MIRACLE. - I. NOTION AND DIVISION. - From the Latin mirari, it indicates a fact that surprises, that arouses wonder, astonishment. It is usually defined as: «A sensible fact, wrought by God, outside all the forces and laws of nature». And since a miracle can surpass the laws of nature in three ways, theologians, following St. Thomas (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 105, a. 8), classify miracles into three categories, according as they surpass the power of created nature: either in their constitutive element, or in relation to the subject in which they occur, or by the manner in which they are brought about. In De potentia, q. 6, a. 2 ad 3, the Angelic Doctor proposes another division, which does not perfectly coincide with the preceding one: miracles supra, contra and praeter naturam. Supra naturam are the miracles that surpass natural forces either absolutely or relatively to the subject in which they occur; contra naturam, those that are opposed to a particular inclination of some creature; praeter naturam, the phenomena that nature cannot produce in the manner in which the Creator brings them about.
II. POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLE
God is omnipotent; he can therefore bring about whatever is not repugnant to being, and hence also the miracle. Moreover, he created with full freedom: in willing the laws of nature, he did not renounce the faculty of manifesting his power outside them; he can therefore in certain cases withdraw, limit, or modify his concurrence, and then the miraculous phenomenon occurs. Nor is the miracle repugnant to divine immutability, as though God were to change his preordained decrees. By one and the same act of will he established from eternity both the laws and the miraculous exceptions. All the change lies in the creatures, not in God: one must not confuse the will of the change with the change of the will. Nor is the miracle a correction that God makes to his work, which is perfect in its own order. Nor is it wrought idly or capriciously; if God performs miracles, he always accomplishes them for a higher end: either to manifest a particular benevolence toward some creature, or to impress his dominion, or to lend credit to some revealed truth. The miracle, then, is not a rent in the fabric of phenomena, but an embroidery, an ornament, which makes the goodness and wisdom of the divine Ordainer stand out the better.
Without doubt, science presupposes the stability of natural laws, but a physical stability, not a metaphysical one: the laws, left to themselves, always act in the same way. They are not, however, such as to exclude every exception on the part of the Creator. The scientist who moves within the field of sensible experience cannot as such enter the metaphysical field in order to deny the Transcendent or his intervention in the world; in no way can he demonstrate absolute or metaphysical determinism, in such a way as to exclude every modification brought about by the Supreme Being.
Some physicists object that the laws of nature are so intimately connected among themselves that one cannot be suspended without suspending them all.
With the miracle, however, God does not suspend the law, but its application; he modifies the effect, not the law, which always remains with all its force of application. The mutual interference of physical laws is not denied, but it is not such as to be disturbed by miracles. The repercussion of the miracle in the universe takes place according to natural laws; therefore it is not a cause of cosmic disorder, just as no human action whatsoever is.
Some physicists, since the energy of the universe is constant, believe themselves entitled to deny miraculous phenomena, which would imply subtraction and increase of cosmic energy. In reality the principle "nothing is created, nothing is destroyed" does not have so universal a scope as to exclude the creation of new elements, nor can it be extended to the energies pertaining to the spirit. It holds only in the physical field and finds certain application in the sphere of natural causality; under the naturalist's hands nothing is created or destroyed: there are transformations. But the principle cannot be extended to divine omnipotence, as though God could not create or destroy. Besides, miraculous action does not imply the creation of new elements, but the impressing of a new direction upon existing cosmic energy. God can multiply loaves and form tissues from existing cosmic elements, without creating new energies.
Against the possibility of the miracle is set contingentism or physical indeterminism, which denies the existence of constant laws. Indeed, one does not see how God could derogate in particular cases from laws, if these do not exist. It should be noted, however, that if today one speaks of indeterminism, it is almost only in the field of atomic and nuclear physics, insofar as the position of corpuscles, their velocity and direction and the consequent phenomena can be known only approximately, unlike what happens in the ordinary macroscopic and microscopic world. It is clear, however, that we are faced with a subjective and not an objective indeterminacy: it would be arbitrary to consider corpuscles outside law, and therefore to speak of objective indeterminacy.
