[290] This statement was denied with much explosive emphasis by a writer in the Catholic World for September and October, 1891, but he brought no fact to support this denial. I may perhaps be allowed to remind the reverend writer that since the days of Pascal, whose eminence in the Church he will hardly dispute, the bare assertion even of a Jesuit father against established facts needs some support other than mere scurrility.
Still another claim to miracle is based upon his arriving at Lisbon and finding his great colleague, Simon Rodriguez, ill of fever. Xavier informs us in a very simple way that Rodriguez was so overjoyed to see him that the fever did not return. This is entirely similar to the cure which Martin Luther wrought upon Melanchthon. Melanchthon had broken down and was supposed to be dying, when his joy at the long-delayed visit of Luther brought him to his feet again, after which he lived for many years.
Again, it is related that Xavier, finding a poor native woman very ill, baptized her, saying over her the prayers of the Church, and she recovered.
Two or three occurrences like these form the whole basis for the miraculous account, so far as Xavier's own writings are concerned.
Of miracles in the ordinary sense of the word there is in these letters of his no mention. Though he writes of his doings with especial detail, taking evident pains to note everything which he thought a sign of Divine encouragement, he says nothing of his performing miracles, and evidently knows nothing of them. This is clearly not due to his unwillingness to make known any token of Divine favour. As we have seen, he is very prompt to report anything which may be considered an answer to prayer or an evidence of the power of religious means to improve the bodily or spiritual health of those to whom he was sent.
Nor do the letters of his associates show knowledge of any miracles wrought by him. His brother missionaries, who were in constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no allusions to them in their communications with each other or with their brethren in Europe.
Of this fact we have many striking evidences. Various collections of letters from the Jesuit missionaries in India and the East generally, during the years of Xavier's activity, were published, and in not one of these letters written during Xavier's lifetime appears any account of a miracle wrought by him. As typical of these collections we may take perhaps the most noted of all, that which was published about twenty years after Xavier's death by a Jesuit father, Emanuel Acosta.
The letters given in it were written by Xavier and his associates not only from Goa, which was the focus of all missionary effort and the centre of all knowledge regarding their work in the East, but from all other important points in the great field. The first of them were written during the saint's lifetime, but, though filled with every sort of detail regarding missionary life and work, they say nothing regarding any miracles by Xavier.
The same is true of various other similar collections published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In not one of them does any mention of a miracle by Xavier appear in a letter from India or the East contemporary with him.
This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any "evil heart of unbelief." On the contrary, these good missionary fathers were prompt to record the slightest occurrence which they thought evidence of the Divine favour: it is indeed touching to see how eagerly they grasp at the most trivial things which could be thus construed.
Their ample faith was fully shown. One of them, in Acosta's collection, sends a report that an illuminated cross had been recently seen in the heavens; another, that devils had been cast out of the natives by the use of holy water; another, that various cases of disease had been helped and even healed by baptism; and sundry others sent reports that the blind and dumb had been restored, and that even lepers had been cleansed by the proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no miracles are imputed by his associates during his life or during several years after his death.
On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his personal limitations, and the difficulties arising from them, fully confirmed by his brother workers. It is interesting, for example, in view of the claim afterward made that the saint was divinely endowed for his mission with the "gift of tongues," to note in these letters confirmation of Xavier's own statement utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he underwent in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.
Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel Acosta's publication shows, the letters of the missionaries continued without any indication of miracles performed by the saint. Though, as we shall see presently, abundant legends had already begun to grow elsewhere, not one word regarding these miracles came as yet from the country which, according to later accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was at this very period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication of them from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of these miraculous manifestations.
But this negative evidence is by no means all. There is also positive evidence--direct testimony from the Jesuit order itself--that Xavier wrought no miracles.
For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know anything of the mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the highest contemporary authority on the whole subject, a man in the closest correspondence with those who knew most about the saint, a member of the Society of Jesus in the highest standing and one of its accepted historians, not only expressly tells us that Xavier wrought no miracles, but gives the reasons why he wrought none.
This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit order, its visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally rector of the University of Salamanca. In 1571, nineteen years after Xavier's death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work mainly concerning the conversion of the Indies, and in this he refers especially and with the greatest reverence to Xavier, holding him up as an ideal and his work as an example.
But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no longer produce apostolic results "lies in the missionaries themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles." He then asks, "Why should our age be so completely destitute of them?" This question he answers at great length, and one of his main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the illiterate; and hence that "in the early times miracles were necessary, but in our time they are not."
