Augustine of Hippo and the Dreams of the Dead

A Bishop’s Investigation

Around the year 420, in the closing decade of his life, Augustine of Hippo composed a short treatise titled De Cura pro Mortuis Gerenda, “On the Care to be Taken for the Dead.” The work was written in response to a query from his fellow bishop Paulinus of Nola, who had been asked by a grieving widow whether burial of her son in the basilica of St Felix would assist his soul in the afterlife. Augustine’s answer, characteristically careful, occupies the first half of the treatise. The second half, however, takes up a related and more difficult question: whether the dead are aware of the living, and whether they can communicate with them.

To investigate this, Augustine departs from his usual scholastic method and presents a series of case reports. The treatise is unusual in his corpus for the documentary specificity of these accounts. He names witnesses, gives dates, identifies localities, and records what was seen and what subsequently was verified. The treatise stands as one of the earliest systematic collections of paranormal apparition cases in the Christian tradition.

The Tunic of Curma

The first and most detailed case concerns a peasant named Curma from the village of Tullium, near Hippo. Curma, taken seriously ill, lay for several days in a state resembling death. He neither breathed nor moved. His family prepared his burial. After some days he revived. He reported that during his apparent death he had been in another place, where he had seen many of his deceased neighbours, and where he had been instructed that a different Curma, a blacksmith of the same village, had been summoned in his stead by error.

Curma, recovering, sent at once to inquire after the blacksmith. The man had died at the very hour Curma had himself ceased to breathe. The peasant, restored to his family, also reported that in his vision he had seen Augustine himself, who had instructed him to come to Hippo and receive baptism. Curma made the journey, presented himself to the bishop, was duly baptised, and afterwards lived for some years in good health.

Augustine notes carefully that Curma had never been to Hippo before, had never met him, and yet recognised him on sight. Augustine for his part had never seen Curma. The bishop questioned the peasant closely, including the village deacon and Curma’s wife, and could find no flaw in the account.

For more on the near-death experience tradition and its long pre-Christian and Christian history, see our broader treatment.

The Apparition of Eulogius’s Father

A second case concerns a rhetorician named Eulogius of Carthage, a former pupil of Augustine who had taken up Augustine’s own old teaching post in that city. Eulogius, preparing his lectures on Cicero, had encountered a passage he could not understand. He went to bed troubled. In the night his father appeared to him in a dream, and explained the difficult passage word by word. In the morning Eulogius wrote to Augustine for confirmation that the explanation was correct. Augustine answered that it was.

Augustine takes this case seriously enough to discuss it at length, but he is unwilling to conclude that Eulogius’s actual deceased father had returned. He raises three possible explanations: that the soul of the father did indeed return, by special divine permission; that an angel, taking the form of the father, conveyed the explanation; or that Eulogius’s own mind, working in sleep upon material it possessed but could not consciously access, produced the appearance and the explanation as a single integrated dream. Augustine concludes, with notable caution, that he cannot decide among the three.

The Reburied Servant

A third case concerns a man whose father, recently deceased, appeared to him in a dream and reproached him for not having paid a particular debt. The son had no knowledge of the debt. The father in the dream gave him precise directions: the receipt for payment was hidden in a particular spot in the house. The son, on waking, searched the spot and found the receipt.

Augustine includes this case as evidence that information not consciously held by the dreamer can be communicated through dream-apparitions. He notes that purely subjective explanations cannot easily account for cases in which verifiable information of which the dreamer was unaware appears in the dream content. He stops short, however, of concluding that the dead routinely watch over the living. His position is that the dead are ordinarily unaware of the affairs of the living, but that God may, in particular cases, grant them limited knowledge or use angelic mediators to convey messages in their forms.

Augustine’s Cautious Theology

The framework Augustine develops in De Cura pro Mortuis Gerenda would dominate Christian thought on these matters for the next thousand years. The dead, he argues, do not generally appear to the living. When they seem to do so, the appearance may be the work of God, of angels assuming their forms, of demons impersonating them, or of the percipient’s own dreaming mind. The pastor’s task is to discern among these possibilities case by case.

This is a notably restrained position by the standards of the period. Augustine does not deny the reality of apparitional experiences. He records them. He discusses them. He grants that some, at least, convey verifiable information that could not have been arrived at by ordinary means. What he refuses is the confident folk reading that every such experience represents an actual visit from the deceased.

The Persistence of the Cases

Augustine’s treatise was widely copied throughout the medieval period. Its case reports were repeatedly cited by later writers as authoritative testimony, often with the bishop’s careful agnosticism stripped away in favour of confident affirmation that the dead can and do return. The Curma episode in particular entered medieval exempla literature and was retold in countless preacher’s handbooks.

For the modern reader the value of De Cura pro Mortuis Gerenda lies precisely in its restraint. A trained Roman rhetorician, an experienced bishop, a man who had lived through the sack of Rome and would die during the Vandal siege of Hippo, sat down in his old age to record what he had personally investigated of apparitions of the dead. He named names, sought corroboration, and refused to overreach. The cases he preserved, four centuries before the medieval ghost-lore of the Latin West would crystallise into its standard forms, remain among the earliest documentary apparition reports of the Western tradition.

Sources

• Augustine, De Cura pro Mortuis Gerenda, chapters 11-17.
• Augustine, Confessiones, Book IX (the dream of Monica).
• Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, 1981).
• Frederick Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Cornell, 1990).
• Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, 1998).