Book 4, lines 312-348

[Previous lines 275-311]

John narrates. Christ has been performing miracles, but he has not yet raised anyone from the dead.

“Atque ideo quacunque viam observatus agebat,
semper eum opperiens turba ingens strata iacebat
perfora, perque vias, sanctique ad limina templi.
Nondum aliquem tamen infernis revocaverat umbris        [315]
morte obita, cùm Sidonia remearet ab ora,
et Naïm ingressus sociis comitantibus altam est.
Ecce autem ingentem longo procedere pompam
ordine flammarum aspicimus; mœstamque per urbem
audimus luctum; causam tum denique luctûs                     [320]
cernimus, egregii iuvenis miserabile corpus
impositum molli pheretro; quem mersit acerba
morte dies, dulci cùm vix pubesceret aevo,
atque omnem vultu florenti dempsit honorem.
Qualis, quem pede pressit agro bos signa relinquens,        [325]
paulatim lassa languet cervice hyacinthus;
aut rosa, quam molli decerpens pollice virgo
vepribus in densis lapsam sub sole reliquit.
Urbe furens tota genitrix miseranda, capillos
scissa, genasque ambas manibus fœdata cruentis               [330]
ibat: eam circum pariter per densa viarum
pulsabant sœvis matres plangoribus astra.
ipsi orbam cives miserantur: ei unica proles
ille relictus erat vidui solatia lecti.
Ut Deus exanimis iuvenili in corpore vidit                          [335]
pallorem, et molli pictas lanugine malas,
parcere lamentis iubet, et considere pompam;
admotusque manu mulcens immobile corpus,
rursum animam gelidis membris innexuit: ecce,
erigitur puer, et (cunctis mirabile visum)                             [340]
prosiluit raptim in medios, vacuumque pheretrum
Llquit, et amplexans solatus voce parentem est.
Nec verô multis etiam post mensibus idem
egregiam amissa donavit luce puellam,
cui calor, et toto de pectore fugerat omnis                            [345]
halitus, aereas penitus dilapsus in auras.
Virginis ipse pater factum testatur Iarus
largus opum, pollens lingua et popularibus auris.”

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“And wherever he went he was noticed,
a huge crowd always turned up, lying strewn
on roads or at the Holy Temple’s threshold.
He hadn’t yet recalled any shades from hell,                      [315]
brought the dead back, when he returned from Sidon’s
coast to lofty Naim, with his disciples.
Here we saw a very large procession
all carrying torches, and throughout the city
we heard wailing. Finally—the sorrow’s cause:                  [320]
the pitiful corpse of an excellent young man
laid on a soft bier. He’d been plunged into death,
that very day, barely old enough to be a man:
and all the beauty of his face had vanished.
As when an ox in the field treads upon                              [325]
the stem of a hyacinth and it wilts little by little;
or a rose by a stream is plucked by a girl
then tossed in the sunlight into the briars.
The mother in her grief ran through the city
unkempt, tearing both her cheeks with her nails:               [330]
and around her, through the network of roads
other mothers raised lamentation to the stars.
They pitied her, bereaved of her only child,
the one consolation of her widowed bed.

When the god saw the young man dead, and the                [335]
pallor covering his down-covered cheeks
he stopped the procession and hushed their laments.
He lightly touched the still body, and bound
its soul again to those cold limbs. Behold!
The child rose up, and (amazing thing to see!)                   [340]
jumped from the bier and ran into the crowd
to embrace and console his mother.

A few months later he did the same again:
brought back to the light a beautiful girl,
from whose body all heat had gone, and whose soul           [345]
had completely dispersed into the air.
This is confirmed by Jairus, the girl’s father,
A generous man well loved by the people.”

------------

The first of these two miracles is found only in Luke:

Now it happened, the day after, that He went into a city called Nain; and many of His disciples went with Him, and a large crowd. And when He came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her. When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then He came and touched the open coffin, and those who carried him stood still. And He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” So he who was dead sat up and began to speak. And He presented him to his mother.

