Miracles are not Given Straightforwardly

On interpretation and the force of religious appeals to the miraculous

If anyone says that all miracles are impossible, and that therefore all reports of them, even those contained in sacred scripture, are to be set aside as fables or myths; or that miracles can never be known with certainty, nor can the divine origin of the Christian religion be proved from them: let him be anathema.

~Canons of the First Vatican Council

It is essential to traditional, conservative Christianity—and to traditional forms of religion generally, but here I am concerned with Christianity—that miracles both occur and that their occurrence be knowable with certainty.¹ That is, on its own terms, traditional Christianity is not credible unless positive, wondrous events beyond the power of physical, embodied things to effect have occurred by Divine decree or intervention² and that we be able to recognize and affirm these events as both wondrous, beyond the ability of finite things to cause, and effects of Divine intervention or decree. It is an integral part of the Gospel narratives, for instance, that Jesus of Nazareth performed signs and wonders that serve, in no small part, to undergird the credibility and credentity of belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah and the Son of God; the later tradition never ceases to appeal to the supposed miracles wrought by Christ—including His resurrection—as evidence, even proof, of the reasonableness of faith in Christ, and the fathers of the first Vatican council go so far as to anathematize anyone who denies that miracles are possible, knowable, and that by which the divine origin of the Christian religion can be proved. Take away the possibility of knowing, really knowing, the supposed reality of miracles—and this clearly and straightforwardly, such that no honest and reasonable person could contest their reality and meaning if he or she experiences them empirically—and one takes away a major reason to take traditional, conservative Christianity seriously.

If one attends to things and considers them carefully, however, one immediately runs into problems—not so much with affirmations that miracles are possible (for, if there exists a first and positively infinite creative principle of all things actual and possible, as a serious consideration of the conditions of the possibility of both any being even potentially coming to be and our being able to think this would seem to suggest, why not?), but rather with affirmations that miracles have actually occurred and/or that such occurrences can be known with certainty.³ For while we are all of us inclined, prior to serious reflection, to take what experience sensibly and its meaning as given straightforwardly, it is not so; and if things such drinking glasses are only experienced and recognized as such through a whole complex process of interpretation, so much more so is this true of miracles: in the case of miracles, not only is one left having to interpret a set of empirical givens that is out of the ordinary, but one also must recognize that the source of this set of empirical givens and its meaning lies outside the empirically-grounded interpretive framework within which we must understand anything whatever. The problems are so great, in fact, that the certainty with which the fathers of the first Vatican council assert one can know miracles, as well as the same fathers’ insistence that they can be used as proofs for the supposed divine origin of the Christian religion, may (understandably) strike one as laughably naive.

But are there really such problems? Is it really fair to say that one cannot straightforwardly or directly experience a miracle and, if one is honest with oneself and others, recognize and admit that it was in fact a miracle? If a hand that has been severed is found reattached without surgery and immediately upon some respected monk’s or nun’s prayers, say, and if that hand were also suddenly fully functional, would that not count as a straightforwardly-given miracle, as an event the nature and meaning of which is completely and directly clear and knowable with certainty as an example of Divine intervention in response to a holy person’s prayers?

It is indeed. For one, as I attempted to point out in an initial way here, there is an enormous amount of interpretive work that goes into every single one of our empirical experiences of anything that strikes us as a unity—in space and through time.⁴ As one can intuit from observing human beings through time as they develop from newborns with clearly uncoordinated and undeveloped powers of sense and memory, as well as no use as yet of language, to children who do have coordinated and developed powers of sense and memory as well as the use of language, coming to experience and notice what is sensed as the sensation of things—rather than the inundations, through various ever-flowing streams, of immediate and raw sensation—to say nothing of actually being able to name those things, requires organic development as well as consistent and attentive training from a child’s parents and larger community.⁵ While the great majority of us come out of this process of growth and development with coordinated senses and mastery of the material and techniques our respective communities use to interpret what is sensed and to name and talk about it, this by no means guarantees that what we perceive, how we interpret or reflectively experience what we sense, is correct or on point: If it were otherwise, heliocentrism would not have faced the vehement and protracted opposition it did. The vast majority of us may gain great facility with forms of picking out, interpreting, and naming things out of the five streams of sensation and their coordination within and through memory (for we remember the conjunction of sense data and what followed upon said conjunction in the past and, in the present, experience things as coordinated in light of our memories thereof), and we may get along in the world just fine with such facility, but this does not translate into knowledge: to know something, really and truly know something, is not to be wrong about that something and to recognize that in fact one is not wrong about it—to recognize all the relevant conditions for affirming something of a matter in a judgment, recognizing that those conditions have been truly met, and then going on actually to to affirm something of the matter at hand in a judgment in light of that two-fold recognition; facility in interpreting, naming, and navigating the empirically-given world is certainly something, but, as past controversies surrounding heliocentrism—for instance—indicate, it does not count as knowledge in any strict sense: it does not preclude the real possibility that one interprets or understands things incorrectly.

And that is simply at the level of ordinary sensation and its interpretation: whether something not congruent with ones memories of past experiences has religious significance, or whether something one’s interpretive framework and the grounding memories thereof cannot seemingly accommodate is the effect or result of Divine intervention or decree, requires much more interpretive work. In the case of a hand suddenly being reattached and functional, without assuming what needs proving, all one can say is that certain words were said or certain movements were performed by a certain someone, and then that a hand that had appeared unattached was suddenly given in one’s conscious experience as reattached and functional—followed, perhaps, by much joy on the side of the apparent beneficiary and onlookers, as well as expressions of swelling sentiment in that community that the words or the work of a nearby religious figure led God to perform a miraculous healing before everyone. One, however, would have to refuse to be caught up in the swelling religious fervor if he is to consider the matter carefully: After determining whether one has sufficient reason to affirm as in fact the case, and not just seemingly the case, that a hand has been reattached following upon certain words or movements, the careful observer would have to ask why—and everyone around saying that it happened because of God does not make it so. Did it happen because of some unusual physical happening for which no one around yet has an account, where the concatenation of words or movements of a revered religious person was a simple coincidence? Was it caused by the agency of technologically advanced agents one does not recognize as such? Was it caused by a sufficiently powerful preternatural agent and not God? Was it all an elaborate ruse? One would have to determine whether or how what occurs in temporal proximity to the hand's reattached is significant for understanding the hand's reattachment and judging truly of it—and how.

