Jerome Before the Judge: The Dialogic Nature of

Reports of Dreams
Graham St John Stott
Arab American University
Dream reports do not just retell a dream; they give it form and signicance,
and they do so dialogically. Drawing on the concept of dialogic utterance
formulated by Mikhail M. Bakhtin, this paper examines the dream in which
St Jerome (340?-420) believed himself condemned and punished by God for
preferring Cicero to scripture. (The punishment comes in the dream, when
Jerome is whipped by servants of the tribunal before which he appears.) After
considering the reasons for believing the dream to be authentic, and noting
the way in which it is, as it happens, rhetorically structured as a dialog, the
paper argues that it should be read as dialogic in a Bakhtian sense: Jeromes
sense of guilt for being a Ciceronian was not something that he brought to the
dream (it was not, that is to say, the burden of an already guilty conscience),
but a discovery made as he tested various speculative explanations for the
punishment he had received against ideas that were in the air in his day.
Keywords: dream reports, dialogism, Jerome
Taking my cue from Kilroe (2000), I am not directly concerned in what follows
with dreams themselves or even our waking memories of dreaming (the text of the
dream), but with the way dreamers report their experience. A dream report, I will
suggest, is what Goffman (1959) would call a collaborative manufacture for, to
borrow the terminology of the Russian linguist Mikhail M. Bakhtin, it is dialogic.
Any time we speak or write, Bakhtin argued, we address ourselves to another (even
if our audience is only implied), and in doing so we are conscious not just of the
ideas and perspective of our addressee, but also of previous contributors to the
discourse usedand we assume that our addressee is aware of these contributors
too. We are, that is to say, in dialog not only with the person addressed, but also
with previous speakers. Our utterances contain the half-concealed or completely
concealed words of others (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 92). More broadly, To live means to
participate in dialogue; to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so
forth . . . . [A person] invests his entire self in discourse and this discourse enters
into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium (Bakhtin, 1984, p.
293). In part this is a well-rehearsed theme, for the idea that dream imagery follows
the logic of an inner conversation has been noted by others (Hunt, 1989). However,
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Graham St John Stott, Modern
Languages Department, Arab American University, PO Box 240, Jenin, Palestine. E-mail:
grahams@aauj.edu
7
Dreaming 2009 American Psychological Association
2009, Vol. 19, No. 1, 716 1053-0797/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0014085
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the scope of the conversation that shapes a dream report, and the number of
conversation partners it entails, has not been noted, and it is that which concerns
me here.
JEROMES DREAM
My example is a well-known dream of St Jerome (340?-420), and the way he
described it in a letter to his prote ge e Julia Eustochium (Jerome, 1933, 22.30). Some
years earlier, Jerome explains (writing around 384 CE), the severity of his Lenten
fasting had led to a fever and unconsciousness, and while lying in a comatose state,
I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat of the Judge; and here
the light was so bright, and those who stood around were so radiant, that I cast myself upon
the ground and did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was I replied: I am a
Christian. But he who presided said: Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of
Christ. For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also. Instantly I became dumb,
and amid the strokes of the lashfor he had ordered me to be scourgedI was tortured
more severely still by the re of conscience, considering with myself that verse, In the grave
who shall give thee thanks? Yet for all that I began to cry and to bewail myself, saying:
Have mercy upon me, O Lord: have mercy upon me.
Bystanders urged the courts presiding ofcer to be merciful, and give Jerome
time to repent (to put him on probation, as it were)after all, he always could be
punished later if he should ever again read the works of the Gentilesand
Jerome seized the moment to promise reform. I made an oath and called upon His
name, saying: Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read
such, I have denied Thee. Dismissed, then, on taking this oath, I returned to the
upper world . . . .
What are we to make of this? Possibly, nothing. It could well be that this dream
was merely a rhetorical exercise on Jeromes parta literary gambit whereby he could
persuade his reader that the sacrice of what others would call normal pleasures was
part of Christian life. Eustochium was one of a group of aristocratic Roman women
who maintained ascetic households (Yarbrough, 1976), and Jerome, who served as her
spiritual tutor, was not satised with the progress she was making in self-discipline.
