“Abstinence and contemplation are the causes of stigmatization: i. Abstinence, in suppressing the vegetative functions, frees both the nervous influx and the blood which were distributed among the digestive organs. 2. Contemplation gathers together the contingent of pain dispersed through all the body, to fix and concentrate it on certain points which it sees, admires, loves, in Jesus Christ. It suppresses all the functions of the life of relation to devote itself exclusively to the object of its passion. The bloody flux, which has been drawn to the surface of the skin by the great functional activity, follows to the end the nervous influx which is constantly directed towards certain points, and the stigmatization is effected.”[265]
Of the ecstasy, according to M. Charbonnier, “abstinence is the principal, contemplation the secondary, cause.” We cannot, indeed, enter into all the details furnished by the author of this strange theory. In order to arrive at a judgment regarding it, we know of nothing better than to cite the conclusions of the reader of the report on the work itself:
“All this,” says M. Warlomont, “forms a whole which must have cost the author long and laborious research. As far as the inquiries of physiology are concerned, the source, respectable though it may be, on which he has relied, must be a cause for regret. His principal, almost his only, authority is that of Longet, who is now many years dead. But the questions relative to nutrition—those precisely which are at stake—have, since Longet, been placed in an absolutely new light. The work which we have just analyzed is altogether a work of the imagination. The demonstration of the à priori thesis which the author has set up he has pursued by every means, clearing out of his road the obstacles of nature which embarrass it, and creating at will new functions whereon to apply his organs; all this written in a lively, imaginative style, and bearing the impress of conviction. There is only one thing which is sadly wanting—experimental proof. A few simple experiments on animals, logically carried out, would have informed him how they withstand a progressive abstinence, and what changes this abstinence effects in their organs and functions. It is to be regretted that he has not instituted these experiments.”[266]
If the theory advanced by M. Charbonnier, based on such doubtful physiological facts, finds no weight with the learned representative of the Academy of Medicine, it is not because he himself admits the conclusions arrived at in the study of M. Lefebvre on Louise Lateau. For him, indeed, the events taking place at Bois d’Haine, apart from the question of fasting, which has not been positively established, and which, on that account, rightly passes beyond scientific discussion,[267] are exempt from all fraud and deception. But let M. Warlomont himself speak:
“After having analyzed,” he says, “the memoir which the Academy has confided to our examination, and having refuted it principally in the portions which concern Louise Lateau, it remains for us in our turn to give our own ideas relative to a fact of such interest which has formed the subject of the memoir.
“And first of all, are the facts cited real? According to our thinking, the simulation of the ecstasies is simply impossible, accompanied as they are by functional troubles the provocation for which would pass quite beyond the empire of the will. As for the actual spontaneity of the stigmata, we have demonstrated this experimentally.”
And now for the chief part of the report. It is that in which the learned academician attempts to give a physiological explanation of the facts. For him ecstasies are a species of double life, of a second condition, such as may be presented in ordinary and extraordinary nervous states, as well as in others: (a) in consequence of material injury to the brain; (b) during the existence of well-determined neurotic disorders; (c) under the influence of certain special appliances (magnetism, hypnotism); (d) spontaneously, without the intervention of any external provocation (as somnambulism or extraordinary neurotic affections).
After having examined each of these points in detail, the author thus continues:
“This point established, what of ecstasies? Well, whatever we may do, it is impossible for us not to class them in the same order of facts, not to see in them the influence of a neurotic perturbation analogous to that which controls neurotic diseases. It is in both cases the passage of a human being into a state of second condition, characterized by the suspension, more or less complete, of the exercise of the senses, with a special concentration of all the cerebral powers towards a limited object. Among the ecstatics, as among the hypnotics, there prevails a perturbation, diminution, or abolition of external sensibility. All is concentrated in a new cerebral functional department.”
So far for the ecstasies. Passing next to the production of stigmata, the report admits in principle the theory of Alfred Maury. That is to say, the imagination plays the principal rôle in the production of these phenomena. But to meet the brilliant member of the Institute, he calls to his aid the physiological laws and most recent discoveries, in order to show how the imagination can, by the irritation of certain given parts, provoke a veritable congestion of those parts, and then a hemorrhage.