Let these things about the oracle through priests suffice. After the reign of David, with the Lord rarely answering through priests, the oracle through prophets began to be more frequent. This can be divided into vision and dream, just as the oracle through priests could also be divided into the vision of brightness and the manifestation of the word. Therefore certain things that will be said about vision and word could, by a kind of analogy, also be accommodated to the prophecy of Urim and Thummim, as readers with a not unrefined nose will easily notice.
The Greek Fathers and the Septuagint not rarely confuse vision and word, as does Scripture itself, when it says that a vision was heard, or that a word was seen or shown. Thus Isaiah says, “Hear, O heaven, because the Lord has spoken,” and yet at the beginning he had called it a vision. And when Zacharias and Ezekiel had said that they would explain the word of the Lord, they add a vision. Nevertheless they differ.
[margin: Philo, Life of Moses, book 3; Origen, homily 6 on Leviticus; Jerome on Hosea chapter 3 and letter 127 to Fabiola; Isaiah 1; Zechariah and Ezekiel on word and vision; Obadiah]
Vision, called horasis or horama by the Greeks and roeh by the Hebrews, is a prophecy by which the mind, with a spiritual eye, sees the prophetic object represented to it by heavenly light. It differs from word, because word often occurs without vision, and vision without word. It differs from dream, because vision is often offered to someone awake. It is also frequently used, in the Hebrew manner, for the concrete thing, or for the thing seen. Thus Moses calls the bush a vision; thus prophets are said to see visions. Such revelations were more frequently the revelations of holy men. In certain centuries they are read as very frequent, as, in almost one twelfth century, those of Orni the solitary, which Gervasius the priest described; of Tundal the Irishman; of Cyril the priest; of Robert, abbot of Limburg; of John of Pino; of Joachim of Sicily; of Simon Stock the Carmelite; of John Bridlington; and of others.
Word, or, as Cyprian prefers, speech, called logos by the Greeks and Dabar by the Hebrews, is a prophecy by which the Holy Spirit, by a certain mental address, teaches hidden things to a prophet, as when he said to Isaiah, “Take the book for yourself,” and again, “Go, say to Hezekiah,” and so forth. This address occurred either by a voice formed in the air and heard, as to Abraham when he was told not to kill his son, or by words placed in the prophet’s mouth, as with Balaam. These are properly called in Aramaic Malki, in Hebrew Malchuth, that is, counsel, as if one should say the king of prophecies, or the chief species of prophecy. For nothing is more useful than counsel.
[margin: Exodus 3; Ezekiel 1 and similar passages; Isaiah 8:1 and 38:5; Genesis 22:11; Numbers 22-23; lexical notes on Hebrew and Aramaic prophetic terms]
Vision and word had this in common: either they concerned glad and favorable matters, and then in the New Testament they are called Gospel, while in the Old Testament they retain the names vision or word; or they concerned unfavorable and mournful matters, announcements of threats and lamentation, portending destruction for kings and peoples. Then the Hebrews called a prophecy of this kind Massa, from the verb Nasa, to lift, raise, carry, or take up. Because of the variety of this root, there is dispute over what Massa properly signifies in sacred Scripture.
Aquila once translated it by harma, not taking it in the profane sense of a chariot, but in the sense of a weight or burden, as our translator most excellently rendered it. For calamity weighs more heavily than Etna upon the person over whom it hangs; and the one against whom such a prophetic sentence was borne, oppressed by fear and sadness, could hardly raise his head, as it were. In this way I explain and embrace St. Jerome’s opinion on Nahum.
Why should I not embrace it, since, if you attend carefully, you will find the word always used for an adverse denunciation, never for a favorable one? The Hebrew noun plainly signifies a burden or weight; and in Psalm 27 the Greek has phortion, that is, weight. Thus some think that John calls it baros, that is, as our translator renders it, a burden. But unless I am deceived, they themselves are deceived; for there the speech is not about prophecy, but about the burden of some forbidden precept, as Primasius and Haymo rightly thought.
Nor does the Holy Spirit go far from this when he uses burden for the people themselves to whom he announces that such a thing is threatening. For God long endured such a people, and then, as if shaking a most troublesome burden from his shoulders, he casts them off when he rejects them and abandons them, as it were, from his favor and peculiar defense.
