The Gates of Horn and Ivory

We are forced at this point to give an opinion about the kind of dreams by which the soul is stirred. And when will we reach the subject of death? When God allows it, I would say; what has to happen in any case cannot be put off for long. Epicurus gave it as his opinion that dreams are altogether empty things — and he said it while releasing God from every kind of care, dissolving the whole order of the world, and giving everything the look of sheer chance, accidental in its outcomes and random in its nature. Well then, if that is what things are like, truth must get its share of the chance as well, since truth cannot be the one thing exempted from the luck that falls to everything else. [a]

Homer assigned two gates to dreams: the gate of horn for what is true, and the gate of ivory for error and illusion — because you can see through horn, they say, while ivory lets no light through. Aristotle, while holding that dreams are untrue in most cases, still admits that there is some truth in them. The people of Telmessus refuse to allow that any dream is meaningless; when they cannot guess what one means, they blame their own weakness instead. Who is such a stranger to ordinary human experience that he has never once found something true in a dream? I can make Epicurus blush by doing no more than glancing at a few of the more remarkable cases.

Herodotus tells how Astyages, king of the Medes, saw in a dream a flood pouring out of the womb of his unmarried daughter and covering Asia; and how, in the year after her marriage, he saw a vine growing out of the same part of her and spreading over the whole of Asia. Charon of Lampsacus tells the same story earlier than Herodotus does. The men who interpreted those visions did not mislead the mother when they marked her son out for so great a career, for Cyrus both flooded Asia and spread over it.

Before he was a father, Philip of Macedon had seen a small ring stamped on the private parts of his wife Olympias, with a lion for its seal. He decided that a child by her was out of the question — because the lion, I suppose, fathers only once — until Aristodemus, or Aristophon, ventured the guess that nothing meaningless or empty lay behind that seal, but that it pointed to a son of great distinction. Anyone who knows anything about Alexander recognizes the lion of that little ring. Ephorus writes to this effect.

Heraclides again has told us of a woman of Himera who saw in a dream the tyranny Dionysius would hold over Sicily. Euphorion has put it on record as a fact that before Laodice gave birth to Seleucus she foresaw that he was destined for the empire of Asia. From Strabo I find that it was owing to a dream that Mithridates took possession of Pontus; and from Callisthenes I learn further that it was on the hint of a dream that Baraliris the Illyrian stretched his rule from the Molossi to the borders of Macedon. The Romans knew dreams of this kind too. It was from a dream that Marcus Tullius Cicero learned that a boy still small and in private life, plain Julius Octavius, personally unknown to him, was the destined Augustus, the man who would put down and destroy Rome's civil strife. This is recorded in the Commentaries of Vitellius.

But prophetic visions of this sort were not confined to predicting supreme power. They pointed out dangers and disasters as well. Caesar was away from the battle of Philippi through illness, and so escaped the swords of Brutus and Cassius; and then, when he expected still greater danger from the enemy in the field, he left his tent in obedience to a vision Artorius had, and so escaped again — for the enemy took the tent shortly afterward. So too the daughter of Polycrates of Samos foresaw the crucifixion that awaited him, in the bath Jupiter gave him and the anointing he had from the sun.

In the same way, revelations are made in sleep of high honors and outstanding gifts; cures are discovered too, thefts brought to light, and buried treasure pointed out. So Cicero's future eminence was foreseen by his nurse while he was still a small boy. The swan that came from Socrates' breast and charmed men is his pupil Plato. The boxer Leonymus is cured by Achilles in his dreams. Sophocles the tragic poet finds, while dreaming, the golden crown that had been lost from the citadel of Athens. Neoptolemus the tragic actor, warned in his sleep by Ajax himself, saves the hero's tomb on the Rhoetean shore in front of Troy from destruction — and as he clears away the rotted stones, he comes back a rich man in gold.

How many commentators and chroniclers vouch for this sort of thing! There are Artemon, Antiphon, Strato, Philochorus, Epicharmus, Serapion, Cratippus, Dionysius of Rhodes and Hermippus — the whole literature of the age. I shall only laugh at the lot of them, if indeed I ought to laugh at the man who imagined he was going to convince us that Saturn dreamed before anybody else did — which we can only believe if Aristotle, who would gladly help us to that opinion, lived before anybody else did. Forgive me for laughing. Epicharmus, in fact, along with Philochorus the Athenian, gave dreams the very highest place among the ways of divining.

