Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

by Auguste Sabatier

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.