[margin: Nahum; Psalm 27; Revelation 2:24, with Primasius and Haymo; Jeremiah 23:33; Jerome on Jeremiah 23; Favorinus in the lexicon, on the Greek term and the meaning of burden or gift]
The Septuagint, Theodotion, and Symmachus usually translate it lemma, a word derived from lambano, and signifying a gift or present. Someone may ask: what is common between a burden and a gift? Very much in the present matter. Indeed here the burden and the gift are the same thing. For a prophetic threatening of imminent misfortune and punishment is an illustrious and precious gift of God, because God chastises those whom he loves; and those whom he chastises he first sets threats before them so that they may recover their senses. As people who wish to frighten wrongdoers rather than harm them are accustomed to do, he lifts and shows the stone in his hand before he throws it. Thus he leaves the human being free to flee from the wrath to come.
Certainly lemma primarily signifies a lifting or taking up, and secondarily a gift, because when something is given it is lifted up by the giver and handed over, and is taken up by the receiver. Hence among Theon and other mathematicians, and also among dialecticians, lemma is the name of that proposition which, inserted into a demonstration or argument and not proved, is taken up from another, and is demanded as granted by the person who has inserted it. Thus, when those interpreters used lemma in sacred Scripture, they took it for the thing itself that is taken up or lifted, and this according to the idiom of the Hebrews. Among them the prophet is said, as it were, to take up and lift the burden itself, and, having poised it, to threaten it against the necks of the impious, to whom he foretells the divine wrath soon to hang over them. For to this belong the phrases that occur everywhere: to take up lamentation, to take up mourning, to take up a parable.
Therefore one must beware lest, with the more recent Greeks, we extend lemma to any prophecy whatever. If these things seem to anyone too broadly stated, if he will deign to consider how greatly excellent men have tortured themselves over these matters, I do not mistrust that he will judge our diligence fair and reasonable.
[margin: Theophylact on Habakkuk and Nahum; Peter John Olivi, book 1 On Prophecy; Arias Montanus, Praeludia on the Minor Prophets; Francisco Ribera on Nahum; Ezekiel 1:3 and 8:2-3; Justin Martyr, admonition to the Gentiles and question 2 to the orthodox; Epiphanius on the Montanist heresy; Chrysostom, preface on Isaiah and homily 29 on 1 Corinthians; Augustine, Against the Academics, book 1, chapter 7]
These two species, vision and word, are sometimes joined with rapture or ecstasy, and sometimes separated from it. They were together in the rapture of Blessed Paul as far as the third heaven, where he saw and heard what it is not lawful for a human being to speak. Perhaps also a certain vision of Ezekiel was of this sort, which is called iad, that is, a prophecy flowing in not gently but violently. Therefore, when ecstasy is added, the teaching of the Fathers must be held: the prophets were not so seized or thunderstruck in mind that they did not know rightly what they were predicting.
Polychronius, on Ezekiel 3, says:
Just as diviners and enchanters advance even to madness, with the demon producing stupor in them, so, on the contrary, the sense of the prophets is affected when the soul is illuminated by the efficacy of the Spirit.
For this was proper to fanatics, such as the Montanist heretics and the seers of the Gentiles. Olivarius very undeservedly reproaches the author of On the Spirit and the Soul, which exists among the works of Augustine, because he wrote that Blessed John wrote the Apocalypse in ecstasy. For ecstasy is twofold: one divine, the other diabolic, as Tertullian suggests in these words: “Ecstasy works this from what is proper to itself, so that wisdom introduces images to us, just as error does.” That is, divine ecstasy introduces images of wisdom and truth; diabolic ecstasy introduces images of errors and falsity.
Therefore that author did not take ecstasy for the alienation of a stunned mind and a certain impotence of the soul, such as existed in those false prophets, but in the manner of the Fathers and rightly, for rapture or only for abstraction from earthly things and from the operation of the bodily senses. Nor did he mean that the Evangelist, so constituted, wrote the book; rather, he wrote down afterwards the things that he had seen while constituted in such an ecstasy.
[margin: Justin, admonition to the Gentiles and questions to the orthodox; Epiphanius on Montanus; Jerome’s preface to Isaiah; Chrysostom on 1 Corinthians; Augustine against the Academics; Tertullian, On the Soul]
To pass over St. Paul’s rapture, such, without doubt, was St. John’s, which he testifies when he says that he was in the Spirit, that is, seized and absorbed in ecstasy, as Haymo interpreted most correctly. Andrew of Caesarea wished briefly to suggest the same thing in one word: one who became possessed by the Holy Spirit. That word signifies a person so breathed upon by the Holy Spirit that he was wholly seized by him in mind or spirit, and occupied as by solid possession. For the affection of the mind of ecstatic persons is called katoche, because for a time they are, as it were, deprived of the bodily senses. Hence also a certain disease was so named, which deprives the body of sense and motion, and is called katalepsis; our physicians call it congelation.
