The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

root of the matter, and to make clear just what the presumption against ecclesiastical miracles is. It matters not that he proceeds to cite the last twelve verses of Mark and to build an argument upon the promise included in them. The spuriousness of the passage evacuates the argument. It is a meaningless excrescence, however, upon his argument in any case. That ultimately comes merely to the historical causa finita est: ecclesia lociita est.

The examination of the evidence for selected miracles which is presented at the end of the volume is an interesting piece of work, but is unconvincing for the main matter. That the conclusion in each case lacks cogency may be shown in one way or another; but it is not necessary to do this. Newman himself allows that the general conclusion reached rests on the antecedent presumption; and that that depends on our attitude to Roman doctrine. For its inherent interest, however, we may glance for a moment at the last, and perhaps the most striking, of the instances of miracles the evidence for which Newman treats fully. It is the miracle of the continued speech of the African confessors deprived of their tongues by the cruelty of Hunneric in 484. The evidence, which is especially profuse and good, is detailed with great skill. We really cannot doubt the underlying fact. The tongues of these martyrs were cut out, cut out by the roots; and one or more of them were known at Constantinople as having still the power to speak. The miracle is inferred. The inference, however, is not stringent. It curiously emerges as a physiological fact that a man with half a tongue cannot speak, but a man with no tongue at all can. Newman knew this fact. Middleton had adduced two French cases — one of a girl born without a tongue who yet talked distinctly and easily, the other of a boy who had lost his tongue without losing his faculty of speech. Newman judged that these instances left his miracle untouched. But other evidence was soon adduced. It happens that the excision of the tongue is a form of punishment repeatedly inflicted in the East, and a body of evidence has grown up there which puts it beyond cavil that excision of the tongue, if thoroughly done, does not destroy the power of speech. In his later editions, while recording this evidence in an appendix, Newman is still unable frankly to allow that this is what happened to the African martyrs.^ ^

Perhaps I ought to mention before leaving Newman's book that it has been subjected to a very thorough examination, and has been given a very complete refutation by Edwin A. Abbott, in a volume- devoted wholly to it, published under the significant title of Philomythus}^ And, having mentioned this book, perhaps I ought to say further that the same writer has also published a very extended discussion of the miracles of Thomas a Becket,^^ under the impression that some sort of a parallel might be drawn between them and the miracles of the New Testament, to the disadvantage of the acknowledgment of the truly miraculous character of the latter. Nothing further need be said of this than what has been briefly said by A. G. Headlam in the course of a discussion of miracles, which he read at the Church Congress at Middlesbrough (1912)/^

"Reference has been made to miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury," he says, "and it is maintained that those miracles are supported by as good evidence as the Gospel narratives, and that they represent just the same strong ethical character that our Lord's work did. I do not think that any one who makes assertions of this sort can have looked at the evidence for a moment. We have very full accounts of the life of Thomas a Becket, and we have many letters written by him. In none whatever of the early narratives is there any reference to miracles performed in his lifetime. Neither he himself nor his contemporaries claimed that he could work miracles. The stories of miraculous happenings are entirely confined to the miracles believed to have been worked by his dead body after

his death, and these narratives are exactly of the same character as those recorded at Lourdes, for example, at the present day. Many of them represent answers to prayers which were offered up in different parts of the world in the name of St, Thomas, many of them are trivial, and some repellent. Some doubtless represent real cures, which were worked among those who went on a pilgrhnage, just as there can be no doubt that real cures are experienced by those who go to Lourdes. What their character may be we need not discuss at this moment, but the whole tone of the narrative represents something quite different from anything that we experience when reading the story of the Gospel."

We return now to the main question: What are we to think of these miracles? There is but one historical answer which can be given. They represent an infusion of heathen modes of thought into the church. If we wish to trace this heathen infusion along the line of literary development, we must take our start from those Apocryphal Acts of Encratite tendency which, in a former lecture, we had occasion to point to as naturalizing the heathen wondertales — then a fashionable literary form — in the church. Once naturalized in the church, these Christian wondertales developed along the line of the church's own development. As time went on, E. von Dobschiitz explains, the church drew ever closer to the Encratite ideals which were glorified in the Apocryphal Acts, and it was this which gave their tendency to the new Christian romances which began to multiply in the later fourth century, and are represented to us especially by Athanasius' Life of Antony, and Jerome's Lives of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus. "Whether there is any historical kernel in them or not," remarks Von Dobschiitz,^^ "they are exactly like the older Christian romances, described already, in their fundamental traits — loose structure, miraculousness and asceticism." The state of the case is fairly brought before us by R, Reitzenstein, when, after expounding at length the relevant details, he states his conclusion thus:^^ "I think I may now ven-

ture to say that the prophet and philosopher aretalogies supplied the literary model for the Christian Acts of the Apostles.... But in order properly to feel the extent and influence of this literature, we must follow the Christian aretalogy a step further.... This new literature arose, as is well known, when, after the victory of Christianity, the interest of the community shifted from the portrait of the ideal missionary to the strange figures of the hermits and monks. For us there come especially into consideration Athanasius' Life of Antony, and the two great collections of the Historia Monachorum and the Historia Lausiaca; only in the second rank, the Lives oj Paul and Hilarion by Jerome."