The whole world is full of oracles of this description: the oracle of Amphiaraus at Oropus, of Amphilochus at Mallus, of Sarpedon in the Troad, of Trophonius in Boeotia, of Mopsus in Cilicia, of Hermione in Macedon, of Pasiphae in Laconia. And then there are others, whose foundations, rites and historians, together with the entire literature of dreams, Hermippus of Berytus will give you a full account of — to the point of surfeit — in five fat volumes. But the Stoics are very fond of saying that God, in his most watchful care over every institution, gave us dreams along with the other safeguards of the arts and sciences of divining, as the special support of the natural oracle.

So much for the dreams that even we have to allow are worth crediting, though we have to interpret them in another sense. As for all the other oracles, at which nobody dreams at all, what else are we to say about them than that they are the contrivance of demons — demons who at that time lived in those famous men themselves, or else set out to revive the memory of them, using it as nothing but a stage for their own evil designs? They went so far as to counterfeit divine power under the shape and form of these men, and, holding to their evil just as stubbornly, they deceived people by the very gifts they handed out: cures, warnings and forecasts, whose only effect was to injure their victims the more they helped them, since the help itself drew them away from all search for the true God by slipping the idea of a false one into their minds.

And of course an influence as ruinous as this is not shut up or confined within shrines and temples. It roams abroad, it flies through the air, and all the while it is free and unchecked. So nobody can doubt that our own houses lie open to these demons, who lie in wait for their human prey with their fantasies not only in their chapels but in our bedrooms.

We declare, then, that dreams are for the most part inflicted on us by demons, even though they sometimes turn out true and in our favor. When they take on a flattering and captivating manner, with the deliberate aim at evil that I have just described, they show themselves all the more empty, and deceitful, and murky, and wanton, and filthy. And it is no wonder that the images share the character of the realities behind them. [l]

But all those visions must be regarded as coming from God which can be set beside the actual grace of God — visions that are honest, holy, prophetic, inspired, instructive, an invitation to goodness, and so generous by nature that they overflow even to outsiders. For God has promised “to pour out the grace of the Holy Spirit on all flesh,” and has laid it down that his male and female servants “are to see visions as well as prophesy”; and with a grand impartiality he “sends his rain and his sunshine on the just and on the unjust.” It was certainly by inspiration from God that Nebuchadnezzar dreamed his dreams; and very nearly the greater part of the human race gets its knowledge of God from dreams. So it is that, just as the mercy of God overflows to the pagans, the temptation of the evil one comes at the holy ones, from whom he never withdraws his spiteful efforts to steal upon them however he can in their very sleep, if he cannot assault them awake.

The third class of dreams will be made up of those the soul apparently makes for itself out of intense concentration on particular circumstances. But since the soul cannot dream of its own accord — Epicharmus takes this view too — how can it become the cause of a vision of its own? Then this class must be handed over to the working of nature, leaving the soul, even in the ecstatic condition, the power of putting up with whatever happens to it. And those dreams that plainly come neither from God, nor from demonic inspiration, nor from the soul — being beyond all ordinary expectation, beyond the usual interpretation, and beyond the possibility of being intelligibly told — will have to be assigned to a class of their own: to what is purely and simply the ecstatic state and the conditions peculiar to it.

They say that dreams are surer and clearer when they come toward the end of the night, because that is when the soul's vigor comes up and heavy sleep goes off. As for the seasons of the year, dreams are calmer in spring, since summer slackens the soul and winter somehow hardens it, while autumn — which is hard on the health in other ways as well — tends to weaken the soul by the richness of its fruit. Then there is the position of the body in sleep. A man ought not to lie on his back, nor on his right side, nor in such a way as to twist his intestines, as though their cavity were being stretched the wrong way: the result would be a pounding of the heart, or else a pressure on the liver that would bring on a painful disturbance of the mind. [n]

However that may be, I take it that all of this amounts to clever guesswork rather than to proof, even though the man who made the guess is no less a man than Plato; and possibly the whole of it is nothing but the working of chance. Broadly speaking, though, dreams will be under a man's own control, if they can be directed at all — for we need not examine what mere opinion on the one hand and superstition on the other lay down for the treatment of dreams, in the matter of sorting and regulating different kinds of food. Superstition is at work when fasting is prescribed for people who mean to go under the sleep required for receiving an oracle, so that going without may produce the purity the rite requires. Mere opinion is at work when the followers of Pythagoras, aiming at the same result, refuse the bean as a food that would load the stomach and cause indigestion.

But Daniel's three companions, who were content with vegetables alone so as to escape the defilement of the royal dishes, received from God, along with other wisdom, the gift above all of seeing into dreams and explaining their meaning. For my own part, I hardly know whether fasting would not simply make me sleep so heavily that I would not even be aware I had dreamed at all.

