CHAPTER III MIRACLE AND INSPIRATION

In speaking of revelation we have already touched on the doctrines of inspiration and of miracle, which are dependencies of it, and, as it were, constituent parts. But these two notions are still so obscure in the public mind, and give rise to so many and such lively controversies, that it may be well to return to them and study them by themselves and in some detail.

In this matter there are two causes of dispute and misunderstanding. The first is that everybody believes he ought to begin by giving his own personal and arbitrary definition of miracle, and afterwards explain by way of deduction why he believes or does not believe in it. The debate thus turns on a question of terminology—that is to say, on a vain and barren logomachy. The second cause is that the defenders of miracle always keep to abstractions, instead of following their contradictors on to the ground of criticism of miraculous stories and placing themselves in presence of the facts which alone make up the matter of the discussion. They believe they have gained everything when they have proved that God, according to the very definition of the idea that we have of Him, can do everything—which no one denies—while the problem consists not in knowing what God can do in abstracto, but what He has done in concreto, in Nature and in History. Now, in order to know what is really done, and whether there are or ever have been produced phenomena which must be referred to the immediate intervention, and to a particular volition of God, independently of the concurrence of second causes, this is evidently something that only the critical observation of facts, past or present, can teach us. Every other method of research and discussion is illusory.

Faithful to our own, we here place ourselves at the historical point of view. Convinced that ideas have a history, and are most clearly and surely defined by their very evolution, we shall confine ourselves to following and describing that evolution. We shall seek in the first place to ascertain the notion of miracle that was current in antiquity; after that we shall see what became of it in mediæval theology; and lastly we shall see into what elements it has resolved itself in modern times, as much at the point of view of science as of piety. As religious inspiration, properly speaking, is but a particular miracle, a miracle of the psychological order, the solution available for the one will apply to the other.

1. The Notion of Miracle in Antiquity

The primitive conception of Nature was animistic. In everything astonishing, extraordinary, men used to see the action of spirits like themselves, with whom their religious imagination peopled the heavens, the earth, the seas. They lived in miracle. It would be easier to enumerate the things that were not than the things that were to them miraculous. The word Nature, which has become so familiar and so indispensable to designate the regular course of things, does not exist in primitive languages. One does not meet with it even in the language of the Old Testament. This is because the conception it represents only came into existence later, and by a slow and laborious process, in the philosophy of the Greeks. The cosmos, ordered and harmonious and fixed, is the sublime creation of Hellenic reason. Elsewhere, no doubt, with experience of life and the daily return of phenomena, a certain order, the effect of custom, would exist around man and be established in his mind. He learned to distinguish between the habitual course of things and the prodigies which caused him wonder, fear, or hope, and in which he always saw the effect either of the favour or the anger of a demon or a god. His imagination, to which his ignorance gave free play, and his credulity, which religious terror held open to all impressions, stories, legends, wrapped his life in an atmosphere of marvel, gentle or terrible, but incessant. Eclipses, earthquakes, thunder, lightning, rainbows, deluges, accidents, maladies, etc.—these were the work of particular actors, personal, impassioned like man, hidden behind the scenes. Add to this the inventions of sorcerers and priests; ... transport yourself into this first effervescence of the human faculties, into this luxuriant vegetation of poetical creation in the early human mind, and you will have some idea of what, for centuries on centuries, must have been the mental state of primitive historic humanity. Such, however, is the comparative poverty of human conceptions, that, when you come to catalogue these marvels, you see them reduced to a small number of miracles which turn up everywhere and again and again among all peoples. Their similarity approaches to monotony.... The question for the moment is not whether these miraculous facts are real or not, but how the men who have transmitted them to us represented them. There is no doubt on this point. To them they were not simply astonishing facts that admitted of a natural explanation. Modern theologians and savants who seek and find for them explanations of this kind do not perceive that they contradict themselves, and that to explain miracle in this way is to destroy it. No; that which is miraculous in these events—to the contemporaries of Tarquin in Rome, of Joshua in Palestine, to the people in our own day—is this, that they are produced, contrary to the natural course of things, solely by a special intervention of the divine will. That is the mark and characteristic of ancient miracle. Efface it, for any reason whatever, and miracle disappears. That which makes it possible is ignorance of Nature and its laws: that which supports it is the religious belief in the existence of these supernatural wills and in their unexpected invasion of the succession of accustomed things. "Without this belief," as M. Ménégoz remarks,[1] "the birth of a myth or of a legend could not be explained. St. Denis, decapitated, would not have been able to carry his head." In fact, the miracles you find in the apocryphal legends are exactly of the same nature as those which are met with in narratives held to be more historical.

