City of God 22.8

Chapter 8. On the miracles that were done so that the world might believe in Christ, and that do not cease to be done now that the world believes.

“Why,” they say, “are those miracles that you proclaim were done not done now?” I could say, indeed, that they were necessary before the world believed, in order that the world might believe. Whoever still looks for wonders in order to believe is himself a great wonder, since he does not believe when the world believes. But they say this so that it may not be believed that those miracles were done even then. Where, then, does it come from that Christ is everywhere sung with such faith as taken up into heaven with his flesh? How is it that, in educated times that rejected everything that cannot happen, the world, without any miracles, has so exceedingly wonderfully believed incredible things? Or will they perhaps say that these things were credible and were therefore believed? Why, then, do they themselves not believe? Our reasoning, then, is short: either other incredible things, which nevertheless happened and were seen, produced faith in an incredible thing that was not seen; or else the thing was so credible that it needed no miracles to persuade men of it, and it refutes the excessive unbelief of these people. This I would say to refute the most frivolous.

For we cannot deny that many miracles were done to attest that one great and saving miracle by which Christ ascended into heaven with the flesh in which he rose. For in the same most truthful books everything is written down, both what was done and for what purpose, to be believed, it was done. These things became known in order to produce faith; through the faith they produced they become known much more clearly. They are read among the peoples so that they may be believed; and yet they would not be read among the peoples unless they were believed. For even now miracles are done in his name, whether through his sacraments or through the prayers or the memorials of his saints; but they are not made so illustrious as to be spread abroad with glory as great as those. For the canon of the sacred writings, which had to be fixed, causes those to be recited everywhere and to cling to the memory of all peoples; but these, wherever they happen, are known there scarcely to the whole city itself or to whatever place people live in together. For generally even there very few know, while the rest are unaware, especially if the city is large; and when they are told elsewhere and to others, no such authority commends them that they are believed without difficulty or doubt, even though they are reported to faithful Christians by the faithful.

The miracle that was done at Milan when we were there, when a blind man received his sight, could come to the knowledge of many, because it is a great city, and the emperor was there at the time, and the thing was done with an immense crowd as witness, which had flocked to the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius. These had lain hidden and were wholly unknown, and they were revealed to Bishop Ambrose in a dream and found; and there that blind man, his old darkness driven away, saw the day.

But at Carthage, who except a very few knows of the healing that was given to Innocentius, formerly an advocate in the vicar's prefecture, where we were present and saw it with our own eyes? For when my brother Alypius and I came from across the sea, not yet clergy but already serving God, he had received us, for he was, with his whole household, most devout, and we were then living with him. He was being treated by physicians for fistulas, which he had, many and intricate, in the lower rear part of his body. They had already operated on him and were doing the rest of their art with medicines. In that operation he had suffered long and bitter pains. But one sinus among many had escaped the physicians and lay so hidden that they did not touch it, though they ought to have opened it with the knife. At length, when all the rest that they had opened were healed, this alone remained, and labour was spent on it in vain. He suspected these delays and was much afraid he would be operated on again (another physician, one of his household, had foretold this to him; the others had not admitted this man even to watch how they did it when he was first operated on, and in anger he had turned him out of the house and scarcely taken him back), and he burst out and said, “Are you going to cut me again? Am I to come to what that man said, whom you would not have present?” They laughed at the unskilled physician and soothed the man's fear with fair words and promises. Many more days passed, and nothing that was done did any good. Still the physicians persisted in their promise that they would close that sinus not with the knife but with medicines. They also called in another physician, already very old and much praised in that art (for he was still living), Ammonius, who, when he had examined the place, promised the same as they, relying on their care and skill. Made confident by his authority, Innocentius mocked his household physician, who had foretold another operation, with witty cheerfulness, as though already well.

