consequences.²⁴ Even after Montanus true visions were not confined to bishops. Part of an early “Apostolic” order proposed that in each church a widow should be given the role of “seeking revelations whenever necessary”; in Cyprian’s letters, visions on Church conduct are still received by Christians other than the bishop, even by “young and innocent boys”; by third-century authors, the idea of direct, ecstatic inspiration could still be entertained. The concept of inspiration had not passed a watershed in Christian company, from random “ecstasy” to a constant angelic guidance and advice in dreams.²⁵ However, approved dreams now had an obedient tone which was unlike anything in Artemidorus’s pagan book: they told a congregation when to pray and whom to choose as a bishop. Cyprian describes how a brave confessor, Celerinus, had hesitated to accept the duties of a clergyman until the Church herself appeared to him in a vision and urged him to accept. Plainly, this particular vision was not demonic.²⁶

We can see the restraints in a valuable story, told by Tertullian in his treatise On the Soul. At the time of writing, his views on “ecstasy” and fasting reveal that he was not yet a committed Montanist, and although the point has been disputed, he seems to be describing a scene in the orthodox Church.²⁷ “Among us,” he wrote in Carthage, “there is a ‘sister,’ gifted with revelations. She talks with angels, sometimes even with the Lord… She sees and hears mysteries.” She was also gifted with a particular Christian insight: “she sees into the hearts of some.” Her gifts extended to healing, “giving medicines to those who ask.”

We would dearly like the memoirs of this gifted female, but her context is illuminating. Like the young visionaries at Medjugorje, since their first sightings, she enjoyed her ecstasy in church during a service. The readings of Scripture, the Psalms, the sermons and the prayers “supply materials for her visions.” After the service, the laity (plebs) were sent away, and the “sister” would tell what she had seen. Her visions were “most carefully collected so that they might also be tested.” On the occasion in question, she had seen a vision which supported Tertullian’s views on the soul.

This type of experience was far from a free play of the Spirit, to be accepted at face value, whatever its topic. It was tested and reserved; it was stimulated, even, by the services in church: a “sister,” entranced during Sunday service, was not likely to upset a bishop’s teaching. If she did, her vision could be rejected as false or demonic. When, though, were such visions known to be true? In Cyprian’s letters, it is noticeable that the acceptable visions tend to be visions of testing and correction, visions which reproach the Christian community’s lapses and predict the onset of persecution. In Cyprian’s own visions God also “castigates” and “warns” insistently, though the warnings had useful implications. Cyprian’s letters allude to his own “revelations” and visions from God as a source of guidance in his role as bishop.²⁸ His critics attacked him, the “dreamer, Joseph,” but we should not see this emphasis on visionary power solely as his response to his own difficult position. Prophetic gifts had been ascribed to bishops before him and were claimed by other bishops in his province. “Among other things which God deigned to show and answer,” wrote Cyprian to an enemy, “he added this: ‘So, then, he who does not believe in Christ making a priest will believe very soon in Christ avenging a priest.’”

At the pagan oracles, the gods “testified” to the virtues of their servants; in Cyprian’s Church, God warned of the consequences of opposing his chosen bishop. At Didyma or Claros, Apollo discussed the gods’ identities and the fate of the soul after death; among Christians, God explained problems of doctrine and met a constant concern over details of the next world. Each of these types of dream took distinctive forms in Christian company.²⁹ It was perhaps excessive when one bishop, Dionysius, alleged that he had only inspected a heretical text when an angel appeared to him and advised him to take the risk; the allegation, however, would never have been made by a pagan. In the pagan world there was no forbidden theological literature. It was perhaps less novel that respected Christians were said to have been told their particular creeds by visions of angels or even by a dialogue between an Apostle and the Virgin Mary. Among pagans, the rules for a cult were sometimes revealed in a dream, but there was no similar concern for literal wording and orthodoxy.

On the matter of the next world, Christians sharpened a widespread pagan uncertainty and, inevitably, there were consequences for their visions here, too. Death, perhaps, is feared in any culture, but we can sympathize with a bishop, known to Cyprian, who was terrified as his own end approached.³⁰ In this case, a young, radiant figure did appear in a vision to console him: “What,” he asked in rebuke, “do you dare to be afraid to leave this life?” It was a fear which other visions did more to magnify than reassure. Here, too, Christians were heirs to Jewish apocalyptic texts, to which they soon added others, reinforcing points in their own ethic.³¹ So-called “Apocalypses” of Peter and Paul purported to give guided tours to hell and its punishments: distinctively, these Christians singled out sexual sinners, the parents of exposed and aborted children and girls who had been promiscuous before marriage. In the Christians’ afterlife, these texts revealed, homosexuals and lesbians were being pushed repeatedly over the precipices onto rocks below. Acquaintance with Peter’s “Apocalypse” was enough to scare any Christian’s conscience: we happen to know that this “vision” was still read as a holy text in the churches in Palestine on Good Friday during the fifth century.

