15. Similar to this is also
that condition when persons, with their senses more profoundedly in
abeyance than is the case in sleep, are occupied with the like
visions. For to them also appear images of quick and dead; but
then, when they return to their senses, whatever dead they say they
have seen are thought to have been verily with them: and they who
hear these things pay no heed to the circumstance that there were
seen in like manner the images of certain living persons, absent
and unconscious. A certain man by name Curma, of the municipal town
of Tullium, which is hard by Hippo, a poor member of the Curia,2744
scarcely
competent to serve the
office of a duumvir
2745
of that place, and a mere rustic,
being
ill, and all his senses entranced, lay all but dead for
several days: a very slight breathing in his nostrils, which on
applying the
hand was just felt, and barely betokened that he
lived, was all that kept him from being buried for dead. Not a limb
did he stir, nothing did he take in the way of
sustenance, neither
in the
eyes nor in any other bodily sense was he sensible of any
annoyance that impinged upon them. Yet he was seeing many things
like as in a
dream, which, when at last after a great many days he
woke up, he told that he had seen. And first, presently after he
opened his
eyes, Let some one go, said he, to the
house of Curma
the smith, and see what is doing there. And when some one had gone
thither, the smith was found to have
died in that moment that the
other had come back to his senses, and, it might almost be said,
revived from
death. Then, as those who stood by eagerly listened,
he told them how the other had been ordered to be had up, when he
himself was
dismissed; and that he had heard it said in that place
from which he had returned, that it was not Curma of the Curia, but
Curma the smith who had been ordered to be fetched to that place of
the dead. Well, in these
dream-like visions of his, among those
deceased persons whom he saw handled according to the
diversity of
their merits, he recognized also some whom he had known when alive.
That they were the very persons themselves I might perchance have
believed, had he not in the course of this seeming
dream of his
seen also some who are alive even to this present time, namely,
some clerks of his
district, by whose presbyter there he was told
to be
baptized at Hippo by me, which thing he said had also taken
place. So then he had seen a presbyter, clerks, myself, persons, to
wit, not yet dead, in this vision in which he afterwards also saw
dead persons. Why may he not be thought to have seen these last in
the same way as he saw us? that is, both the one sort, and the
other, absent and unconscious, and consequently not the persons
themselves, but similitudes of them just as of the places? He saw,
namely, both a plot of ground where was that presbyter with the
clerks, and Hippo where he was by me seemingly
baptized: in which
spots assuredly he was not, when he seemed to himself to be there.
For what was at that time going on there, he knew not: which,
without doubt, he would have known if he had verily been there. The
sights beheld, therefore, were those which are not presented in the
things themselves as they are, but shadowed forth in a sort of
images of the things. In fine, after much that he saw, he narrated
how he had, moreover, been led into
Paradise, and how it was there
said to him, when he was thence
dismissed to return to his own
family, “Go, be
baptized, if thou wilt be in this place of the
blessed.” Thereupon, being
admonished to be
baptized by me, he
said it was done already. He who was talking with him replied,
“Go, be truly
baptized; for that thou didst but see in the
vision.” After this he
recovered, went his way to Hippo.
Easter was now approaching, he gave his name among the other
Competents, alike with very many unknown to us; nor did he care to
make known the vision to me or to any of our people. He was
baptized, at the close of the holy days he returned to his own
place. After the space of two years or more, I
learned the whole
matter; first, through a certain
friend of mine and his at my own
table, while we were talking about some such matters: then I took
it up, and made the man in his own person tell me the
story, in the
presence of some honest townsmen of his attesting the same, both
concerning his marvellous illness, how he lay all but dead for many
days, and about that other Curma the smith, what I have mentioned
above, and about all these matters; which, while he was telling me,
they recalled to mind, and assured me, that they had also at that
time heard them from his lips. Wherefore, just as he saw his own
baptism, and myself, and Hippo, and the basilica, and the
baptistery, not in the very realities, but in a sort of similitudes
of the things; and so likewise certain other living persons,
without consciousness on the part of the same living persons: then
why not just so those dead persons also, without consciousness on
the part of the same dead persons?
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