This statement and argument refer, as we have seen, directly to Xavier by name, and to the period covered by his activity and that of the other great missionaries of his time. That the Jesuit order and the Church at large thought this work of Acosta trustworthy is proved by the fact that it was published at Salamanca a few years after it was written, and republished afterward with ecclesiastical sanction in France.[291] Nothing shows better than the sequel how completely the evolution of miraculous accounts depends upon the intellectual atmosphere of any land and time, and how independent it is of fact.
[291]The work of Joseph Acosta is in the Cornell University Library, its title being as follows: De Natura Novi Orbis libri duo et De Promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De Procuranda Indorum Salute, libri sex, autore Jesepho Acosta, presbytero Societis Jesu. I. H. S. Salmanticas, apud Guillelmum Foquel, MDLXXXIX. For the passages cited directly contradicting the working of miracles by Xavier and his associates, see lib. ii, cap. ix, of which the title runs, Cur Miracula in Conversione gentium non fiant nunc, ut olim, a Christi praedicatoribus, especially pp. 242-245; also lib. ii, cap. viii, pp. 237 et seq. For a passage which shows that Xavier was not then at all credited with "the miraculous gift of tongues," see lib. i, cap. vii, p. 173. Since writing the above, my attention has
been called to the alleged miraculous preservation of Xavier's body claimed in sundry letters contemporary with its disinterment at San Chan and reinterment at Goa. There is no reason why this preservation in itself need be doubted, and no reason why it should be counted miraculous. Such exceptional preservation of bodies has been common enough in all ages, and, alas for the claims of the Church, quite as common of pagans or Protestants as of good Catholics. One of the most famous cases is that of the fair Roman maiden, Julia, daughter of Claudius, over whose exhumation at Rome, in 1485, such ado was made by the sceptical scholars of the Renaissance. Contemporary observers tell us enthusiastically that she was very beautiful, perfectly preserved, "the bloom of youth still upom her cheeks," and exhaling a "sweet odour"; but this enthusiasm was so little to the taste of Pope Innocent VIII that he had her reburied secretly by night. Only the other day, in June of the year 1895, there was unearthed at Stade, in Hanover, the "perfectly preserved" body of a soldier of the eighth century. So, too, I might mention the bodies preserved at the church of St. Thomas at Strasburg, beneath the Cathedral of Bremen, and elsewhere during hundreds of years past; also the cases of "adiposeration" in various American cemeteries, which never grow less wonderful by repetition from mouth to mouth and in the public prints. But, while such preservation is not incredible or even strange, there is much reason why precisely in the case of a saint like St. Francis Xavier the evidence for it should be received with especial caution. What the touching fidelity of disciples may lead them to believe and proclaim regarding an adored leader in a time when faith is thought more meritorious than careful statement, and miracle more probable than the natural course of things, is seen, for example, in similar pious accounts regarding the bodies of many other saints, especially that of St. Carlo Borromeo, so justly venerated by the Church for his beautiful and charitable life. And yet any one looking at the relics of various saints, especially those of St. Carlo, preserved with such tender care in the crypt of Milan Cathedral, will see that they have shared the common fate, being either mummified or reduced to skeletons; and this is true in all cases, as far as my observation has extended. What even a great theologian can be induced to believe and testify in a somewhat similar matter, is seen in St. Augustine's declaration that the flesh of the peacock, which in antiquity and in the early Church was considered a bird somewhat supernaturally endowed, is incorruptible. The saint declares that he tested it and found it so (see the De Civitate dei, xxi, c. 4, under the passage beginning Quis enim Deus). With this we may compare the testimony of the pious author of Sir John Mandeville's Travels, that iron floats upon the Dead Sea while feathers sink in it, and that he would not have believed this had he not seen it. So, too, testimony to the "sweet odour" diffused by the exhumed remains of the saint seem to indicate feeling rather than fact--those highly wrought feelings of disciples standing by--the same feeling which led those who visited St. Simon Stylites on his heap of ordure, and other hermits unwashed and living in filth, to dwell upon the delicious "odour of sanctity' pervading the air. In point, perhaps, is Louis Veuillot's idealization of the "parfum de Rome," in face of the fact, to which the present writer and thousands of others can testify, that under Papal rule Rome was materially one of the most filthy cities in Christendom. For the case of Julia, see the contemporary letter printed by Janitschek, Gesellschaft der Renaissance in Italien, p. 120, note 167; also Infessura, Diarium Rom. Urbis, in Muratori, tom. iii, pt. 2, col. 1192, 1193, and elsewhere; also Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Age of Despots, p. 22. For the case at Stade, see press dispatch from Berlin in newspapers of June 24, 25, 1895. The copy of Emanuel Acosta I have mainly used is that in the Royal Library at Munich, De Japonicus rebus epistolarum libri iii, item recogniti; et in Latinum ex Hispanico sermone conversi, Dilingae, MDLXXI. I have since obtained and used the work now in the library of Cornell University, being the letters and commentary published by Emanuel Acosta and attached to Maffei's book on the History of the Indies, published at Antwerp in 1685. For the first beginnings of miracles wrought by Xavier, as given in the letters of the missionaries, see that of Almeida, lib. ii, p. 183. Of other collections, or selections from collections, of letters which fail to give any indication of miracles wrought by Xavier during his life, see Wytfliet and Magin, Histoire Universelle des Indes Occidentales et Orientales, et de la Conversion des Indiens, Douay, 1611. Though several letters of Xavier and his fellow-missionaries are given, dated at the very period of his alleged miracles, not a trace of miracles appears in these. Also Epistolae Japonicae de multorum in variis Insulis Gentilium ad Christi fidem Conversione, Lovanii, 1570. These letters were written by Xavier and his companions from the East Indies and Japan, and cover the years from 1549 to 1564. Though these refer frequently to Xavier, there is no mention of a miracle wrought by him in any of them written during his lifetime.
