← Back to the beginning of Notes to Lecture III
24. Legenden-Studien, 1906; Die christliche Legend des Abend-landes, 1910.
25. Die christliche Legend, usw., p. 69.
26. PD. 3, 4+ gu. P. 117. 28. 0p. cit., p. 8; cf. Legenden-Studien, p. 70. 29. Die christliche Legend, usw., p. 118.
30. On the miracles, especially of healing, of classical antiquity, see E. Thriner, art., “Health and Gods of Healing,” in Hastings’s ERE, vol. VI, pp. 540-566; Otto Weinreich, Antike Heilungs-wunder, 1909; R. Lembert, Die Wunderglaube der Rome und Grie-chen, 1905; and Antike Wunderkuren, 1911; G. von Rittersheim, Der medizin. Wunderglauben und die Incubation im Altertum, 1878; L. Deubner, De Incubatione, 1goo; M. Hamilton, Incubation, 1906. On the transference of the heathen customs to Christianity, see Deubner and Hamilton, and especially E. Lucius, Die Anfinge des Heiligenkults in der christliche Kirche, 1904; Th. Trede, Wunder-glaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1901, and Das Heiden-tum in der Romishen Kirche, 4 vols., 1889-1891; P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907. With respect to the mediaeval miracles, see especially P. Told of Turin, who began in 1gor in the Studien der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte a scientific classification” of the medieval miracles, in a series of articles entitled, “Lives and Miracles of the Saints in the Middle Ages’; see also Koch’s Zeitschrift fiir vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, vol. XIV (1901), pp. 267 ff., where Told prints the Introduction to these studies. The bizarre character of these miracles is fairly illustrated by a brief but brightly written review of them in R. A. Vaughan’s Hours with the Mystics, 1903, vol. II, pp. 218-222.
31. Heinrich Giinter, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 229, singles the stigmata out from other miraculous manifestations as “an especially Christian manifestation’; all the rest have heathen parallels.
32. Consult, however, A. M. Koniger, in Schiele and Zschar-nack’s Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. V, 1913, col. 024: “In the absolute sense in which it has been until recently thought to be such, Francis of Assisi does not begin the long list. It is, on the contrary, possible to show that at the least the idea of imitating the stigmata, as a consequence of longing after the sufferings of the Lord, was active for the period of the opening thirteenth century when not only was reverence for the sufferings of Christ fostered by the crusades, but more still self-mortifications of all sorts were set on foot by the growing call to repentance and amendment. Consult the self-mutilations of the Belgian Beguine Marie of Oignies (f 1213), of the religious fanatic condemned by the Oxford Synod of 1222, further of the Marquis Robert of Mont-ferrand, about 1226, of the Dutch hermit Dodon von Hasha (Ff 1231).”
Francis was not only the first of the stigmatics in both time and importance, but presented the stigmata in a form which has remained peculiar to himself. The contemporary accounts agree in describing the marks on his hands and feet as blackish, fleshy excrescences, recalling in form and color the nails with which the hands and feet of Jesus were pierced. Only the mark in the side was a wound, whence at times exuded a little blood. No bloody exudation took place except at the side. (Cf. Paul Sabatier, Life of Francis of Assisi, E. T., 1804, p. 206, note, and p. 435). Fran-cis’s stigmatization consisted, then, not of five bleeding wounds but of the imitation of the four nails and the spear thrust in the side. The description given of them by Brother Elias (Sabatier, p. 436) in his letters as Vicar of the Order to the brothers, sent out after Francis’s death, describes them as follows: “For (or Not) a long time before his death our Brother and Father appeared as crucified, having in his body five wounds, which are truly the stigmata of Christ, for his hands and his feet bore marks as of nails without and within, forming a sort of scars; while at the side he was as if pierced with a lance, and often a little blood oozed from it.” Joseph von Gérres, Die christliche Mystik, ed. of 1836, vol. II, p. 422, puts together a very detailed description of the wounds on the hands and the feet: “The wounds of notable extent opened in the centre of the extremities. In the middle of them had grown out of the flesh and cellular tissue nails like iron; black, hard, fixed, with heads above, below pointed and as if clinched, so that a finger could be inserted between them and the skin. They were movable from side to side, and if drawn out to one side, were correspondingly drawn in on the other but could not be extracted; as St. Clara discovered when she tried to extract them after his death, and could not do it. The fingers remained, moreover, flexible as before, and the hands performed their service; neither did the feet fail, although walking had become more difficult to him, and he therefore rode thereafter in his journeying through the neighborhood.” A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, 1839, I, pp. 105 f., points out the defects in the testimony: “In the case of all other saints the legend speaks only of wound scars, and the portraits of Francis present him only with the scars; the old reporters nevertheless describe them in a peculiar way as if there had grown nails of flesh, with the color of fresh iron and with clinched points. Nevertheless perfect clearness is lacking in the reports. The report of the tres socii says: nails of flesh were seen ef ferri quoque nigredinem. Celano says: Non clavorum quidem puncituras, sed ipsos clavos in eis impositos, ex ferri recenti nigredine; the last words yield no sense, and the editors conjecture: ex ferri recentis nigredinem. The matter is spoken of still less clearly in a letter of Francis’s immediate successor in the generalship of the Minorites (in Wadding, ad annum 1226, no. 45). Here we read: Nam manus ejus et pedes, quasi puncturas clavorum habuerunt ex utraque parte confixas, reservanles cicatrices, et clavorum nigredinem ostendentes. According to this also nails were present.” For recent discussions see the works mentioned at the close of the article on the “” Stigmatics”’ in Schiele and Zscharnack, as cited, pp. 433-443.;
33. Gorres, as cited, pp. 426-428: f. Margaret Roberts, Saint Catherine of Sienna and Her Times? 1907, p. 103: “ Catherine spent long hours in the Church of St. Cristina, and it was there that to her inner consciousness she received the stigmata, invisible to human eyes, but to her awfully real.” On her bloody sweat and weeping with bloody tears, see Augusta T. Drane, The History of St. Catherine of Siena, 1899, vol. I, p. 52.
34. Germano di Stanislao, Gemma Galgati, German version by P. Leo Schlegel, 1913; W. F. Ludwig, Gemma Galgati, eine Studie aus jiingste Zeit, 1912. The most well-known instance of stigmatization of the later years of the nineteenth century was probably Louise Lateau. Her case is discussed by William A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement, 1876, pp. 350-362; on page 350 an extended bibliography is given which may be supplemented from that at the end of the article, “‘Stigmatization,” in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. XI, pp. 96-97. A. Rohling’s Louise Latean, nach authentischen medizinischen und theologischen Docu-menten, 1874, was translated and printed in The Catholic Review, and afterward in a pamphlet entitled Louise Lateau, Her Stigmas and Ecstasy, New York, Hickey & Co., 1891. The following account is drawn from this pamphlet.
