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Omnes istae conditiones insanabiles esse possunt, raro sanari possunt.
Estne vir aspermatosus, seu carens semine, impotens?
(1). Affirmant multi moralistae qui inseminationem requirant talem impotentem.
(2). Ejectio seminis confectio est actus sexualis viro, et alia in actu ejectioni mere conducunt.
In Azoospermia copula carnalis qua copula eadem est ac in coitu normali: microscopium solum aut sterilitas absentiam spermatozoon detegunt. In Oligospermia coitus quoque normalis esse paret.
Opinor virum aspermatosum impotentem sub lege esse quia nequit copulam sexualem perficere; e contra, virum oligo-spermatosum aut azoospermatosum steriles tantum esse.
Impotentia igitur definiri potest, in viro: Impotens est quum (1) vel absolute et perpetua, vel relative et perpetua, incapax sit intromissionis et quasi inseminationis; aut (2) quum spado sit, et ita sub decreto Sixti V veniat.
Impotentia in muliere definiri potest: quum nullam vaginam vel vaginam perpetuo impenetrabilem habeat; vel cum pathologice recuset marem.
Impotentia coeundi potest esse (1) aut antecedens aut consequens; prout matrimonii contractum anteit aut illi supervenit; (2) perpetua seu insanabilis, aut temporanea; (3) absoluta aut relativa, in quantum "aliquem ad quemlibet copulam consummatam inhabilem reddit, aut tantummodo usum matrimonii inter duas certas personas impossibilem facit" (Lehmkuhl).
Ut impotentia tanquam impedimentum matrimonii dirimens habeatur, debet esse: (1) impotentia coeundi; (2) insanabilis; (3) antecedens; (4) aut absoluta aut relativa.
AUGUSTINUS ÓMALLEY.
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The bloody sweat of our Lord mentioned in Saint Luke's Gospel (xxii., 44), has given rise to not a little discussion. The Greek text is:The Vulgate has this text thus: "Et factus est sudor ejus sicut guttae sanguinis decurrentis in terram." The Douay version is: "And his sweat became as drops of blood trickling down upon the ground." The King James translation has it: "And his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." The Greek text and the Vulgate and Douay versions are the same, but in the King James translation the words, "as it were great" differ somewhat from the statement in Greek.
The belief in the Catholic Church is that our Lord literally sweat blood through His unbroken skin, and this sweat is commonly deemed miraculous. Those that deny the sweat was really blood have no ground whatever for their assertion, because apart from all miracle bloody sweat can be a purely natural occurrence.
Dr. J. H. Pooley, inThe Popular Science Monthly(vol. 26, p. 357), has an article on this subject in which he reported 47 cases of bloody sweat through unbroken skin. He, however, is of the opinion that our Lord's sweat had no real blood in it. Whatever his reason may be for this assertion he carefully conceals it.
Hemorrhage through the unbroken skin is a rare occurrence; but, as has been said, Dr. Pooley found 47 cases reported, and there are probably many others. The discharge may be pure blood which coagulates in crusts, or it may be blood mixed with sweat; it may be present over the whole surface of the body or only in those parts where the{348}skin is thin and delicate. Commonly, bloody sweat is an oozing, but Hebra, is hisDiseases of the Skin,tells of a young man that he himself observed, from whose legs and hand blood ran, sometimes in minute jets one-twelfth of an inch in height. The skin was sound, and the bloody sweat was not caused by any emotion.
The flow may be intermittent, appearing at intervals from a few hours to months. Sometimes the discharge is connected with skin diseases, but often the skin is unaffected. Examples have been found at every age and in both sexes, but this sweat is commoner in women. Du Gard reports an instance in a child only three months old, and Spolinus tells of such a sweat in a child twelve years of age.
Bloody sweat may occur in malaria; it may be connected with neurasthenic conditions, and it has been caused frequently by overwhelming emotion, as terror and anguish.
De Thou tells of a French officer who was in command at Monte Maro in Piedmont in 1552, who sweated blood after he had been threatened with an ignominious execution if he did not surrender the town. The same writer mentions a young Florentine, put to death in Rome during the pontificate of Sixtus V, who sweated blood before execution.