For, shortly after Xavier's heroic and beautiful death in 1552, stories of miracles wrought by him began to appear. At first they were few and feeble; and two years later Melchior Nunez, Provincial of the Jesuits in the Portuguese dominions, with all the means at his command, and a correspondence extending throughout Eastern Asia, had been able to hear of but three. These were entirely from hearsay. First, John Deyro said he knew that Xavier had the gift of prophecy; but, unfortunately, Xavier himself had reprimanded and cast off Deyro for untruthfulness and cheatery. Secondly, it was reported vaguely that at Cape Comorin many persons affirmed that Xavier had raised a man from the dead. Thirdly, Father Pablo de Santa Fe had heard that in Japan Xavier had restored sight to a blind man. This seems a feeble beginning, but little by little the stories grew, and in 1555 De Quadros, Provincial of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, had heard of nine miracles, and asserted that Xavier had healed the sick and cast out devils. The next year, being four years after Xavier's death, King John III of Portugal, a very devout man, directed his viceroy Barreto to draw up and transmit to him an authentic account of Xavier's miracles, urging him especially to do the work "with zeal and speedily." We can well imagine what treasures of grace an obsequious viceroy, only too anxious to please a devout king, could bring together by means of the hearsay of ignorant, compliant natives through all the little towns of Portuguese India.
But the letters of the missionaries who had been co-workers or immediate successors of Xavier in his Eastern field were still silent as regards any miracles by him, and they remained silent for nearly ten years. In the collection of letters published by Emanuel Acosta and others no hint at any miracles by him is given, until at last, in 1562, fully ten years after Xavier's death, the first faint beginnings of these legends appear in them.
At that time the Jesuit Almeida, writing at great length to the brethren, stated that he had found a pious woman who believed that a book left behind by Xavier had healed sick folk when it was laid upon them, and that he had met an old man who preserved a whip left by the saint which, when properly applied to the sick, had been found good both for their bodies and their souls. From these and other small beginnings grew, always luxuriant and sometimes beautiful, the vast mass of legends which we shall see hereafter.
This growth was affectionately garnered by the more zealous and less critical brethren in Europe until it had become enormous; but it appears to have been thought of little value by those best able to judge.
For when, in 1562, Julius Gabriel Eugubinus delivered a solemn oration on the condition and glory of the Church, before the papal legates and other fathers assembled at the Council of Trent, while he alluded to a multitude of things showing the Divine favour, there was not the remotest allusion to the vast multitude of miracles which, according to the legends, had been so profusely lavished on the faithful during many years, and which, if they had actually occurred, formed an argument of prodigious value in behalf of the special claims of the Church.
The same complete absence of knowledge of any such favours vouchsafed to the Church, or at least of any belief in them, appears in that great Council of Trent among the fathers themselves. Certainly the
re, if anywhere, one might on the Roman theory expect Divine illumination in a matter of this kind. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of it was especially claimed, and yet its members, with all their spiritual as well as material advantages for knowing what had been going on in the Church during the previous thirty years, and with Xavier's own friend and colleague, Laynez, present to inform them, show not the slightest sign of any suspicion of Xavier's miracles. We have the letters of Julius Gabriel to the foremost of these fathers assembled at Trent, from 1557 onward for a considerable time, and we have also a multitude of letters written from the Council by bishops, cardinals, and even by the Pope himself, discussing all sorts of Church affairs, and in not one of these is there evidence of the remotest suspicion that any of these reports, which they must have heard, regarding Xavier's miracles, were worthy of mention.
History Of The Warfare Of Science With Theology In Christendom Page 52