Louise Lateau was born a peasant girl, in a Belgian village, on the 30th of January, 1850. Her early life was passed in poverty and sickness. In the spring of 1867 she fell into a violent illness, and remained in a dying condition for a year, suffering from abscesses and hemorrhages, until she was miraculously cured, arising at once from her bed, on the 20th of April, 1868. “Three days later,” says Rohling, “Louise received the stigmas of our
Saviour, Jesus Christ” (p. 8). Here is the account given by Doctor Rohling:
“We have seen that she was suddenly restored to health on the 20 April, 1868. During the two following days she continued perfectly well, the thought of receiving the stigmas of the Passion never of course entering her mind. Indeed at that time, she had never even heard of God’s having bestowed this wonderful favor either on St. Francis, or upon any other of his faithful servants. On the 24th of April, however, she experienced a return of those excruciating pains, from which she had been enduring a martyrdom of suffering since the beginning of the preceding year. And on the same day, which was Friday, the first trace of the stigmas appeared. On that occasion, however, blood flowed only from the left side. Next day the bleeding had entirely ceased, and all the pain had disappeared. Louise, thinking that it was some transient form of her late illness, remained silent about what had occurred. But on the following Friday, the 1st of May, the stigmas again appeared; and the blood now flowed not only from the side, as in the previous week, but also from the upper surface of both feet. Filled with anxiety and embarrassment, Louise still kept the matter a profound secret, speaking of it only to her confessor… (who)… made nothing of what had occurred.. On the next Friday, the 8th of May, blood came as in the previous weeks, and, in addition, about nine o’clock in the morning it began to flow copiously from the palms and backs of both hands.”… “Since then the bleeding is accustomed to return on Fridays.” “On the 25th September, 1868, blood flowed for the first time from the forehead and from a number of points around the head—a striking memorial of our Lord’s crown of thorns—and this has also occurred regularly ever since. On the 26th April, 1873, an additional wound of large dimensions appeared on Louise’s right shoulder, such as our Lord received in carrying the cross to Calvary. The blood usually begins to flow from the stigmas about midnight on Thurs-days; occasionally the bleeding from the left side does not begin until somewhat later. Sometimes blood flows only from either the upper or lower surface of the feet, and from either the palms or backs of the hands; but frequently the bleeding takes place from both. Nor is the time uniform, during which the bleeding continues… but invariably the blood ceases to flow before midnight Friday. The first symptom of the commencement of the bleeding is the formation of blisters on the hands and feet… When they are fully developed, the blisters burst, the watery liquid passes off, and blood immediately begins to flow from the true skin beneath… During the rest of the week, the position of the stigmas can be discerned by a reddish tinge, and a glassy appearance of the skin, the epidermis is intact, exhibiting no trace of wound or scar, and beneath it with the aid of a good lens (with a magnifying power of 20) the skin may be observed in its normal condition… During the ecstasy Louise has no consciousness of material occurrences around her… The stigmas are the seat of acute pain.”
35. Les Stigmatisées, Louise Lateau, etc., Paris, 1873; La Stig-matization, ecstasie divine, et les miracles de Lourdes, Paris, 1894. We are drawing, however, directly from The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 204. Two American cases are described incidentally in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VII (1891-1892), pp. 341 and 345.
36. Migne, Dictionnaire des Prophéties et des Miracles, p. 1069.
37. Op. cit., pp. 1068 f.; cf. Revue des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1907, p- 207.
38. G. Dumas, Revue des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1907, p. 207, quoting Ribadeneira, Vie d’Ignace de Loyola, book V, chap. X.
39. Pp. 1066 fi. 40. ‘P. 1070. 41. Pp. 1030 1.
42. A. Poulain, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 295: “It seems historically certain that ecstatics alone have the stigmata.”
43. It is the judgment of a sympathetic critic that “trances, losses of consciousness, automatisms, visions of lights, audition of voices, stigmata,’ and such like experiences, are evidences of hysteria, and they are not in themselves evidences of divine influence or of divine presence.”—Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, 1909, p. xxviii. Compare what he says more at large, when speaking of Francis of Assisi (p. 165): “The modern interpreter, unlike the medieval disciple, finds this event, if it is admitted, a point of weakness rather than a point of strength. Instead of proving to be the marks of a saint, the stigmata are the marks of emotional and physical abnormality.” In a like spirit, Baron von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. II, p. 42, declares generally that “the downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions have all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and normal constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely peculiar psycho-physical organization.” On the Stigmata and Stigmatics, see especially F. W. H. Myers, Personality, Human and Divine, vol. I, pp. 492 ff.
44. Die christliche Mystik, new ed., 1836, vol. II, pp. 407-468: “Die Ecstase im unterem Leben, und die durch sie gewirkte Transformation der Leiblichkeit.” English translation of this section under the title of The Stigmata: A History of Various Cases, London, 1883.
45. A.M. Kbniger, in Schiele and Zscharnack, as cited, col. 924: “Their bearers are predominantly women and simple people. In the immaturity of their understanding they have not yet reached stability.
46. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XIV, p. 294. The italics are ours.; 47. Pp. 205 fl. 48. Gorres, 0p. cit., vol. II, p. 180. 49. J. K. Huysmans, Sainte Lydwine, p. 101.
46. We are reminded by Mrs. E. Herman, however (The Meaning and Value of Mysticism, 1915, p. 159), that in one element of the faith of those “moderns” whom she represents, there is a return to this desire to help Christ save the world. Commenting on some remarks of Angela de Foligno, she says: “To those unacquainted with medieval religious literature this seems curiously modern in its implied insistence upon our obligation to ask a humble share in the atoning suffering, instead of acquiescing in a doctrine which would make a passive acceptance of Christ’s sufferings on our behalf sufficient for the remission of sins.” No sharing in Christ’s atoning sufferings can be described as humble. It is not the “acceptance of Christ’s sufferings’ which is represented by the Scriptures and understood from them by evangelicals as “sufficient for the remission of sins.” It is Christ’s sufferings themselves which are all-sufficient, and the trail of the serpent is seen in any suggestions that they need or admit of supplementing.
51. For example, A. Poulain, as cited; f. A. M. Koniger, as cited: “The analogous cases of suggestion from without (local congestion of blood, slight blood-sweating, formation of blisters, and marks of burning) lie so far from the real stigmata, connected with lesion of the walls of the blood vessels (hemorrhages), that medical science knows as yet nothing else to do but to class this among the obscure neuropathic bleedings.’”’
52. The Principles of Psychology, ed. 1908, vol. II, p. 612. Compare the statement quoted by A. T. Schofield, The Force of Mind, 1908, pp. 61 {., from Professor Barrett, of Trinity College, Dublin, Humanitarian, 1905: It is not so well known but it is nevertheless a fact, that utterly startling physiological changes can be produced in a hypnotized subject merely by conscious or unconscious mental suggestion. Thus a red scar or a painful burn, or even a figure of definite shape, such as a cross or an initial, can be caused to appear on the body of the entranced subject solely through suggesting the idea. By creating some local disturbance of the blood-vessels in the skin, the unconscious self has done what it would be impossible for the conscious self to perform. And so in the well-attested cases of stigmata, where a close resemblance to the wounds on the body of the crucified Saviour appears on the body of the ecstatic. This is a case of unconscious self-suggestion, arising from the intent and adoring gaze of the ecstatic upon the bleeding figure on the crucifix. With the abeyance of the conscious self the hidden powers emerge, whilst the trance and mimicry of the wounds are strictly parallel to the experimental cases previously referred to.”
53. These cases, with others of the same kind, are cited by F. W. A. Myers, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VII (1891-1892), pp. 337ff., who introduces them with the following remarks: The subliminal consciousness, it will be seen, was able to turn out to order the most complicated novelty in the way of hysterical freaks of circulation. Let us turn to an equally marked disturbance of the inflammatory type, the production namely, of suppurating blisters by a word of command. This phenomenon has a peculiar interest, since, from the accident of a strong emotional association with the idea of the stigmata in the hands and feet, this special organic effect has been anticipated by the introverted broodings of a line of mystics from St. Francis of Assisi to Louise Lateau.” Cf. the similar cases cited by G. Dumas, as cited, pp. 215 ff.
54. Myers, as cited, p. 333.
55. Letter to Thomas de Gardo, a Florentine physician, printed in the Eighth Book of his Correspondence—as cited by Dumas, as cited, p. 213.