[1] La notion biblique du miracle (Leçon d'ouverture), 1894.

I must add that this notion of miracle is absolutely the same in Biblical as in profane literature. In a general way, no doubt, the supernatural in the history of Israel and in the early days of Christianity is of a more sober, more profoundly moral and religious character than it is everywhere else. But the sacred writers do not represent miracles differently. Without exception, they also conceive of them as a violation, by a particular volition of God, of the ordinary course of things.... Still, so far from being more striking or more numerous, miracles and prodigies in the Bible are rarer than elsewhere, clearer, less fantastic, more under law to conscience and to common sense. The worship of one God, invisible, spiritual, in whom centres the ideal of wisdom, reason, righteousness, conceived by the prophets, joined to the lack of imagination in the Hebrew race, has freed the Bible from the luxuriant growths of oriental mythologies and theogonies, as of the marvellous in the poesy of Greece. Nothing purifies the mind like a great moral idea around which all the rest organises itself. It is very remarkable that the great prophets, Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, work hardly any miracles. If prodigy has penetrated into the life of Jesus at two or three points, the explanation is to be found in the mistakes or the legendary corruptions for which His biographers are alone responsible, and which criticism may eliminate without violence. Prodigy, properly so called, is quite foreign to the wholly moral conduct of His life, and to the strictly religious conception of His work. He did not found His religion on miracle, but on the light, the consolation, the pardon and the joy which His gospel, issuing from His holy, loving heart, brought to broken and repentant souls. His works proceeded only from His charity. Far from wishing to impose belief in His miracles, He often forbids men to divulge them. It is to the faith of the afflicted that He refers their cure. He turns away from the seductive invitations of miraculous Messianism as from the distrust or the curiosity of an incredulous wisdom. To those who demanded of Him an indubitable prodigy come from heaven, He answers that no sign shall be given them save the preaching of repentance by the prophet Jonah. The whole temptation in the wilderness is simply a victory of the moral consciousness over the religion of physical prodigy. His filial piety to the Father raised Him above miracle itself and above the dualism that miracle supposes in Nature and in the divine action. He discovers in everything the signs of the presence, the will, the affection, of His Father. He accepts them, submits to them, celebrates them, without preoccupying Himself with the ordinary or the extraordinary manner in which they may be manifested. This absolute piety, absolutely pure and confident, succeeds in realising the unity of the world and the universal and continuous action of God, quite as well as the dialectic of a Scotus Eriginus or a Spinoza or a Hegel; for it suppresses still more radically the old and mortal antithesis of the natural and the supernatural. Nature in its expansion and its evolution—what is it but the very expression of the Will of the Father? How can you imagine then that there could ever be conflict in it between the order which reigns in it and the action of Him by whom that order is maintained day by day and moment by moment? If the thought of Jesus was bounded by the ancient notion of miracle, it must be acknowledged that His piety was not imprisoned in it, but went beyond it. Not having come into the world to teach science, He contented Himself with the opinions He had inherited with the rest of His people, and which constituted the science of Nature of His little popular environment, without concerning Himself as to whether these opinions were erroneous or correct. Miracle was not then something essentially religious as it is to-day. Belief in miracles was not a sign of piety. Everybody shared in it, men of the world as well as men of God. Herod believed in them not less than the apostles. The Pharisees did not doubt them; they only denied the miracles of Jesus; they attributed them to Beelzebub. Christ did not doubt any more than they did that Satan and the demons wrought as many and perhaps more miracles than the messengers of God. He did not wish them to believe the doctrine because of the prodigy, but in the prodigy because of the doctrine. It will be seen how far they were at that time from the dualism of our day, and from the conflict created by scholasticism between science and piety.

When we examine this ancient notion of miracle, especially in the superior expression it receives in the Bible, we discover in it two things: it is made up of two judgments of a very different order: of an intellectual and scientific order, disclosing that which then existed in point of fact, a naïf and perfect ignorance of the nature and the laws of things; and of a judgment of a religious order, implying an absolute confidence in an all-good God who is almighty to respond to the cry of His children and to deliver them. These two judgments are so thoroughly blended in the biblical notion of miracle that orthodox theologians and irreligious philosophers agree in declaring them to be inseparable, and they would compel us to choose between a piety hostile to the elementary results of science, and a science radically hostile to piety. The dilemma is specious but false. To see it vanish it is only necessary to perceive that these two judgments, not being of the same nature, cannot be eternally solidaire. The settlement of the controversy in which Christian thought has been engaged for the last three centuries will consist in separating them.