Although she had taken a vow of perpetual virginity, Jerome believed that if Eusto-
chium continued to enjoy the food, and dress and social life of an upper-class Roman
woman, her sexual abstinence was merely a pretence of dedication to Christ. If she
were not to be judged a hypocrite, she needed to renounce the world more fully and
more consistently than she had done up until thendressing more simply, avoiding the
round of visits that other aristocratic women made, and (by taking care as to what she
read) not committing an adultery of the tongue (Jerome, 1933, 22.29). It was this last
concern that led him to talk about his dream. Since, as he would explain 2 years later
in his commentary on Ephesians (dated to 386), one who possesses the surpassing
love of Christ ought to reect on nothing else (Heine, 2002, p.163; cf. the praise for
unwearied meditation on the law of Christ in Jerome, 1933, 60.11), Eustochium
needed to avoid all books that would not direct her thoughts appropriately (Laurence,
1997; cf. van den Bergh, 2000; Gibson, 2006)and the account he gave of his dream
was a way of driving this message home.
However, if it was because of his concern for Eustochium that Jerome told of
his dream, that inevitably invites suspicion. His report that he had put his salvation
8 Stott
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at risk because his own renunciation of the classics had been incomplete could well
have been, at least in part, a pious ction written to encourage his student to give
up every vanity for Christ. Antin (1968) has suggested that the description of a
dream in one of the sermons of Jeromes younger contemporary St Augustine
(354430) was really a dramatization of a catechetical situation, and possibly the
same is true in the present case. Rather than drawing on his memory, we might
suppose, Jerome was exploiting Eustochiums knowledge of judicial ceremonial to
inspire fear. The judge who will hear the cases of criminals in public, places his
tribunal in a high location, we read in one fourth-century account of Roman legal
protocol; . . . you will see there the ofcials arranged in their proper order: [and]
in the middle of the judicial hearing chamber are placed the horrible devices of
punishment, which are painful not just to suffer, but even to see (qtd. Shaw, 2003,
pp. 54041). Jerome did not have to have actually dreamt of being tried to use such
commonly known details to good effect, and since he had no qualms about changing
his biography elsewhere in this letter to provide authority for his message
reinventing himself as one who had gone to the desert to be alone in its vast solitude
(Jerome, 1933, 22.7), when his asceticism had actually taken more social forms
(Rebenich, 2002)such ctionalizing would not be in any way surprising.
Besides, whether or not the dream report was a pious ction, it seems over-
literary and suspiciously coherent. (There are two apparent inconsistenciesthe
nature of the court changes from an anticipation of the Day of Judgment to being
an ordinary Roman court, and its location changes also: the dream begins with
Jerome caught up, as if to heaven, but ends with him returning, like Aeneas, from
the underworldbut these apparent contradictions can be explained away. Jerome
probably had no way of imagining divine justice that was not somehow based in that
he knew, and for him afterlife would have been chthonic. As Le Goff, 1984, reports,
the fourth-century church assumed that the dead awaited judgment in subterranean
world.) This is not to insist on irreparable discontinuity as a sign of authenticity in
dream reports. Although some theorists have emphasized the bizarre elements
of dreams (Hobson, 2002; Flanagan, 2000), such features are not found in every
dream, let alone every dream report (Hunt, 1989; Domhoff, 2007). And besides, if
Jeromes experience were specically characterized as a nightmare, we would
expect to see coherence in his account. As usually dened, nightmares are coher-
ent dream sequences that seem real and become increasingly more disturbing as
they unfold (Pagel, 2008, p. 76). Yet even if this is allowed, the rhetorical mastery
evidenced in the account that Jerome givesits verbal parallels and embedded
scriptural quotationsresults in so smooth a surface, and so economical a narra-
tive, that it is hard not to wonder if we might be reading a literary dream rather than
a dream report. (In a literary dream there is a brief plot, with a single event, that
functions as an element in a larger narrative strategy: Bachorski, 2004).
Finally, we might also question the authenticity of the dream because of the
language used. Jerome echoes the phrasing of Virgil (Thierry, 1963, 1967), so that,
ironically, a narrative telling how a Christian was condemned for his love of
classical literature is couched in the language of the classics themselves. Possibly the
irony was unconscious; several scholars have suggested that Jerome was incapable
of writing without betraying his classical education (Antin, 1951; Cameron, 1991;
Clark, 1999), but even if that is so, it is understandable that the extremely literary
Dialogic Nature of Reports of Dreams 9
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qualities of Jeromes dream report have led one of his biographers to dismiss it as
a magnicent piece of showmanship (Rebenich, 2002, pp. 9).