56. Traité de Amour de Dieu. Book IV, chap. xv (E. T. in Methuen’s “” Library of Devotion,” On the Love of God, 1902, p. 196). Cf. Dumas, as cited, who, however, quotes more at large, including certain phrases (not found in the E. T.) which withdraw somewhat from the purity of the naturalistic explanation.
57. The literature of Stigmatization is very large and varied; a guide to it may be found in the bibliographies attached to the appropriate articles in Herzog-Hauck, the New Schafi-Herzog, Schiele and Zscharnack and The Catholic Encyclopedia. The essay by Dumas in the Revue des Deux Mondes for May 1, 1907, is exceptionally instructive. With it may be consulted the older discussions by A. Maury, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1834, vol. IV, and in the Annales Medico-Psychologiques (edited by Baillarger, Cerise, and Longe), 1855; and the more recent studies by R. Virchow, “Ueber Wunder und Medizin,” in the Deutsche Zeitschrift fiir practische Medizin, 1872, pp. 335-339; Paul Janet, “Une Ecsta-tique,” in the Bulletin de Institute psychologique for July, 19o1, and The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata, New York, 1gor; and Maurice Apte, Les Stigmatisés, 1903; cf. also W. A. Hammond, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement, 1876, pp. 320-362, and the short note in W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1874, pp. 6809-600. No general description is better than Gorres’s, as cited; and no general discussion supersedes Tholuck’s, as cited. O. Stoll, Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Violker-psychologie?, 1904, pp. 520 fi., is chiefly useful for the setting in which the subject is placed.
58. Les Légendes Hagiographiques, 1905, p. 187. Cf. what is said by G. H. Gerould, Saints’ Legends, 1916, p. 42.
59. L. Deubner, De Incubatione: “The religion of Christians had and has its own demi-gods and heroes; that is to say, its saints and martyrs”; G. Wobbermin, Religionsgeschichtliche Studien, 1896, p. 18: “The saints of the Christian Churches, and especially those of the Greek Church, present a straightforward development of the Greek hero-cult. The saints are the heroes of the Ancients.” Cf. P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, 1907, and especially Lucius, as cited; also M. Hamilton, as cited.
60. Cf. Friedrich Pfister, Der Reliquienkult im Altertum, 1902, pp. 429 ff.; E. Lucius, Die Anfinge des Heiligenkults in der christliche Kirche, 1904.
61. Cf. the account by Pfister, as cited, p. 323, and especially 430ff.
62. Cf. Saintyves, as cited, pp. 33ff. We are told that many of the bones of the eleven thousand virgin martyrs displayed at the Church of St. Ursula at Cologne are bones of men (A. D. White, Warfare, etc., vol. 11, p. 29).
63. A. D. White records that Frank Buckland noted that the relics of St. Rosalia at Palermo are really the bones of a goat (Gor-don’s Life of Buckland, pp. 94-96); and yet they cure diseases and ward off epidemics.
64. Harbey, Supplément aux Acta Sanctorum, vol. I, 1899, p. 203 (cited by Giinter). Cf. in general Saintyves, as cited, pp. 44 ff.
65. H. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, p. 109, note 6, citing the Vita S. Maximini, c. 9 (Scriptores rerum Merov., I11, 78).
66. Pausanias, III, 16, 1 (Pfister, p. 325); also Delehaye, p. 186, with references given there.
67. Henri Etienne, A pologie pour Hérodote, ou Traité de la Con-formité des Merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ed. le Duchat, 1735, chaps. XXIx—xxvIil, as cited by P. Saintyves, as cited, p. 46, who may be consulted (pp. 44—48) on the general subject.
68. Cf. Paul Parfait, La Foire aux Reliques, pp. 137-138.
69. On Mary’s milk, see the whole chapter on “Le Saint Lait d’Evron,” in Paul Parfait, as cited, pp. 135-144. On what may lie in the background of this whole series of legends, see article “Milk,” in Hastings’s ERE, vol. VIII, pp. 633-637.
70. The Sacred Shrine, 1912, p. 363.
71. These words are Mechthild’s; and Hirn adds: The idea that the Madonna gives milk to all believers appears finely in a poem in the Swedish collection of Latin hymns, Pie Cantiones, p. 161:
73. He gives a series of references to instances.
74. Deutsche Schriften, 1, p. 74.
75. Acta Sanctorum, 38, pp. 207-208.
76. Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 165f. Compare Die christliche Legend des Abendlandes, 1910, p. 43: “That the legend [of Mary] praises the Mother of Pity also as the succorer of the sick is a matter of course. But the mysticism of the Mary-legend brought a new means of healing, in that it makes Mary give her breast to the sick.” Cf. the curious details on p. 85. In the notes accompanying the passage quoted from the Legenden-Studien, Giinter shows how wide-spread and how full of variants such legends were. In one Ms. the motive is varied in a threefold way: 4 cleric in his illness had bitten off his tongue and lips, and was suddenly healed by Mary’s milk; a monk thought already dead was healed; another monk had his experience only in a dream, but with the same effect. Noting that the milk with which Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, was sprinkled and healed, is said in one Ms. to have been gathered up and saved as a relic, Giinter infers that the milk-relics date from this epoch. This is how the story of Ful-bert is told in Sablon, Histoire et Description de la Cathédrale de Chartres: St. Fulbert, Bishop and Restorer of this Church, having been visited by God with an incurable fire which parched him and consumed his tongue, and seized with an insupportable pain which permitted him no rest through the night, saw as it were a noble lady who commanded him to open his mouth, and when he had obeyed her she at once ejected from her sacred breasts a flood of celestial and savory milk which quenched the fire at once and made his tongue more well than ever. Some drops had fallen on his cheeks, and these were afterwards put into a vial and kept in the treasury.”
77. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, p. 178; Die christliche Legend, pp- 85, 162.
78. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, p. 59.
79. Ibid., p. 208.
80. Ibid., p. 107; cf. the list of others of similar character in Th. Trede, Das Heidentum in der Rimischen Kirche, I, 1889, pp. 158 ff.
81. Ibid.
81a. 0p. it., p. O10.
82. Legenden-Studien, p. 106.
83. J. B. Heinrich, Dogmatische Theologie, vol. X, p. 797, makes much of this: “A miracle which belongs peculiarly to them, wrought not by but on the holy bodies, is their incorruptibility through the centuries. No doubt this incorruptibility can in many cases be explained by purely natural causes; but in many cases the miracle is obvious. It is especially evident when a portion only of the holy body remains uncorrupted, particularly that portion which was peculiarly placed at the service of God during life, as the tongue of St. John of Neponac, the arm of St. Stephen of Hungary, the heart of St. Teresa, etc. And especially when, with the preservation of the body there is connected a pleasant fragrance instead of the necessarily following penetrating corpse-odor, or when everything was done, as there was done with the body of St. Francis Xavier, to bring about a speedy corruption.” It is astonishing what stress is laid on this incorruptibility of the body of the saints: Thus Herbert Thurston (Hastings’s ERE, VIII, 149) thinks it worth while, in a very condensed article on Lourdes, to record, of Bernadette Soubirous: “It is noteworthy that, though her body at the time of death (1879) was covered with tumors and sores, it was found, when the remains were officially examined in 1909, thirty years afterwards, entire and free from corruption (see Carriere, Histoire de Notre-Dame de Lourdes, p. 243). On this matter see A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 1896, II, pp. 10, 11, who sets it in its right light, and mentions similar instances—of those who were not saints.
