Miracles in the Medieval World

And in the modern world?

I began Sunday’s post with reflections on the astonishing—for someone like me, simply baffling—abundance of miracles in Gregory the Great’s account of the life of St. Benedict. It turns out I’m not the only one who has puzzled over this. In volume four of Italy and Her Invaders, Thomas Hodgkin (d. 1913), a distinguished historian of the early Middle Ages, introduced a section on St. Benedict with an attempt—sincere and respectful, but in my view largely unsuccessful—to reconcile Gregory’s Dialogues with the world as modern people experience and perceive it:

Supernatural events occupy a large place in the narrative, and we find ourselves at once confronted with one of those problems as to the growth of belief which so often perplex the historian of the Middle Ages.

Let’s give credit to Hodgkin for describing this as a “perplexing” “problem” rather than just dismissing medieval literature as a tangled web of pious fantasies.

We have not here to deal with the mere romancing of some idle monk, manufacturing legends for the glory of his order about a saint who had been in his tomb for centuries. Pope Gregory was all but a contemporary of St. Benedict, and he professes to have derived his materials from four disciples and successors of the Saint…. In these circumstances the merely mythical factor seems to be excluded from consideration; and there is something in the noble character of Gregory and of the friends of Benedict which makes a historian unwilling to adopt, unless under absolute compulsion, the theory of a “pious fraud.”

Giving a fine example of responsible historical scholarship, Hodgkin carefully considers the nature of the source text and the status of its author. Is he inclined to accept the many miraculous events in Benedict’s life? No. But he must also admit that, given the circumstances, it makes little sense to deny them. Indeed, a perfectly objective historian, limiting himself to the available evidence, would almost be obligated to argue that most of the miracles really happened. But human beings are rarely if ever perfectly objective.

Yet probably not even the most absolutely surrendered intellect in the Catholic Church accepts all the marvels here recorded as literally and exactly true. It is useless to attempt to rationalise them down into the ordinary occurrences of everyday life. Yet in recounting them one would not wish to seem either to sneer or to believe.

You can really feel Hodgkin’s pain here, as his mind is pulled in two opposite directions. He doesn’t want to sneer. But he doesn’t want to believe, either. Surely, no one could believe all this stuff. But then again, the miracles are clearly miraculous, not just literary versions of ordinary occurrences, and why should we not believe the writings of a virtuous and brilliant man?

Our best course doubtless is to give them in Pope Gregory’s own words, studying them as phenomena of the age, and remembering that whatever was the actual substratum of fact, natural or supernatural, this which we find here recorded was what one of the greatest minds of the sixth century … either himself believed or wished to see believed by his disciples.

This is how Hodgkin concludes, and notice that absolutely nothing has been resolved. Study them as “phenomena of the age”? That’s just elegant capitulation—in the Middle Age as in every other, things either really, physically happen or they don’t. The “actual substratum of fact”? If the substratum is natural, and the event is portrayed as supernatural, then we’re back at the “pious fraud,” which makes no sense. “Wished to see believed by his disciples”? Gregory would be a strange sort of saint if he propagated dubious miracles so as to manipulate the opinions of his fellow Christians.

I’m willing (indeed, I feel compelled) to go one step further and say what Hodgkin did not: The miracles really happened—all of them, or at least the vast majority, since a few mistakes are always possible. In the case of Benedict’s life as recounted in Gregory’s Dialogues, this is the only reasonable conclusion. In many other cases, however, it is not the only reasonable conclusion.

The raising of Lazarus