CHRISTIANUS SUM
Such doubts are not surprising, and perhaps are unavoidable, but they focus on
only one part of the story. Behind the smoke and mirrors, behind the artice and
showmanship, there seems to have been a real and terrifying experiencean
example of what Bulkeley (2000) calls a transforming dream. Jerome awoke
changed. Thereafter, he wrote, I read the books of God with a zeal greater than
I had previously given to the books of men, and though this too can be seen as a
conventional touch, for a while (assuming that we date the dream to around 370)
Jerome really did give up the study of the classics (Kelley, 1975; Weisen, 1964). The
extent to which he did so, and the length of time he held to his purpose, is
controversial; but given Jeromes magpie mind and . . . vast memory (Adkins,
1999, p. 16) there is no need to see the classical borrowings in his letter as evidence
that he had broken his vow at the time he wrote to Eustochium, or that he was
exaggerating the dreams effect upon him in his report. Although Jerome no doubt
carefully chose his words to secure the impact he desired on his correspondent, that
should not lead us to doubt that there was a dream.
Of course, even if that is allowed, we should not think that the report presents
us with an image by image replay of the dream itself. Even if there were no literary
embellishments to reckon with, such an approach would be na ve. As Patrizia Violi
notes, that which becomes . . . the dream report is . . . [merely] an elaboration of
the content of the oneiric experience (Violi, 1998, p. 152; Kilroe, 2000). It is not its
transcription. But once it is granted that there probably was a dream for Jerome to
report, it becomes possible to look at the way it is reported and trace the way his
understanding of the experience evolved. The attempt should be made with cau-
tion, for such an approach presumes a starting pointthe dream text, the dream-
as-rememberedwhich cannot be examined. In as much as the dream text is that
which comes between the dream and the dream report, and its nature can only be
inferred. Nevertheless, I would suggest that sometimes it is possible to recognize
key stages in a dream reports elaboration, and Jeromes is a case in point.
Jerome had disciplined himself as part of his Lenten fast, and the imagery of
the dream seems to have incorporated the resulting pain. Although Vogel (1993, p.
298), reports that dream content is remarkably independent of external psycho-
logical and physical stimuli both before and during sleep, it is not totally or
necessarily so (for dream incorporation, see Ellman & Antrobus, 1991; for the
sensory richness of nightmares, see Hartmann, 1984; Hunt, 1989), and I nd it
probable here. Jerome reports waking to nd his shoulders were black and blue
(I felt the bruises long after I awoke, he writes: Jerome, 1933, 22.30), and I take
this to be the result of his self-agellation before sleeping. We might, of course,
explain the bruises otherwise: as a coincidence, unconnected to the dream; or as
psychosomatic outcomes of the dream, perhaps (cf. Weitzenhoffer, 1953; Vergote,
1988); or, more probably, as wounds that were self-inicted after the event. As
ascetics presumed that a dream-lled sleep was evidence of a failure in spiritual
discipline (Evagrius Ponticus, 1981, ch. 56), Jerome might have felt the need to prove
10 Stott
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that he was not reporting a dream but telling of rapture, and since the only evidence
that he could produce to defend the objectivity of [his] experience was the observ-
able effects of agellation (Wiebe, 1997, p. 18) it could be that had Jerome provided
rather than discovered the evidence he needed. However, that seems unnecessarily
suspicious: particularly since presuming that the bruises followed from self-agellation
prior to the dream would make it easier to understand the violence associated with the
dream itselfthe way in which Jerome reports being dragged before the court, thrown
on the ground, and whipped into submission. Jerome, dreaming, would have been in
pain, and such imagery should hardly surprise.
The pain, the whipping, the ofcers of the court to administer the whipping
this, I suggest, was the text of Jeromes dream. The accusations made by the
presiding ofcer, and the reasons for the punishment inicted, were clearly
worked-up for the report he gave (as noted, they are uncomfortably literary), and
I suggest that their substance as well as their style was the subject of Jeromes
reection after he awoke. (I do not insist on this point. Little in what follows would
be affected by presuming otherwise, but, given the artice of Jeromes report, I
suggest that these details are the fruit of conscious reection.) Within the dream,
Jerome thought that he had been hauled before a Roman court (Shaw, 2003), and
that he had been on trial for his faith. As a young man in Rome he had been
fascinated by the horror of the catacombs (Kelley, 1975), even then a place of
devotion to the cult of Christian martyrs, and now, to his delight, he seemed on his
way to receive a reward to equal theirs. (Although the persecution of the church
had ended with the conversion of Constantine early in the century, asceticism was
thought to qualify one for the martyrs reward [Houziaux, 2008]. It would have
been a natural associative leap for Jerome to think of himself in this way [Jay,
1992].) Challenged to identify himself, he therefore proudly replied with the phrase
I am a Christian (Christianus sum), a confession that in earlier days would have
led to deathand a martyrs crown. However, to his surprise, Jerome was not
sentenced to death; instead, he was only whipped.