In reality, the great physicists, when they speak of the "uncertainty principle," mean to say that one cannot have a precise knowledge of the position and motion of corpuscles, such as to foresee their actions with certainty, as happens in classical physics, but they do not mean to exclude an objective determinism. Indeterminism is the impossibility of foreseeing future phenomena, due to the imprecision of physical measurements: thus L. De Broglie (I quanti nella fisica moderna, Turin 1938, p. 220). Max Planck, Nobel laureate in physics, after affirming that "our observations are too coarse to be applied to a direct verification of the law of causality," adds: "We need not dwell further to explain that physics, in all the problems of the atomic and molecular world, tends... to substitute statistical laws than with rigidly causal dynamic laws, and in this sense it is legitimate to say that physics... in all its fields is founded on the validity of the causal law" (La conoscenza del mondo fisico, Turin 1942, p. 121). Atomic and nuclear phenomena take place in the realm of material energies, and therefore have fixed laws: it is not presumable that they are endowed with free will, capable of self-determination.
III. HISTORICAL KNOWABILITY OF MIRACLE
The miracle is a rare fact, but this increases attention and prompts a more careful investigation. Moreover, insofar as it is perceptible, it is a fact like any other and can be known in the same way, namely: either by direct vision, possible only to those who are present at it; or by the testimony of those who were present at it. It is objected that for the most part miracles are attested by people of the common folk, untrained in criticism and prone to superstition. Their judgment therefore cannot be trusted. For it may indeed be presumed that they mistook for a miracle what in fact was not one. The reply, however, is that it is one thing to attest that a fact occurred, another that it is miraculous. To testify that a fact took place does not require great learning and culture. Whether, then, the historically established fact is miraculous or not will be judged in the light of modern knowledge.
Some rationalists, inspired by Hume, affirm that miracles, even those most historically established, since they are in contradiction with scientific laws, cannot be admitted as true. But the conflict pointed out does not exist: the data of science and of history can agree. It is known with scientific certainty that physical laws, left to themselves, always act in a uniform manner, and that the exception wrought by the supreme Ordainer is not repugnant. In other words, the scientific law attests a rule, the historical testimony an exception. It is illogical not to accept both.
IV. PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWABILITY OF MIRACLE
The question arises whether it is possible to know that a phenomenon transcends every physical causality and represents an exception to the laws of nature. All the more, it is said, since it could depend on unknown material energies. It is known with certainty, however, that certain phenomena nature cannot bring about at all. Everyone knows, for example, that a single word cannot bring back to life someone truly dead, and that a little water cannot in an instant cleanse one of gangrenous wounds or of leprosy. This has always been admitted, by all peoples, of every age and culture. Common sense finds in this a confirmation from science. It is known, then, that certain phenomena are naturally unrealizable; therefore, if a fact occurs that falls among these, one must say that it depends on a cause transcending the physical order. If the preternatural character of some phenomenon remains doubtful, it will be called a doubtful miracle: this does not take away the existence of certain miracles.
However great the physical forces may be claimed to be, they are always material: in order to act they must be applied, and the effects are proportionate to them. And since material agents have a specific nature, a determinate structure, the phenomena that follow will always be determinate, not disparate. If, therefore, there occur phenomena with characteristics opposed to those mentioned, one must say that they transcend material causality and depend on a free spiritual agent. Christianity is full of these phenomena. A word that heals at a distance, a voice that calms the storm, changes water into wine, multiplies the loaves, frees a possessed man, makes a fever cease, makes a paralytic walk, raises a man dead for four days — it cannot be called an adequate cause of such disparate effects. Such phenomena, by their variety and irregularity, have no proportion to their physical antecedents and postulate a free cause transcending matter.
