Corn. Agrippa, Ep. xiv.
The uniform and indispensable condition of all miraculous cures, whether produced by prayer, imposition of hands, penitential castigation, or magic power, is faith. Physician and patient alike must believe that disease is the consequence of sin, and accept the literal meaning of the Saviour's words, when he had cured the impotent man near the pool called Bethesda, and said: "Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." (St. John v. 14.) Like their great teacher, all the apostles and saints of the church have ever insisted upon repentance in the heart before health in body could be accorded. It is interesting to notice, moreover, that all Oriental sages, the Kabbalists and later Theosophists, have, without exception, adopted the same view, however widely they may have differed on other points. In one feature only some disagreed: they ascribed to evil spirits what others attributed to sin; but the difference is only nominal, for men, by sin, enter into communion with evil spirits, and become subject to their power. Hence the woman "which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years" was said to have been "bound by Satan," and when she was healed she was "loosed from the bond." (Luke xiii. 16.)
To this common faith must be added on the part of the physician an energetic will, and in the patient an excited imagination. The history of all ages teaches, beyond the possibility of doubt, that where these elements are present results have been obtained which excite the marvel of men by their astonishing promptness, and their apparent impossibility. They seem generally to be the result of certain symbolic but extremely simple acts, such as the imposition of hands—which may possibly produce a concentration of power—the utterance of a blessing, or merely a continued, fixed glance. The main point, however, is, of course, the psychical energy which is here made available by a process as yet unknown. Prayer is probably the simplest agency, since it naturally encourages and elevates the innermost heart of man, and fills him with that perfect hope and confidence which are necessary for his recovery. This hope is, in the case of miraculous cures performed at the shrines of saints, materially strengthened by the collective force of all preceding cures, which tradition has brought to bear upon the mind, while the senses are powerfully impressed, at the same time, by the surroundings, and especially the votive offerings testifying to the reality of former miracles. In the case of relics, where the Church sees simply miracles, many men believe in a continuing magic power perceptible only to very sensitive patients; thus the great theologian, Tholuk, ascribes to the "handkerchiefs or aprons" which were brought from the body of St. Paul, and drove away diseases and evil spirits (Acts xix. 12), a special curative power with which they were impregnated. (Verm. Schriften, I. p. 80.) At certain times, when the mind of a whole people is excited, and hence peculiarly predisposed to meet powerful impressions from specially gifted and highly privileged persons, such miraculous cures are, of course, most numerous and most striking. This was the case, for instance, in the first days of Christianity, at the time of the Reformation, and during the years which saw the Order of Jesuits established. There is little to be gained, therefore, by confining the era of such phenomena to a certain period—to the days of the apostles, when alone genuine miracles were performed, as many divines believe, or to the first three centuries after Christ, during which Tholuk and others still see magic performances. Magnetic and miraculous cures differ not in their nature, but only in their first cause, precisely as the trance of somnambulists is identical with the trance of religious enthusiasts. The difference lies only in the faith which performs the cure; if it is purely human, the effect will be only partial, and in most cases ephemeral; if divine faith and the highest power co-operate, as in genuine miracles, the effect is instantaneous and permanent. Hence the contrast between the man who at the Lord's bidding "took up his bed and walked" and the countless cripples who have thrown aside their crutches at the graves of saints, only to resume them a day or two afterward, when, with the excitement, the newly acquired power also had disappeared. But hence, also, the resemblance between many acts of the early Jesuit Fathers and those of the apostles; the intense energy of the former, supported by pure and unwavering faith, produced results which were to all intents and purposes miraculous. With the death of men like St. Xavier, and the rise of worldly ambition in the hearts of the Fathers, this power disappeared, and modern miracles have become a snare and a delusion to simple-minded believers.
The faith in such psychical power possessed by a few privileged persons is as old as the world. Pythagoras performed cures by enchantment; Ælius Aristides, who had consulted learned physicians for ten years in vain, and Marcus Antoninus, were both cured by incubation. Tacitus tells us that the Emperor Vespasian restored a blind man's sight by moistening his eye with saliva, and to a lame man the use of his feet by treading hard upon him. (Hist. l. iv. c. 8.) Both cures were performed before an immense crowd in Alexandria, and in both cases the petitioners had themselves indicated the means by which they were to be restored, the emperor yielding only very reluctantly to their prayers and the urgent requests of his courtiers. (Sueton., Vita Vespas.) Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, had cured colic and diseases of the kidneys by placing the patient on his back and touching him with his big toe (Plutarch, Vita Pyrrhi); and hence Vespasian and Hadrian both used the same method!
