History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

by Andrew Dickson White

This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any "evil heart of unbelief." On the contrary, these good missionary fathers were prompt to record the slightest occurrence which they thought evidence of the Divine favour: it is indeed touching to see how eagerly they grasp at the most trivial things which could be thus construed.

Their ample faith was fully shown. One of them, in Acosta's collection, sends a report that an illuminated cross had been recently seen in the heavens; another, that devils had been cast out of the natives by the use of holy water; another, that various cases of disease had been helped and even healed by baptism; and sundry others sent reports that the blind and dumb had been restored, and that even lepers had been cleansed by the proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no miracles are imputed by his associates during his life or during several years after his death.

On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his personal limitations, and the difficulties arising from them, fully confirmed by his brother workers. It is interesting, for example, in view of the claim afterward made that the saint was divinely endowed for his mission with the "gift of tongues," to note in these letters confirmation of Xavier's own statement utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he underwent in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.

Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel Acosta's publication shows, the letters of the missionaries continued without any indication of miracles performed by the saint. Though, as we shall see presently, abundant legends had already begun to grow elsewhere, not one word regarding these miracles came as yet from the country which, according to later accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was at this very period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication of them from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of these miraculous manifestations.

But this negative evidence is by no means all. There is also positive evidence—direct testimony from the Jesuit order itself—that Xavier wrought no miracles.

For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know anything of the mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the highest contemporary authority on the whole subject, a man in the closest correspondence with those who knew most about the saint, a member of the Society of Jesus in the highest standing and one of its accepted historians, not only expressly tells us that Xavier wrought no miracles, but gives the reasons why he wrought none.

This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit order, its visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally rector of the University of Salamanca. In 1571, nineteen years after Xavier's death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work mainly concerning the conversion of the Indies, and in this he refers especially and with the greatest reverence to Xavier, holding him up as an ideal and his work as an example.

But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no longer produce apostolic results "lies in the missionaries themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles." He then asks, "Why should our age be so completely destitute of them?" This question he answers at great length, and one of his main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the illiterate; and hence that "in the early times miracles were necessary, but in our time they are not."

This statement and argument refer, as we have seen, directly to Xavier by name, and to the period covered by his activity and that of the other great missionaries of his time. That the Jesuit order and the Church at large thought this work of Acosta trustworthy is proved by the fact that it was published at Salamanca a few years after it was written, and republished afterward with ecclesiastical sanction in France.(291) Nothing shows better than the sequel how completely the evolution of miraculous accounts depends upon the intellectual atmosphere of any land and time, and how independent it is of fact.