84. Accordingly, Percy Dearmer, Body and Soul, 1912, p. 262, says: ‘“For the greater part of Christian history faith-healing was mainly centered in relics, so that probably more people have benefited in this way than in any other.” Speaking particularly no doubt of the ancient church, but in terms which would apply to every age, Heinrich (op. cit., X, p. 796) observes: “Now, however, these miracles are regularly wrought at the graves, in the churches, and often precisely by the relics of the saints,” and he is led to add two pages further on (p. 798): “There is scarcely another doctrine of the church which has been so approved, established by God Himself, as the veneration of the saints and relics”’—that is to say by miraculous attestation.
85. For the literature of pilgrimages, see the bibliography attached to the article “Wallfahrt und Wallfahrtsorten,” in Schiele and Zscharnack’s Religion.
86. Hastings’s ERE, vol. VIII, pp. 684 f. Itisa refreshing note that Meister Eckhard strikes, proving that common sense was not quite dead even in the opening years of the fourteenth century, when he asks, ‘” What is the good of the dead bones of saints? The dead can neither give nor take.”
87. W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, 1889, p. 262 and note 2, is prepared to maintain that “a degraded form” of fetichism is exhibited in much else in modern Roman Catholicism than its relicworship. He finds it exhibited, for example, “by the so-called neo-mystical school of modern France, and in the baser types of Roman Catholicism everywhere.” He adduces in illustration Huysmans two “mystical” novels, En Route and La Cathédrale, and comments as follows: ‘““The naked fetichism of the latter book almost passes belief. We have a Madonna who is good-natured at Lourdes and cross-grained at La Salette; who likes pretty speeches and little coaxing ways’ in paying court to her, and who at the end is apostrophised as our Lady of the Pillar,’ our Lady of the Crypt.” It may, perhaps, be excusable to resort to such expedients as these in the conversion of savages” (Query: Isit?); “but there is something singularly repulsive in the picture (drawn apparently from life) of a profligate man of letters seeking salvation in a Christianity which has lowered itself far beneath educated paganism.” “Our Lady of the Pillar,” “Our Lady of the Crypt,” are two images of Mary venerated at the cathedral at Chartres, information concerning which is given in the article entitled “The oldest of our Lady’s Shrines: St. Mary’s Under-Earth,” in The Dolphin, vol. VI (July-December, 1904), pp. 377-399. On Mary’s shrines in general, see below. Those who have read Huysmans’s La Cathédrale should read also Blasco Ibafies’s La Catedral, and perhaps Evelyn Underhill’s The Lost Word, that the lascinations of cathedral symbolism may be viewed from several angles.
88. Op. cit., vol. X, p. 799. Yet it is not merely God who is venerated in the saints, he says; there is an honor due to the saints in themselves, and accordingly Alexander VIII condemned the proposition: The honor that is offered to Mary as Mary is vain. On the other hand it is said that it is merely the saint and through him God that is venerated in the relic, according to the explanation of Thomas Aquinas: ‘“We do not adore the sensible body on its own account, but on account of the soul which was united with it, which is now in the enjoyment of God, and on account of God, whose ministers they were.” Why then continue to adore the body when it is no longer united with the soul, on account of its union with which alone it is adored?
89. P. 794.
90. P. 794.
91. What Pfister says, p. 610, although not free from exaggerations, is in its main assertion true. In the Christian religion, he says, the presence in the relics of a supernatural, in a certain degree magical, power is accustomed to be emphasized even more than it is in the heathen. For, according to the Greek belief, the graves were thought of chiefly as the protection of the heroes, without the bones themselves being thought able to work miracles—for they rest in the grave; the miracle, the help, comes in general from the hero himself, not from an anonymous, impersonal, magical power which dwells in the relics. According to the Christian belief the relics themselves, on the other hand, can perform miracles, and the power residing in them can by contact be directly transferred and produce effects. Thus artificial relics can be produced by contact with genuine ones. The habit of relic-partition is connected with this: a part of the object filled with magical power may act like the whole. Compare Hirn, p. 490, note 2: “We deliberately leave out of consideration here the assertion of educated Catholics that in the relics was really worshipped the saint in the same way that God is worshipped in a picture or a symbol (f. Esser, art., Reliquien,’ in Wetzer-Welte, Kirchenlexicon). It cannot be doubted that relic worship—for the earlier Christians as for the mass of believers to-day—was based on utilitarian ideas of the help that might be had from the sacred remains.”
92. See the characterization of the Catholic world-view, by E. Schmidt in Schiele and Zscharnack’s Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 1736. 03. Baumgarten, in Schiele and Zscharnack’s Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 2162.
93. The Sacred Shrine, chaps. 1-1v.
94. Compare Smith and Cheatham, Dictionary of Christian Archeology, 1, pp. 62, 429; II, p. 1775, and especially I, p. 431: “” As churches built over the tombs of martyrs came to be regarded with peculiar sanctity, the possession of the relics of some saint came to be looked upon as absolutely essential to the sacredness of the building, and the deposition of such relics in or below the altar henceforward formed the central portion of the consecration rite.” The succeeding account of the ritual of the consecration should be read.
95. The literature of relics and relic-veneration is sufficiently indicated in the bibliographies attached to the articles on the subject in the encyclopedias: Herzog-Hauck, New Schafi-Herzog, Schiele-Zscharnack. The exhibition of the Holy Coat at Tréves from August 20 to October 3, 1891, with the immense crowd of pilgrims which it brought to Tréves, created an equally immense literature, a catalogue of which may be derived from the Theologischer Jahresbericht of the time, and a survey of which will give an insight into the whole subject of the veneration of relics in the nineteenth century.
96. The recent history of relic-miracles in the United States is chiefly connected with the veneration of relics of St. Ann. Certain relics of St. Anthony venerated in the Troy Hill Church at Allegheny, Pa., have indeed won large fame for the miracles of healing wrought by their means, and doubtless the additional relic of the same saint deposited in the Italian Church of St. Peter, on Webster Avenue, Pittsburgh, has taken its share in these works. But St. Ann seems to promise to be the peculiar wonder-worker of the United States. The Church of St. Anne de Beaupré has, within recent years, become the most popular place of pilgrimage in Canada; until 1875 not over 12,000 annually visited this shrine, but now they are counted by the hundred thousand; in 1905 the number was 168,000. A large relic of St. Ann’s finger-bone has been in the possession of this shrine since 1670; three other fragments of her arm have been acquired since, and it was in connection with the acquisition of one of these, in 1892, that the cult and its accompanying miracles of healing were transferred to New York. St. Ann seems to be one of those numerous saints too much of whom has been preserved in the form of relics. Her body is said to have been brought from the Holy Land to Constantinople, in 710; and it is said to have been still in the Church of St. Sophia in 1333. It was also, it is said, brought by Lazarus to Gaul, during the persecution of the Jewish Christians in Palestine under Herod Agrippa, and finally found a resting-place at Apt. Lost to sight through many years, it was rediscovered there in the eighth century, and has been in continuous possession of the church at Apt ever since. Yet the head of St. Ann was at Mainz up to 1516, when it was stolen and carried to Diiren in the Rhineland, and her head, “almost complete”— doubtless derived from Apt—is preserved also at Chiry, the heir of the Abbey of Ourscamp. Churches in Italy, Germany, Hungary, and in several towns in France “flatter themselves that they possess more or less considerable portions of the same head, or the entire head” (Paul Parfait, Le Foire aux Reliques, p. 94, in an essay on “The Head of St. Ann at Chiry”’). Despite all this European history, a relic of St. Ann was again brought from Palestine in the thirteenth century, and it was this that was given to St. Anne d’Auray in Brittany in the early half of the seventeenth century by Ann of Austria and Louis XIII. The origin of the pilgrimages and healings at St. Anne d’Auray was not in this relic, however, but antedated its possession, taking their start from apparitions of St. Ann (1624-1626). The relics which have been recently brought to this country are said to derive ultimately from Apt. Thence the Pope obtained an arm of the saint which was intrusted to the keeping of the Benedictine monks of St. Paul-outside-the-Wall, Rome. From them, through the kind offices of Leo XIII, Cardinal Taschereau obtained the “great relic which was presented to St. Anne de Beaupré in 1892; and from thence also came the relic, obtained by Prince Cardinal Odeschalchi, and presented to the Church of St. Jean Baptiste in East Seventy-sixth Street, New York, the same year (July 15, 1892). Another fragment was received by the Church of St. Jean Baptiste on August 6, 1893; and some years later still another fragment was deposited in the Church of St. Ann in Fall River, Mass., whence it was stolen on the night of December 1, 1901.