V. PROBATIVE VALUE OF THE MIRACLE
The miracle is a most certain criterion of Revelation, if it has a close connection with it. This connection can be explicit, if the thaumaturge performs prodigies to show the divine origin of his mission, or implicit, if this results from the circumstances. The miracle is in fact a divine work: man can only implore it. If therefore the thaumaturge asks for it in confirmation of a doctrine, it is God himself who confirms it; if a person claims to speak in the name of the Most High and to announce to men a revealed religion, and performs miracles, these are like the seal impressed by God to authenticate the affirmations of the legate. God is free, but he cannot do evil. If in the circumstances recalled he were to perform miracles without the intention of approving the doctrine of the thaumaturge, he would become a witness of falsehood, and would lead those present into an insuperable error: for these, basing themselves on common sense, would take the miracles as a divine confirmation and would accept as revealed a doctrine that instead is not.
Bibliography10 works
Fabio Fabbri
VI. THE MIRACLE OF JESUS
Jesus Christ himself had said to the two disciples sent by John the Baptist: "Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise" (Mt. 11:5); the same Redeemer, to the Jews who had asked him whether he was truly the Christ, had replied: "The works that I do in my Father's name are those that bear witness to me" (Jn. 10:23 ff. and 5:36).
The first representations of the Lord's miracles in Christian cemetery art appear in the so-called Greek chapel in the cemetery of Priscilla (v.), with the scenes of the resurrection of Lazarus, the healing of the paralytic, and the fractio panis with the seven baskets of bread, allusive to the miracle of the multiplication (mid-2nd century). In the 3rd and 4th centuries, in the cemetery frescoes and on the sarcophagi, there will appear the scenes of the changing of water into wine at the wedding of Cana, the healings of the woman with the issue of blood, of the Canaanite woman, of the crippled woman, of the possessed man, of the man born blind and of the blind men, and the resurrections of the daughter of Jairus and of the son of the widow of Nain.
In non-cemetery art there are the scenes of the Lord walking on the waves and of St. Peter saved, as well as the healing of the paralytic in the frescoes of Dura-Europos (v.) of the mid-3rd century.
Precisely according to the text of the Synoptics (Mt. 8:2-3; Mk. 1:40-42; Lk. 5:12-13), at the simple touch of the Lord's hand the leper is healed (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, pl. 220, 1st fragment on the left). At the simple gesture of Christ's right hand the demoniac is freed, as shown by the fresco of the first half of the 3rd century in Catacumbas (G. Mancini, Scavi sotto la basilica di S. Sebastiano sull'Appia, in Notizie degli scavi, 20 [1923], pl. 10, 1 and 2), an ivory in the Louvre Museum of the 5th century (G. Duthuit and F. Volbach, Art byzantin, Paris 1903, pl. 10 B) and one of the mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna dated between 493 and 526 (C. Ricci, Tavole storiche dei mosaici di Ravenna, S. Apollinare nuovo, Rome 1934, pl. 1, fig. 2). Artists represent Jesus Christ in the act of performing miracles by means of different gestures, as is read in the Gospel texts, that is, the Lord is implored to lay his hands (in the Greek text), his hand (in the Latin text [Mk. 5:23; 7:32; Mt. 7:32]) on the sick, or simply to touch them (Mk. 8:22); he puts his fingers into the ears of the deaf-mute and moistens his tongue with his saliva (Mk. 7:33); he lays his hands instead on the eyes of the blind man of Bethsaida (Mk. 8:23) and on the woman bent double (Lk. 13:11-15); he touches the leper (Mt. 8:2-3; Mk. 1:40-42; Lk. 5:12-13), the blind men (Mt. 9:2-3; 20:29-34); but he also restores sight by joining the eyes with earth moistened with saliva (Jn. 9:1-38); the woman with the issue of blood is healed at the simple contact with the Lord's garments; the sister of Lazarus approaches the divine Master as a suppliant (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, pls. 125, 5; 126; the artist, in order to represent the iam foetet of the Johannine text, has her put her fingers to her nose [id., ibid., pl. 115, 1]) or, full of gratitude, kisses the Savior's hand
(id., ibid., pls. 91, 207, 2 and fig. 186), a gesture that the Canaanite woman also performs with veiled hands, presented to Christ by a disciple (id., ibid., pl. 116, 1). All these scenes do not have a historical meaning, but were chosen by the Church's magisterium and reproduced to attest the living faith in Jesus Christ, the divine thaumaturge sent down from heaven to heal humanity. Thus indeed St. Augustine indicates him: "ad sanandum grandem aegrotum descendit omnipotens medicus" (Sermo, 87, 11: PL 38, 527) and again: "Dominum nostrum et Salvatorem Jesum Christum medicum esse nostrae salutis aeternae" (Sermo, 88, 1: ibid., 38, 539).