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2. The Notion of Miracle in the Face of Modern Science and of Piety

Modern science neither affirms nor denies miracle; it ignores it, necessarily. It is, for it, as if it did not exist.

Religious persons, who often look towards science to ascertain what their faith may hope or fear from it, only consider its results, and as these are never definitive, but always variable, always being revised, enlarged, enriched, they secretly indulge the hope that a moment may come when science, which has not yet welcomed miracle, will welcome it; that such a fact, supported by such and such testimony, will in the end conquer its resistances and obtain a place in the category or the catalogue of scientific facts. They would quickly lose this illusion, if, turning away from the net results of science, they would fix their attention on its processes and methods of investigation. What is it, according to science, to know a phenomenon? It is to place it in a necessary link of succession, concomitance, and causality with other phenomena which explain it by analogy. Suppose a mysterious phenomenon without analogy and connection with any other; savants brought into its presence will declare themselves simply in a state of ignorance with respect to it. They will say they have not discovered the cause of it, that they cannot explain it; they will study it on every side a thousand times if necessary until they have torn out the heart of the mystery. Either they will succeed, or on this point there will never be science made or explanation established.

Savants, it is true, are the first to recognise and to proclaim, in all domains, the limitations of their knowledge. The most advanced are the most modest. They all have the feeling that their discoveries are but a beginning, and that the part of Nature they have explored is as nothing to that of which they are ignorant. They hold themselves in readiness to modify the laws they have established, to enlarge their hypotheses, to make new ones, to record all facts which observation may supply. That many facts astonish them and disconcert them, we see every day. But mark the attitude of the true savant in face of these new phenomena. Does he doubt a single moment that they obey laws, unknown perhaps, but certain? ... There can only be science of that which is general and constant.

It is therefore absolutely chimerical to expect of science the establishment of any miracle whatever.... Miracle, according to the only tenable definition, and this is the ancient and traditional one, is a positive intervention of God in the phenomenal order and at a particular point. Now science knows only second causes. How could it ever seize in the course of these causes the immediate action of the First Cause? Is God a phenomenon that the eye of man can ever perceive in any phenomenal series? And is not this the reason why science despairs of ever proving scientifically the existence of God? It recognises itself to be impotent to step out of the relative, to resolve anything outside space and time, and it has removed from its domain all questions as to origin and aim, because it has no means of reaching them.

To perceive God and the action of God in the human soul and in the course of things is the business of the pious heart (Matt. v. 8). The affirmation of piety is essentially different from scientific explanation. It places us in the subjective and moral order of life, which no more depends on the order of science than the scientific order depends on piety. There cannot be conflict between these two orders, because they move on different planes and never meet. Science, which knows its limits, cannot forbid the act of confidence and adoration of piety. Piety, in its turn, conscious of its proper nature, will not encroach on science; its affirmations can neither enrich, impoverish, nor embarrass science, for they bear on different points and answer different ends. My child is ill; I procure for it the best advice and the best remedies; but confiding in God's mercy, I beg of Him to spare me my child, or, in any case, to help me to accept His will. The child recovers. What savant will forbid me to thank my heavenly Father? Will this be because my thanksgiving will be a denial of the science of the physician? Certainly not, for my gratitude will include the fact of the doctor, the medicine, the care bestowed, the whole series of second causes that have contributed to the recovery of my child. Was not this the piety of Jesus when He taught us to pray: "Our Father which art in Heaven: Thy will be done: Give us our daily bread"? Was He ignorant of the fact that in order to have bread we must sow wheat? No; but none the less He asked His food from God, because He knew also that, in the last resort, it is the will of God that makes the substance and the order of things, that it is He who clothes the lilies of the field, feeds the fowls of the air, makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and sends upon the labourer's soil the early and the latter rain.

Reduced to its religious and moral significance, miracle, for Jesus, was the answer to prayer, as M. Ménégoz (pp. cit. pp. 19-29) has clearly shown, and this altogether apart from the phenomenal mode in which the answer was produced. God only manifests Himself in extraordinary events in order that we may learn to recognise Him in ordinary ones. The child asks, the father grants; but the child does not trouble himself about the means by which his wishes are gratified. The pious man adores the ways he cannot comprehend. This confidence in the love and justice of God may be accompanied in the mind of the apostles and of Jesus Himself by imperfect or erroneous scientific ideas as to the mode of divine action in Nature. But it is not solidaire, with them, and may easily be detached in order to bring it into harmony with the views of our present science, as in the mind of Jesus and the apostles it was in harmony with the science of their time. For piety, the laws of Nature which have since then been revealed to us in their sovereign constancy, become the immediate expression of the will of God. The Christian submits to them instinctively, saying: "Thy will be done." Which is only saying that these laws, which are sometimes spoken of with a sort of horror, as of a blind and brutal fate, become religious and are consecrated in the eyes of piety by a divine authority. Why then should not piety offer to science and its revelations of Nature the same frank and joyous welcome as that accorded to them by scientists themselves? The opposition established by scholasticism between faith and science, is it not as irreligious as it is irrational, and has it not been one of the chief causes of the death of theology in the Church and of the triumph of incredulity in the present age?

