Dreams, Texts, and Truths: Augustine on Hermeneutics and Oneirocriticism

URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10447/667817

Work Package : WP 8 – UbiQuity

Keywords: Augustine, dreams, oneirocriticism, oneirology, Bible, biblical exegesis, allegory, Tertullian, Origen, Philo of Alexandria, Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, early Christian literature, Artemidorus of Daldis

Abstract
In the Greek and Roman worlds, oneirocriticism is hermeneutics and presupposes an epistemology – these and other cognate fields of inquiry being involved in a continuous process of social, political, and religious change. The present paper explores the relationship between dreams and hermeneutics in a meaningful passage of Augustine’s twelve-book commentary On the Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram) – a work rightly considered the most important testimony to the Christian cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages – in which the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers establishes a parallel between the interpretation of dreams and that of sacred texts. By elucidating the cultural background of Augustine’s understanding of dream images as cognitive phenomena that underlie both crucial passages of the Bible and the common experience of humans – both the soul and the body, both natural and supernatural powers – this paper sheds new light upon Augustine’s reaction to the materialism and literalism of Tertullian and early Christian communities, his reception of the allegorical method of Origen and the Alexandrian school, and his mystical embracing of Neoplatonic theories of knowledge. Indeed, Augustine turns out to be perfectly aware of many Greco-Roman and early Christian debates on oneirology and hermeneutical methods, and while he fiercely warns against the belief that the revelation of the Bible can be superseded or contradicted by the individual revelations of dreams, he strives to put together an original paradigm of natural philosophy, cognitive psychology, and symbolic interpretation, in an attempt to give dreams a definite place in the order of things.