Thoughts on the Validity of Miracles

Thoughts on the Validity of Miracles

I’ve recently encountered the notion that supposed that the miracles from the Bible were either complete fiction, or that they were on such a small scale that they could have been simple slight of hand magic tricks, like those accomplished by Sathya Sai Baba now in India, or by some of the better street magicians now working in the West. So, okay. None of us should be absolutely married to the Bible, once it has fallen into doubt. Shouldn’t our Religions be like Caesar’s wife, that is, ‘beyond reproach’. It might be a better idea for us all to perhaps re-write what we will use as our Civilization’s “Bible”, using documented accounts concerning the grandest and most spectacular Saints and Miracles of all of the World’s Higher Religions.

Of the Saints, I can start by mentioning just a few:



Vincent Ferrer who was so copious in his miracles that he honestly made Jesus Christ look like an amateur. It was said of Vincent that any day without ten-thousand miracles would have been a miracle. He went about Europe in the High Middle Ages, leading a band of thousands of flagellentes, people whipping themselves in atonement for the sins of the World, and his boost was that while they bled from open wounds, fasted, and marched 30 miles a day, none of them fell ill. He would go from town to town and empty hospitals and cure everybody of everything. He would address crowds numbering in the thousands, without anything like a public address system, and everybody would hear him, and hear him in their own native language, even while he was only an old man speaking Castilian in a quiet voice that carried by power of obvious miracle. We all would have heard more of Vincent Ferrer except that the Catholic Church has always been ashamed of him, since he had followed the French Popes and not the Roman ones during one of the Church’s many schisms (which should make one wonder how much God really favors the Roman Church if some of the greatest Saints had flourished outside of that Pall).

Joseph of Copertino flew. They call it levitation, but his was no so lift up into the air that makes one suspect wires and winches. No, his flights were described as “swift as an arrow”, and he would occasionally “spin like a top”. Both inside Cathedrals and then outside above processions, flying over trees, over building and walls. He became such a tourist attraction that the Catholic Church sent him packing away to an isolated monastery. Too much attention was being taken from the Bishops who resent so much attention being taken up by a monk of the lowest rank that the Church could offer.

Dominic would levitate also, but tried to keep it a secret. One time it was noticed that Dominic came back to his monastery late at night after the gates had already been locked and he did not wish to awaken the gatekeeper and so he looked around to see if there were any witnesses. Well, Dominic’s eyes were apparently not used to the dark, because in the shadows there did happen to be a few other monks who had also been caught outside after curfew, and, well, since Dominic was their Superior, it could well be understood why they would wish to avoid being seen by him. It was their concern to get back inside without being caught. Anyway, once Dominic thought that he was unseen, he raised himself up into the air and up over the wall. No jumping. No climbing. He rose up and over. On his death, they found that Dominic had wrapped himself in heavy timber chains, they conclude so that he would be weighted down enough to inhibit a tendency for levitation.

Saint Francis of Paola was perhaps the most imaginative and creative. He manipulated gravity and dimension – he would suspend falling men in the air while he pondered whether he should take the further step of interrupting their fall altogether (as the local Bishop had told him to be discrete regarding his miracle working). He would miraculously adjust the weight of boulders and stone pillars so that they would be feather light enough so that just several villagers could help him erect new chapels in short time. When chapels needed to be larger than originally planned, he would stretch the main roof beams to meet the new dimensions. He kept pet sheep in a country where sheep were a favorite menu item, and so time and again he was pressed to raise his pets from the dead, even when they were reduced to a pile bones and a fleece. Once when workers had lunched on one of his lambs and thrown the bones into a brick furnace, the Saint learned of the mistake and opened the furnace door, flames peeling out, and called for the lamb to jump out ‘before it got burned’, and in front of the entire workforce, out jumped the same little white lamb they had just finished. Then, years later, visiting the Court of the King of France, where they heard he was a vegetarian but supposed he would eat fish, the Saint corrected them and took the tray of grilled trout offered him and ‘resurrected’ them and turned them loose in the King’s goldfish pond. Some of his miracles are ongoing. As he was traveling toward the French Court, there had been outbreaks of the plague and several villages along the way prayed for his intercession, and so he agreed, and blessed their villages and, voila, there was no plague. But, curiously, afterward, for the next 4 or 5 centuries, no epidemic has effected these same few villages, not even the flu. Certainly simple magic tricks do not span hundreds of years.