While developing themselves on parallel lines, can science and faith remain isolated? Man is one, and his scientific activity, like his religious activity, tends to a synthesis. The synthesis will be found in a teleological consideration of the universe. This universal teleology, faith predicts it, science labours to realise it. It can only be established by this twofold concurrence. Without faith, knowledge of the universe is impossible; without phenomenal science all interpretation of the universe becomes illusory. Faith, therefore, must become more and more an act of confidence in God, and the scientific study of phenomena ever more profound and rigorous. Of course the teleological synthesis will never be completed here below, but it will always find a provisional and satisfying conclusion in the act of confidence and adoration towards God.

Science is perpetually becoming. If at times it closes to piety dear and familiar prospects, it necessarily and constantly opens new ones. If it takes away its crutches, it gives it wings. The contemplation of the harmony of the worlds which moves us religiously is, it seems to me, worth more to modern thought than the fatidical oracle, or the cry of the crow that frightened the good old woman of Rome. The more science progresses the more it puts into things the order and harmony of thought. It can only create a Cosmos more and more intelligible and, consequently, susceptible of an increasingly religious interpretation.

At the same time as science instituted its severest methods, it radically transformed its primary notion of Nature. This was conceived by the Cartesian Rationalism as a finished and coherent whole, a system of identical movements and phenomena which were produced by virtue of the same springs acting in the same circle (the vortices of Descartes). The familiar image under which they loved to represent it was that of a watch, constructed and wound up by the divine artificer once for all. Now, we see this dogma of the immutability of Nature going to join the other dogmas of the past. The theory of the ascensional evolution of beings, which renders miracle useless, shows Nature to us in the course of constant transformation and perpetual travail. Nothing in it is stable or final. Everything is preparatory to something else; each form of life is the preface to a higher form. What then is the hidden mystery which ferments in the bosom of this painful nature and endeavours to expand?

"The more cannot issue from the less," said the schoolmen, and no doubt in abstract logic they were right. But reality smiles at logic. It shows us everywhere the triumph of the opposite maxim. Perfection is at the beginning of nothing. Cosmic evolution proceeds always from that which is poorer to that which is richer, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from dead matter to living matter, from physical to mental life. At each stage Nature surpasses itself by a mysterious creation that resembles a true miracle in relation to an inferior stage. What then shall we conclude from these observations except that in Nature there is a hidden force, an incommensurable "potential energy," an ever open, never exhausted fount of apparitions at once magnificent and unexpected? How can such a universe escape the teleological interpretation of religious faith? For the moment, science may accord nothing more to piety; but piety has no need to ask more from it; for it has already in this way found safeguarded the three things which the old notion of miracle guaranteed to it: the real and active presence of God, the answer to prayer, and liberty to hope.

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3. Religious Inspiration

Passing by the subject of prophecy, which is a species of miracle, and admits of the same kind of explanation, it may be well to touch upon the subject of prophetic inspiration. The ancients represent it as a veritable state of possession. The spirit of the god or demon violently entered into the body of a man or woman, sometimes of an animal, and made of it an organ the more faithful in proportion as it was unconscious. Everybody knows the description given by Virgil of the Cumaean sybil at the moment of vaticination: "The god, the god, she cried," etc. (Aeneid VI. v. 45 et 77.)[2] It was a sort of frenzy or sacred delirium in which divine words involuntarily and sometimes unconsciously proceeded from the mouth of the possessed. Madmen, epileptics, idiots, hysterical persons, were regarded almost everywhere as sacred beings, friends and confidants of superior spirits. Their strange malady only seems explicable by the presence in them of one of these spirits.

[2] Cf. Plato, Meno. Timaeus, 45.—Cicero, De Divin 1. 2. 18. 31. Aristotle, Problem, xxx. p. 474.