I think the same thing is signified when the prophets say that the hand of the Lord was made upon them; likewise, “the Spirit lifted me up,” or “the hand of the Lord led me forth in the Spirit”; likewise, “an excess of mind fell upon him,” where in Greek it is ekstasis. Theodoret and Theophylact wrongly confuse lemma with rapture of this kind, that is, iad with Massa.
[margin: Haymo; Andrew of Caesarea; Galen; Ezekiel 11 and 40; 2 Kings/4 Kings 3:11; Acts 10:10; Nahum; Isaiah 29:7]
The third species was dream, occurring only to those sleeping, by means of an image or phantasm. The Hebrews call it chalom, the Greeks enypnion. If someone dreams about things that are going to happen, but does not himself understand what he is dreaming, then with respect to him it will not be prophecy; but with respect to that person to whom God reveals the meaning of the dream it will be prophecy. Therefore Joseph was a prophet, and not Pharaoh or his servants; Daniel was a prophet, and not Nebuchadnezzar. But the dreamer himself is finally counted among the prophets when, together with the dream, he also received understanding of the dream, as Daniel did in the second dream of the proud king. Concerning these prophetic dreams three things must be considered: mode, cause, and degree or dignity.
The mode is manifold, as our Pererius accurately explained. Some are sent with fear and horror in the dreamer; some peacefully. Some are not understood; some, as I said, are understood at the same time. Some are clear and without coverings, as those of Joseph, of the three Magi, and of Blessed Paul; some are obscure, involved, and wrapped up, as those of Pharaoh and his servants, and of Nebuchadnezzar. In some, God seems to address the person, as Solomon; sometimes a good angel, as Blessed Joseph; sometimes a human being, as the Macedonian man addressed Paul.
Sometimes dreams correspond to preceding thoughts, and thus they take their beginning from an animal cause, as the first dream of Blessed Joseph and the first dream of that Babylonian king. Sometimes, however, no thought precedes, as happened in the second dream of Blessed Joseph. Blessed Gregory noted this difference. Sometimes God unexpectedly sends a dream to someone who is asking nothing, as happens for the most part and happened in the sacred examples already named. Sometimes, however, he sends it to those who ask for a revelation and hope for it, as to Daniel.
It is more evident from sacred Scripture than anyone ought to doubt that the Hebrews were accustomed to present desires of this kind to God, and to ask him to deign to open to them, through dreams, the future outcome. The Gentiles were accustomed to do the same thing in the temple of Serapis or Pluto, so that they might learn by what means they would be freed from diseases; or to obtain a resolution of doubts, as Aedesius did, and, in the poet, King Latinus; and Apollonius in the temple of Asclepius; and the Spartan magistrates in the temple of Pasiphae. Such also was the temple of Amphiaraus and of Callias near Mount Garganus, and temples of this kind were called psychomanteia.
The apostate Julian tried, by calumny, to twist the Christian vigils at the tombs of martyrs into this crime; but Blessed Cyril vigorously struck him back. Isaiah the prophet teaches that the Jews sometimes slipped into this superstition so far as to sleep in the temples of the Gentiles in order to catch dreams: “those who sacrifice in gardens and sacrifice upon bricks, who dwell in sepulchers and sleep in the shrines of idols.” There the Septuagint, as they often do, added paraphrastically, “because of dreams,” explaining the cause of the incubation. St. Jerome says: “Sleeping in the shrines of idols, where they were accustomed to lie upon the skins of victims, so that they might learn future things by dreams. The error of the Gentiles, and of many others, still celebrates this today in the shrine of Asclepius.” The same Cyril confirms this there in his commentary.
[margin: Pererius, On the Observation of Dreams; Genesis 15, 28, 40-41; Daniel 2 and 4; Matthew 1-2; Acts 16; Gregory, Moralia, book 6; 1 Samuel 28; Aristophanes, Plutus; Eunapius on Aedesius; Virgil, Aeneid 7; Philostratus; Tullius, On Divination; Pausanias; Strabo; Cyril against Julian; Isaiah 65; Jerome on Isaiah 65]
The efficient causes of dreams will be explained in another place. Now we are treating only the final cause, as they call it, of divine dreams, which is gathered from sacred Scripture as manifold. First, that someone may be deterred from evil, as happened to Abimelech king of Gerar and to Laban. Blessed Job suggests this when he says, “In the horror of a vision of the night, when sleep is accustomed to seize human beings, fear held me,” and elsewhere, “You will terrify me by dreams and shake me by visions with horror.”