What more? So many days passed afterwards, spent in vain, that, weary and confounded, they admitted that he could in no way be healed except by the knife. He was terrified, turned pale, disturbed by excessive fear, and when he had collected himself and could speak, he told them to go away and come to him no more. Worn out with tears and now held fast by that necessity, nothing else occurred to him than to call in a certain Alexandrian, who was then held to be a wonderful surgeon, so that he might do what Innocentius in his anger would not have them do. But when this man came and saw, as a craftsman does, their work in the scars, he did the part of a good man and persuaded him to let those who had laboured so much on him, which he wondered at as he examined it, rather enjoy the completion of their cure, adding that in truth he could not be well unless he were operated on; it was very contrary to his own ways to take the palm of so much labour, for the little that remained, from men whose most skilful work, industry, and care he saw with admiration in his scars. They were restored to his favour, and it was agreed that they themselves, with the same Alexandrian present, should open with the knife that sinus which by the consent of all was now thought incurable otherwise. The matter was put off to the following day.

But when they had gone away, such grief arose in that house from the master's excessive sorrow that it was scarcely restrained by us, like the lamentation at a funeral. Holy men visited him daily: Saturninus of blessed memory, then bishop of Uzalis, and the presbyter Gulosus, and the deacons of the church of Carthage; among whom was also Aurelius, now bishop, the only one of them still among the living, to be named by us with due honour, with whom we have often talked of this matter, recalling the wonderful works of God, and we found that he remembers very well what we are recounting. When they visited him in the evening, as they used to, he begged them with pitiable tears to be so good as to be present in the morning at his funeral rather than at his pain. For such fear had seized him from his earlier sufferings that he did not doubt he would die in the physicians' hands. They comforted him and urged him to trust in God and to bear his will manfully. Then we went in to prayer; and while we knelt and bent to the ground as usual, he threw himself down as though he had been struck down by someone pushing him violently, and began to pray. In what manner, with what feeling, with what stirring of soul, with what flood of tears, with what groans and sobs, shaking all his limbs and almost cutting off his breath, who could set it out in any words? Whether the others were praying, and their attention was not turned away to this, I did not know. I at any rate could not pray at all; I only said this briefly in my heart: “Lord, what prayers of your people do you hear, if you do not hear these?” For it seemed to me that nothing more could now be added except that he should breathe his last in praying. We rose, received the bishop's blessing, and departed, he begging them to be present in the morning, they urging him to be of calm mind.

The dreaded day dawned. The servants of God were there, as they had promised they would be; the physicians came in; everything that hour required was prepared; the fearful instruments were brought out, while all were astonished and in suspense. While those of greater authority raised up his fainting spirit with comfort, his limbs were arranged on the couch for the surgeon's hands, the knots of the bandages were undone, the place was laid bare. The physician looks, and, armed and intent, searches for the sinus to be cut. He scrutinizes it with his eyes, feels it with his fingers, tries it finally in every way: he finds a perfectly firm scar. The gladness, the praise and thanksgiving to the merciful and almighty God that poured from the mouths of all, with tears of joy, is not to be entrusted to my words; let it be imagined rather than told.

In the same city of Carthage, Innocentia, a most devout woman of the first rank in that city, had a cancer in her breast, a thing, as the physicians say, curable by no medicines. So either the member in which it arises is usually cut off and separated from the body, or, so that the person may live a little longer, though death will come from it however slowly, all treatment is to be omitted, according to the opinion, they say, of Hippocrates. She had received this from a skilled physician very close to her household, and she had turned to God alone in prayer. As Easter approached she was told in a dream that, watching at the baptistery on the women's side, she should have whatever newly baptized woman first met her sign the place with the sign of Christ. She did so; health followed at once. The physician, of course, who had told her to apply no treatment if she wished to live a little longer, when he examined her afterward and found her entirely sound, whom by that same examination he had known to have that disease before, eagerly asked her what she had applied, wishing, as one may understand, to learn of the remedy by which the rule of Hippocrates had been overcome. And when he had heard from her what had happened, it is said that he replied, in the tone and with the look of someone showing contempt, so that she feared he would utter some insulting word against Christ, with devout courtesy: “I thought,” he said, “you were going to tell me something great.” And while she was already shuddering, he quickly added, “What great thing did Christ do in healing a cancer, he who raised a man four days dead?”

