E.2-12: The Dreaming Church: A History We Were Never Taught
Season 2: Episode 12
The Dreaming Church: A History We Were Never Taught
listen by clicking the audio player here:
In this episode you will learn:
This episode covers:
-- Tertullian's De Anima and the theology of dream discernment
-- Perpetua of Carthage: dreaming in prison, preserved in worship
-- The desert fathers' nepsis and the tradition of interior discernment
-- Monica, Augustine, and the dream that held for seventeen years
-- Jerome: flogged in a dream, redirected in his scholarly life
-- Ignatius of Loyola and the Spiritual Exercises
-- Jung's recognition of Ignatius: active imagination and the five-century precedent
-- How we lost this -- and how we recover it
Episode Length: 22:00
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Transcript
Before you decide whether God still speaks through dreams, consider what the church believed for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence. Not the fringe. Not the mystics at the edges. The theologians, the martyrs, the desert mothers and fathers, the bishops, the scholars. The people who gave us the creeds, the canon, and the contemplative tradition that shaped Christian spirituality to this day. None of them thought God had stopped speaking in the night. The question was never whether. It was how to listen well.
INTRO -- after music]
I'm Angela Meer, and I welcome you into the sacred meeting place of psychology and theology, where the timeless patterns of Scripture meet the deep symbols of the soul.
Last week we established the biblical ground: God has always spoken through dreams, from the patriarchs to the prophets to the apostles. The Scripture is saturated with it. But I want to pause before we build the practice, because I know some of you are carrying an objection. Maybe you have already heard it from someone in your life, or maybe it lives in your own chest: that was then. That was the Bible. That was before we had the full revelation of Scripture. God doesn't need to speak in dreams anymore.
I want to show you something. I want to show you what the church believed -- not what the 19th-century church believed, not what the modern Western evangelical church believes, but what the church believed for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence. Because the assumption that God has stopped speaking in dreams is not the historic Christian position. It is the newest position in the room. And the room has been occupied for two thousand years.
Let me introduce you to some people.
It's time to awaken holy wonder.
[MUSIC STING]
[TERTULLIAN -- 0:45-5:00]
Around the year 210 AD, Tertullian of Carthage wrote a treatise called De Anima -- On the Soul. Tertullian was not a fringe figure. He was the first major Christian theologian to write in Latin. He gave the church the word Trinity. And he wrote a theology of dreams.
He categorized three kinds: divine dreams, sent from God; demonic dreams, counterfeited by the enemy; and natural dreams, arising from the soul's own activity during sleep. This categorization is significant not for what it says about demons or natural psychology but for what it assumes: that divine dreams exist. That God sends them. That the question requiring serious theological thought is not whether divine dreams happen but how to tell them from their counterfeits.
This is where the church begins its teaching on dreams. Not with skepticism. With discernment. The framework presupposes the phenomenon. You do not develop a sophisticated theology of distinguishing genuine divine dreams from counterfeit ones if you believe there are no genuine divine dreams to distinguish. Tertullian believed there were. So did the entire theological tradition he was writing within and for.
[PERPETUA -- 5:00-14:00]
Three years before Tertullian finished De Anima, in the year 203 AD, a young noblewoman named Vibia Perpetua was arrested in Carthage for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. She was twenty-two years old, nursing an infant. She was sentenced to die in the arena.
While she waited in prison, she dreamed. And she wrote the dreams down.
In the first dream, she climbed a golden ladder that reached to the heavens. Its sides were lined with iron weapons -- swords, lances, hooks -- that would tear the flesh of anyone who climbed carelessly. A great dragon lay at the foot of the ladder. She stepped on the dragon's head and climbed. At the top she found a vast garden and a grey-haired shepherd, who offered her a mouthful of sweet milk. She woke with the taste still in her mouth. And she understood: she would not leave the arena alive.