Second, that the afflicted may be consoled and the sad suffused with joy, which Blessed Angela of Foligno affirms about herself. Third, that someone may be exhorted toward some good, as Gideon and Judas and his army were. Fourth, that someone may be warned or taught what must be done or avoided, as Blessed Joseph and the three Magi were. Job indicates this cause in these words: “Through a dream he opens the ears of men, and instructing them teaches discipline, so that he may turn a man away from the things that he does,” and so forth.
Fifth, that he may at the same time grant the spirit of prophecy or some other spiritual gift. To this, according to some, belong these words of Moses: “If anyone among you is a prophet of the Lord, I will appear to him in a vision, or I will speak to him by dream.” They wish to signify that he will confer the Spirit of prophecy either by vision or by dream. I would rather believe that he is speaking about those to whom, once the spirit of prophecy has already been given, he signifies that afterwards he will not deal with any of them as familiarly as with Moses, with whom he deals mouth to mouth, but with the others only through vision and dreams.
The saying of Joel better belongs here: “Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions”; for what preceded was, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons shall prophesy.” Thus the gift of wisdom and prudence was given to Solomon in dreams, according to the more probable opinion of Tostado. Thus also the promise of dignity to come was given to Joseph and Mordecai.
[margin: Job 4:13 and 7:14; Blessed Angela of Foligno; Judges 7:13; 2 Maccabees 15; Matthew 1-2; Job 33:15; Numbers 12:6; Joel 2:28; 1 Kings/3 Kings 3; Genesis 37; Esther 11]
Sixth, that some divine mystery, or great changes of a republic or empire, may be revealed, as with Israel, Egypt, and Nebuchadnezzar. To these heads many divine dreams can be referred, of which mention is made in the histories of the saints: that African dream in Victor of Utica, On the Vandalic Persecution, book 2; the one offered to Eusebius, bishop of Carthage; the vision offered after the death of Sidonius to a cupbearer in Gregory of Tours, book 2 of the History of the Franks, chapter 23; among others, one to a mime in the life of Symeon Salus in Metaphrastes; another, frequently offered to a sacrilegious man of Utrecht, in Surius, volume 4, in the life of St. Frederick; another offered to a monk of Cluny by the Blessed Virgin in the time of St. Odo, in John the Monk, book 3 of the life of St. Odo, chapter 9, on which occasion the Blessed Virgin began to be called Mother of Mercy; another to Berta, mother of St. Suitbert, in Blessed Marcellinus, chapter 1 of the life of Suitbert; another to St. Abramius the confessor, in Metaphrastes in his life; another to Emperor Henry, in Rupert, in the life of St. Herebert, chapter 20; another to St. Ludger, among the monks of Werden, in his life, chapters 11 and 16; another to St. Hugh of Grenoble, in Guigo, in his life; another to Hartmann of Deutz, in Conrad, in the life of St. Wolphelm; another, a multiple one, to Elpediphorus, in John the priest, in the life of St. Basil, bishop and martyr; and innumerable others.
Concerning the degrees or dignity of prophecy, Moses the Egyptian and Francisco Pico gathered together many and various things, but things too minute rather than useful. Therefore, passing them by, I say only that, of all these, intellectual revelation, which occurs without the cooperation of the phantasy, is the most excellent if it is taken according to itself and precisely. The other, however, in which the phantasy, excited by the intellect, concurs, is more excellent extensively, because it includes the first and something else besides. Thus also intellectual revelation, taken by itself and compared with imaginary revelation, is more perfect. But if you add imaginary revelation to intellectual revelation, then both together will be more perfect extensively than intellectual revelation alone by itself. So teaches Father Francisco Suarez on the Third Part, question 30, article 1, disputation 9, section 2.
[margin: Victor of Utica; Gregory of Tours; Metaphrastes; Surius; John the Monk on St. Odo; Marcellinus; Rupert; Guigo; Conrad; John the priest; Moses Aegyptius/Maimonides in the Guide of the Doubting; Francisco Pico, On Foreknowledge, book 2, penultimate and final chapters; Francisco Suarez on the Third Part, question 30, article 1, disputation 9, section 2]