The same ideas were current among the Hebrews, and are to be found both in the Old and in the New Testament. The prophets of Ramah, disciples of Samuel, and Saul himself, putting themselves by contagion into a state of delirium and "prophecy," are in a physical and mental state identical with that of the sybil of Cumae. The demons in possession of the man who was healed by Jesus were the first to divine and to salute His messianic dignity. The poor woman whom Paul healed at Philippi was haunted by "a spirit, a Python." The speakers with tongues at Corinth were thought by those present to be mad, and those at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost looked like drunken men (1 Sam. x. 5-7: Mark i. 24: Acts xvi. 16-20: 1 Cor. xiv: Acts ii. 13).

All these manifestations, formerly held to be supernatural, are now recognised as morbid phenomena, of which mental pathology describes the physiological causes, the natural course, the fatal issue. Even in frightful disorders order has been discovered; laws and remedies have been found for many of these sad afflictions. Formerly they deified these demented and tormented souls; in the Middle Ages, and up to the eighteenth century, they burned them; we pity them and care for them. This is much the best for all concerned.

Preoccupied with guaranteeing the infallibility of the sacred writings, the theology of the Fathers, of the scholastic doctors, and of the Protestant doctors of the seventeenth century, drew from this ancient notion of religious inspiration a dogmatic theory applicable to the divine oracles contained in the Bible. It seemed to them that the more passive the personal spirit of the writers was, the purer would be the word of God that they were charged to deliver when it reached us. At this point of view, the most faithful organ of God, the one that ought to inspire us with the greatest confidence, would be Balaam's ass. "The writer might be stupid," exclaims Gaussen, "but that which came from his hands would always be the Bible." Some have gone further by way of inventing images borrowed from the material order, such as, "the strings of a lyre," sounding beneath the divine bow, "the quills or pens of the Holy Spirit," etc., etc. The theory is familiar. It was developed throughout the Middle Ages until they came to say that God was the author and is alone responsible for the Bible, and for everything that is found in it; not only for the things and thoughts, but also for the words and style; not only for each word, but also for the vowels and the consonants. It only remained that they should have added the punctuation, not the least important matter in a connected discourse. Unhappily, the punctuation is absent from the oldest manuscripts.

Let us remind ourselves, however, that St. Paul, and Jesus Christ before him, had deposited the germ of a conception of religious inspiration more human, more psychological, and, at the same time, more real. Paul, who had ecstasies, visions, "tongues," always spoke of these doubtful privileges with a certain modesty, and that only when he was constrained to it, as if he had the feeling that there was something abnormal and morbid in these phenomena. On the other hand, he opposes to them a theory of true Christian prophecy conceived as a forcible, eloquent, irresistible proclamation of the mercy and justice of God; prophecy on the lips of the apostle, the poet, or the orator, springing from the assurance given him by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit that he is in perfect harmony with the divine thought. The force of this inspired prophecy comes from the luminous evidence which springs up within, which warms and kindles up the spirit like an inward fire. Under the influence of this illumination the apostle feels his strength increase tenfold; he rises at a mighty bound above himself. His faculties are carried to their maximum of energy and power. So far from being an inert, passive instrument, his intellect has never been intenser, richer; his thoughts more clear and more coherent; his words more fluent, more abundant, more pictorial and expressive; his voice more firm and resonant; his gestures more imperious. It is the hour when he is most himself, when his particular genius has freest play, when his moral originality is greatest, when he is most certainly the organ of eternal truth. Thus understood, religious inspiration does not differ psychologically from poetic inspiration. It presents the same mystery, but it is not more miraculous. It is not produced like a trouble violently introduced into the psychical life from without, but as a really fruitful force, acting from within, in harmony with all the laws and forces of the mind.

Does not experience establish and piety confirm this? When does an Amos, an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, a St. Paul, or a St. John, appear to us as the most authentic bearer of the word of truth and life, but in their most eloquent pages, where their personal genius, their faith, their thought, shine forth most freely? Religious inspiration is simply the organic penetration of man by God; but, I repeat, by an interior and indwelling God, and in such wise that when that penetration is complete, the man finds himself to be more really and fully himself than ever. It is with this mysterious action of the Spirit in the bosom of humanity as it is with the solar heat upon the plants that spring up from the soil. In regions where the heat is greatest and the other conditions favourable, plants which elsewhere are stunted attain their richest development and their greatest fecundity.

The inner root of this inspiration is only found in the piety common to religious men. It differs from it not in nature, but simply in intensity and energy. Prophetic inspiration is piety raised to the second power. There is no other mystery in it than the religious mystery par excellence. That is why this inspiration is essential to and promotes effectually the progress of the moral and religious life. They advance together through the ages as we now shall see.