But notice what the dream gave her. Not just the information that she would die. Not just a forecast. Presence. The shepherd at the top of the ladder was not distant. He was there. Offering milk. Welcoming her. The dream did not merely tell her what was coming. It accompanied her into it.
Perpetua continued to dream. She dreamed of her dead brother Dinocrates -- first suffering in darkness, then healed and playing in light after her prayer. She dreamed of a combat in the arena in which she became a man and defeated a great adversary, and she understood the battle ahead was spiritual, not merely physical, and that she had already been shown the outcome.
She was killed in the arena on March 7, 203 AD. She was twenty-two years old.
The church preserved her account. For centuries it was read publicly in North African worship services alongside Scripture. Tertullian, who may have written the preface to her Passion, called it new prophecy -- not lesser than what the apostles received, but continuous with it. The church did not treat Perpetua's dreams as interesting historical curiosity. It treated them as the testimony of a martyr-prophet receiving genuine divine communication in the hours before her death.
This is not the fringe. This is the center. A twenty-two-year-old woman in prison, dreaming, writing it down -- and the church saying: this is worth preserving. Read it in worship. This is what God sounds like.
[THE DESERT FATHERS -- 14:00-20:00]
A century after Perpetua, the Egyptian desert began to fill with men and women who had gone into the wilderness to pursue God with undivided attention. They gave Christian civilization the monastic tradition -- the tradition that preserved learning and faith through the collapse of Rome, that produced every major renewal movement in Western Christianity for a thousand years.
The Apophthegmata Patrum -- the Sayings of the Desert Fathers -- is the foundational text of all subsequent Christian monasticism. It contains repeated reference to dreams as vehicles of divine communication, warning, and formation. But what is more significant than any individual dream account is the posture the tradition developed toward interior experience.
They called it nepsis: watchful attentiveness to interior movement. Not passive reception, not credulous acceptance of everything that comes, but disciplined, prayerful attention to the movements of the soul -- including the movements that come in the night -- with the constant question: where is this from? Is this God? Is this the enemy? Is this the body?
This discernment tradition is sophisticated precisely because it presupposes divine communication. You do not develop a discipline of distinguishing genuine interior movement from counterfeit if you believe there is no genuine interior movement to distinguish. The desert fathers were not naive. They were among the most rigorous interior practitioners in Christian history. And they took the night seriously.
Antony the Great -- the father of Christian monasticism, whose life Athanasius wrote and the whole church read -- entered the desert shaped by visionary experience. The tradition he founded produced the most sophisticated theology of interior discernment in Christian history. That theology assumed God speaks. Its entire sophistication was devoted to developing the capacity to hear accurately.
[AUGUSTINE AND MONICA -- 20:00-25:00]
Monica, the mother of Augustine of Hippo, prayed for her son's conversion for seventeen years.
Early in those years, she had a dream. A radiant young man appeared to her weeping and asked why she grieved. She told him: she was mourning the ruin of her son. He told her to look -- and she saw that where she stood, Augustine was standing beside her. She held the dream for seventeen years as a promise from God. While her son was deep in Manichaeism and later Neoplatonism, while he moved to Rome and then to Milan, while he lived with a mistress and had a son and pursued a distinguished academic career without any apparent motion toward Christian faith -- she held the dream.
Augustine eventually converted. He records Monica's dream in the Confessions with full seriousness. Not as his mother's delusion. Not as wish fulfillment. As genuine divine communication that sustained a mother's intercession through years of apparent failure. Monica believed the dream was from God. Augustine, the greatest theologian the Western church produced, records that belief as reasonable and well-founded.
Augustine himself engaged with the question of dreams in multiple works. His position is always nuanced -- he applies careful reasoning to questions of what can be trusted and how -- but he never suggests that God has stopped communicating through dreams. The question, as for Tertullian and the desert tradition, is always one of discernment: how do we receive accurately? Not: has God stopped sending?