Then fear came upon all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen up among us”; and, “God has visited His people.” And this report about Him went throughout all Judea and all the surrounding region. [Luke 7:11-17]

The second is reported in Matthew 9:23-6, Mark 5:37-43 and Luke:

While He was still speaking, someone came from the ruler of the synagogue’s house, saying to him, “Your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the Teacher.”

But when Jesus heard it, He answered him, saying, “Do not be afraid; only believe, and she will be made well.” When He came into the house, He permitted no one to go in except Peter, James, and John, and the father and mother of the girl. Now all wept and mourned for her; but He said, “Do not weep; she is not dead, but sleeping.” And they ridiculed Him, knowing that she was dead.

But He put them all outside, took her by the hand and called, saying, “Little girl, arise.” Then her spirit returned, and she arose immediately. And He commanded that she be given something to eat. And her parents were astonished, but He charged them to tell no one what had happened. [Luke 8:49-56]

There is, I discover (it's no surprise, of course) a vast scholarly literature on miracles. How to think about them, though? Here, and more broadly?

Setting aside baseline issues of possibility and impossibility, or likelihood and extreme unlikelihood, there is the, I’d say, common-sense business of context. Coming at this matter from my position of relative ignorance, I would have said that Jesus’ miracles make historicist sense. What I mean is: the first century AD, and the near east, was a time and a place in which people believed in magic as a real-world business. The land was swarming healers and wizards and exorcists and conjurers. People took signs and wonders to be part of the fabric of reality. The disciples talk about Jesus performing miracles because nobody, in that place, at that time, would have taken him seriously if he hadn't performed miracles.

Nowadays we don’t, by and large, believe magic is a real-world business. We have been Max-Weber-ishly disenchanted. We walk through a world that figures by the laws of science. Anyway this is, as I understand it, the argument of eminent 20thC German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, more or less: that the truth of the NT is historicist and existential rather than literally miraculous.

But it seems more recent scholarship, or some of it, has challenged this view:

Despite the view made popular particularly by Rudolf Bultmann (whose chapter on miracle in his History of the Synoptic Tradition is arguably the most brilliant one in that book) that the world in which Jesus lived was peopled by miracle-workers of many kinds, and that the story of Jesus could hardly have been told without the recital of similar feats, the evidence tends to the opposite conclusion. True parallels to Jesus' miraculous activity are stubbornly hard to find. Jewish writings of the time show little interest in individual healers; exorcisms in anything like the gospel form are exceedingly rare; and the ‘nature miracles’ are unexpectedly unamenable to explanation as re-plays of classic biblical ‘mighty works’. Even the attempt by Geza Vermes to place Jesus in a class of charismatic ‘men of deed’ is carefully exposed as going beyond the evidence: Honi and Haninah ben Dosa were perhaps exceptional intercessors rather than healers, exorcists, or miracle workers, and the phrase ‘men of deed’ itself (the class of men which is said to have ceased when Haninah died) can be shown not necessarily, or even probably, to refer to miracles. [A E Harvey, review of Eric Eve’s The Jewish Context of Jesus' Miracles (Continuum 2002), The Journal of Theological Studies 54:2 (2003), 666]

This was interesting, and surprising, to me. Harvey, here, is reviewing Eric Eve’s attempt to situate the NT reports of Jesus’s miracle-work in a Jewish context; but most of the miracles contemporaneous Jewish writers discuss are OT, with a particular emphasis on those Mosaic wonders from Exodus. It seems that actually there wasn’t the broader culture of many itinerant wonder-workers and magic-men wandering 1st-century Judea that I had assumed: ‘the Gospels provide evidence of far more apparently miraculous activity than any Jewish writings with which they can be compared.’ So it seems the Jesus of the gospels was an unusual figure.

