A Promise Made in a Dream

I could fairly give the answer I have given even if this were a promise made while fully awake. But this is something new and shameless: he throws in my face a mere dream. How am I to answer? I have no time to think about anything outside my own work. I wish that I were not kept even from reading the Holy Scriptures by the crowds that throng this place and by the gathering of Christians from every part of the world. Still, when a man makes a dream into a crime, I can quote to him the words of the prophets, who say that we are not to believe dreams. For even dreaming of adultery does not condemn us to hell, and dreaming of the crown of martyrdom does not raise us to heaven. I have often seen myself in dreams dead and laid in the grave. I have often flown over the earth and been carried through the air as if swimming, over mountains and seas. My accuser might as well demand that I stop living, or that I have wings on my shoulders, because my mind has often been mocked in sleep by vague fancies of this kind. How many people are rich while asleep and wake to find themselves beggars! How many drink water in their sleep to cool their thirst, and wake with their throats parched and burning! [a]

You demand from me the keeping of a promise given in a dream. I will meet you with a truer and closer question: Have you done all that you promised in your baptism? Have you or I fulfilled all that the profession of a monk demands? I beg you, consider whether you are not looking at the speck in my eye through the beam in your own. I say this against my will; it is sorrow that forces my reluctant tongue into words. As for you, it is not enough for you to make up charges about what I do while awake; you must accuse me for my dreams. You take such an interest in my actions that you must discuss what I have said or done in my sleep. I will not dwell on how, in your zeal to speak against me, you have soiled your own profession and done all you could, by word and deed, to dishonor the whole body of Christians.

But I give you fair warning, and I will repeat it again and again: you are attacking a creature with horns. If I did not take to heart the words of the apostle, “Evil speakers will not inherit the kingdom of God,” and “By hating one another you have been consumed by one another,” I would make you feel what a vast quarrel you have stirred up after a slight and pretended reconciliation. What do you gain by heaping up slanders against me among friends and strangers alike? Is it because I am not an Origenist, and do not believe that I sinned in heaven, that I am accused as a sinner on earth? And was the result of our renewed friendship to be that I must not speak against heretics, for fear that my notice of them would be taken as an attack on you? So long as I did not refuse your praises, you followed me as a master, you called me friend and brother, and you acknowledged me as a catholic in every respect. But when I asked to be spared your praises, and judged myself unworthy to have so great a man as my trumpeter, you at once struck your pen through what you had written, began to abuse everything you had praised before, and poured out sweet and bitter words from the same mouth.

I wish you could understand how much I am holding myself back in not fitting my words to the boiling heat in my breast, and how I pray with the Psalmist, “Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth; keep the door of my lips. Do not turn my heart to words of malice.” And as he says elsewhere, “While the wicked stood before me, I was mute and humbled, and kept silent even from good words.” And again, “I became like a man who does not hear, in whose mouth are no reproofs.” But the Lord, the Avenger, will answer for me, as he says through the prophet, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” And in another place, “You sat and spoke against your brother, and slandered your own mother’s son. These things you have done, and I kept silent. You thought, indeed, that I would be someone like yourself; but I will rebuke you, and set them before your eyes,” so that you may see yourself found guilty of the very things you falsely lay to another’s charge.