[JEROME -- 25:00-29:00]
Jerome translated the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin. The Vulgate -- his translation -- shaped Western Christianity for a millennium. It is arguably the single most influential act of scholarship in the history of the Western church.
Jerome was also redirected by a dream.
He was an avid reader of Cicero and the classical authors -- so passionate about literary style that he had been neglecting Scripture. In the dream, he was brought before a heavenly tribunal. Asked to identify himself, he said: I am a Christian. The judge replied: you lie. You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where your treasure is, there your heart is also. He was flogged before the tribunal. He woke in tears. He says the bruises were real. He spent the next decades translating Scripture with the passion he had previously given to Cicero.
The man who gave the Western church its Bible was shaped by what came in the night.
[IGNATIUS AND JUNG -- 29:00-40:00]
In 1521, a young Spanish soldier named Ignacio de Loyola was struck by a cannonball at Pamplona. Both legs were shattered. During his long convalescence, he asked for books of chivalric romance. The castle had none. He was given a life of Christ and a collection of saints' lives instead.
He read them. And he began to notice something.
When he imagined imitating the knights of chivalry, he felt a surge of energy. But when the daydream ended, he felt flat and empty. When he imagined imitating the saints, the energy lasted after the imagination ended. It deepened rather than faded. Something was different about these two streams of interior movement. And Ignatius -- not yet a theologian, barely yet a serious Christian -- began to pay attention to the difference.
He spent years developing what he had begun to notice. The Spiritual Exercises -- published in 1548 -- are the result. They are a 30-day structured retreat organized around one central insight: God communicates through interior movement, and the soul can be trained to recognize, attend to, and respond to that communication with increasing accuracy.
The primary practice of the Exercises is what Ignatius calls the application of the senses. The retreatant takes a Gospel scene -- the Nativity, the baptism of Jesus, the raising of Lazarus -- and enters it with all five senses. Not to analyze it. To be present in it. To see what is seen, hear what is heard, smell the stable, touch the ground, taste the air. And then to notice what arises: what feelings, what movements of consolation or desolation, what sense of God drawing near or pulling away.
Consolation draws toward God -- toward love, peace, holy desire, the increase of faith. Desolation draws away -- toward anxiety, self-absorption, darkness, the diminishment of charity. Ignatius wrote rules for distinguishing them. Fourteen rules in the first week. Eight more advanced rules in the second week. The rules do not tell the retreatant what God is saying. They give tools for recognizing the signature of genuine divine movement versus the signature of its counterfeit.
The Spiritual Exercises have been used continuously for five centuries. By Jesuits, by religious sisters, by laypeople, by retreatants of every tradition. By millions of people across five hundred years who have found in them a structured way of attending to what God is doing in the interior life.
Now. Carl Jung read the Spiritual Exercises.
In 1937, Jung delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale University -- later published as Psychology and Religion. In those lectures he engaged with the Jesuit method of meditation at length. He recognized immediately what he was looking at. Ignatius's imaginative contemplation -- entering a sacred scene with all five senses, attending to what arises without forcing a predetermined outcome -- was structurally identical to what Jung was developing as active imagination. The deliberate, receptive engagement with an interior image. The attending to what arises. The distinguishing of genuine movement from counterfeit.
The difference was the frame. Ignatius held the practice within a theological frame: the image is a gift from God, the movements of consolation and desolation are the language of the Spirit, the goal is union with the will of God. Jung held the same practice within a psychological frame: the image arises from the unconscious, the movements of the psyche carry information about the Self, the goal is individuation. The practice was the same. The vocabulary was different.
Jung was honest about the recognition. He did not claim to have invented the method. He claimed to have given it new language that made it accessible to people who could no longer receive it in its original theological packaging. He understood that what Ignatius had built was not merely a spiritual technique but a sophisticated technology for engaging the non-rational interior life -- for attending to what moves beneath the surface of conscious thought, for developing the capacity to recognize genuine movement from counterfeit.