The “Great Relic’—a piece of the wrist-bone of St. Ann, four inches in length—was brought from Rome by Monsignor Marquis; and, on his way to Quebec, he stopped in New York with it. Monsig-nor O’Reilly has given us an enthusiastic account of the effect of its exposition at the Church of St. Jean Baptiste during the first twenty days of May of that year (see the Ave Maria of August 6, 1892; and The Catholic Review of the same date). Something like two or three hundred thousand people venerated the relic; cures were wrought, though apparently not very many. When Monsignor Marquis returned on July 15 with the fragment which was to remain at St. Jean Baptiste, the enthusiasm was redoubled, and St. Ann did not let her feast-day (July 26) pass without giving some signal proof of her love to her children.” Since then a novena and an exposition of the relics are held during the latter part of each July, in conjunction with St. Ann’s feast-day, and many miracles have been wrought. In 19or a new marble crypt was completed at the church, and used for the first time for this novena and exposition, and public attention was very particularly called to it. The public press was filled with letters pointing out abuses, or defending the quality of the cures, which were numerous and striking (see a short summary note in T/%e Presbyterian Banner, August 8, 1go1). On the whole Monsignor O’Reilly’s hope that the depositing of the relics of St. Ann in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste will result in “the founding here in New York of what will become a great national shrine of St. Anne’’—to be signalized, the editor of the Ave Maria adds, “by such marvels as have rendered the sanctuaries of St. Anne de Beaupré and St. Anne d’Auray famous throughout Christendom’’—seems in a fair way to be fulfilled. The following is a typical instance of what is happening there. It was reported in The Catholic Telegraph. 1t is the case of a young man aged nineteen, of New Haven, Conn.: “Two years ago young Maloney, who was working at the time in a New Haven factory, fell and injured his hip. Every doctor consulted said he would be a cripple for life. When he walked he was obliged to use crutches. Until recently he has been under the care of the ablest physicians in the city, yet all declared him incurable. Hearing of several cures wrought at St. Anne’s shrine, New York, he started thither, making a retreat on arriving. After several days spent in prayer, he visited the shrine of St. Anne. The morning of his visit he received holy communion, and then the relic of the saint was applied, and the sufferer anointed with consecrated oil. Almost instantly he felt better. Another visit and he was able to walk without crutches, leaving the latter before the shrine in which the relics are kept. He was well, quite well, and thus returned to New Haven, to the astonishment of all who knew him.” It is worth noting that the Cincinnati Enquirer of July 28 and the Lexington (Ky.) Leader of July 29, 1902, record the sudden cure of a deaf woman in St. Anne’s Church, West Covington, Ky., on St. Ann’s feastday. “She said she had heard the key in the tabernacle, which contains a relic of St. Ann, click as the priest turned it’’—and after that she heard everything.
The following extract from The New York Tribune for August 13, 1906, will be not uninteresting in this connection: “Two thousand quarts of water from the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, in France, arrived here in huge sealed casks on Saturday, consigned to the Fathers of Mercy, who have charge of the American shrine of that name, at Broadway and Aberdeen Street, Brooklyn. The water will be distributed to thousands of physically afflicted men, women and children from all parts of the country next Wednesday afternoon and the following Sunday. Next Wednesday in the Catholic calendar is known as the Feast of the Assumption. It is the titular day of the French shrine, and is kept with equal solemnity by the Fathers of Mercy at the American shrine. The water comes to this country under the seal of the clergy in charge of the French shrine, who guarantee it to be undiluted. Father Porcile, rector of the Brooklyn church, said yesterday that only two ounces would be given to each person applying. The celebration of the festival will begin at [blurred] o’clock on Wednesday morning with a solemn mass. In the afternoon at 3.30 o’clock the pilgrimage to the shrine, which has stood for years on the grounds of the church, will take place. Father Porcile, who has been at the French shrine several times, says the French Government will not attempt to carry out the threatened abandonment of Lourdes on the charge that it is a menace to public health. ‘I read about French pathologists holding that the piscina in which the afflicted bathe is unhealthy,’ he said. Anybody who has seen the piscina knows better. It is not a pool, but a cavity, which is filled with running water. If the pool were stagnant, it might be argued, with some show of truth, that it was unhealthful.’”” It is only right to suppose that the reporter misunderstood his collocutor with regard to the piscinaswhether their formation or their filth. Their filth is not glossed by, say, Robert Hugh Benson (Lourdes, 1914, pp. 51 f.), who bathed in one of them: “That water,” says he, “had better not be described.”
97. Cf. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, p. 177, and especially Die christliche Legend des Abendlandes, pp. 35 ff.
98. This string of epithets is taken from the Roman Breviary, Antiphon to the Magnificat. If we wish to know the extravagances to which the prevalent Mariolatry can carry people, we may go to Liguori’s Le Glorie di Maria, a book which a J. H. Newman could defend (Letter to Pusey on the Eirenicon, 1866, pp. 105 ff.). “The way of salvation is open to none otherwise than through Mary.” “Whoever expects to obtain graces otherwise than through Mary, endeavors to fly without wings.” “Go to Mary, for God has decreed that He will grant no grace otherwise than by the hands of Mary.” “All power is granted to thee (Mary) in heaven and on earth, and nothing is impossible to thee.” You, oh Holy Virgin, have over God the authority of a Mother, and hence can obtain pardon for the most obdurate of sinners.” Here is the way J. K. Huysmans represents her as thought of by her votaries, doubtless drawing from the life (La Cathédrale, ed. 1903, p. 9): “He meditated on the Virgin whose watchful attentions had so often preserved him from unforeseen danger, easy mistakes, great falls. Was she not”’—but we must preserve the French here—“le Puits de la Bonté sans fond, la Collatrice des dons de la bonne Patience, la Touriére des coeurs secs et clos; was she not above all the active and beneficent Mother?”
100. Compare Lachenmann in Schiele and Zscharnack’s Religion, etc., vol. V, col. 1837: “Belief in miracles is the chief motive of the favorite places of pilgrimage and the climax is reached in the innumerable localities where the grace of Mary is sought. The origin of these lies not in the region of veneration of relics since the Catholic church knows neither the grave of Mary nor relics of her body, but goes back to stories of visible appearances or of inner revelations of the Mother of God at particular localities which she herself has thus indicated for her special worship, or as places of grace (La Salette, Lourdes); or else to vows made to Mary by individuals, or by whole communities, in times of need; or finally to the miraculous activities of an image of Mary.”
101. A full account of it is given by Léon Marillier in The Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. VII (1891-1892), pp. 100-110.
