"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream”: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and Byzantine Literature by Nicholas Constas PhD.

This very interesting paper, is available for reading and free downloading from the Dumbarton Oaks Library Website

Dr. Nicholas Constas writes,

"The Middle State of Souls: Memory and Mimesis

The intimate juxtaposition of body and soul and the nature of their relationship after death continued to exercise the imaginations of theologians as well as the patrons of sacred shrines. For all parties, the body was increasingly seen as foundational to the nature of human identity, and corporeal relics and personal objects were granted a critical role in epitomizing the material continuity of the self as it passed from life into death.

Fragments of bone and bits of clothing helped to keep alive the memories of the lives that preceded them, although they were more than just medieval artes moriendi. In venerating relics, the Byzantines embraced living saints, as well as their own death; each informed the other. The relic of the body was thus deeply marked by the presence of the soul, while the soul, after death, was equally marked by the memory of its life in the body.

The Byzantines were sensitive to the lack of correspondence between inner states and outer expressions, and they knew that one’s outward appearance by no means reveals what goes on within. 

After death, however, the soul was thought to become a mirror of the self, reflecting its inner dispositions and ruling passions. Between the body and the soul, an exchange took place producing, on the one hand, the subjective corporeality of relics and, on the other, like the picture of Dorian Gray, the corporeal subjectivity of the soul. 

The fluid self acquires, as it were, a material body and appearance as the finite is inserted into infinity. A striking example of this belief can be found in a sermon by Dorotheos of Gaza (b. ca. 506) on the “Fear of the Punishment to Come.”

According to Dorotheos, the various thoughts and mental images to which the soul is habitually attached in life will constitute its new environment and reality as consciousness is carried over into death. Thoughts and memories will have as much power over the self as they did in life, indeed more so, notes Dorotheos, inasmuch as they can now be avoided through the distractions of the body. After death, however, repressed memories and unfulfilled desires will reaffirm themselves, occurring and recurring with massive force and unmitigated intensity, from which there will be no possibility of escape, for there will be no dispassionate point of reference.

 "This psychological model is taken in a somewhat different direction by Niketas Stethatos (ca. 1005–90), who is also attentive to the role that memory and consciousness play in the period between death and resurrection. In his treatise On the Soul (written ca.1075),28 Stethatos argues that soul and body are a complex, interactive unity, and that, without the body, the human person is incomplete. 

After sorting out what faculties are proper to the body, what to the soul, and what to the union of the two, Stethatos considers what from among these survives the transition from life to death. Like “marks on a tablet,” he says, the soul registers the impressions it has received in life, each one tinting the soul’s complexion in one way or another. In addition
to the indelible etchings of memory that are common to all human souls, the souls of the saints retain various modes of noetic perception and transcendental knowledge,and after death they find themselves in exalted, heavenly places (topoi) constellated according to their distinctive charisms and affections.

Stethatos later indicates that these topoi are actually “angelic powers,” or the “shadows cast by angelic wings,” or, in one instance, “the wings of Christ”  Sheltered within these sacred pinions, the saintly soul rests in the hope of future blessings, remembering its former good deeds and sensing the prayers and works of mercy offered on its behalf. Watching over the soul is its guardian angel, who prompts the soul to a remembrance of things past and draws its attention to the good things currently being done for it on earth. Although the saintly soul is “at rest” with respect to the faculties it employed while in the body, its memory becomes clear and focused, and it is vividly conscious of the memorials, liturgies, and feasts held in its honor.

Here Stethatos gestures toward the experience of dreams in sleep as an analogy for the mind’s postmortem preoccupation with its past deeds and future prospects, as well as for its active independence from the passivity of the sleeping (i.e., dead) body. That the context for these remarks is the cult of saints and relics seems evident, as when Stethatos further notes that good souls are fragrant, a sensation frequently associated with the mortal remains of holy persons." from the Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001), p. 99-p.102.