An inscription discovered at Timgad expresses the same concept very well, invoking Jesus Christ as the only physician: "rogo te Domine: subveni Christe tu solus medicus sanctis et penitentibus" (G. Carcopino, L'invocation de Timgad au Christ médecin, in Rendiconti della Pont. accad. rom. di arch., 3rd series, 5 [1928], pp. 79-87).
The same representations, especially that of the resurrection of Lazarus, of the multiplication of the loaves, of Jesus Christ walking on the waters, will be repeated in ivories, in gilded glass, and in the iconographic cycles of the basilicas from Dura Europos of the mid-3rd century to the grandiose ones of the ancient and medieval basilicas, and in the stained-glass windows of Romanesque churches. There the scenes of the Lord's miracles are at once narrative and didactic. St. Gregory the Great (590-604), repeating a concept already expressed by Paulinus of Nola, affirms that "the image is for the illiterate what writing is for those who know how to read; by means of images the illiterate learn what they ought to imitate; images are the reading book of the illiterate" (Ep., IX, 105: PL 77, 1027).
Enrico Josi
VII. THE MIRACLE IN CAUSES OF BEATIFICATION AND CANONIZATION
The miracles sometimes performed during their lifetime by the servants of God do not of themselves constitute proof of holiness; therefore only those worked through their intercession after death definitively confirm such holiness with divine authority. For this reason the Church has always held this supernatural element in great consideration in causes of beatification and canonization and even today, albeit by a different criterion, makes of it an indispensable coefficient, at least in ordinary cases.
Proof of a miracle is required for every canonization; for beatification two cases are excepted: that of martyrs, when the martyrdom is most evident and, since there are no miracles (can. 2116 § 2), a pontifical dispensation from this supplementary proof is possible; and that of "equipollent" beatification, for the confirmation of a cult already legitimately in practice (can. 2134). For canonization two miracles are always required, unless it has been preceded by an equipollent beatification, in which case three are needed (can. 2138); for formal beatification the number depends on the value of the proofs adduced in the processes on the heroic virtues. If these consisted of direct or immediate testimonies, two duly approved miracles are sufficient; if they were only in part direct, three are needed; if all were indirect or documented, the CIC requires four (can. 2117). To be admitted in the causes of the saints, miracles must consist in instantaneous and perfect healings from incurable or grave diseases, of an organic and not psychic or functional nature, obtained following upon invocation of the servant of God. For each miracle there must be certain: the diagnosis of the disease, the prognosis, the fact of the instantaneous, perfect and inexplicable healing according to the laws of nature, the recourse to the intercession of the servant of God. The proofs must be furnished by immediate witnesses (can. 2020 § 7), corroborated by medical or other documents, gathered under the scientific control of an official expert (can. 2088 § 8) or of other doctors of the S. Congregation of Rites; among the witnesses the attending physicians cannot be lacking (can. 2028). Practice moreover requires, in accordance with can. 2031, that two expert inspectors examine the person healed by miracle, if still alive, and report in writing to the inquiring tribunal. The interrogations are conducted on the basis of special questions prepared by the promoter general of the faith. The discussion of the proofs is no less rigorous. A first preliminary examination is today entrusted to a medical college recently instituted at the Sacred Congregation of Rites, by which the two expert opinions that can. 2118 § 1 requires for each miracle are examined and discussed in one or more plenary sessions. The college has at its disposal the entire body of proofs collected, which it may also have supplemented, and must answer a twofold question already put to the two official experts: namely, whether it is a case of a true cure from a determined disease; whether such a cure is inexplicable according to the laws of nature (can. 2119). The collegial response, accompanied by a reasoned report on the discussions that took place, is delivered to the cardinal prefect of the Sacred Congregation and then submitted to the formal discussion of the cardinals, prelates and consultors, convoked in preparatory congregation, together with all the proofs collected in a summary, the arguments of the defense and the objections of the promoter general of the faith, who may avail himself of the technical counsel of a private expert of his confidence. The whole, delivered in a printed volume, is called the "position." The preparatory congregation discusses the miracles (no more than two at a time) under all scientific and theological aspects, and by decision of the cardinals decrees whether or not further proceedings may be taken. If so, in the so-called general congregation the cardinals, prelates and theologians submit to the pope their consultative vote on the individual miracles proposed for the beatification and canonization of the servant of God in question, and the pope, if and when in his high counsel he believes it right to do so, orders the promulgation of the decree of approval, or in the other case orders new and appropriate clarifications.