Jerome would not have been surprised to have awoken oppressed by a general
sense of guilt, for his theology was shaped by an oppressive awareness of Gods anger.
The third-century apologist Lactantius argued that reward and punishment, hope and
fear, structured our relationship with God (it is impossible to honor God, if he does
not reward his worshippers; or to fear him, if he is not angry with those who do not
worship himLactance, 1982, 6.1, my translation), and Jerome, accepting this, went
on to presume that fear was more important than hope in Christian discipleship. God,
he believed, was not just angry for deeds committed: he is angry because the sinner is
proud and, elevated and inexible, is not overcome with weeping nor requests mercy
for his sin (Heine, 2002, p. 216). So long as we are held down by this frail body, he
explained to Eustochium in the same letter in which he told of his dream, so long as
we have our treasure in earthen vessels; so long as the esh lusteth against the spirit and
the spirit against the esh, there can be no sure victory (Jerome, 1933, 22.3).
However, the events of the dream had taken place in a court, and courts dealt
with specic violations of the law, not guilt in general; if the dream was to mean
anything, Jerome needed to go beyond a general sense of spiritual disapprobation
to discover a specic offense. This was not just a matter of curiosity: if the terror
of the holy lash goes unheeded, he would reect some years later (if, that is to say,
Gods warnings were ignored), a sinner would experience Gods anger in its
Dialogic Nature of Reports of Dreams 11
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fullness at Judgement (qtd. De Bruyn, 1999, p. 62)and that being so, if the dream
was a warning it was of crucial importance for Jerome to learn what it was he had
been warned against. As guilty conscience replaced self-congratulation as the driver
of Jeromes hermeneutic, the courtroom took on eschatological signicance, and
the search for an answer began.
DREAMS AND DIALOG
How does dialogism t with this scenario? We can easily note the use of dialog
as a rhetorical device in the account given to Eustochium. In the heart of Jeromes
dream report there is an overt exchange between himself and another individual.
To be specic, the report we have is crafted as an example of what Cheyne and
Tarulli (1999) call a magisterial dialog: one in which a rst (magisterial) voice
demonstrates its claims upon a second (novitiate) one by the appeal to an author-
itative third party. In this case the authority of the magisterial voicethat of the
presiding ofceris shown by his appeal to the well-known saying of Jesus,
[W]here your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Mt. 6:21/Lk. 12:34).
Further, there is a strong sense of audience (and therefore an implicit dialog)
in the way Jerome talks to Eustochium. In conversation (and a letter is a conver-
sation) the words of a speaker not only provoke an answer; they structure them-
selves in the answers direction (Bakhtin, 1981, 280; Searle, 1997). Not surpris-
ingly, therefore, in inviting Eustochium to join her mentor in contemplating [his
text], evaluating it, and responding to it (the formula is that of Pratt, 1977, p. 136),
Jerome anticipates and answers her questions about his dreams authority. Their
contemporary Macrobius, writing his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio at the end
of the 4th century, would divide dreams into ve categories. Two of them (the
phantasma and the insomnium) offered nothing to the dreamer; the rst was the
result of mental illness or demonic possession, and the second followed from
emotional distress or digestive disorder. A third kind of dream (the somnium)
hinted at signicance, but its imagery was ambiguous. Only two categoriesthe
visio and the oraculumoffered unambiguous instruction. The former was a fore-
telling of a future event; the latter, a prophetic warning. Jerome was certainly aware
that there were different kinds of dreams, and the way in which some could be
dismissed as trivial: earlier in the letter he had satirized those who dream of the
apostles after overeating, and reminded Eustochium of his own dreams of dancing
girls when fasting (Jerome, 1933, 22.16, 7); here, anticipating her question, he
assures her that what he experienced was no sleep nor idle dream [somnium], such
as those by which we are often mocked (Jerome, 1933, 22.30).
However, although of rhetorical interest, these exchanges do not show in
themselves the dialogic nature of the process whereby, rather than seeing of himself
as a follower of Christ destined for glory, Jerome came to realize that he had come
before the court as a violator of the law, and understood. It is to this aspect of the
dream report that I now turn.