(291)The work of Joseph Acosta is in the Cornell University Library,
its title being as follows: De Natura Novi Orbis libri duo et De
Promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De Procuranda Indorum
Salute, libri sex, autore Jesepho Acosta, presbytero Societis Jesu. I.
H. S. Salmanticas, apud Guillelmum Foquel, MDLXXXIX. For the passages
cited directly contradicting the working of miracles by Xavier and his
associates, see lib. ii, cap. ix, of which the title runs, Cur
Miracula in Conversione gentium non fiant nunc, ut olim, a Christi
praedicatoribus, especially pp. 242-245; also lib. ii, cap. viii, pp.
237 et seq. For a passage which shows that Xavier was not then at all
credited with "the miraculous gift of tongues," see lib. i, cap. vii,
p. 173. Since writing the above, my attention has been called to the
alleged miraculous preservation of Xavier's body claimed in sundry
letters contemporary with its disinterment at San Chan and reinterment
at Goa. There is no reason why this preservation in itself need be
doubted, and no reason why it should be counted miraculous. Such
exceptional preservation of bodies has been common enough in all ages,
and, alas for the claims of the Church, quite as common of pagans or
Protestants as of good Catholics. One of the most famous cases is
that of the fair Roman maiden, Julia, daughter of Claudius, over whose
exhumation at Rome, in 1485, such ado was made by the sceptical scholars
of the Renaissance. Contemporary observers tell us enthusiastically that
she was very beautiful, perfectly preserved, "the bloom of youth still
upom her cheeks," and exhaling a "sweet odour"; but this enthusiasm was
so little to the taste of Pope Innocent VIII that he had her reburied
secretly by night. Only the other day, in June of the year 1895, there
was unearthed at Stade, in Hanover, the "perfectly preserved" body of
a soldier of the eighth century. So, too, I might mention the bodies
preserved at the church of St. Thomas at Strasburg, beneath the
Cathedral of Bremen, and elsewhere during hundreds of years past; also
the cases of "adiposeration" in various American cemeteries, which never
grow less wonderful by repetition from mouth to mouth and in the public
prints. But, while such preservation is not incredible or even strange,
there is much reason why precisely in the case of a saint like St.
Francis Xavier the evidence for it should be received with especial
caution. What the touching fidelity of disciples may lead them to
believe and proclaim regarding an adored leader in a time when faith
is thought more meritorious than careful statement, and miracle more
probable than the natural course of things, is seen, for example,
in similar pious accounts regarding the bodies of many other saints,
especially that of St. Carlo Borromeo, so justly venerated by the Church
for his beautiful and charitable life. And yet any one looking at the
relics of various saints, especially those of St. Carlo, preserved with
such tender care in the crypt of Milan Cathedral, will see that they
have shared the common fate, being either mummified or reduced to
skeletons; and this is true in all cases, as far as my observation has
extended. What even a great theologian can be induced to believe
and testify in a somewhat similar matter, is seen in St. Augustine's
declaration that the flesh of the peacock, which in antiquity and in the
early Church was considered a bird somewhat supernaturally endowed, is
incorruptible. The saint declares that he tested it and found it so (see
the De Civitate dei, xxi, c. 4, under the passage beginning Quis enim
Deus). With this we may compare the testimony of the pious author of
Sir John Mandeville's Travels, that iron floats upon the Dead Sea while
feathers sink in it, and that he would not have believed this had he not
seen it. So, too, testimony to the "sweet odour" diffused by the exhumed
remains of the saint seem to indicate feeling rather than fact—those
highly wrought feelings of disciples standing by—the same feeling which
led those who visited St. Simon Stylites on his heap of ordure, and
other hermits unwashed and living in filth, to dwell upon the delicious
"odour of sanctity" pervading the air. In point, perhaps, is Louis
Veuillot's idealization of the "parfum de Rome," in face of the fact, to
which the present writer and thousands of others can testify, that
under Papal rule Rome was materially one of the most filthy cities in
Christendom. For the case of Julia, see the contemporary letter printed
by Janitschek, Gesellschaft der Renaissance in Italien, p. 120, note
167; also Infessura, Diarium Rom. Urbis, in Muratori, tom. iii, pt. 2,
col. 1192, 1193, and elsewhere; also Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Age
of Despots, p. 22. For the case at Stade, see press dispatch from Berlin
in newspapers of June 24, 25, 1895. The copy of Emanuel Acosta I have
mainly used is that in the Royal Library at Munich, De Japonicus rebus
epistolarum libri iii, item recogniti; et in Latinum ex Hispanico
sermone conversi, Dilingae, MDLXXI. I have since obtained and used the
work now in the library of Cornell University, being the letters and
commentary published by Emanuel Acosta and attached to Maffei's book on
the History of the Indies, published at Antwerp in 1685. For the first
beginnings of miracles wrought by Xavier, as given in the letters of
the missionaries, see that of Almeida, lib. ii, p. 183. Of other
collections, or selections from collections, of letters which fail to
give any indication of miracles wrought by Xavier during his life,
see Wytfliet and Magin, Histoire Universelle des Indes Occidentales et
Orientales, et de la Conversion des Indiens, Douay, 1611. Though several
letters of Xavier and his fellow-missionaries are given, dated at the
very period of his alleged miracles, not a trace of miracles appears in
these. Also Epistolae Japonicae de multorum in variis Insulis Gentilium
ad Christi fidem Conversione, Lovanii, 1570. These letters were written
by Xavier and his companions from the East Indies and Japan, and cover
the years from 1549 to 1564. Though these refer frequently to Xavier,
there is no mention of a miracle wrought by him in any of them written
during his lifetime.