The imposition of hands, for the purpose of performing miraculous cures, has been practised from time immemorial; Chaldees and Brahmins alike using it in cases of malignant diseases. The kings of England and of France, and even the counts of Hapsburg in Germany, have ever been reputed to be able to cure goîtres by the touch of their hands, and hence the complaint was called the "king's evil." The idea seems to have originated in the high north; King Olave, the saint, being reported by Snorre Sturleson as having performed the ceremony. From thence, no doubt, it was carried to England, where Edward the Confessor seems to have been the first to cure goîtres. In France each monarch upon ascending the throne received at the consecration the secret of the modus operandi and the sacred formula—for here also the spoken word went hand in hand with the magic touch. Philip I. was the first and Charles I. the last monarch who performed the cure publicly, uttering the ancient phrase: "Le roi te touche, Dieu te guérisse!" In a somewhat similar manner the Saludadores and Ensalmadores of Spain cured, not goîtres and stammering only, as the monarchs we have mentioned, but almost all the ills to which human flesh is heir, by imposition of hands, fervent prayer and breathing upon the patient.
Similar gifts are ascribed to Eastern potentates, and the ruling dynasty in Persia claims to have inherited the power of healing the sick from an early ancestor, the holy Sheik Sephy. The great traveler Chardin saw patients hardly able to crawl dragging themselves to the feet of the Shah, and beseeching him only to dip the end of his finger into a bowl of water, and thus to bestow upon it healing power. It will excite little wonder to learn that those remarkable men who succeeded by the fire of their eloquence and the power of contagious enthusiasm to array one world in arms against another, the authors of the Crusades, should have been able to perform miraculous cures. Peter of Amiens and Bernard of Clairvaux obtained such a hold on the minds of faithful believers, that their curse produced spasms and fearful sufferings in the guilty, while their blessing restored speech to the dumb, and health to the sick. Here also special power was attributed even to their clothes, and many remarkable results were obtained by the mere touch. Spain, the home of fervent ascetic faith, abounds in saints who performed miracles, the most successful of whom was probably Raimundus Normatus (so called because not born of woman, but cut from his dead mother's body by skillful physicians), who cured, during the plague of 1200, great numbers of men by the sign of the cross. To this class of men belong also, as mentioned before, the early fathers of the Society of Jesus, though their powers were as different as their characters. Ignatius Loyola, who represented the intelligence of the new order, performed few miraculous cures; Xavier, on the contrary, the man of brilliant fancy, was successful in a great variety of cases. The first leaders, like Loinez, Salmeron and Bobadilla, had no magic power at all, but later successors, like Ochioa Carrera and Kepel, displayed it in a surprising degree, although Ochioa's gifts were distinctly limited to the healing of the sick by the imposition of hands. The whole period of this intense excitement extended only over sixteen years, from 1540 to 1556, after which the vivid faith, which had alone made the cures possible, disappeared. It is worth mentioning that the Jesuits themselves and most of their historians deny that they ever had power to perform miracles, and ascribe the cures to the faith of the patients alone. St. Xavier, it is well known, brought the dead to life again, and even if we assume that they lay only in syncope and had not yet really died, the recovery is scarcely less striking. The most remarkable of these cases is that of an only daughter of a Japanese nobleman. Her death stunned the father, a great lord possessed of immense wealth, to such a degree that his friends feared for his reason; at last they urged him to apply to the great missionary for help. He did so; the Jesuit, filled with compassion, asked a brother priest to join him in prayer, and both fell upon their knees and prayed with great fervor. Xavier returned to the pagan with joyous face and bade him take comfort, as his daughter was alive and well. The nobleman, very unlike the father in Holy Writ, was indignant, thinking that the holy man either did not believe his child had died or refused to assist him; but as he went home, a page came running up to meet him, bringing the welcome message that his daughter was really alive and well. She told him after his return, that her soul upon leaving the body had been seized by hideous shapes and dragged towards an enormous fire, but that suddenly two excellent men had interposed, rescuing her from their hands, and leading her back to life. The happy father immediately returned with her to the holy man, and as soon as his child beheld Xavier and his companion, she fell down at their feet and declared that they were the friends who had brought her back from the lower world. Shortly afterwards the father and his whole family became Christians. (Orlandini, Hist. Soc. Jesu., ix. c. 213.) The case seems to be very simple, and is one of the most instructive of modern magic. The girl was not dead, but lay in a cataleptic trance, in which she had visions of fearful scenes, and transformed the fierce hold which the disease had on her body into the grasp of hostile powers trying to obtain possession of her soul. At the same time she became clairvoyant, and thus saw Xavier and his companion distinctly enough to recognize them afterwards. The cure was accomplished by the Almighty in answer to the fervent prayer of two pious men filled with pure faith, according to the sacred promise: "The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." All the more is it to be regretted that even in those days of genuine piety and rapturous faith, foreign elements should at once have been mixed up with the true doctrine; for already Caspar Bersaeus ascribed some of his cures to the Holy Virgin; and soon the power passed away, when the honor was no longer given to Him to whom alone it was due.