Anyway, there is plenty of splendid documentation, surging up even during relatively modern times attesting to miracles to grand to have been supported by any of the mechanical technologies of their times. But these miracles need to be understood in a proper context. And people typically insist upon applying the wrong context. They use Greek Philosophy. Well, the Greeks never had a Miracle Worker. All their thoughts upon theology were entirely speculative. They argue from a purely uninformed reason, not pretending to the least bit of Prophecy or Revelation that God must be Absolute and qualified by all the Absolute attributes – that God must be All Knowing, All Powerful, and all of that business. Well, why? Even the Philosophers didn’t agree – it was as though half of the Greeks made arguments so that the other half could have their laughs by shooting them down. It seems most likely that Greek Philosophy designed its Theology mostly to give their Atheists the advantage.

But what do we see when we look empirically? We see supernatural miracles if we are willing to admit it. But these miracles are limited in their scope. We see nothing in absolutes. While we see instances of Supernatural Powers they are still confined within physical dimensions. Indeed, anybody who has studied the Saints can easily categorize them according to their relative strength, as Vincent Ferrer was obviously more powerful than Francis. And it is understood that some Angels are more powerful than others.

So, anyway, if one is really searching for the miraculous, then it is really a quest after the Spiritual Agent that has the most Spiritual Power. Praying to God, the Supreme Transcendental Being, seems to ignore the obvious problem that God is indeed Transcendental, that is, God, in His essence, is removed from the contingencies of His Creation – the One is not mixed up in Duality. So this would leave one to rally the Saints and the Angels to one’s sympathy. Now, the problem there is here is as I mentioned before – these Saints and Angels do not seem to have any Absolute Powers, and that what powers they may have may have to be budgeted. After all, the messages we get from the Saints and from the Marian Apparitions is that people need to pray and do penances in order to in effect charge the battery that the Saints and Angels use for their Miraculous Powers. Remember that the most prolific Saint in World History, Vincent Ferrer, also was the Saint who had the largest following of thoroughly enthusiastic penitents, all praying, fasting and atoning for practically every waking moment of every single day. And all of that power was channeled into the Miracles of their lead Saint.

But who does any fasting or atonement today. One need not wonder why even the Catholic Church can no longer boost of a single living Miracle Worker today, when, to be more like the Protestants, they have long since given up on prescribed fast days and discontinued any official call for overt acts of contrition. Now, just like the Protestants, Salvation is free because people once had the good sense to murder Jesus for the benefits of Free Sin. So, with little or nothing going into the Economy of the Miraculous, then we should not be surprised there are now so few miracles. People asking for miracles draw from the pool of power, but nobody contributes to it, and so of course it is all quite dry, and the Field is arid.

Well, there is some residual prayer and atonement going on. Despite the lack of any leadership within the Organized Religions, still private individuals here and there still pray, still fast, still practice penitential ascetic acts of atonement. Apparently these are enough to keep certain streams of Miracles flowing. Perhaps the best known of these are the healing springs in Lourdes France. We all do still remember Our Lady of Lourdes, don’t we? Well, those miraculous springs still flow, and people still remark upon continued miraculous healings all the time there. Indeed, I’ve heard from friends that there is a common miracle that everybody experiences there, and that is that while everyone is forbidden to towel dry themselves, it is noticed that everybody becomes instantly dry without toweling. Well, it would certainly be difficult to ‘prove’ this to be a ‘miracle’, since people would eventually air dry in any event, but still people are surprised by the instant dry phenomena even when they have not been told to expect it.

Oh, and this reminds me of one of the more curious auxiliary miracles that occurred along with the better known miracles of Our Lady of Fatima. The best known miracle there was the Miracle of the Sun, in which the sun was seen by 75,000 people across 500 square miles to be dancing and twirling in the sky and then to be plummeting toward the earth. Both dazzling and frightening. Well, incidentally, it had been raining. A large weather front had gone through, bringing a drenching rain that had gone on all night and all the morning, ending only as the Miracle of the Sun commenced. It was even considered part of the miracle that the unbroken and solidly black layer of clouds had suddenly parted so quickly to present a complete blue sky as a background for the suns spectacular dance. But, still, everybody was at least ankle deep in mud and many of the cars were bogged down up to their axles, and everybody was soaked to the bone. But immediately after the Miracle of the Sun came to its close, they say after about 20 minutes, and the sun was seen to be back to its ordinary appearance, well everybody then noticed that their cloths were completely dry, the ground was completely dry, and none of the stuck cars were any longer stuck. And nobody remembers the exact moment when the dryness occurred, as everybody’s attention had been so occupied with the Miracle of the Sun. But when their attention came back down to earth, nobody could explain where all the cold and damp had gone. Now, why would somebody go through all the trouble for these little known and incidental miracles which are miracles nonetheless?

Oh, and what was the message from Our Lady of Fatima, a supernatural Apparition? Well, it was for people to pray and do penance, as there can be no divine miracles or providential intercessions without first the supply of power that sources out of these ascetic practices.
People need to do more than just ask ask ask.