In order to arrive at an explanation for his guilt, Jerome had to start with the
only clue he had: his punishment, the fact that he had been whipped. Many reasons
for this could be supposed if it were taken as a judicial punishment, but what
Jerome seized upon was that whippingas against execution (or even agella-
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tion)was the punishment given slaves for neglect of duty (for Roman punish-
ments, see Johnston, 1932; cf. Saller, 1991). St Paul had been the rst to think of
Christians as slaves of Christ (1 Co. 7:22; cf. Martin, 1990), using the comparison to
signal a dependency on God. By the fourth century, however, Christian slavehold-
ers had become used to the recalcitrant nature of their human property, and the
metaphor was being used instead to illustrate human resistance to divine rule. Many
Christians, Augustine would explain, writing some 20 years after the letter to
Eustochium but not saying anything that Jerome would not heard before, like bad
servants, as it were, or even worthless runaways, need to be summoned back to
their Lord by a temporary ogging (Augustine, 2001, 185.21).
It was, I suggest, Jeromes self-recognition in the gure of the truant slave,
rather than the saying on the treasure and the heart he would produce for Eusto-
chiums benet (or even that in Mt. 6:24/Lk. 16:13 concerning our not serving two
masters), that helped him appreciate just how serious his position was. Contempo-
rary ideas on (Roman, male) domestic authority, in which . . . betrayal by ones
own domestics questioned the legitimacy ( potestas) of the householders right to
dominate others, both inside and outside the home (Harrill, 2003, p. 233), would
have connected with the events of the dream in a way that the logion did not.
But if Jerome was a truant, what had constituted his truancy? A truant would
be dened in Justinians Digest as one who . . . frequently indulges in aimless
roving and, after wasting time on trivialities, returns home at a late hour (Bradley,
1994, p. 115)how could this apply to Jerome, to someone who was excruciatingly
serious by nature? The answer, that his love of secular literature had made him a
self-willed timewaster rather than a dutiful servant, is obvious with hindsight, but
would probably not have seemed so at the time. Although Jerome did not hesitate
to warned Eustochium against the adultery of the tongue, and Augustine, just a few
years later, would condently link the reading of the classics to indelity
(1998, 1.13.21), Jeromes eventual conclusion that his guilt lay in the time spent on
secular literature would not have been immediately obvious.
To be sure, Tertullian had thundered against classical literature two centuries
before. Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Pla-
tonic, and dialectic composition! he had written. We want no curious disputation
after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our
faith, we desire no further belief (1914, ch. 7). But his was a minority voice. In 386,
the newly converted Augustine would think it unproblematic to combine the
authority of Christ with and the rationality of the Platonists (Conybeare, 2006), for
the advice Jerome had given to Eustochium was not generally followedand 14
years before, when he was using his reading of the classics as an excuse for not
studying Hebrew (Williams, 2006), it was not advice that Jerome had thought to
give himself. It was no doubt only after serious reection that Jerome realized what
he had to do.
Each step taken to arrive at his vow of renunciation, it will have been noted,
required Jerome to question, to reect, to cast around for solutions and test them
for t; each one entailed a trying out of multiple points of view. Each step, that is
to say, was essentially dialogic in nature. The idea that a Christians reading Cicero
had angered God followed from the recognition that it was an act of le`se majeste;
the idea that it was criminal followed from the recognition that a Ciceronian was
guilty of truancy, which in turn followed from the idea that a Christian was Gods
Dialogic Nature of Reports of Dreams 13
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slaveand that was a recognition freshly forced upon the dreamer by the discovery
that in his punishment he had been treated as a slave. In short: at each step, in
offering what Virginia T. Gill (1988) calls a speculative explanation for his
punishment, Jerome was drawing on ideas that were part of his life in Rome. (Gill
uses the phrase to label the way patients tacitly ask a doctor to conrm or
disconrm their explanation for a particular condition; one might compare the
way in which alien abduction beliefs are part of an attribution process:
Clancy, 2005, p. 34).
By the time the dream is told, Dombeck has argued, . . . it is a text,
structurally and culturally marked, [that] can speak both to the dreamer and the
hearer (1993; cf. Yamane, 2000). So it is; but it does not just address dreamer and
hearer, as we have seen. The marking Dombeck refers to is produced by a larger
castand this is the case whether or not it is assumed that Jerome reached an
understanding of the dream through deliberate reection. Even if we suppose that
Jerome reached his insight in an unconscious ash of abduction as he dreamt, the
same could be said. Our speech is shaped and developed in continuous and
constant interaction with others individual utterances (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 89; cf.
Said, 2005), and so are our thoughts.
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