LEGENDS, &c. MIRACLES, &c.
A Legend[79]was originally a book used in the old Romish churches, containing the lessons that were to be read in divine service. Hence also the lives of saints and martyrs came to be called legends, because chapters were read out of them at matins, and in the refectories of the religious houses. TheGolden Legendis a collection of the lives of the Saints, compiled by James De Varasse, better known by the Latin name of J. De Veragine, Vicar-General of the Dominicans, and afterwards Bishop of Genoa, who died in 1298. It was received into the church with the most enthusiastic applause, which it maintained for 200 years; but, in fact, it is so full of ridiculous and absurd romantic monstrosities, that the Romanists themselves are now generally ashamed of it. On this very account alone the word Legend got into general disrepute.
The following is stated to be the origin of those ecclesiastical histories entitled Legends:—The professors in rhetoric, before colleges were established in the monasteries where the schools were held, frequently gave their pupils the life of some saint for a trial of their talent atamplification. The students, being constantly at a loss to furnish out their pages, invented most of these wonderful adventures. Jortin observes, that the Christiansused to collect out of Ovid, Livy, and other pagan poets and historians, the miracles and portents, so found there, and accommodated them to their own monks and saints. The good fathers of that age, whose simplicity was not inferior to their devotion, were so delighted with these flowers of rhetoric, that they were induced to make a collection of these miraculous compositions; not imagining that, at some distant period, they would become matters of faith. Yet when James De Veragine, Peter Nadal, and Peter Ribadeneira, wrote the Lives of the Saints, they sought for the materials in the libraries of these monasteries; and, awakening from the dust the manuscripts of amplification, imagined they made an invaluable present to the world, by laying before them these voluminous absurdities. The people received these pious fictions with all imaginable simplicity; and as the book is adorned with a number of cuts, these miracles were perfectly intelligible to their eyes. Fleury, Tillemont, Baillet, Launoi, and Ballendus, cleared away much of the rubbish. The enviable title ofGolden Legend, by which James De Veragine called his work, has been disputed; iron or lead might more aptly express the character of this folio.
The monks, when the world became more critical in their reading, gave a graver turn to their narratives, and became more penurious of their absurdities. The faithful Catholic contends that the line of tradition has been preserved unbroken; notwithstanding that the originals were lost in the general wreck of literature from the barbarians, or came down in a most imperfect state. Baroniushas given the lives of many apocryphal saints; for instance, of a SaintXenoris, whom he calls a Martyr of Antioch; but it appears that Baronius having read this work in Chrysostom, which signifies a couple or pair, he mistook it for the name of a saint, and continued to give the most authentic biography of a saint who never existed! The Catholics confess this sort of blunder is not uncommon, but then it is only fools who laugh!
As a specimen of the happier inventions, one is given, embellished by the diction of Gibbon the historian.
“Among the insipid legends of ecclesiastical history, I am tempted to distinguish the memorable fable of theSeven Sleepers, whose imaginary date corresponds with the reign of the younger Theodosius, and the conquest of Africa by the Vandals. When the emperor Decius persecuted the Christians, seven noble youths of Ephesus concealed themselves in a spacious cavern on the side of an adjacent mountain, where they were doomed to perish by the tyrant, who gave orders that the entrance should be firmly secured by a pile of stones. They immediately fell into a deep slumber, which was miraculously prolonged without injuring the powers of life, during a period of one hundred and eighty-seven years. At the end of that time the slaves of Adolius, to whom the inheritance of the mountain had descended, removed the stones, to supply materials for some rustic edifice. The light of the sun darted into the cavern, and the Seven Sleepers were permitted to awake: after a slumber, as they thought, of afew hours, they were pressed by the calls of hunger; and resolved that Jamblichus, one of their number, should secretly return to the city to purchase bread for the use of his companions. The youth, if we may still employ that appellation, could no longer recognise the once familiar aspect of his native country; and his surprise was increased by the appearance of a large cross, triumphantly erected over the principal gate of Ephesus. His singular dress, and obsolete language, confounded the baker, to whom he offered an ancient medal of Decius as the current coin of the empire; and Jamblichus, on suspicion of a secret treasure, was dragged before the judge. Their mutual inquiries produced the amazing discovery that two centuries were almost elapsed since Jamblichus and his friends had escaped from the rage of a pagan tyrant. The bishop of Ephesus, the clergy, the magistrates, the people, and, it is said, the emperor Theodosius himself, hastened to visit the cavern of the Seven Sleepers; who bestowed their benediction, related their story, and at the same instant peaceably expired.
“This popular tale Mahomet learned when he drove his camels to the fairs of Syria; and he has introduced it, as a divine revelation, into the Koran.” The same story has been adopted and adorned, by the natives from Bengal to Africa, who profess the Mahometan religion.