When I had heard this, and was strongly indignant that so great a miracle, done in that city and to that person, who was certainly not obscure, should remain so hidden, I thought she should be admonished and almost rebuked for it. When she answered that she had not kept silent about it, I asked the ladies who happened to be with her at the time, her closest friends, whether they had known of it before. They answered that they had not known it at all. “There,” I said, “is how you do not keep silent: not even these women, who are bound to you by such close friendship, hear of it.” And because I had asked her only briefly, I made her relate the whole thing in order, as it had happened, while they listened, marvelling greatly and glorifying God.

We know that there was a physician with gout in the same city, who had given in his name for baptism. The day before he was to be baptized he was forbidden in a dream, by black curly-haired boys whom he understood to be demons, to be baptized that year; and when he did not obey them, and they even trampled on his feet, he burned with the sharpest pain he had ever felt. Overcoming them all the more, he did not put off being washed in the bath of regeneration, as he had vowed; and in baptism itself he was rid not only of the pain with which he was tormented beyond the usual, but of the gout too, and though he lived long afterwards, his feet never pained him again. Who knows of this? Yet we know it, and the very few brothers whom it could reach.

A certain man of Curubis, a former actor of mimes, was made whole when he was baptized, not only of a paralysis but also of a shapeless swelling of his genitals, and, freed from both troubles, he came up from the font of regeneration as if he had had nothing wrong in his body. Who knew this except at Curubis, and except a very few others who could hear of it anywhere? When we learned it, at the order of the holy bishop Aurelius we even had him come to Carthage, though we had first heard it from people whose good faith we could not doubt.

Hesperius, a man of tribunician rank, lives among us; he has an estate in the territory of Fussala, called Zubedi. When he learned that his house was suffering the harmful power of evil spirits, with affliction of his animals and his slaves, he asked our presbyters, in my absence, that one of them should go there, to whose prayers the spirits would yield. One went, offered there the sacrifice of the body of Christ, praying as hard as he could that that harassment might cease; by God's mercy it ceased at once. Now he had received from a friend some holy earth brought from Jerusalem, where Christ was buried and rose on the third day, and he had hung it up in his bedroom so that he himself might suffer no harm. But when his house had been cleansed of that infestation, he was considering what should be done with the earth, which out of reverence he did not wish to keep any longer in his bedroom. It happened that I and my colleague at the time, Maximinus, bishop of the church of Sinitum, were nearby; he asked us to come, and we came. When he had told us everything, he also asked that the earth be buried somewhere and that a place of prayer be made there, where Christians too could gather to celebrate the things of God. We did not refuse; it was done. There was there a young countryman who was paralysed. On hearing this, he asked his parents to carry him to that holy place without delay. When he had been carried there, he prayed, and at once went away from there whole, on his own feet.

There is a country house called Victoriana, less than thirty miles from Hippo Regius. There is a memorial there of the Milanese martyrs Protasius and Gervasius. A certain young man was carried there who, while washing his horse in a deep pool of the river at midday in summer, had fallen foul of a demon. As he lay there, either near to death or very like a dead man, the lady of the estate came in, as was her custom, for the evening hymns and prayers with her maidservants and some consecrated virgins, and they began to sing the hymns. At that sound he was jolted as if struck, and with a terrible roar he seized the altar and held it, not daring or not able to move it, as if he were tied or fastened to it, and with loud wailing, begging to be spared, the demon confessed where, when, and how it had seized the young man. At last, declaring that it would go out, it named each of his members that it threatened to cut off as it went, and with these words it departed from the man. But his eye, fallen onto his cheek, hung by a slender vein as by an inner root, and all its centre, which had been dark, had turned white. When those present saw this (others too had run up, called by his cries, and all had prostrated themselves in prayer for him), though they were glad that he stood there in his right mind, they were saddened again because of his eye and said that a physician must be sent for. At that, his sister's husband, who had brought him there, said, “The God who put the demon to flight at the prayers of the saints is able to restore the sight.” Then, as best he could, he put the fallen, hanging eye back in its place and bound it with a handkerchief, and did not think it should be untied until after seven days. When he did so, he found it perfectly sound. Others too were healed there, of whom it would take long to speak.

