Synesius of Cyrene and the treatise On Dreams: imagination as a mirror
Synesius of Cyrene, pupil of Hypatia and bishop of Ptolemais, wrote a treatise On Dreams on imagination and dream divination, later translated by Ficino.
An aristocrat from Cyrenaica, a Neoplatonic philosopher and later a Christian bishop, wrote between the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD one of antiquity's most original texts on dreams. Synesius of Cyrene did not compile a repertory of images like Artemidorus, nor a classification like Macrobius, but a philosophical reflection on why dreams can reveal something and which faculty of the soul produces them. His treatise, short and dense, enjoyed a second life in the Renaissance.
A pupil of Hypatia
Synesius was born in Cyrene, in present-day Libya, around 370. He studied in Alexandria with the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, to whom he remained bound by deep admiration, as the letters he addressed to her show. He was sent as an ambassador to Constantinople to the emperor Arcadius and, back home, took part in defending the region against raids by desert tribes.
Around 410, although he was married and had reservations about some dogmas, he was elected bishop of Ptolemais. He accepted after long hesitation, laying down conditions that we know from his letters. He died around 413, probably before the tragic killing of Hypatia in Alexandria in 415. Among them was the right to keep his wife and his own philosophical convictions.
The treatise On Dreams
The De insomniis was written around 404 or 405, when Synesius was still a lay philosopher. In a letter to Hypatia he says that he composed it in a single night, almost as if under divine dictation, and asks for her opinion. At the heart of the work lies the imaginative pneuma, the spirit of imagination, a kind of subtle vehicle of the soul in which images take shape.
According to Synesius this spirit works like a mirror: if it is pure it clearly reflects higher realities and the future, if it is clouded it produces confused images. Imagination is therefore not a lower faculty to be despised, but the place where the soul can come into contact with the divine. Dreams thus become a form of natural divination, bound up with the inner condition of the dreamer.
A divination within everyone's reach
One of the treatise's most curious arguments concerns the democratic character of dreams. Other divinatory methods require instruments, journeys, priests and money; the dream, by contrast, is open to rich and poor, to slaves and masters, and no tyrant can forbid it. Synesius also suggests writing down one's dreams alongside the events of the day, in order to learn to recognise their personal language.
The treatise survived in the Byzantine tradition, where Nicephorus Gregoras wrote a commentary on it in the fourteenth century. In the West it was translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino at the end of the fifteenth century and published by Aldus Manutius together with other Neoplatonic texts. The humanists found in it a new dignity for imagination, which influenced Renaissance thinking on fantasy, natural magic and poetic inspiration.
Synesius thus remains a figure on the border between paganism and Christianity, between philosophy and faith, and his little book on dreams bears witness to the richness of an age in which the schools of Alexandria and the Churches of Africa were still in dialogue with one another. His letters, hymns and speeches complete the portrait of a refined intellectual, able to join classical culture to the new faith without giving up either.