At this date, there was still no concept of purgatory, “correcting” all but the very few between their death and Resurrection. The idea of remedial punishment was reserved for the aftermath of the Last Judgement, before Christians passed into the company of Christ and the angels.³² The options, then, between death and this judgement were relatively clear: either an immediate torture, like Dives, or “interim refreshment,” like Lazarus, in the bosom of Abraham. Tours of the next world, therefore, were not yet concerned with the theological problems which purgatory would later raise. Their bulletins concerned one of only two locations: Paradise, for martyrs only, or hell’s torments, for the worst sinners. As a result, most of these early “tours” had a dark and alarming quality. They were instruments of discipline whose range and precision exceeded any pagan visions of the underworld.

“With the path of dreams blocked,” it has been suggested, “the way was open for nightmares… medieval man would not reconquer the dream-world for a long time to come.”³³ There is no denying the authority which was given to these particular nightmares, but the connection between the two experiences was not one of cause and effect. The early Christians did not “block” dreams: they merely argued that many of the most frequent types were demonic or without significance. As for the “nightmares,” the most famous were literary works which may not derive from a genuine vision. The prominence of dreams of the next life was not caused by a “block” on other subjects. It derived, simply, from the extreme weight which attached to the afterlife in Christian circles and the ways in which it laid such a high requirement on human nature.

Like Hermas’s dreams or the dreams of martyrs, these underworld visions wore a characteristic stamp. They concerned the concept of sin which Christians emphasized and the duality of fierce correction and childlike innocence and rest. These shades of meaning had not coloured pagan “epiphanies,” and again, they bring out a constant area of impact of Christianity on Christians’ minds. Among Christians, indeed, the place and scope of an “epiphany” were significantly different. Before Constantine, the central hope of “epiphany” was focussed on future history. As yet, neither the liturgy nor any widespread sacred art enhanced the sense of a visible presence, potentially “evident” and “manifest” at any moment. Between the age of the Apostles and the Christian Empire, there was ample reason why “epiphanies” in Christian company should have been more restricted than in most other periods of Christian history.

In Christian company, the old idea of “epiphany” did indeed take on different contours. It has not lost them since: tours of purgatory, advice on twice-weekly fasting, the criteria of “true” trance and ecstasy, the relation between visions and the growing capacity of visionaries, the status of visions which criticize the official Church, all these elements are still present and keenly disputed in the Virgin’s evening “visits” to the children of Medjugorje, the new Pepuza. The Virgin appears in the form, essentially, of her statue in church: she was first seen by children among whom were those who had known a recent bereavement and acute illness. Her latest “sightings” are not “unique.” They conform to a pattern as old as Christian experience and in details draw content from it. There is one exception: in the early Church, no angel or vision revealed “secrets” which the seer should keep quiet and never agree to reveal.

“Not to everyone do the gods appear…”; the old Homeric view had acquired new depth in early Christian experience. The company of angels was reserved for the most virtuous natures, as Hermas had already exemplified. Perfectionism did not cease with Hermas, and it is in its light, finally, that we can best understand the most celebrated recent find of early Christian documents. In Upper Egypt, across the Nile from Diospolis Parva, twelve “books,” or codices, with leaves from a thirteenth, were unearthed in a jar in 1945, the famous “Nag Hammadi Library” of fifty-seven Coptic tracts. Much has already been written on their contents, their spurious Gospels, their connections with known “Gnostic” heresies of the second century, their imagery of Creation and their mysteries of higher theology. Historically, however, particular interest lies in their origin. They are not an “early Gnostic Christian’s” library: none of the “Gnostic” Christians bothered to read or write Coptic.³⁴ The collection is not a single library, nor is it uniformly heretical, nor even entirely Christian. It includes a poor translation of a section of Plato’s Republic and a pagan letter of “Eugnostos the Blessed”: the letter was then given a Christian preface and conclusion and presented in another copy as the “wisdom” which Jesus revealed to his Apostles after his death. The “Library” also includes three texts which are known in a pagan setting: a prayer and two discourses of Thrice-great Hermes, the pagan god.

