Dreams, Virtue and Divine Knowledge in Early Christian Egypt

by Bronwen Neil, Doru Costache, Kevin Wagner

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. This volume traces that development and its influence on early Egyptian experiences of the divine in dreams.

217 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 25, 2019

About the author

Bronwen Neil is the Burke Senior Lecturer in Ecclesiastical Latin at ACU Brisbane, and acting director of the Centre for Early Christian Studies in first semester, 2012. In the eleven years since she received her doctorate from Australian Catholic University, Dr Neil has made significant achievements in the study of early Christian history. Her publications reflect a rare command of a broad range of areas, including Greek and Latin text edition, Byzantine theology, the cult of martyrs, hagiography and bishops of Rome in the fourth to ninth centuries. An Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship (2001-2005) resulted in a monograph published by Brepols in the new series Studia Antiqua Australiensia (2006). In 2009 Dr Neil published Leo the Great in the Routledge series The Early Church Fathers. Dr Neil’s expertise has been recognised by invitations to contribute various chapters to books and Festschriften and several articles to encyclopediae and dictionaries, including Encyclopedia of Biblical Reception (vols. 2 and 3, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011) and the forthcoming Dictionary of Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press). She is currently completing a book (with P. Allen) on Crisis Management in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of Episcopal Letters, and another on the letters of Pope Gelasius I (492-496).