102. “Our Lady of Pellevoisin,” reprinted in The Catholic Review (New York) for July 30, 1892, from the Liverpool Catholic Times.
103. In J. K. Huysmans’s La Cathédrale we are given a highly picturesque meditation on the several manners in which Mary has revealed herself. She owes something to sinners, it seems, for had it not been for their sin she could never have been the immaculate mother of God. She has tried hard, however, to pay her debt, and has appeared in the most diverse places and in the most diverse fashions—though of late it looks as if she had deserted all her old haunts for Lourdes. She appeared at La Salette as the Madonna of Tears. Twelve years later, when people had got tired of climbing to La Salette (the greatest miracle about which was that people could be got to go there), she appeared at Lourdes, no longer as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, but as the Madonna of Smiles, the Tenant of the glorious Joys. How everything has been changed! The special aspect in which Mary is worshipped at Chartres, it is added, is under the traits of a child or a young mother, much more as the Virgin of the Nativity than as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.
The old artists of the Middle Ages, working here, have taken care not to sadden her by recalling too many painful memories, and have wished to show, by this discretion, their gratitude to her who has constantly shown herself in their sanctuary the Dispensatrice of benefits, the Chatelaine of graces.
104. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XV, p. 464.
105. See The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, p. 115; vol. XV, p. 115; also B. M. Aladel, The Miraculous Medal: Its Origin, History, etc. Translated from the French by P. S. Baltimore, 1880.
106. Doctor Rouby, La Vérité sur Lourdes, 1910, pp. 318 f.
107. A sufficient outline of these scandals is given in the article on La Salette in The Catholic Encyclopedia, which also mentions the chief literature. It was said that ‘““the beautiful lady seen by the children was a young woman named Lamerliére; suits for slander were brought; and A. D. White is able to say (Warfare, etc., 11, pp. 21-22, note) that the shrine “preserves its healing powers in spite of the fact that the miracle which gave rise to them has twice been pronounced fraudulent by the French courts.” The whole matter is involved in inextricable confusion. A sympathetic account of La Salette may be read in J. S. Northcote, Celebrated Sanctuaries of the Madonna, 1868, pp. 178 fi. Gustave Droz’s first novel, Autour d’une Source, 1869, seems to have drawn part of its inspiration from the story of La Salette; it is extravagantly praised by A. D. White (Warfare, II, p. 44) as “one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern fiction’; and not quite accurately described as “showing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous powers at a fashionable spring in France.” It does show how easily such things may be even innocently invented. On the question whether the visions of Bernadette may not have been the result of ecclesiastical arrangement, see J. de Bonnefon, Lourdes et ses Tenanciers, Paris, without date, and, on the other side, G. Bertrin, Lourdes, un document apocryphe, in the Revue practique d’Apologétique, April 15, 1908, pp. 125-133.
108. See Marillier, as cited, and f. H. Thurston’s remarks in Hastings’s ERE, vol. VIII, p. 149.
109. J. K. Huysmans, in his La Cathédrale, suggests that two rules seem to govern the appearances of Mary. First, she manifests herself only to the poor and humble. Secondly, she accommodates herself to their intelligence and shows herself under the poor images which these lowly people love. She accepts the white and blue robes, the crowns and garlands of roses, the jewels and chaplets, the appointments of the first communion, the ugliest of attire. The peasants who have seen her, in a word, have had no other examples by which to describe her (except under the appearance of a fine lady’) but the traits of an altar Virgin of the village, of a Madonna of the Saint-Sulpice quarter, of a Queen of the streetcorner.”
110. We are quoting A. T. Myers and F. W. H. Myers, Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. IX, 1804, p. 177.
111. Legenden-Studien, p. 126.
112. Lourdes, 1891, p. 31, as cited by Myers, as cited, p. 178.
113. Myers, as cited, pp. 178, 179.
114. In the contrast which he draws between La Salette and Lourdes, in his La Cathédrale, J. K. Huysmans does not neglect this one. “And God who imposed La Salette, without having recourse to the methods of worldly publicity, has changed His tactics and, with Lourdes, puffing comes into play. This is very confounding—Jesus resigning Himself to employ the miserable artifices of human commerce, accepting the repulsive stratagems of which we make use in pushing a product or a business!”
115. Lourdes (the first of the triad on “the cities,” Lourdes, Rome, Paris) was published in 1894; E. T. same year, by Vizetelly, and often since. Cf. a critical article on it in The Edinburgh Review, 1903, No. 103. The secret of Lourdes, says Zola, is that it offers to suffering humanity “the delicious bread of hope, for which humanity ever hungers with a hunger that nothing will ever appease’’; it proposes to meet humanity’s insatiable yearning for happiness.” Since its publication Catholic writers on Lourdes have, as is natural, concerned themselves very much with Zola’s book; G. Bertrin’s work (Histoire critique des événements de Lourdes) which reached its 37th edition in 1913, and which Herbert Thurston pronounces “undoubtedly the best general work on Lourdes” (Hastings’s ERE, vol. VIII, p. 150), would not be unfairly described as a formal reply to Zola.
116. Edward Berdoe, “A Medical View of the Miracles at Lourdes,” in The Nineteenth Century, October, 1895, pp. 614 ff. Doctor Berdoe was a liberal-minded Catholic in faith; see Herbert Thurston’s remarks in The Month for November, 1895, and his citation of Doctor Berdoe’s own representations in The Spectator, July, 1895. (Cf. Public Opinion, November 28, 1895, p. 108.)
117. Lourdes, 1914, p. 29.
118. The details are given by Benson, p. 32.
119. A curious fact emerges from Bertrin’s tables in his appendix (E. T., p. 292); more physicians visit Lourdes every year to look on at the cures than there are cures made for them to observe. For the fourteen years from 18go to 1903, inclusive, 2,530 physicians visited the Medical Office there, an average of 180 yearly. During these fourteen years 2,130 cures were registered at that office, an average of 152 yearly.
120. A. D. White, Warfare, etc.,? vol. 11, p. 24: E. Berdoe, as cited, p. 615. Other estimates of the proportion of the cured to patients may be found in Dearmer, Body and Soul? 1912, p. 315, and in Rouby, La Vérité sur Lourdes, 1910, p. 272. Rouby thinks that about five out of every thousand patients are cured, that is, about one-half of one per cent; Dearmer can arrive at no more than one per cent from the figures given, and remarks that even if five per cent be allowed, as is asserted by some, the proportion is much smaller than under regular psychotherapeutical treatment.
121. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X, 1911, p. 390; cf. the earlier estimates in his Lourdes, A History of its Apparitions and Cures, E. T., 1008, p. or.
122. A rather favorable opportunity for estimating the proportion of cures to patients seems to be afforded by the figures given concerning the patients from Villepinte, a private asylum for consumptive girls, near Paris. Bertrin (E. T., pp. 98 ff.) tells us that for the three years 1896-1808 inclusive, 58 of these girls were sent to Lourdes, of whom 20 were cured. Rouby (pp. 163 ff.) derives from Boissarie a report also for three years (apparently just preceding those given by Bertrin, but not explicitly identified) during which 58 girls were sent to Lourdes, of whom 24 were cured or ameliorated, the cure being maintained with two or three exceptions. Rouby says he investigated the facts for one of these years, 1894, in which out of 24 girls who were sent, 14 were reported cured or ameliorated; he found that 10 of those so reported afterwards relapsed, leaving only 4 benefited. He went to Villepinte, he says, and investigated personally the facts for 19o2, finding that 30 girls had been sent, and all 30 had come back unbenefited; and he quotes Ludovic Naudeau as having investigated the facts for igor with the same result—none were benefited. We gather from Bertrin, p. 101, that the same thing was true for 1903. Here, apparently, then, are three consecutive years, 1901-1903, in which no cures at all were wrought in the Villepinte delegation.
