As Wendy O'Flaherty has argued persuasively in her recent book, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, it is possible to falsify the hypothesis that one is dreaming—by waking up; but it is not possible to verify that one is awake by falling asleep. The thought that one cannot verify the fact that one is awake but only only falsify the fact that one is asleep (by waking up) delivers something of a jolt to Western “common sense,” which typically takes for granted the distinctness of such categories as “real” and “unreal,”“conscious” and “unconscious,”“dream” and “waking life.” Yet, as O'Flaherty points out, we know that we cannot see ourselves seeing an illusion, just as we cannot verify the “reality” of ourselves in the moment when we are engaged in testing our reality.

It seems somewhat paradoxical that at the very time in the eleventh century when laity and clergy were most critical of the corrupt and decadent life led in many monasteries throughout Europe, one should find among reformers the most exaggerated claims for the benefits of monastic life. Peter Damian (1007–1072), one of the most ardent and indefatigable monastic reformers, provides ample evidence of this paradox.

On the west front of Bath Abbey there are carved two stone ladders stretching from heaven to earth on which twelve angels are climbing, six on each ladder. A tourist who sees the west front of the abbey for the first time is told that the carvings represent the dream of Oliver King, Bishop of Bath and Wells under Henry VII and his former chief secretary. The bishop had a nocturnal vision of angels climbing ladders to heaven. As he stood before the ladders in amazement, he heard voices saying that an olive should establish the crown and that the king should restore the church. He took the reference to olives and kings to be an allusion to his own name and concluded that he, Oliver King, should support the Tudor monarchy and rebuild the ruined abbey at Bath.

During the past two decades scholars have become more appreciatively aware of the medieval scholastic roots of Protestantism and have begun to gain some appreciation, albeit halting, of the scholastic form of Protestantism which dominated the Protestant universities in the seventeenth century. This awareness implies, in the first place, a development beyond the thesis advanced by Lortz and Bouyer that Protestantism was the effect of the decadent nominalist theology of the later Middle Ages. Scholars like Oberman, Hägglund, and Steinmetz have acknowledged much of the continuity but have emphasized the positive character of late medieval thought.

Wauwatosa is a suburb of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was there that a particularly fascinating bit of twentieth-century church history was played out between 1900 and 1929. Three theological professors, J.P. Koehler, August Pieper, and John Schaller, headquartered in Wauwatosa sought to influence a generation of students preparing for the ministerium of the Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran church. Short-lived and generally scorned, the Wauwatosa Theology is clothed in a comic-tragic story. Its rise and fall is contemporaneous with the rise and fall of its chief framer, John Philip Koehler.