I know that a certain virgin of Hippo, when she had anointed herself with oil into which the presbyter praying for her had let his tears drop, was soon healed of a demon. I know too that a bishop once prayed for a young man whom he did not see, and that he was at once rid of a demon.

There was a certain old man of our Hippo, Florentius, a devout and poor man; he supported himself by the tailor's trade. He had lost his cloak and had nothing with which to buy another; at the shrine of the Twenty Martyrs, whose memorial is very celebrated among us, he prayed in a clear voice to be clothed. Some young men, mockers, who happened to be there, heard him and followed him as he left, taunting him as though he had asked the martyrs for fifty folles to buy a garment. But he, walking on in silence, saw a great fish cast up and gasping on the shore, and with their good will and help he took hold of it and sold it for three hundred folles to a cook named Catosus, a good Christian, for his pickling kitchen, telling him what had happened; he planned to buy wool with the money, so that his wife might make him something to wear as best she could. But the cook, cutting up the fish, found a gold ring in its belly, and at once, moved by compassion and struck with religious awe, gave it to the man, saying, “See how the Twenty Martyrs have clothed you!”

At Aquae Tibilitanae, when Bishop Praeiectus was bringing a relic of the most glorious martyr Stephen, it was coming with a great crowd flocking to meet it. There a blind woman asked to be led to the bishop who was carrying it; she gave the flowers she was carrying, received them back, put them to her eyes, and at once she saw. While those present were amazed, she went on ahead rejoicing, taking the road and no longer needing a guide on the way.

Lucilius, bishop of the place, was carrying the relic of the same martyr, which is kept in the fortified town of Sinitum, near the colony of Hippo, with the people going before and following. A fistula, from whose trouble he had long suffered, and for which he was waiting for the hands of a physician very close to him to operate, was suddenly healed through his carrying that holy burden; for from then on he did not find it in his body.

Eucharius is a presbyter from Spain, living at Calama, who suffered from an old disease of the stone; through the relic of the same martyr, which Bishop Possidius brought there, he was made well. Later, when another disease overcame him, the same man lay dead, so that his thumbs were already being tied; through the help of the martyr, when the presbyter's own tunic had been brought back from his memorial and laid over the body as it lay, he was raised up.

There was a man there of the first rank in his order, named Martialis, already advanced in years and very averse to the Christian religion. He had, indeed, a believing daughter and a son-in-law baptized that same year. When they begged him, while he was ill, with many and great tears to become a Christian, he refused outright and drove them from him in stormy indignation. His son-in-law decided to go to the memorial of Saint Stephen and pray there for him as much as he could, that God might give him a good mind, so that he would not put off believing in Christ. He did this with great groaning and weeping and with a sincerely burning feeling of devotion; then, as he left, he took some of the flowers from the altar, whatever came to hand, and, since it was now night, laid them at the old man's head; then they went to sleep. And see, before dawn he cries out for someone to run to the bishop, who happened then to be with me at Hippo. When he heard that the bishop was away, he asked for the presbyters to come. They came; he said he believed; he was baptized, to the wonder and joy of all. As long as he lived he had these words on his lips: “Christ, receive my spirit,” though he did not know that these had been the last words of the most blessed Stephen when he was stoned by the Jews; they were his last words too, for not long afterwards he himself died.

Two citizens with gout were also healed there through the same martyr, and one stranger; the citizens completely, but the stranger learned by a revelation what to apply when he was in pain, and when he did so the pain ceased at once.

Audurus is the name of an estate where there is a church, and in it a memorial of the martyr Stephen. A small boy was playing in the yard when oxen drawing a cart ran off the track and crushed him with a wheel, and at once he lay gasping, breathing his last. His mother snatched him up and laid him at that memorial, and he not only came back to life but was seen to be unhurt.

A consecrated virgin on a neighbouring estate called Caspaliana was ill and her life was despaired of; her tunic was brought to the same memorial, but before it was brought back she died. Her parents, however, covered her corpse with this tunic, and her breath returned and she was made well.