123. Benson, as cited, pp. 25-26.
124. We find Doctor E. Mackey, Dublin Review, October, 1880, pp. 396 f., very properly dissenting when Pére Bonniot (Le Miracle, etc., p. 89) lays stress thus on suddenness as a proof of miraculousness in a cure. Mere suddenness of cure,” he says, “is not decisive… the power of imagination is very great.” Cures just as remarkable and just as sudden as those of Lourdes constantly occur in the ordinary experience of physicians. Doctor J. Burney Yeo quite incidentally records two such sudden cases, in an article on a subject remote from Lourdes, in The Nineteenth Century for August, 1888, vol. XXIV, pp. 196-197—one of blindness and the other of lameness. “A gentleman,” says he, “the subject of serious disease, who had shown a tendency to the development of somewhat startling subjective symptoms, suddenly declared that he was blind. He was carefully examined by the writer and by an eminent oculist, and although no particular optical defect could be found in his eyes, to all the tests it was possible to apply, he appeared to be blind. A few days afterwards, and without any apparent or sufficient cause or reason for the change, and almost without comment, he asked for the Times newspaper, which he proceeded to read in bed without any difficulty!” “The next instance,” he continues, is perhaps still more remarkable. A young woman presented herself at a London Hospital, supporting herself on crutches, and declared she was losing the use of her legs. After one or two questions, and after noticing the awkward manner in which the crutches were used, the writer took from her both crutches, and ordered her, in a firm manner, to walk away without them, which she did! Some years afterwards he was sent for into a distant suburb to see this person’s father, having himself quite forgotten the preceding incident, when this same young woman came forward and reminded him that he had cured her of lameness’ many years ago! Now, although no curative agency whatever, in the ordinary sense, was introduced or applied, in either of these instances, yet one of them might have said, whereas I was blind, now I see,” and the other, whereas I was lame, now I walk.””” Professor Charles (or George?) Buchanan, “a distinguished Professor of Surgery in Glasgow” “visited Lourdes in the autumn of 1883, and was much interested in the undoubted benefit that some of the pilgrims received.” He published some notes in the Lancet of June 25, 1885, from which Doctor A. T. Myers and F. W. H. Myers extract the following account of an instantaneous cure in which he was an actor (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 1X, 1893-1894, pp. 101 ff.). With regard,” he writes, to persons who have been lame and decrepit and known as such to their friends, the fact of their leaving their crutches and walking away without help does seem astonishing and miraculous, and it is cases such as these which make the greatest impression.” “I believe that the simple visit to the grotto by persons who believe in it, and the whole surroundings of the place, might have such an effect on the mind that a sudden change in the nerve condition might result in immediate improvement in cases where there is no real change of structure, but where the malady is a functional imitation of organic disease. Such cases are frequent and familiar to all medical men, and are the most intractable they have to deal with, the disorder being in the imagination and not in the part… It is rather a remarkable coincidence that on October 2, 1883, within three weeks of my visit to Lourdes, I received a letter from Mrs. F., reminding me that some years before I had performed in her case a cure, instantaneous, and to all appearances miraculous, and which she properly attributed to undoubting faith in my word. It is a very good illustration of the kind of case to which I have been alluding, and of the power of mind over mind, and of the effect of imagination in simulating real disease. Mr. F. called on me in October, 1875, and requested me to visit his wife, who had been confined to bed for many months with a painful affection of the spine. When I went into the house I found Mrs. F., a woman of about thirty-one years of age, lying in bed on her left side, and her knees crouched up, that being the position that afforded most relief. She was thin and weak-looking, with a countenance indicative of great suffering. I was informed that for many months she had been in the same condition. She was unable to move her limbs, any attempt being attended with pain, and practically she was paralytic. She was not able to alter her position in bed without help, and this always gave so much trouble that she would have remained constantly in the same position if the attendants had not insisted on moving her to allow of the bed-clothes being changed and arranged. She had altogether lost appetite, and had become dreadfully emaciated, and only took what was almost forced on her by her husband and friends. She had given up all hope of recovery, but had expressed a strong desire to be visited by me in consequence of something she had heard from her husband in connection with a health lecture he had been present at many years before. When I entered her bedroom something in the way she earnestly looked at me suggested the idea that I might have some influence over her supposing it to be a case of hysterical spine simulating real spine irritation and sympathetic paralysis. The story I got was not that of real disease of spine or cord or limbs, and I at once resolved to act on the supposition that it was subjective or functional, and not dependent on actual molecular change or disintegration. I went to her bedside and said suddenly: ‘I cannot do you any good unless you allow me to examine your back.” In an instant she moved slightly round, and I examined her spine, running my finger over it at first lightly, then very firmly, without her wincing at all. I then said:
Get out of bed at once.” She declared she could not move. I said: You can move quite well; come out of bed,” and gave her my hand, when, to the surprise of her husband and sister, who looked perfectly thunderstruck, she came out of bed almost with no help at all, and stood alone. I said: Walk across the floor now,” and without demur, she walked without assistance, saying: ‘I can walk quite well; I knew you would cure me; my pains are gone.” She then went to bed with very little assistance, lay on her back, and declared she was perfectly comfortable. She was given a glass of milk which she took with relish, and I left the house having performed a cure which to the bystanders looked nothing short of a miracle. For many years I heard nothing of Mrs. F., when on October 2, 1883, I got her letter referred to, and shortly after the patient herself called at my house. In February, 188s, she again called on me. She is at present in fair health, not robust, but cheerful and contented. She says she never altogether regained her full strength; but as an evidence that she is not feeble or unable for a good deal of exertion, I may state that she now lives about five miles from my house, and she made her way alone, partly by omnibus, partly by tramway, and the rest on foot.” Compare the curiously parallel case, happening half a century earlier, described in note 26 to Lecture IV, on the “Irvingite Gifts.”
125. Benson, as cited, p. 24.
126. Bertrin, as cited, p. 280.
127. Pp. 250, 202.
128. P. 280. 120. P. 236. 130. P.i28%0. 13%. P. 2062.
132. On the case of Frau Ruchel, see the report in the Deutsch-evangelische Korrespondenz for August 11, 1908. The facts are brought out in the brochure of Doctor Aigner of Munich, Die Wahrheit iiber eine Wunderheilung in Lourdes.
133. Pp 197-198.
134. Zola, wishing to express these limitations in a word, said he would not ask very much—only let some one take a knife and cut his finger and immerse it in the water, and if it came out cured he would say nothing more. Charcot puts it in a higher form: “Faith-cure has never availed to restore an amputated limb” (as cited, p. 19). Percy Dearmer, having theories of his own, makes merry over such statements. There is no such thing as the supernatural, he says; all that God does is natural. But that carries with it that it is not unnatural. The only limit to such cures as we see at
Lourdes, then, is that nothing unnatural can happen there. Of course, then, faith cannot grow a new leg. But that is only because we are men and not crabs, and cannot be expected to act in a crustacean manner. Grace can turn a sick man into a well one, but it cannot turn a man into an apple-tree or a cactus. God must act on the lines of nature; the supernatural is not the unnatural (Body and Soul? pp. go ff.). All this is, of course, pure absurdity. It is to be noted, not obscured, that there are limitations to such cures; that a lost member cannot be restored by them, not even a lost tooth. It is only to dodge the question to say that such things are out of the question; they are not out of the question but very much in it—when it is a question of miracle. It is easy to say, “Better far to hop about on crutches than to have the soul of a crab,” but it is better simply to acknowledge that there are physical disabilities which Lourdes cannot repair, and that the reason is that they are above the power of nature to repair. It should be noted in passing that Lourdes does not admit that there are any physical disabilities which she cannot repair, and that the reason is that she, unlike Dearmer, believes in the supernatural, and believes that she wields it.
