A new edition and translation of Manuel II Palaeologus’ Epistle to Andreas Asanes on Dreams: On the Fringes of the Late Byzantine Reception of Aristotle’s De Divinatione per Somnum
A new edition and translation of Manuel II Palaeologus’ Epistle to Andreas Asanes on Dreams: On the Fringes of the Late Byzantine Reception of Aristotle’s De Divinatione per Somnum

Summary/Abstract: Manuel II Palaeologus, in his Epistle to Andreas Asanes (probably written in the last decade of the 14th c.) argues against the popular as well as certain Neoplatonists’ (such as Synesius of Cyrene’s) belief in ordinary dreams as means for predicting future events. Mainly based on Thomas Aquinas’ IIa IIae and Anastasius of Sinai’s Quaestiones et Responsiones, Manuel argues that there are three kinds of dreams: (i)those caused by the physical state of one’s body and one’s everyday life activities; their predictive value is zero; (ii) dreams that emerge by the soul’s nature itself; due to the postlapsarian human condition, which includes an uneasy body-soul relation, their predictive value eventually borders on zero; (iii) dreams sent by God, all of which do predict the future. Manuel’s discussion of (ii) is important, because it complies with Theodore Metochites’ and George Scholarios’ view that Aristotle is right in refusing to consider dreams as means for predicting future events and goes against George Pachymeres’ overtly anti-Aristotelian defense of the high gnoseological potential of the human soul even in the postlapsarian state.

• Details
• Contents