Well then, you ask, has plain living nothing to do with the matter? Certainly it has as much to do with it as it has with the whole subject: if it does superstition some good service, it does far more for true religion. Even the demons demand this discipline of those who dream for them, as a compliment to their divinity, because they know it is acceptable to God — since Daniel, to quote him again, “ate no pleasant bread” for three weeks. But he used that abstinence in order to please God by humbling himself, not in order to work up a sensitivity and wisdom in his soul beforehand, ready to receive communication by dreams and visions, as if the doing of that were not rather the work of the ecstatic state. So plain living, which is what our question is about, will have nothing to do with exciting ecstasy; it will rather serve to commend the ecstasy as being God's own doing.

As for the people who suppose that infants do not dream, on the ground that all the soul's functions throughout life are performed according to the capacity of the age, they ought to watch carefully how babies tremble and nod and smile brightly in their sleep, and understand from that that these are the movements of their soul as it dreams, which come to the surface so easily through the delicate tenderness of an infant's body. [q]

The story that the African nation of the Atlantes pass the night in a deep, lethargic sleep does, however, bring down on them the charge that there is something wrong in the makeup of their soul. Either report — which now and then slanders foreigners — deceived Herodotus, or else a large force of demons of this sort has the upper hand in those barbarian regions. Aristotle does remark of a certain hero in Sardinia that he used to withhold visions and dreams from those who came to his shrine for inspiration; so it must lie with the will and the whim of demons to take the faculty of dreaming away as well as to grant it, and this may be where the remarkable fact I mentioned earlier comes from, that Nero and Thrasymedes only dreamed so late in life.

We, however, derive dreams from God. Why then should the Atlantes not receive the faculty of dreaming from God, when there is really no nation now that is a stranger to God, since the good news flashes its glorious light through the world to the ends of the earth? Could it be, then, that rumor deceived Aristotle, or is this whim still the way demons work? Take whichever view of the case you like; only do not let anyone imagine that any soul at all is exempt from dreams by the way it is naturally made.

We have said enough by now about sleep, the mirror and image of death, and enough about sleep's own business, dreams. Let us go on to consider the cause of our departure from here — the appointment of death and the course it takes — because we must not leave even that unquestioned and unexamined, although it is itself the end of all questions and investigations. [s]

Following the common sentiment of the human race, we call death “the debt of nature.” That much was settled by the voice of God; that is the contract made with everything that is born. And this by itself refutes the chilly notion of Epicurus, who says no such debt is owed by us. It also disposes of the insane opinion of the Samaritan heretic Menander, who will have it that death not only has nothing to do with his disciples but in fact never reaches them at all. He claims to have received a commission from the secret power of One above, so that everyone who shares in his baptism becomes immortal and incorruptible, and is invested on the spot with resurrection life.

We read, of course, of a great many remarkable kinds of water: how the wine-like quality of the stream makes people drunk who drink at Lyncestis; how at Colophon the water of a demon-driven spring affects men with madness; how Alexander was killed by the poisonous water from Mount Nonacris in Arcadia. And there was a pool in Judea, before the time of Christ, that had healing power in it. Everyone knows how the poet celebrated the marshy Styx for keeping men from death — though Thetis had to mourn her son in spite of the preservative. And for that matter, if Menander himself were to take the plunge into this famous Styx, he would certainly have to die after all; for you must first come to the Styx, and by every account it lies in the regions of the dead.

Well then, what are these blessed and delightful waters, and where are they — waters which John the Baptist never used in his preparatory work, and which Christ after him never revealed to his disciples? What was this marvelous bath of Menander's? A comedy, I suppose. But why was such a font so seldom asked for, so obscure, resorted to by so very few for their cleansing? I really do find something to suspect in so rare an instance of a sacred rite that carries so much security and safety with it, and that dispenses with the ordinary law of dying even in God's own service — when on the contrary all the nations have “to go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob,” who requires of his holy ones in martyrdom the very death he required even of his Christ.

Nobody will credit magic with power enough to exempt a man from death, or to freshen and revive a life the way a vine is revived when its condition is renewed. Not even the great Medea was granted such power — over a human being at any rate, whatever she may have managed with a silly sheep. Enoch, no doubt, was taken away, and so was Elijah, and neither of them experienced death; but it was postponed, and only postponed. They are being kept back for the suffering of death, so that by their blood they may put out Antichrist. Even John died, although an unfounded expectation had gone around that he would stay alive until the coming of the Lord.

Heresies, for the most part, spring up in a hurry out of examples we ourselves supply: they get the armor they defend themselves with from the very place they attack. In short, the whole question comes down to this challenge. Where are the men Menander himself has baptized? Whom has he plunged into his Styx? Let them come out and stand in front of us — those apostles of his that he has made immortal. Let my doubting Thomas see them, let him hear them, let him handle them: then he is convinced.