Take a step back. My problem with miracles, I suppose, is the way they imply a one-time or temporary intervention that either breaks or (at a pinch) bends the ‘natural’ logic of things. In the Summa Contra Gentiles Aquinas classifies ‘those things must properly be called miraculous’ (things ‘done by divine power apart from the order generally followed in things’) under three heads: (1) ‘events in which something is done by God which nature could never do’; (2) ‘events in which God does something which nature can do, but not in this order’; and (3) events which occur ‘when God does what is usually done by the working of nature, but without the operation of the principles of nature’. As an example of (1) Aquinas cites the case of the sun going back on its course, as reported in Isaiah; of (2) the case of someone ‘living after death, seeing after being blind or walking after being paralysed’. For (3) Aquinas instances somebody instantly cured of a disease that doctors, working more slowly over time, might have been able to cure eventually anyway. But this, it seems to me, separate God from His creation, such that we mark as miraculous moments when He intervenes. Brian Davies puts it well, I think:

It is very common to find people speaking of miracles as divine interventions. As we have seen, Mackie speaks in such terms. For him, the world has certain ways of working when left to itself, and miracles are instances of God stepping in. One might, however, wonder about the appropriateness of thinking of miracles in these terms. For should we suppose that God is literally able to intervene? To say that something has intervened on a given occasion would normally be taken to imply that the thing has moved in where it was not to be found in the first place. In this sense, I can be said to intervene in a fight when I enter the fight myself, having formerly not been part of it. Does it, however, make sense to speak of God moving in where he has not been present before? And does it make sense to think of miracles as cases of God moving in? It will make sense to speak and think in such ways if we take God to be basically a kind of observer in relation to the world, and if we think of the world as able to carry on independently of him. On such a view, sometimes referred to as ‘Deism’, there is no intrinsic problem with the notion of God intervening (though classical deists were not, in fact, supporters of belief in miracles as divine interventions). But matters are different if, along with orthodox Christianity, for example, we hold that the world is always totally dependent on God for its existence. If that is the case, then God is always present to his creatures as their sustainer or preserver. He is ‘omnipresent’ or ‘ubiquitous’, and it will therefore make sense to deny that he can, strictly speaking, intervene. It will also make sense to deny that miracles should be thought of as cases of divine intervention. [Brian Davies, ‘Miracles’ New Blackfriars 73 (1992), 102-120]

It is, I suppose, theologically uncontroversial to suggest that since God made the laws of the universe He can break the laws of the universe if he wishes to. But it's much harder for me to see, and is indeed rather obnoxious to imagine, that God can break Himself. If he is the ground of existence, and everywhere within it, then what we call the laws of nature are, simply, Him; and to violate them would be to violate Himself. That's a problem, isn't it?

Davies quotes another theologian, Samuel Thompson

The notion of miracle as something which happens in nature and is contrary to the laws of nature is a curiously confused concept. In the first place, no such conception can be found in the Biblical sources of the Hebrew-Christian tradition, for those sources did not have the conception of natural law. To call an event a miracle is to call it a ‘marvel’, and to say that it evokes wonder and awe. It is to say that the event is inexplicable apart from its supernatural significance. Even if direct intervention by God occurs in nature only ignorance can make it appear capricious. Whatever it is, it has its explanation and it fits the rational order of being. If we cannot account for it in terms of the natural order it is because the natural order is not the whole of the rational order of being. We have to assume that complete knowledge would show us the complete harmony of divine and natural causation in every event. [Thompson, A Modern Philosophy of Religion (Chicago, 1955), 454]

There’s something attractive in this—C S Lewis makes a similar argument in his Miracles book. In an earlier blogpost I meandered along lines somewhat like these: the three ‘kinds’ of miracle associated with the NT Jesus are to do with his miraculous birth, his curing of the sick and magicking food and drink for others, and his resurrection. If we take these not as violations of the natural order but as marvellous intensifications of three astonishing facts of our existence—that our decaying genetic material is able to combine into fresh new genetic material when we make babies, that we are able to counter the flow of entropy to the extent that medicine and agriculture carve out islands of flourishing, against the cosmic grain, and that … well, as I say in that blog the third miracle there is the one I find hardest to swallow, but: life as such, I guess. That we live and continue to live rather than not. Davies isn’t having this, though. He suggests that the miracles recorded in the NT are not ‘intensifications’ of an, as it were, natural grain of flourishing woven into reality, but stark breaches with natural law:

It is correct to say that in English translations of the Bible, ‘miracle’ is sometimes used to refer only to an event which the author regards as somehow significant, or as somehow pointing beyond itself. It is also correct to say that biblical authors never speak of ‘natural laws’, and that some of them (e.g. the author of the Fourth Gospel) do not regard the significance of miracles as exhausted by the observation that they are events which are contrary to what modern authors mean by ‘natural laws’. According to the New Testament scholar R.H. Fuller, the Bible ‘knows nothing of nature as a closed system of law. Indeed the very word “nature” is unbiblical’. But it is surely going too far to suggest that, in the sense of 'natural law' noted above, biblical authors have no notion of natural law, and that they have no notion of miracles as violations of natural laws. As writers like Swinburne and Mackie understand it, the following events, if they occurred, would be violations of natural laws:

Levitation, resurrection from the dead in full health of a man whose heart has not been beating for twenty four hours and who was dead also by other currently used criteria; water turning into wine without the assistance of chemical apparatus or catalysts; a man getting better from polio in a minute.

Yet this is exactly the sort of event typically cited in the Bible (or, at least, the New Testament) as miraculous. And, though biblical authors do not indulge in the sort of qualification present in the list just given, any reader of their texts ought to be able to see that they often seem to presuppose something like it when they talk of the miraculous. In many cases, at any rate, they presume that miracles are events which cannot be brought about by the physical powers of objects in the world. [Davies 106]

These are deep waters, I know; but even the small pedalo-like excursion I have made into them has not filled me with confidence that scholarship has them very well mapped. Take for instance, Larry Shapiro’s sceptical line in The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural Is Unjustified (Columbia University Press 2016). He makes the distinction between ‘justified’ and ‘unjustified’ beliefs:

Another way to understand the significance of the justified/unjustified distinction is to reflect on the difference between beliefs that you think are true on the basis of some sort of evidence versus those that you simply want to be true or wish were true. Beliefs of the latter sort have nothing to recommend them except, perhaps, that it might be really nice if they were true. Sadly, beliefs don’t become true just because you would like them to be. If they did, I would get myself to believe that a big bowl of ice cream will appear in front of me in the next ten seconds because I have a hankering for some mint chocolate chip. No doubt living in a world where beliefs were true just because you wanted them to be would have its advantages. Just imagine. You would never become ill unless you wanted to. You would become rich if you believed that you would be. You would never die, or if you did, you would live in paradise for eternity if that’s what you believe would happen. If only wishing that something were true actually made it true. [Shapiro 17-18]

His point is that ‘to demand justification for one’s beliefs is to understand that their truth doesn’t rest on their desirability. Justification requires evidence of some kind.’ But this is very oddly put. ‘Beliefs don’t become true just because you would like them to be’ presupposed that all belief is denotative, and none of it is performative; and his daft little example with the ice-cream contradicts, rather than supports, what he’s trying to say, I think. I have a hankering for a cup of tea. I wish one would appear on my desk, as I type. I get off my arse, go into the kitchen, brew up a cup and bring it back. Presto!

I don’t mean to be merely facetious. Shapiro is finessing that wish, want and will and all tangled up together and that, in fact, nothing happens in the human world at all without some willpower putting its pressure on the Archimedian lever of actuality. My cup of tea appears if and only if I will it to appear. Similarly telepathy, ‘reading’ another’s mind, might seem miraculous, in the sense of impossible, were it not that humans have language, a tool that enables us to do it all the time, every day, simply by talking to one another. Nor is this philosophically trivial: there is an important and respectable tradition in metaphysics that sees will and primary, actually: for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche will is the fundamental nature of everything.

At the head of this post: ‘Christ Raising Jairus's Daughter’ (c.1800) by William Blake.

[Next: lines 349-388]