135. Ed. 7, 1905, p. 55. (E. T., Medicine and Mind.)
136. The New Review, January, 1893, p. 31: ‘I have seen patients return from the shrines now in vogue who had been sent thither with my consent, owing to my own inability to inspire the operation of the faith-cure. I have examined the limbs affected with paralysis or contraction some days before, and have seen the gradual disappearance of the local sensitive spots which always remain for some time after the cure of the actual disease—paralysis or contraction.”
137. The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, E. T., 1908, p. 72: A patient, “whose neck and jaw had been immobilized for years, and who had undergone unsuccessfully medical and surgical treatment from the most renowned clinicians, found sudden cure in the piscina at Lourdes.” Yet Dubois does not think well of Lourdes (p. 211); that is to say, after experience with it. His expectations had been good, and he was disillusioned only by experience. “The cures there,” he says, ‘“are in fact rare.” Superstition goes all lengths, and—well, “Lourdes is not very far from Tarascon.”
138. As cited, p. 271.
139. Jean de Bonnefon has accumulated at the end of his trenchant pamphlet, Fawut-il fermer Lourdes? 19o6—in which he argues that Lourdes should be abolished by the state—a number of opinions from French physicians to whom a questionnaire was sent, asking whether they thought the enterprise of Lourdes useful or injurious to the sick, whether they thought the piscinas were dangerous, on account of the chill or the filth, whether the long pilgrimages of the sick across France were or were not a menace to the country, and whether they thought the laws of hygiene were observed at Lourdes. The opinions of the physicians vary greatly: many are thoroughly hostile, a few are wholly favorable. What is noticeable is that a considerable number believe it is useful and ought to be sustained, although they have no belief whatever in the supernaturalness of the cures wrought there. One physician, for example, writes: “For a great number of sick people, and particularly women, Lourdes is a benefit… Free from all religious opinions, I never hesitate to send to Lourdes sick people who are in the particular mental condition to receive benefit from it, and I have often had occasion to congratulate myself on having done so” (p. 51). Another writes in a less genial spirit (p. 51): “The enterprise of Lourdes is useful for feeble-minded people, and there are legions of these in our fine land of France… I know Lourdes, and it seems to me that they are as filthy there—in the medical sense of the word—as they are everywhere else in France.”
140. W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1824, p. 684, is engaged in pointing out the physical effects which may be wrought by “expectant attention.” He says: “That the confident expectation of a cure is the most potent means of bringing it about, doing that which no medical treatment can accomplish, may be affirmed as the generalized result of experiences of the most varied kind, extending through a long series of ages. For it is this which is common to methods of the most diverse character; some of them —as the Metallic Tractors, Mesmerism, and Homceopathy—pretending to some physical power; whilst to others, as to the invocations of Prince Hohenlohe, and the commands of Doctor Vernon, or the Zouave Jacob, some miraculous influence was attributed. It has been customary, on the part of those who do not accept the physical or the miraculous’ hypothesis as to the interpretation of these facts, to refer the effects either to the imagination or to faith’—two mental states apparently incongruous, and neither of them rightly expressing the condition on which they depend. For although there can be no doubt that in a great number of cases the patients have believed themselves to be cured, when no real amelioration of their condition had taken place, yet there is a large body of testimony and evidence that permanent amendment of a kind perfectly obvious to others has shown itself in a great variety of local maladies, when the patients have been sufficiently possessed by the expectation of benefit, and by faith in the efficacy of the means employed.”
141. The New Review, January, 1893, p. 23.
142. A writer in The Edinburgh Review for January, 1903, p. 154, has this to say of the use of “suggestion” at Lourdes: “What is so painful and so repulsive in Lourdes and similar centres of popular devotion, is not so much the fanaticism of the pilgrims, the commercial element inseparable from the necessity of providing transport and lodging for the multitude of strangers, or even the incongruous emergence of those lower passions never wholly absent when men are met together, and separated by so small an interval from overwrought emotion, whatever its source, as the deliberate organization of hysteria, the training of suggestion, the exploitation of disease. Everything in the pilgrimage is calculated to disturb the equilibrium of the faculties, to stimulate, to excite, to strain. The unsanitary condition under which the journey is made, the hurry, the crowding, the insufficient food and sleep, the incessant religious exercises, the acute tension of every sense and power, all work up to a calculated climax.”
143. Op. cit, BE. ‘T. pp. 118.
144. Lourdes, pp. 42 fi.
145. Ibid., p. 50.
146. Ibid., p. v; cf. also Herbert Thurston, Hastings’s ERE, vol. VIII, p. 150. This is apparently also what J. A. MacCulloch means when he says (Hastings’s ERE, vol. VIII, p. 682): ‘“Occasionally miracles at Lourdes are also wrought on more than neurotic diseases,” and “they suggest an influx of healing power from without.”
147. Op. cit, pp. 150 fi. Cf. John Rickaby, “Explanation of Miracles by Unknown Natural Forces,” in The Month for January, 1877.
148. October, 1880, pp. 386-398. 1409. P. 308. 150. La Vérité sur Lourdes, pp. 123 fi. 151. We take the account as given by A. Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, 1, p. 139.
152. The shortcomings of the authorities at Lourdes in their reports of the cures may be read in The Dublin Review, October, 1908, pp. 416 fi., apropos of Doctor Boissarie’s L’@Euvre de Lourdes, new ed., 1908. Cf. Paul Dubois, The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, p. 211: ‘I have detected in the physicians of the bureau of statistics, in spite of their evident good faith, a mentality of such a nature that their observations lose all value in my eyes.”
153. Sir Francis Champneys, M.D., F.R.C.P., in The Church Quarterly Review, April, 1917, p. 44, says justly: “It is not safe to define a Miracle as something which cannot be understood; for, at that rate, what can be understood?”’
154. Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 32.
155. Deut. 13:2.
156. Paris, p. 195.
157. Lourdes, p. 39.
158. See above, p. 59.
159. Lourdes, p. 82.
160. P. Saintyves, Les Saints successeurs des Dieux, p. 11, note 1.
161. The bibliography at the end of Herbert Thurston’s article “Lourdes,” in Hastings’s ERE, is a model list, and contains all that the student need concern himself about. The English reader has at his disposal: H. Lasserre, Miraculous Episodes of Lourdes, 1884; R. F. Clarke, Lourdes, and its Miracles, 1888; G. Bertrin, Lourdes; a History of its Apparitions and Cures, 1908; R. H. Benson, Lourdes, 1914; together with such illuminating articles as that of Professor George Buchanan in the Lancet of June 25, 1885; of a series of British physicians and surgeons in the British Medical Journal for June 18, 1910; of J. M. Charcot (“The Faith Cure’) in The New Review, January, 1893, vol. VIII, pp. 18-31; and of Doctor A. T. Myers, and F. W. H. Myers (“Mind Cure, Faith Cure and the Miracles of Lourdes’) in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. IX, 1893-1894, pp. 160-209. There are also three excellent articles by Catholic physicians accessible: Doctor E. Mackey, Dublin Review, October, 1880, pp. 386-398; Doctor J. R. Gasquet, Dublin Review, October, 1894, pp. 342-357; Doctor E. Berdoe, Nineteenth Century, October, 1895, pp. 614-618.