At Hippo a certain Bassus, a Syrian, was praying at the memorial of the same martyr for his sick daughter, who was in danger, and had brought her dress with him there; and see, servants ran from the house to tell him she was dead. But while he was praying they were met by his friends, who stopped them from telling him, so that he would not lament in public. When he had returned home, which was already ringing with the wailing of his household, and had thrown his daughter's dress, which he was carrying, over her, she was restored to life.

Again, there among us, the son of a certain Irenaeus, a tax collector, died of an illness. While the body lay lifeless, and the funeral was being prepared amid mourning and lamentation, one of his friends suggested, among the words of the others who consoled him, that the body should be anointed with the oil of the same martyr. It was done, and he revived.

Likewise among us, Eleusinus, a man of tribunician rank, laid his little son, who had died of an illness, on the memorial of the martyrs which is on his suburban estate, and after the prayer that he poured out there with many tears, he lifted him up alive.

What am I to do? The promise to finish this work presses me, so that I cannot recount here everything I know; and no doubt many of our people, when they read this, will be sorry that I have passed over so many things that they certainly know as well as I. I ask them now to forgive me, and to consider how long a labour it would be to do what the necessity of the work I have undertaken compels me not to do here. For if I wished to write down only the miracles of healing, to say nothing of others, that have been done through this martyr, the most glorious Stephen, in the colony of Calama and in ours, many books would have to be made, and yet not all of them could be collected, but only those for which written statements have been given in, to be read out to the people. For we wanted this done when we saw that signs of divine power like those of old were frequent in our times too, and that they ought not to be lost from the knowledge of many. It is not yet two years since that memorial began to be at Hippo Regius, and though many statements have not been given in about the wonderful things done, as we know for certain, those that have been given in had reached almost seventy when I wrote this. At Calama, where the memorial began earlier and statements are given in more often, they are beyond comparison more numerous.

At Uzalis too, a colony near Utica, we have learned that many remarkable things were done through the same martyr; his memorial was set up there by Bishop Evodius long before ours. But there the custom of giving in statements does not exist, or rather did not; for perhaps it has now begun. For when we were there recently, we urged Petronia, a lady of senatorial rank, who had been wonderfully healed there of a great and long illness in which all the aid of physicians had failed, with the consent of the bishop of the place mentioned above, to give in a statement to be read to the people, and she most obediently complied. In it she also set down something I cannot pass over here, though I am compelled to hasten to what this work presses on to. She said that she had been persuaded by a certain Jew to insert a ring into a cord of hair, to be worn under all her clothing, girded next to her bare body; the ring had under its gem a stone found in the kidneys of an ox. Bound with this as a remedy, she was coming to the holy martyr's threshold. But after setting out from Carthage, when she had stopped at her own estate near the river Bagradas, on getting up to continue her journey she saw that ring lying before her feet, and in amazement she examined the girdle of hair with which it had been tied. When she found it still tied, just as it had been, with its own very firm knots, she supposed the ring had cracked and jumped off; but when that too was found perfectly whole, she took it that she had received, from so great a miracle, a kind of pledge of her future healing, and untying that cord she threw it into the river together with the ring.

Let those not believe this who also do not believe that the Lord Jesus was born through the unbroken virginity of his mother and entered to his disciples when the doors were shut; but let them at least investigate this, and if they find it true, let them believe those things. She is a lady of senatorial rank, nobly born, nobly married, and lives at Carthage; a great city and a great person do not allow the matter to be hidden from those who inquire. Certainly the martyr himself, at whose intercession she was healed, believed in the Son of the ever-virgin; he believed in him who entered to his disciples when the doors were shut; and lastly, which is why we are saying all this, he believed in him who ascended into heaven with the flesh in which he had risen; and so great things are done through him because he laid down his life for this faith.

