Dreams, Virtue and Divine Knowledge in Early Christian Egypt

Professor Bronwen Neil offers a taste of a forthcoming book that she co-authored: Dreams, Virtue and Divine Knowledge in Early Christian Egypt (Cambridge University Press)...

What did dreams mean to Egyptian Christians of the first to the sixth centuries? Alexandrian philosophers, starting with Philo, Clement and Origen, developed a new approach to dreams that was to have profound effects on the spirituality of the medieval West and Byzantium. Their approach, founded on the principles of Platonism, was based on the convictions that God could send prophetic dreams and that these could be interpreted by people of sufficient virtue.

In the fourth century, the Alexandrian approach was expanded by Athanasius and Evagrius to include a more holistic psychological understanding of what dreams meant for spiritual progress. The ideas that God could be known in dreams and that dreams were linked to virtue flourished in the context of Egyptian desert monasticism. Our volume traces that development and its influence on early Egyptian experiences of the divine in dreams.

In the Platonist tradition that flourished in Alexandria in the first century CE, dream-visions mattered. They offered a glimpse of the divine realities behind what the eye could see of the material world, and behind the perceptions produced by the imagination, the eye of the mind.

Confirmation for this insight was sought and found in Jewish and Christian Scriptures. This volume deals with several influential Christian thinkers from the second to fifth centuries who grappled with the paradoxical nature of dreams. While these thinkers recognised that dreams could have divine origins, they also grew increasingly wary of their potential to lead believers away from the path of virtue.

It is argued here that there were two main avenues of approach to seeing God in Alexandrian thought: the philosophical and the psychological. The philosophical approach is first exemplified by Philo, the Hellenistic Jew who was influenced by his reading of Plato. The psychological approach was first expounded by the Greek monk and Neoplatonist Evagrius (d. 399). Evagrius, trained in Platonism by the Cappadocian Christians Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, spent his final years in the Lower Egyptian desert, in the coenobitic communities of Nitria and in solitude at Kellia.

Between these two poles, other Alexandrian philosophers – including Clement, Origen, Athanasius and Synesius – strove to find their own answers to the enduring problem of dreams and their role in the spiritual life.

https://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/dreams-virtue-and-divine-knowledge-early-christian-egypt?format=HB&isbn=9781108481182#contentsTabAnchor



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