Miracles

MIRACLES

MIRACLES. Miracles were a vital feature of Christianity in the early modern period. Issues surrounding the possibility and impossibility of miracles were enthusiastically discussed in many theological, devotional, and scientific works, even as most Europeans actively sought divine intervention when harsh circumstances threatened. In his theological and historical work, The City of God, the fifth-century theologian St. Augustine (354–430) had outlined many of the teachings concerning miracles that were to play an important role in Europe for centuries to come. Augustine had stressed that the greatest of all miracles was the daily re-creation of the earth, sustained and controlled by a benevolent God, who used nature as a mirror to display his power over every aspect of his Creation. In this view, seemingly inexplicable events that occurred in the natural order were not to be feared, but rather to elicit awe as signs of God's dominion. At the same time, The City of God also enthusiastically recounted many wonders the saints had worked in recent years, using these as signs to confirm the truth of orthodox church teachings. These dimensions of Augustine's theology of miracles—his emphasis on nature's wonders and his insistence that the miracles of the saints confirmed the church's truth—continued to exert a powerful influence on the religious piety of the early modern world.

Around 1500, though, it was the miracles of the saints that most often captivated the European imagination. The keeping of records of miracles worked by the saints was a common practice, one whose origins stretched back into late antiquity and found at least partial inspiration in the teachings of Augustine. A vast network of pilgrimage shrines sustained the practice, and the manuscript records that survive from these places reveal that an exchange mentality largely governed Europeans' appeals to the saints. When life's trials threatened, the faithful approached the saints with prayers and vows of pilgrimages and gifts. With their requests granted, pilgrims journeyed to the saint's shrine, often describing their miracle to a scribe, who carefully recorded their testimony. These miracle records were often proclaimed to those who visited these places. By the later fifteenth century, such accounts were increasingly being committed to print and circulated among a broad readership. Church authorities and humanist critics sometimes condemned these practices, seeing in them an indulgence in forms of magic and barter they believed bordered on idolatry. At the same time, the tens of thousands of miracle records that survive from the period point to the widespread popularity of the practice.

PROTESTANT ATTACKS

During the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers stepped up criticisms long voiced about the saints and their miracles, unleashing a war against pilgrimage and the cult of the saints in an attempt to rid the European countryside of these practices. In turning to oppose the long-standing popularity of the cult of the saints, Protestants faced several dilemmas. First, they needed to explain the seeming effectiveness of the saints to their sixteenth-century audience. In some cases the reformers accused the medieval clergy of having promoted fraudulent miracles. More often, however, they admitted that the miracles that had long been attributed to the saints were real, but that they had actually been worked by demonic, rather than divine, agency. A second issue involved the role that miracles had played in confirming not only a specific pilgrimage or saint but all church teachings. From the early days of the Reformation, reform-minded preachers and theologians responded that miracles were unnecessary to those who possessed faith, since faith was in and of itself its own self-confirming miracle. Even as they made such a claim, though, most sixteenth-century reformers were anxious to exploit wonders that seemed to confirm their own religious positions. Like Augustine before them, they turned to nature, where they found wonders that confirmed their teachings. The fashion for natural wonders in Protestantism emerged early, beginning even with Martin Luther, who in 1524 exploited a dramatic misbirth in print. Luther treated the appearance of a hideously deformed calf in Saxony, the so-called Monk Calf of Freiberg, as a divine pronouncement on the degenerate state of monasticism and the church. Numerous similar readings of natural miracles followed, and by the later sixteenth century hundreds of short broadsides and pamphlets filled with tales of recent celestial apparitions, earthquakes, floods, and deformed births poured from the presses of Europe. While accounts like these were consumed everywhere, the fascination with reading natural wonders as divine signs was far more pronounced in Protestant than in Catholic regions. Here, natural wonders came to satisfy the appetites of readers for signs of God's continued intervention in the world, an appetite that early modern Catholics indulged, by contrast, through the miracles of the saints. Even in the generally restrained and often rationalistic climate of John Calvin's Geneva, natural wonders played a role in shaping piety. Although on occasion Calvin held out the possibility that miracles had long since ceased to occur, he endorsed the publication of Luther's treatment of the Monk Calf in Geneva, and in the dedication to his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) he insisted that a steady stream of wonders had long confirmed the Reformation message. Thus a curious paradox surrounded miracles in the Protestant tradition. On the one hand, most Protestant commentators insisted that miracles were not necessary to those who possessed a saving faith. On the other hand, wonders—if not full-fledged miracles—were enthusiastically tracked and commented upon and continued to shape piety in Protestant Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

POLEMIC AND GROWING DISENCHANTMENT

Miracles also entered into the heated religious rivalries of the time. The reformers' attacks of the early sixteenth century had sent pilgrimage and the recording of saintly miracles into a temporary decline in many parts of Europe, but in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these practices experienced a dramatic resurgence. Catholic propagandists enthusiastically promoted the miracles recently worked by their saints or by the Blessed Virgin Mary as a vivid testimony to Roman Catholicism's truth. These renewed efforts sparked bitter confessional rivalries and polemic, prompting the Protestant charge that pilgrimage and the intercession of the saints was nothing more than a form of sorcery. In the overheated disputes of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, miracles of healing, successful exorcisms, and any seeming violation of the natural order might be used alternately by Protestants or Catholics to condemn their opponents. At the same time, the popular demand for miracles of healing persisted particularly in the Catholic countryside and inspired the foundation of numerous new pilgrimage shrines, many of which grew to heights of popularity far beyond any pre-Reformation precedent. While the saints did not survive in Protestant territories except as vestigial models for piety, the fashion for visiting sites where great miracles had occurred was shared by Protestants and Catholics alike. At the end of the seventeenth century, for example, a spate of miracles involving images of Martin Luther inspired new pilgrimages among Lutherans to his one-time residences. As a result, the reformer's birthplace, Eisleben, was celebrated as Germany's "New Bethlehem" and was sought out by the pious well into the eighteenth century.

Even as the hunger for the wonders persisted, though, new forces were at work that questioned the possibility of God's supernatural intervention in the world. One important development in this regard was the appearance of the doctrine of the cessation of miracles, a teaching pioneered by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–1536) and endorsed by seventeenth-century Calvinists, alleging that wonders had been necessary only for the foundation of the Christian religion in ancient times. Once Christianity had been successfully established, the Holy Spirit had ceased to work miracles. While this notion did not find general acceptance among most religious thinkers at the time of its appearance, the doctrine pointed to a new skepticism that would eventually result in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment's denials of miracles. The most famous of these appeared in the work of the Scottish empirical philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758), Hume argued that miracles were impossible because nature's laws operated according to ironclad regularity and inevitability and could not be violated. A similar debunking spirit pervaded Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (1752), in which he argued that miracles had functioned throughout Europe's history only to sustain fanaticism and intolerance. Even as these elite attacks on supernatural beliefs flourished, accounts of miracles remained vital to the religious life of the eighteenth century, particularly in the Catholic countryside where the cult of the saints and pilgrimage retained great popularity. At the same time, the attacks of elites were not without an eventual impact. By the later eighteenth century, Europe's Catholic princes often viewed the appetite for miracles as an archaism and many reform efforts focused on weaning people away from the long-standing customs of pilgrimage and the veneration of the saints.

See also Erasmus, Desiderius ; Hume, David ; Reformation, Protestant .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eire, Carlos M. N. War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge, U.K., 1986.

Scribner, Robert W. Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany. London, 1988.

Soergel, Philip M. Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria. Berkeley, 1993.

Walker, D. P. "The Cessation of Miracles." In Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus. Washington, D.C., 1988.

Philip Soergel