Bibliography5 works
Salvatore Indelicato
VIII. MIRACULOUS HEALINGS
These are healings that occur exceptionally, accessible to the control of the senses, brought about by the intervention of God. For a physician, on an objectively scientific plane, to be able to declare that a healing is miraculous, five factors must concur, demonstrable in a categorical manner.
1) Preexistence of a serious illness accompanied by anatomical alterations (modifications, loss or overproduction of tissues), with a diagnosis confirmed by the most reliable methods of investigation and with a prognosis unfavorable at least for the organ affected. 2) Repair of every organic lesion in a time so brief as to be considered instantaneous (either absolutely or at least relatively). 3) Inefficacy of every therapeutic means, or at least of those employed. 4) Absence of the normal period of gradual recovery of function (the healed person can immediately walk or eat and digest with full normality, etc.) or the period necessary for the reabsorption of edemas, ascites, pleural effusions, destruction of tumor masses, etc., which, however, does not exclude a rapid progression of his state of health (increase in weight, in strength, etc.). 5) Lasting healing, that is, one that does not exhaust itself in an ephemeral improvement, but, besides being perfect, persists upon subsequent check-ups made at a considerable distance of time.
At Lourdes (v.), for example, the "Bureau des constatations médicales" invites the "graced" person to submit to a collegial examination after at least one year, bringing certificates and reports of the attending physicians, a weight-gain curve and whatever else may be useful for the judgment; there follows a very rigorous examination, aided by radiological and laboratory tests; if all the members of the commission are in agreement, the healing in question is declared to be of a preternatural order.
Furthermore, it is characteristic of miraculous healing to be in constant correlation with religious acts on the part of the sick person or of other persons (prayers, pilgrimages, applications of relics, images, water, earth, oil, etc., immersions in or ingestion of holy water). At times, not constantly, at the moment of the healing the subject experiences particular, strange, painful sensations, states of anguish, or loses consciousness; all of very brief duration, immediately followed by a sensation of calm, of well-being and the impression of feeling healed; at times, in coincidence with the healing, the healed person is pervaded by a wave of sweet, indescribable perfume (osmogenesis).
Positive science has attempted by various paths an explanation of the miracle that would exclude God and his intervention. The most common is that of suggestion (v.): in the mind of the sick person there insinuates itself the persuasion that the illness is curable, that little by little it is coming to an end, that it no longer exists and that health has by now been regained. In support of the thesis, the instantaneous healings of certain nervous and psychic illnesses are adduced, having recourse to the diagnosis of "hysteria" (v.). In doing so, however, they close their eyes to the substantial difference between the healing of a functional disorder and the disappearance of an organic illness provoked by verified anatomical alterations. Bernheim himself said and taught that suggestion is the therapy of functions, and no scientist worthy of the name can seriously and honestly explain by suggestion the instantaneous healing of a tuberculosis, of a bone fracture, of a long-suppurating abscess.