It has been much disputed of late, whether the work which stands at the head of this literature, Athanasius' Life of Anto7iy, is really Athanasius' or is a work of fiction. Perhaps we do not need to treat the alternative as absolute. The book can scarcely be denied to Athanasius, and if we conceive it as a work of fiction, it ceases to be wholly unworthy of him. "In spite of its bad Greek — Athanasius was anything but a master of form" — writes Reitzenstein,^^ "the book belongs distinctly to the category of 'great literature,' and its appearance may be spoken of as an event of world-historical importance." T. R. Glover, who considers that it has been demonstrated that the book is a "work of fiction," points out^^ that "it was fiction as U^icle Tom's Cabin was fiction," and wrought even more powerfully; "of all the books of the fourth century it had the most immediate and wide-spread influence, which, though outgrown by us, lasted on to the Renaissance." How great the misfortune was that the ascetic ideal should be commended to the world-weary people of God in this age of dying heathenism through the medium of a romance of such undeniable power, the event only too sadly showed.

The elevation of the work above its successive imitators — Jerome's Paul and Ililarion and Malchus, Sulpitius Severus's Martin and beyond — is immense. Reitzenstein suggests it to us^^ in the contrast he draws between it and Jerome's Life of Hilarion. It is Jerome's obvious purpose to outvie Athanasius, and he does it with vigor. "The dif-

ference between the two works," says Reitzenstein, "is certainly very great. Athanasius handled the miraculous narrative as a concession to his public, laid all the stress on the discipline of the monk, and precisely thus raised the work to a value which must be felt even by one who is filled with horror by this pedagogically presented union of the fervor of Christian faith and Egyptian superstition. Jerome has retrenched even the preaching and the exhortation which form the religious kernel of the heathen as well as the Christian aretalogy; the miracle narrative is its own end; it is 'great history' which he is giving, and he presents it by this means." ^^

Thus a new literature sprang up synchronously with monasticism — a monkish belletristic, as A. Harnack calls jj. 59 ''Feuilletonists in monks' clothing made romances and novels out of the real and invented experiences of the penitents, and the ancient world delighted itself with this preciosity of renunciation." The miraculous was in this literature a matter of course; and the ever-swelling accounts of miracles in that age of excited superstition transferred themselves with immense facility to life. "The martyrlegend," says H. Giinter strikingly, at the opening of his Legend-Studies,^^ "is older than the Christian martyrs — of course with a grain of salt — in its presuppositions"; and the same is true of the monk-legends. Giinter illustrates what the martyr-legend did with Bible passages by bidding us observe what is done in the Acts of Peter and Andrew with Christ's sajdng about the camel passing through the eye of a needle. This aretalogist is so zealous for the saving of rich men that he makes a camel actually pass

repeatedly through the eye of the smallest needle that can be found, before our very eyes.^^ There is nothing too hard for the monkish legend. A veil of miracle settles down over everything, covering up all historical and individual traits.

An admirable summary of what took place in the church itself, parallel with this literary development, is drawn up by Robert Rainy in the course of his general description of the effects of the introduction of monasticism into the

church. "The stimulus which was applied to the fancy and to nervous tendencies," says he,^^ "is revealed also by the extraordinary harvest of visions, demoniacal assaults, and miracles which follo"wed in its wake. The occurrence of some marvels had been associated all along with Christian history, in times of persecutioYi especially, and in other cases of great trial. But both in type and in number these had hitherto occupied a comparatively modest place, and the Christian feeling had been that miracles comparable to the Gospel miracles had for good reasons passed away. But from Antony onward the miraculous element increases, and by the end of the fourth century it had overflowed the world. Asceticism was one cause; another, which operated in the same way, was the mood of mind now prevailing in regard to the relics of the saints. Illustrations of the first may be found abundantly in Sulpitius Severus. For the effect of reUcs, note how Augustine, who in earlier days recognized the comparative absence of the miraculous from Christian experience, in later life qualified and virtually retracts the statement. For in the meantime not only had asceticism begun to bear fruits, but the relics of St. Stephen had come into Africa, and miracles everywhere followed in their train; and such miracles!"

When we say that this great harvest of miracles thus produced in Christian soil, from the late fourth century on, in connection with the rise of the monastic movement, was a transplantation from heathendom, we do not mean