The church had been doing it for five centuries before Jung named it. Ignatius learned it from the desert tradition, which learned it from the martyrs and the apostles, who received it from a God who has always spoken through the interior life of His people.
[HOW WE LOST THIS -- 40:00-44:00]
If the early church, the desert tradition, the medieval church, and Ignatius all took dreams and interior communication seriously as divine speech -- how did we end up with a Christianity that dismisses it?
The answer is not primarily theological. It is cultural.
The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries produced an intellectual culture that privileged rational, propositional, empirical knowledge over experiential and imaginal modes of knowing. Dreams were reclassified as random neurological noise, or at best psychological phenomena. The interior life was no longer a site of divine speech. It was a biological process.
Protestant Christianity, reacting against what it perceived as Catholic excess in mysticism and visionary experience, drew sharper lines. The canon is closed. The apostolic age is over. We have the Bible. We do not need dreams.
This hardens into formal cessationism -- the argument that certain gifts of the Spirit ceased with the apostolic age -- in the 19th century. It is associated with the Princeton theologians, particularly B.B. Warfield. It is not the patristic position. It is not the medieval position. It is not even consistently the Reformation position. Calvin wrote that God communicates through dreams. Luther did not dismiss them.
We inherited a cessationism that the early church would not recognize, presented as orthodox Christianity. The church that preserved Perpetua's dreams for public worship did not believe it. Tertullian did not believe it. Augustine did not believe it. Jerome did not believe it. Ignatius did not believe it. And Jung -- outside the faith, looking at what the faith had built -- recognized that what had been dismissed was doing something genuinely important for the human soul.
We did not inherit a skeptical Christianity. We inherited a dreaming one. And someone told us to stop.
[ACTS 2 AND THE INVITATION -- 44:00-47:00]
Acts 2:17 -- in the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.
Peter quotes Joel at Pentecost. He is not describing the apostolic age as a brief exception to God's normal silence. He is describing the age inaugurated by the poured-out Spirit -- an age that has not ended, in which the normal expectation is that God speaks to all people through the interior life, including the night. We are in that age. The Spirit has been poured out. The dreams and visions are part of what that pouring out produces.
The arc you are building is not a novelty. It is a recovery. Tertullian, Perpetua, the desert fathers, Monica, Jerome, Hildegard, Aquinas, Ignatius: a two-thousand-year tradition of the church receiving, discerning, and living from what God sends in the night. This is your inheritance. Not what you were told. What the church actually believed.
Receive it.
[PAUSE PRAY HEAL]
Let us close with a moment to Pause, Pray, and Heal.
Pause: Where did you receive your assumptions about dreams? Was it explicitly taught -- or absorbed from a culture that assumed it without argument? Sit with that. Notice where the assumption came from. It did not come from the early church.
[Pause]
Pray: In the spirit of Acts 2:17 and the tradition that stands behind it:
Lord, I want to receive my full inheritance. Not a Christianity narrowed by Enlightenment rationalism. Not a faith more comfortable with the silence of God than with His speech. Pour out Your Spirit on me -- on my waking hours and my sleeping ones. Speak in the night as You have always spoken. I am willing to hear what You have always been willing to say.
Heal: This week, read the account of Perpetua's first dream. Just that one. Read it slowly, as if you are reading the testimony of a martyr-prophet -- which is exactly what it is. Notice what it is like to receive a twenty-two-year-old woman's dream as serious theological testimony. Notice what opens in you when you allow it to be that.
[FINAL
Subscribe to The Christian Jung Podcast wherever you listen. Find the full article and this week's Inner Room piece -- on the Ignatian discernment framework and how to apply it to your own dreamwork -- on Substack at The Christian Jung. Find me at angelameer.com.
Next week we begin to build the practice. The history is behind us. The tradition is available to us. Let's use it.
Heal Deeply. Walk Holy.
[END]