Charcot, referring to the work of suggestion and autosuggestion, wrote that the cause of miraculous healings must be sought in the "faith that heals"; faith, naturally, not understood by the author in the theological sense of the word, but as a psychic force capable of shaking the mind of the sick person. The "modernists," with E. Le Roy at their head, generally accept this theory; for them faith ("la foi qui guérit," "the faith healing") in determinate circumstances is capable of unleashing a beneficial psychic-nervous shock, of releasing a force that acts by exciting the imagination, promoting emotion, exalting hope, the intense desire, the craving for healing, to the point of bringing, through the force of suggestion, to the conviction and the fact of healing.
The entire scientific inconsistency of such reasoning is clear; but, apart from that, how is one to explain by suggestion the prodigious healings in infants of a few months, truly physically incapable of feeling the "faith that heals"; and in those who go to the shrines skeptical, hostile, desperate, or in those far from the enthusiasm-inspiring manifestations of collective faith, or during a disheartened return journey or in sleep?
Many other theories seek to explain miraculous healings by having recourse to the presumed healing efficacy of psychic actions. They have recourse to so-called "psychotherapy" (v.; to which, on the other hand, suggestion and autosuggestion also belong). Psychotherapy can be empirical or systematic, and in all its various forms, whether it seeks to create excitations of a psychic nature capable of reflecting on the somatic part through the pathways of the subconscious, or whether it proposes, like psychoanalysis (v.), to transform the unconscious psychic complexes, the cause of the illness, into conscious psychic processes therefore controllable by the higher faculties; in all its forms it is brought forward by certain deniers of the miracle to give an explanation of extraordinary healings, maintaining that through the psychic pathway some therapeutic influence can be obtained even on organic lesions. Apart from the fact that not all scholars are in agreement on this last assertion, even granting this theory in full, one must say that it reveals itself altogether insufficient to explain miraculous healings. The curative action, in fact, as they themselves admit, is limited, whereas in the miracle the healing is total; to observe some modification in the state of illness and in the organic lesions, even if it occurs, a very long time is required and numerous sessions carried out by the specialist, on the suitably prepared subject, in particular conditions of environment, recollection, etc., that is, a procedure and a mechanism in antithesis with the instantaneous transformation wrought by the miracle.
With regard to theosophically based theories that presume to explain the miracle by the direct influence of a strong faith and a full conviction in the "unreality of evil" ("Christian science"), v. BAKER, MARY EDDY.
Other theories attempt to explain the miracle by invoking causes outside our sensory experience. Thus that of the "fourth dimension" (Zollner), defined by Schiaparelli as "the most ingenious and the most probable that can be imagined"; or the "spiritistic" explanation (Schrenck-Notzing, Koehler; for these v. METAPSICHICA; SPIRITISMO). In particular, it should be added that the followers of these various conceptions hold that miraculous healings are phenomena due to the intervention of spirits, that is, of discarnate souls. This granted and not conceded, insurmountable objections arise. In fact, the presumed sensible intervention of the discarnate manifests itself only when determinate conditions proper to the spiritistic séance are fulfilled (chain, medium, evocation of the departed, semi-darkness, etc.), which no one has ever seen take place in our shrines, or put into operation by the healed sick persons. Moreover, the power of discarnate souls, according to the spiritists themselves, is not "materially" superior to our power; therefore it is absurd to claim that the souls of the dead, with their "astral" bodies, can produce those material phenomena, those instantaneous healings, which living men, complete in soul and body, were not capable of producing.
Another order of explanations is based on the admission of a particular healing virtue in certain "intermediary agents" of the miracle — material substances (relics, oils, earth gathered at shrines or waters springing there, etc.) placed in contact with the diseased parts or used as a drink or in baths. It is thought that in such "intermediary agents" some force of powerful curative energy may be enclosed. In particular, this hypothesis is applied at Lourdes to the water of the pools and the earth of the grotto. It is well known, on the other hand, that the repeated analyses of the water and earth of Lourdes, carried out in various laboratories with the most modern methods of investigation, have given completely negative results. And, on the other hand, it is characteristic of medicines to act electively and for that determined disease with a constant similar action. At Lourdes, instead, and likewise in every other place of miracles, the most disparate morbid forms can disappear under the same apparent action, while completely similar sick persons are affected in a totally different manner by the same "intermediary agents."