Many miracles, then, are done even now, the same God doing them through whom he will and as he will, who also did those we read of; but these do not become known in the same way, nor are they beaten into memory, like gravel, by frequent reading, so as not to slip from the mind. For even where there is the care, which has now begun among us, that the statements of those who receive benefits are read out to the people, those present hear it once, and more are not present; so that even those who were present do not retain after a few days what they heard, and scarcely anyone of them is found who tells what he heard to someone he knows was not present.

One miracle was done among us, not greater than those I have mentioned, but so clear and conspicuous that I think there is no one in Hippo who has not either seen it or learned of it, and no one who could by any means have forgotten it. Ten brothers and sisters (seven of them male and three female) from Caesarea in Cappadocia, not undistinguished among their fellow citizens, were cursed by their mother, who had lately been left alone by their father's death and took very bitterly a wrong they had done her; they were punished by God with such a penalty that all of them were horribly shaken with a trembling of the limbs. In this most unsightly condition, unable to bear the eyes of their fellow citizens, they wandered over almost the whole Roman world, wherever each thought fit to go. Two of them came to us too, a brother and sister, Paulus and Palladia, already known in many other places through the report of their misery. They came about fifteen days before Easter, and daily frequented the church and in it the memorial of the most glorious Stephen, praying that God might now be appeased toward them and restore their former health. Both there and wherever they went they drew the attention of the city. Some who had seen them elsewhere and knew the cause of their trembling told others as they could.

Easter came, and on the Lord's day itself, in the morning, when a crowded congregation was already present, and the young man was holding the rails of the holy place where the martyr's shrine was, praying, he suddenly fell prostrate and lay very like one sleeping, yet not trembling, as they used to do even in sleep. Those present were amazed, some afraid, some grieved; and when some wanted to raise him up, others prevented them and said they should rather wait for the outcome. And see, he rose, and did not tremble, for he had been healed, and stood sound, looking at those who looked at him. Who then held back from praising God? The church was filled throughout with the voices of people crying out and rejoicing. Then they run to me, where I was sitting, about to come out; one after another rushes in, each later one announcing as news what an earlier one had said; and while I was rejoicing and thanking God within myself, the man himself also comes in with several others, bows at my knees, and is raised to my kiss. We go out to the people; the church was full and ringing with shouts of joy, “Thanks be to God! Praise be to God!” with no one silent, as they cried out on this side and that. I greeted the people, and again they cried out the same words with more fervent voice. When at last there was silence, the appointed readings of the divine Scriptures were read. When the place for my sermon came, I said a few words suited to the occasion and to the delight of that joy. For I let them not so much hear a kind of eloquence of God in the divine work as contemplate it. The man dined with us and told us carefully the whole story of his own, his brothers' and sisters', and his mother's calamity.

So on the following day, after my sermon, I promised that a written statement of his account would be read to the people the next day. When this was done on the third day after Easter Sunday, I had both, brother and sister, stand on the steps of the apse from whose raised place I was speaking, while their statement was read. The whole people, of both sexes, saw the one standing without unsightly movement, and the other trembling in every limb. And those who had not seen him saw in his sister what divine mercy had done in him. For they saw what there was to give thanks for in him, and what to pray for on her behalf. Meanwhile, when their statement had been read, I told them to leave the sight of the people, and I had begun to discuss the whole matter rather more carefully, when, see, while I was discussing it, other voices of new rejoicing are heard from the martyr's memorial. Those who were listening to me turned that way and began to run together. For she, when she came down from the steps on which she had stood, had gone to pray to the holy martyr; and as soon as she touched the rails she likewise collapsed as if into sleep and rose healed. While we were asking what had happened, and what that joyful uproar was, they came into the basilica where we were, bringing her healed from the martyr's place. Then such a shout of wonder arose from both sexes that the sound, kept up with tears, seemed as if it could not end. She was led to the place where a little before she had stood trembling. They rejoiced that she was like her brother, whereas they had grieved that she remained unlike him; and they saw that their prayers for her, not yet poured out, but their will going before them, had been heard so soon. They rejoiced in the praise of God with voices without words, with such a noise as our ears could scarcely bear. What was in the hearts of those rejoicing but the faith of Christ, for which Stephen's blood was shed?