Essays In Pastoral Medicine Part 32

In many conditions where the nervous system can have influence a miracle is very difficult of proof from the context. There can, of course, be evident miracles in the cure of some nervous disorders, supposing the diagnosis to be certain. The sudden cure of advanced paresis would be as much a miracle as the sudden replacing of a lost femur. Commonly, however, in neuroses if there is an apparently miraculous healing or similar effect, the supernatural quality can not be established. Suppose Bernadette reported that she had seen the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes: the only safe thing to do in such a case is to deny the apparition until it has been proved. Suppose, secondly, that a patient who has been confined to bed for years by an hysterical paralysis, believed in the reality of the vision, had himself carried to Lourdes, and while at prayer there he suddenly stood up cured. That effect would prove neither the reality of the vision nor the supernatural quality of the cure; nor would it disprove either. We simply can not judge the case, because exactly the same effect has happened hundreds of times from purely natural impressions. If that same paralytic were lying in his bed at home and you set the house afire he would jump up and run.

If the patient, however, had been bedridden with a paralysis caused by certain degeneration of nervous tissue, and he were cured in the manner described, that effect would be supernatural, miraculous; always provided there is no error in the medical diagnosis.

There is a genuine diabetes and a pseudodiabetes. The latter condition may be diagnosed as true diabetes by a number of physicians, but it is only a symptom of hysteria. If the pseudodiabetes is suddenly cured, this cure may or may not be miraculous, but no one can say which is the truth; the probability is a hundred to one that the cure is altogether natural. There was a flourishing Christian Science congregation established in the west recently upon "miraculous" cure of a case of pseudodiabetes, which some ignorant physicians had called true diabetes, notwithstanding the fact that Christian Science does not believe in either diabetes or false diabetes.

We must not, then, call every strange event miraculous; nor, what is worse, are we rashly to make the supernatural a matter to be explained away loftily by the impudence of half science. A Belgian priest named Hahn wrote a monograph {352} to the effect that the ecstatic conditions observed in the life of Saint Teresa were autohypnotic, and he succeeded in drawing upon himself the undivided attention of the Congregation of the Index and a serious disturbance of his peace of mind. He became a martyr to science. We all like to be "liberal,"

impartial; but from the religious Mugwump _libera nos, Domine!_ Autohypnosis is always a mark of degeneracy in the natural order, and to call the ecstacy of a saint autohypnosis not only takes all worth from the manifestation, but the a.s.sertion is also untrue. There is a vast difference between the intense intellectual contemplation of a great saint in ecstacy, which leaves the person unconscious of the body and its surroundings, and the cataleptic trance of a neurotic patient who may mimic the saint.

Hypnotic or autohypnotic stigmata, and by stigmata here is meant bleeding from the hands, feet, and side, would be degeneracy of the mind and body in the natural order. Moreover, no clearly established cases are known, because conditions like those of Louise Lateau are by no means certainly physical from all points of view, as they would be if they occurred in an ordinary hysteric. In hypnosis or autohypnosis the subject's mind and body are degenerate; in sanct.i.ty, where at times may be displayed certain effects that resemble autohypnosis, there is always a sound mind. A saint may have an unsound, neurotic body, but a crazy "saint" or an hysterical "saint" is no better than any other lunatic or hysteric, and certainly anything but a saint. If a saint has stigmata, these external marks might come (1) miraculously, as a gratuitous sign of divine favour; (2) as an effect of natural, intense contemplation of the Pa.s.sion of our Lord, producing these bleedings in a sound body; or (3) as an effect of a rational, intense contemplation of the same Pa.s.sion, acting, more easily, on a neurotic body.

Scientific theorising on this matter is necessarily sterile, because such an investigation is only half material for science,--physical science. Science is not a bad thing in itself, especially when it minds its own business and keeps its place below stairs; but it never sympathises with sanct.i.ty, and there is no deep knowledge without sympathy. Fact-grinding made Darwin "nauseate Shakspere." Science can not see in the dark as genius and sanct.i.ty see, and if it does see in the dark it is no longer science but genius working on a scientific object. As Professor William James said: "Science taken in its essence should stand only for a method, and not for any special beliefs, yet, as habitually taken by its {353} votaries, Science has come to be identified with a certain fixed general belief, the belief that the deeper order of Nature is mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such a thing as human life." Science should recognise its own limitations and not meddle in attempted explanations of the inexplicable. Therefore, what of the stigmata of the saints from a scientific point of view? There is no scientific point of view.

AUSTIN oMALLEY.