These monks imagined that holiness was often proportioned to a saint’s filthiness. St. Ignatius delighted, say they, to appear abroad with old dirty shoes; he never used a comb, but sufferedhis hair to run into clots, and religiously abstained from paring his nails. One saint attained to such a pitch of piety as to have near three hundred patches on his breeches; which, after his death, were exhibited in public as a stimulus to imitate such aholy life. St. Francis discovered, by certain experience, that the devil was frightened away by similar kinds ofunmentionables; but was animated by clean clothing to tempt and seduce the wearers; and one of their heroes declares that the purest souls are in the dirtiest bodies. On this subject a story is told by them which may not be very agreeable to fastidious delicacy. Brother Juniper was a gentleman perfectly pious in this principle; indeed so great was his merit in this species of mortification, that a brother declared he could always nose Brother Juniper when within a mile of the monastery, provided he was at the due point. Once, when the blessed Juniper, for he was no saint, was a guest, his host, proud of the honour of entertaining so pious a personage, the intimate friend of St. Francis, provided an excellent bed and the finest sheets. Brother abhorred such luxury; and this too evidently appeared after his sudden departure in the morning, unknown to his kind host. The great Juniper did this, says his biographer, (having told us what he did) not so much from his habitual inclinations for which he was so justly celebrated, as from his excessive piety, and as much as he could to mortify worldly pride, and to shew how a true saint despised clean sheets.
Among other grotesque miracles we find, in thelife of St. Francis, that he preached a sermon in a desert, but he soon collected an immense audience. The birds shrilly warbled to every sentence, and stretched out their necks, opened their beaks, and when he finished, dispersed with a holy rapture into four companies, to report his sermon to all the birds of the universe. A grasshopper remained a week with St. Francis during the absence of the Virgin Mary, and fastened on his head. He grew so companionable with a nightingale, that when a nest of swallows began to twitter, he hushed them, by desiring them not to tittle tattle of his sister the nightingale. Attacked by a wolf, with only the sign manual of the cross, he held a long dialogue with his rabid assailant, till the wolf, meek as a lap-dog, stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him through towns, and became half a Christian. This same St. Francis had such a detestation of the good things of this world, that he would never suffer his followers to touch money. A friar having placed some money in a window collected at the altar, he observed him to take it in his mouth and throw it on the dung of an ass! St. Phillip Nerius was such an admirerof povertythat he frequently prayed God would bring him to that state as to stand in need of a penny, and find none that would give him one! But St. Macaire was so shocked at havingkilled a lousethat he endured seven years of penitence among the thorns and briars of a forest.
The following miraculous incident is given respecting two pious maidens. The night of the Nativity of Christ, after the first mass, they bothretired into a solitary spot of their nunnery till the second mass was rung. One asked the other, “why do you want two cushions, when I have only one?” The other replied, “I would place it between us, for the child Jesus; as the Evangelist says, “Where there are two or three persons assembled I am in the midst of them.”—This being done, they sat down, feeling a most lively pleasure at their fancy; and there they remained from the nativity of Christ to that of John the Baptist; but this great interval of time passed with these saintly maidens, as two hours would appear to others. The abbess and her nuns were alarmed at their absence, for no one could give any account of them. On the eve of St. John, a cowherd passing by them, beheld a beautiful child seated on a cushion between this pair of run-away nuns. He hastened to the abbess with news of this stray sheep, who saw this lovely child playfully seated between these nymphs, who, with blushing countenances, enquired if the second bell had already rung? Both parties were equally astonished to find our young devotees had been there since the birth of Christ to that of John the Baptist. The abbess inquired after the child who sat between them: they solemnly declared they saw no child between them, and persisted in their story.”
“Such,” observes a late writer on this subject, “is one of the miracles of the ‘Golden Legend,’ which a wicked wit might comment on, and see nothing extraordinary in the whole story. The two nuns might be missing between the nativities, and be found at last with a child seated betweenthem. They might not choose to account either for their absence or their child: the only touch of miracle is, that they asseverated they sawno child, that I confess is alittle (child)too much.
Ribadeneira’s Lives of the Saints exhibit more of the legendary spirit than Alban Butler’s work on the same subject, (which, by the bye, is the most sensible history of these legends;) for wanting judgment and not faith, the former is more voluminous in his details, and more ridiculous in his narratives.
Alban Butler affirms that St. Genevieve, the patron of Paris, was born in 422, at Nanterre, four miles from Paris, near the present Calvary there, and that she died a virgin on this day in 512, and was buried in 545, near the steps of the high altar, in a magnificent church, dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, began by Clovis, where he also was interred. Her relics were afterwards taken up and put into a costly shrine about 630. Of course they worked miracles. Her shrine of gold and silver, covered with precious stones, the presents of kings and queens, and with a cluster of diamonds on the top, presented by the intriguing Mary de Medicis, is, on calamitous occasions, carried about Paris in procession, accompanied by shrines equally miraculous, and by the canons of St. Genevieve walking barefoot.