Of these three pagan texts, the prayer has a fascinating postscript which is carefully inscribed in a decorated rectangle.³⁵ “I have copied this one discourse of his [Hermes]. Indeed, very many have come to me. I have not copied these too, because I thought that they had come to you. I hesitate to copy these for you, because perhaps they have come to you already, and the business may burden you…” Other texts have other postscripts, which refer to “the father” and “the brethren.” What, then, was this community which was so well supplied with pagan Hermetic literature?

When the bindings of the codices were first opened and their padding examined, the materials in one of them proved that it dated after the year 348. Another referred to a Christian monk, and first thoughts were that much of the padding derived from a nearby Christian monastery whose members had owned the books.³⁶ Further study has shown that other suggested references to the monks and their community are only one possibility among several, and sometimes not even that, but the general theory has not been refuted: it still explains the evidence more tidily than any other.³⁷ Barely five and a half miles from the discovery of these books lay a major monastic community, founded by the great Pachomius, father of this type of monasticism in Egypt: his own first monastery was only three miles distant. In theory, the filling of the bindings could have derived from any rubbish heap elsewhere, but the brilliant conjecture that the books, too, belonged to monks is still the most economical.³⁸ There were no “Gnostics” at Nag Hammadi in the mid-fourth century and certainly no study group of Coptic-speaking “Hermetists,” pagans who wished to own so many Christian books beside their own. Coptic, however, was the language of the majority in the early Pachomian monasteries: after c. 350, we know that rumours of rampant unorthodoxy caused their members’ opinions to be checked. Our texts seem to fall into three separate collections, which were gathered, perhaps, by their owners and then hidden near a deserted pagan temple when the books in their monasteries began to be questioned and sought out.

The picture is intriguing. By c. 350, we have a group of Christian monks who owned such a quantity of texts from the pagans’ spiritual master, “Thrice-great Hermes,” that a scribe had hesitated before sending them any more. By c. 300, we know, Christian authors already welcomed “Thrice-great Hermes” as a pre-Christian witness to their Christian theology.³⁹ The Library’s extract from Plato’s Republic also gains a new relevance.⁴⁰ As mistranslated in Coptic, it refers to the virtue of “casting down every image of the evil Beast and trampling on them, together with the image of the Lion.” Monks were the supreme destroyers of pagans’ religious art, the “image of Beast and Lion.” For monastic readers, the passage was only too aptly chosen.

In these books, texts of revelation and “tours of heaven” are abundant. Some were originally Jewish while others are Christian, but seriously heretical; others are pagan: three extracts from Hermes and a longer text called “Zostrianos.”⁴¹ To the first monks, it seems, any guide to heaven and the vision of God was as good as another. It did not matter if the text was pagan, Christian or heretical, so long as it suited their piety and its aims.

The founder of the monasteries, Pachomius, is said in his Greek biography to have “seen the Invisible God in purity of heart, as in a mirror.”⁴² Certainly, he enjoyed one type of vision, the power of seeing deeply into the hearts of the Christians whom he controlled. It was Pachomius’s gift to know his fellow Christians better than they knew themselves; beholders were aware of his intense, searching gaze, that self-revealing quality which they ascribed to the neutral surface of Father Pachomius’s eye. Did Pachomius also see upwards as well as inwards? He was questioned on reports of his mystic visions, but the case was never established against him. He did, however, use a cryptic alphabet with a mystical significance which has still to be deciphered. His aim, it seems, was to keep company with the angels, whatever the results. It is not, then, surprising that lesser monks in his community were studying with interest the texts of previous heavenly visions.

By subsequent monks, we know, the gift of sleep was despised and rejected.⁴³ They prayed and fasted intently, and by breaking the night with their vigils, they aspired to “sleeplessness.” Consequently, they set little store by dreams, preferring the waking vision, a goal which some of the texts in the “Library” had attained. While striving for their high ideal, they could read how others had achieved it: “I have found the beginning of the power that is above all powers,” one of their “Library’s” texts proclaimed, “the power without beginning. I see a fountain bubbling with life. I have said, ‘O my son, I am Mind. I have seen… no words can reveal it…”’ The speaker was a pagan disciple of Hermes whose author, plainly, had known the vision of God.⁴⁴

However, between the monks and attainment of this vision lay barriers which differed in degree from those which pagans had acknowledged. How could Christians be sure that their visions were of God, not a demon? When man was so profoundly sinful, how could he ever be so pious as to see God? From these distinctive Christian questions, two scenes in our texts gain a new relevance.