Other hypotheses advanced (properties of the chlorophyll of the plants of the place, iodous or magnetic effluvia of herds, odors of certain qualities of hay, perfumes and aromas of the floral vegetation near the shrines) do not even have the merit of seriousness.
Finally, to explain the miracle, the "forces of nature," mysterious and scattered everywhere, are invoked. It is asserted that there cannot exist in nature a phenomenon that does not depend on natural forces and departs from the laws of nature and is outside or above it.
For naturalists, therefore, miraculous healings are not phenomena superior to natural forces, but only superior to our present knowledge; facts not in opposition to the laws of nature, but effects of natural forces that are not known today. This is why naturalists do not seek the cause of the miracle in the known forces of nature (animal or terrestrial magnetism, emanations of rare metals, cosmic waves, etc.), but focus on the unknown forces of nature, which in the future, their faith affirms, will be discovered by science, and then miraculous healings will be explained naturally.
This theory has already been answered above in the theological treatment of the miracle; here a special observation may be added for miraculous healings. Biology teaches that, when there is a fracture of a bone or any organic lesion, the consolidation and repair of the lesions take place by degrees, progressively; that is, there is needed the contribution by the blood of the elements necessary for the reconstruction of the new tissue, in a time more or less long according to the subject and the circumstances in which he lives, a time, however, that can never be annulled. If miraculous healings depended on natural forces (known or unknown), if they were, that is, effects of causes immanent in nature, there would come to be in nature forces in opposition to other forces, laws contrary to the laws of nature, which is contradicted by the order that is instead seen to reign in phenomena. In the study of nature, one must take into consideration the forces that act and the laws that regulate them. Natural forces have existed since the moment of creation; the laws evidently were not all immediately known, but successively and laboriously discovered as science progressed. Other laws will come to integrate our knowledge, new laws, but not new forces; it is impossible that new forces should be discovered, that is, that at a determined moment they should begin to exist, to act, to make their effects felt. This, on the contrary, should have happened at the shrine of Lourdes, where mysteriously, suddenly, from 1858 (the time of the apparition of the Virgin to Bernadette), natural forces until then unknown, endowed with characteristic curative virtues, should have appeared.
Bibliography7 works
IX. FOLKLORE
Devotional and moralizing literature of a popular tone has found a broad source of inspiration in miracles. Sacred dramas, narrative songs and prose legends have evoked and handed down among the people the memory of a most varied series of miracles worked by Christ crucified, by the saints, but especially by the Virgin.
In medieval theater miracles constituted almost a genre of their own: it is enough to recall the Miracles de Notre Dame par personnages of a Parisian confraternity of the 14th century (edited by G. Paris and N. Robert in 7 vols., Paris 1876-83), and the various miracles brought to the stage by the Tuscan sacre rappresentazioni of the 15th century. Italian popular and popularizing poetry counts numerous "stories" in ottava rima and little songs in short meters that narrate this or that miracle of the Madonna, of the Crucifix or of the saints: among the latter especially St. Anne, St. Alphonsus Liguori, St. Anthony Abbot and St. Anthony of Padua, St. Cajetan, St. Jerome, St. John, St. Nicholas. All these little poems or narrative songs have a clear moralizing purpose, but they rarely attain the climate of true poetry. They are also handed down through popular booklets. Numerous legends of miracles furthermore circulate in oral tradition in a non-fixed form.
Miracles also find an interesting reflection in popular art with the painted tablets for ex voto, which reproduce the scene of the grace obtained in a miraculous manner: some of these ex voto, through a particular ingenuousness and spontaneity of inspiration of their own, attain an expressive power of rare effectiveness. In this case too, the majority of the miracles depicted is attributed to the Madonna.