From that day the power to perform miraculous cures has been but rarely and exceptionably granted to a few individuals. Thus Matthias Will, a German divine of the seventeenth century, was as famous for his marvelous power over the sick and the possessed as for his fervent piety, his incessant praying and fasting, and his utter self-abnegation. Sufferers were brought to him from every part of Christendom, and hundreds who had been given up by their physicians were healed by his earnest prayers and the blessing he invoked from on high. His memory still survives in his home, and an inscription on his tombstone records his extraordinary powers. (Cath. Encycl., Suppl. I. 1320.) Even the Jansenists, with all their hostility to certain usages of the Church, had their famous Abbé Paris, whose grave in the Cemetery of St. Médard became in 1727 the scene of a number of miraculous cures, fully attested by legal evidence and amply described by Montgéron, a man whom the Abbé had in his lifetime changed from a reckless profligate into a truly pious Christian. (La vérité des miracles, etc., Paris, 1737.) The magic phenomena exhibited on this occasion were widely discussed and great numbers of books and pamphlets written for and against their genuineness, until the subject became so obscured by party spirit that it is extremely difficult, in our day, to separate the truth from its large admixture of unreliable statements. A peculiar feature of these scenes—admitted in its full extent by adversaries even—was the perfect insensibility of most of the enthusiasts, the so-called Convulsionnaires. Jansenists by conviction, these men, calm and cool in their ordinary pursuits, had been so wrought up by religious excitement that they fell, twenty or more at a time, into violent convulsions and demanded to be beaten with huge iron-shod clubs in order to be relieved of an unbearable pressure upon the abdomen. They endured, in this manner, blows inflicted upon the pit of the stomach which under ordinary circumstances would have caused grievous if not fatal consequences.
The above-mentioned witness, who saw their almost incredible sufferings, Carré de Montgéron, states that he himself used an iron club ending in a ball and weighing from twenty to thirty pounds. One of the female enthusiasts complained that the ordinary blows were not sufficient to give her relief, whereupon he beat her sixty times with all his strength. But this also was unavailing, and a large and more powerful man who was standing near had to take the fearful instrument and with his strong arms gave her a hundred additional blows! The tension of her muscles must have been most extraordinary, for she not only bore the blows, which would have killed a strong person in natural health, but the wall against which she was leaning actually began to tremble and totter from the violent concussion. Nor were the blows simply resisted by the turgescence of the body; the skin itself seemed to have been modified in a manner unknown in a state of health. Thus one of the brothers Marion felt nothing of thrusts made by a sharp-pointed knife against his abdomen and the skin was in no instance injured. To do this the trance in which he lay must necessarily have induced an entire change of the organic atoms, and this is one of the most important magic phenomena connected with this class of visions, which will be discussed in another place.
It is well known that the cures performed at the grave of the Abbé Paris and the terrible scenes enacted there by these convulsionnaires excited so much attention that at last the king saw himself compelled to put a stop to the proceedings. After a careful investigation of the whole matter by men specially appointed for the purpose, the grounds were guarded, access was prohibited, and the wags of Paris placed at the entrance the following announcement:
"Défense de par le Roy. Défense à Dieu,
De faire miracle en ce lieu!"