In the mid-fourth century, the life of Antony, the first Christian hermit, was publicized in Greek by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. It is easy to doubt the work’s purpose and credentials: a bishop of such a high Greek education was an unlikely biographer for a simple Coptic-speaking holy man who had lived most of his life in isolation. Much has been conjectured of the work’s intention, its interest in claiming the new Christian perfectionists for the orthodox Church, its concern, perhaps, to combat contemporary heresy.⁴⁵ However, it gives its hero a very long speech to his Egyptian brethren which has a more immediate aim. In it, Antony is made to distinguish a vision which is sent by God from a vision which is sent by demons. His criterion is one of emotional effect, whether the vision brings only fear or fear followed by joy: the criterion has recurred frequently in Catholic theology, perhaps most famously in the trials of Joan of Arc. “When they come to you by night,” said Antony, “and wish to foretell the future, or say to you ‘we are angels,’ pay no heed, for they are lying. In a true vision God and his angels take away fear… It comes quietly and gently, and at once, joy and gladness and courage rise in the soul… whereas demons bring fear and hatred of others, fear of death and remembrance of kin and family.” The monk should ask his divine visitor a question as old as Homer, to whose heroes this sequence of fear, then “courage” had also marked an epiphany of the gods. “Ask them, ‘Who are you?’ and ‘From whence are you come?’” “The holy ones will change your fear into joy,” as Christ, indeed, had changed it for the Apostles after the Resurrection.

The author of this speech was plainly aware of the aims and pitfalls of contemporary monastic life. The speech sits very neatly with the contents of the Nag Hammadi texts. Monks did aspire to angelic contact, to a state in which their protectors would “stand beside” man, as of old, “face to face,” in a “waking vision, not a dream.” This company of the angels was most evident to the overachiever, as Hermas had already testified: from Hermas’s book, this sense of angelic company had greatly struck Origen and his perfectionist view of human nature. Monks, the new perfectionists, were heirs to this theme in Hermas and Origen, so much so that lesser Christians addressed them as “your angel” and believed that they lived “in the state of angels”:⁴⁶ once, it was believed, when Antony had been suffering from slothfulness, he had seen a man in his own likeness, busy at his work. Like Hermas, Antony had been graced with an angelic corrector: his angel appeared disguised as himself, further emphasizing the perfect Christian’s upward potential, aspiring to the angelic state.⁴⁷

Perfection, however, is a receding ideal and Antony was exceptional. Like a book or a garden, a painting or a musical performance, human nature is a thing never perfect to those who feel responsible for it. Monks were deeply aware of the gap between their imperfect selves and the vision of God. Here, the contrast with pagan religiousness is beautifully caught in one of their stories: one day, a pagan visitor arrived at the Christian monastery in Scetis and lodged in Abba Olympius’s cell.⁴⁸ After a while, he asked his host a natural pagan question: “Leading this way of life, do you really have no visions of your God?” “No,” Abba Olympius answered, “we do not.” “When we perform rites to our God,” said the pagan, “he hides nothing, but he reveals his mysteries to us all. With all these toils and vigils and silences and acts of asceticism, do you really mean to say you have no visions at all? You must, indeed, have wicked thoughts in your hearts which separate you from God: that is why he will not reveal his mysteries.” Abba Olympius left his visitor and reported these words to his fellow monks. They did not reject them as unworthy: there had been no retreat from the ideal of “company with God,” no ending of a long debate in religious history. Indeed, there had not, for as we now suspect, these very monks read texts of the pagans’ experience, striving to share it themselves. “Indeed,” the monks replied, “it is so. Unclean thoughts do keep God away from man.” The higher a man set the ideal of virtue, the further the vision of God withdrew. “Always before,” King Alcinous had warned in the Odyssey, “the gods have appeared to us clearly when we offer glorious hecatombs…” Ever more elusive, the encounter was now placed in the life to come. “The gods are hard to cope with,” Hera had warned in the Iliad, “when seen very clearly…” In Christian company, God would be greeted with weeping, by Christian holy men who shed tears in his presence for their own and their fellow Christians’ sins. To prepare for their last meeting, God, too, made new arrangements. If only the pure in heart could see God, then Christian viewers needed correction after their death and before this last encounter: “epiphany” became a seed from which that ultimate fiction, purgatory, grew in Christian thought.

8. Visions and Prophecy

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