Themiraclesof St. Genevieve, as related in the Golden Legend, were equally numerous and equally credible. It relates that when she was a child, St. Germaine said to her mother, “Know ye for certain that on the day of Genevieve’s nativity theangels sung with joy and gladness,” and looking on the ground he saw a penny signed with the cross, which came there by the will of God; he took it up, and gave it to Genevieve, requiring her to bear in mind that she was the spouse of Christ. She promised him accordingly, and often went to the minister, that she might be worthy of her espousals. “Then,” says the Legend, “the mother was angry, and smote her on the cheek—God avenged the child, so that the mother became blind,” and so remained for one and twenty months, when Genevieve fetched her some holy water, signed her with the sign of the cross, washed her eyes, and she recovered her sight. It further relates, that by the Holy Ghost she showed many people their secret thoughts, and that from fifteen years to fifty, she fasted every day except Sunday and Thursday, when she ate beans, and barley bread of three weeks old. Desiring to build a church, and dedicate it to St. Denis and other martyrs, she required materials of the priests for that purpose. “Dame,” answered the priests, “we would; but we can get no chalk nor lime.” She desired them to go to the bridge of Paris, and bring what they found there. They did so till two swineherds came by, one of whom said to the other, ‘I went yesterday after one of my sows and found a bed of lime;’ the other replied that he had also found one under the root of a tree that the wind had blown down. St. Genevieve’s priests of course inquired where these discoveries were made, and bearing the tidings to Genevieve, the church of St. Denis was began. During itsprogress the workmen wanted drink, whereupon Genevieve called for a vessel, prayed over it, signed it with the cross, and the vessel was immediately filled; “so,” says the Legend, “the workmen drank their belly full,” and the vessel continued to be supplied in the same way with “drink” for the workmen till the church was finished. At another time a woman stole St. Genevieve’s shoes, but as soon as she got home lost her sight for the theft, and remained blind, till, having restored the shoes, St. Genevieve restored the woman’s sight. Desiring the liberation of certain prisoners condemned to death at Paris, she went thither and found the city gates were shut against her, but they opened without any other key than her own presence. She prayed over twelve men in that city possessed with devils, till the men were suspended in the air, and the devils were expelled. A child of four years old fell into a pit, and was killed; St. Genevieve only covered her with her mantle and prayed over her, and the child came to life, and was baptised at Easter. On a voyage to Spain she arrived at a port “where, as of custom, ships were wont to perish.” Her own vessel was likely to strike on a tree in the water, which seems to have caused the wrecks; she commanded the tree to be cut down, and began to pray; when lo, just as the tree began to fall, “two wild heads, grey and horrible, issued thereout, which stank so sore, that the people there were envenomed by the space of two hours, and never after perished ship there; thanks be to God and this holy saint.”
At Meaux, a master not forgiving his servant his faults, though St. Genevieve prayed him, she prayed against him. He was immediately seized with a hot ague: “on the morrow he came to the holy virgin, running with open mouth like a German bear, his tongue hanging out like a boar, and requiring pardon.” She then blessed him, the fever left him, and the servant was pardoned. A girl going out with a bottle, St. Genevieve called to her, and asked what she carried: she answered oil, which she had bought; but St. Genevieve seeing the devil sitting on the bottle, blew upon it, and the bottle broke, but the saint blessed the oil, and caused her to bear it home safely notwithstanding. The Golden Legend says, that the people who saw this, marvelled that the saint could see the devil, and were greatly edified.
It was to be expected that a saint of such miraculous powers in her lifetime should possess them after her death, and accordingly the reputation of her relics is very high.
Several stories of St. Genevieve’s miraculous faculties, represent them as very convenient in vexatious cases of ordinary occurrence; one of these will serve as a specimen. On a dark wet night she was going to church with her maidens, with a candle borne before her, which the wind and rain put out; the saint merely called for the candle, and as soon as she took it in her hand it was lighted again, “without any fire of this world.”
Other stories of her lighting candles in this way, call to mind a candle, greatly venerated byE. Worsley, in a “Discourse of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church, or, a full refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet’s unjust Exceptions against Miracles,” octavo, 1676. At p. 64, he says, “that themiraculous wax candle, yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois, may give the reader entertainment, being most certain,and never doubted of by any. In 1105, that is, much above 720 years ago, (of so great antiquity the candle is,) a merciless plague reigned in Arras. The whole city, ever devout to the Mother of God, experienced her, in this their necessity, to be a true mother of mercy; the manner was thus: The Virgin Mary appeared to two men, and enjoined them to tell the bishop of Arras, that on the next Saturday towards morning she would appear in the great church, and put into his hands a wax candle burning; from whence drops of wax should fall into a vessel of water prepared by the bishop. She said, moreover, that all the diseased that drank of this water, should forthwith be cured.This truly promised, truly happened.Our blessed Lady appeared all beautiful, having in her hands a wax candle burning, which diffused light over the whole church; this she presented to the bishop; he blessing it with the sign of the cross, set it in the urn of water; when drops of wax plentifully fell down into the vessel. The diseased drank of it; all were cured; the contagion ceased; and the candle to this day, preserved with great veneration, spends itself, yet loses nothing; and therefore remains still of the same length and greatness it did 720 years ago. A vast quantity of wax, made upof the many drops which fall into the water upon those festival days, when the candle burns, may be justly called a standing indeficient miracle.”
This candle story, though gravely related by a catholic writer, as “not doubted of by any,” and as therefore not to be doubted, miraculously failed in convincing the protestant Stillingfleet, that “miracles wrought in the Roman catholic church,” ought to be believed.