That is, one would have to determine whether the religiously-inflected interpretive framework through which other bystanders interpret the apparent healing as a miracle is reasonable and true, or if, barring an ability to determine the truth of that framework, whether it is absolutely the most reasonable framework to adopt, and this not for lack of knowing better—if one is to have certain knowledge, real and true knowledge, of the miraculous character of the healing one has witnessed, and certainly if it is to serve as any proof of the Divine origin of a religion. But doing so entails a vast effort beyond ordinary facility with interpreting and naming what is empirically given out of the continuous flow of immediate sensuous experience: it involves determining whether in fact the world and its foundations and origins are such that it even makes sense to believe the creator or cause of the world would so intervene in the first place, as well as whether one indeed has good enough reason to believe that this or that person can or does act in the name of that creator or cause—and not just that this or that person can or has put on a good show with the help of a preternatural or technologically advanced agent, say. It is a commonplace in these sorts of discussions, but given to what extent we humans often disagree about the total constitution, foundation, and origin of our world, even among those of us who are religious, prima facie, it would be a difficult task indeed, one undertaken with serious risk of getting things wrong at any number of steps along the way.

While the above does not render belief that miracles have actually occurred and have determinate, recognizable meanings or significance unreasonable, it does militate against the notion that one can have knowledge, real and true and certain knowledge, that they have in fact occurred and mean what this or that religious community claims they mean. Moreover, it militates strongly against the claim that purported miracles can serve as proof, real and solid and true proof, of anything. For, when all is said and done, actual miracles may be given in empirical experience either to a singular person or a community—or both—but they are by no means given straightforwardly; the claim that they are, or the insistence that they mean what someone or some community asserts they do—as many in the Christian tradition, including participants in the first Vatican council, have often done—need not, even should not, be taken seriously by any reasonable person.⁶

1. Header image: Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning (1885).

2. Which perhaps amount to the same thing—Divine decree and intervention—when they are spoken of regarding some finite, created occurrence: There are debates going back to the Middle Ages in sacramental theology, for instance, over whether the sacraments effect what they effect physically or morally—that is, whether they effect what they effect because God directly acts through a specific sacramental act to bring about an effect or whether the effect is brought about simply because God decrees that it should be so or “considers” it to be so—whether, for instance, something is “done” to the being of an authentic penitent in the sacrament of Reconciliation by means of the priest’s absolution or if the sinner is simply accepted by God as forgiven and newly righteous upon certain words being said intentionally by the right person in the right setting involving a sinner. But, insofar as these debates have resulted in the sheading of Christian blood by fellow Christians, the distinction is not meaningless.

3. Of course, we often speak about being certain of things or having certainty, but what is it, to be certain? What is it, to have certainty? Is it a feeling? If a feeling, we all have had the experience of feeling quite certain about something only later to be proved wrong. Is it simply a way of emphasizing that one truly knows? If so, it adds no new information but is only a way of saying that claims to knowledge are truly meant. In this piece, I take the Vatican I council fathers to mean something like the latter, both in light of the Scholastic tradition out of which they thought and because one cannot claim to have known something if it turns out that one was wrong all along about the thing he or she claimed to know. (Claims to certainty can also, as surely all of us have experienced, be a means to maneuver or cudgel another into accepting what one claims to be true; Christians are just as guilty of this as anyone.)

4. This is by no means a novel point: Immanuel Kant makes much the same point in his Critique of Pure Reason—a point that has since been made many times and in many different ways within different fields of inquiry. But it is too easily forgotten: all of us, and not just partisans of traditional religious commitments, so often fail to recognize the immense accomplishment that recognizing and naming something sensed really is, so beguiling is the ease with which we do so.

5. One can also notice this by being present to himself and attending very carefully and in a disciplined way to each act of his or her acts of perception and noticing the layers of action and content involved in moving from bare and immediate sensation to the actual reflective understanding and naming of something sensed. But this is a difficult practice—as the difficulty in writing truly good haiku and tanka, the practice of which is in no small part a function of one’s ability to attend to what one senses and experiences in its presence, when it is present—in its presentiality— attests—; it is easier if one first thinks on one’s experience of human beings growing from newborns to talkative youngsters to adults and then moves to notice what is essentially the recapitulation of this entire vast process in every act of conscious, reflective perception: a movement, no matter how quick, from bare sensuous immediacy to a reflective, self-aware act of naming.

6. It is worth pointing out that while the later Christian tradition so often takes Jesus’ supposed miracles, as well as those of his followers, as essentially a Divine flex, as something God does in order to show who is really in charge, Jesus’ own miracles as recounted in the Gospels—the leper healed, Jairus’ daughter raised from the dead, the woman healed of the bleeding disorder, and the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, for instance—are not particularly unique as miracles: every traditional religious tradition has tales of miraculous healings and other deeds done. Rather, what is interesting about Jesus’ miracles is that they all involve, in some way or other, the reintegration of people into the communities, the healing of communities, or ensuring that communities more fully flourish (as with the wedding feast at Cana). That is, what is noteworthy about Jesus’ wonder-working is not its spectacular character but what it does for the people and communities that are its object or beneficiaries.