The Society of Arts at Haarlem reported the case of a Danish sailor who sweated blood through terror in a storm. This man was observed carefully by a physician on the ship. The physician at first thought the man had been wounded by a fall, but after wiping away the blood he discovered that the oozing came through uninjured skin. When the storm had ceased the sailor at once regained a healthy condition.
In theFrench Transactions médicales,for November, 1830, is narrated the case of a young woman who had turned from Protestantism to Catholicism, and after this conversion she grew hysterical because of persecution by her family. During the hysterical attacks she sweat blood from the surface of her cheeks and belly.
Before the Christian era bloody sweat was observed by Aristotle, Galen, Diodorus Siculus, and Lucan also mention such occurrences.
The stigmata of some saints are authenticated cases of bleeding through the sound skin of the hands, feet, and side during extraordinary sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, and deep mental concentration upon that Passion,—the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi, for example. Such bleeding is regarded in the Church as miraculous. Apart from any question of faith, there is no reason why they may not be{349}miraculous, especially if the supernatural quality is supported by other facts; but, again, such stigmata can be natural. To prove, in general, that stigmata are miraculous requires commonly heroic sanctity as a background, and even then in all cases the proof is not necessarily absolute.
Focachon, a chemist at Charmes, applied postage stamps to the left shoulder of a hypnotised subject, and kept them in place with ordinary sticking plaster and a bandage. He suggested to the patient that he had applied a blister. The subject was watched, and after twenty-four hours the bandage, which had been untouched, was removed. The skin under the postage stamps was thickened, necrotic, of a yellowish-white colour, puffy with the serum of the blood and leucocytes, and surrounded by an intensely red zone of inflammation. Several physicians, including Beaunis, confirmed this observation; and Beaunis made photographs of the blister, which he showed to the Society of Physiological Psychology, June 29, 1885. (Animal Magnetism.Binet and Féré. New York, 1889.)
In Ricard'sJournal de magnétisme animal,2d year, 1840, pp. 18, 151, is a similar case. Prejalmini, in November, 1840, raised a blister on the healthy skin of a somnambulist by a piece of ordinary writing paper on which he had written a prescription for a blister.
At the meeting of theSociété de biologie,on July 11, 1885, Bourru and Burot, professors of the Rochefort school, published records of epistaxis and of bloody sweat, produced by suggestion on a male hysteric. On one occasion, after the patient had been hypnotised, his name was traced with the end of a blunt probe on both the patient's forearms. There was, of course, no mark of any kind left on the arms. Then the patient was told: "This afternoon, at four o'clock, you will go to sleep, and blood will then issue from your arms on the lines which I have now traced." The man was paralytic and anaesthetic on the left side. He fell asleep at four o'clock, and while he was asleep the name appeared on the sound left arm, raised in a red wheal, and there were minute drops of complete blood (serum and corpuscles) in several places. There was no change on the paralysed right forearm. Later the patient himself commanded the arm to bleed and it did so. This second occurrence was observed by Mabille. (Binet and Féré. Op. cit., p. 199.) Charcot and his pupils at the Salpêtrière have often produced by suggestion alone the effects of burns upon the skin of hypnotised patients. The blisters in these cases did not appear at once{350}but after some hours had elapsed. The blisters, of course, contained blood.
The weekly bleeding, through the unbroken skin, of the hands and feet of Louise Lateau is an example of stigmata in our own day, which may have been supernatural or natural. Physicians would call it natural, an effect of autohypnosis, but there is no reason why it may not have been just as miraculous as the stigmata of the saints. Professor Lefèvre of the University of Louvain, a physician, said her stigmata were miraculous. Theodore Schwann, the discoverer of the cell doctrine, deemed her condition natural.
In the Letters of the Rt. Rev. Casper Borgess, Bishop of Detroit, Michigan, is an account of a visit to Louise Lateau made in July, 1877. He says, "I first seated myself on the only chair in the room, which I had placed at the right side, near the head of the bed. Louise's two hands rested on several thicknesses of folded linen, spread over the bed-cover, and were covered with a folded linen cloth. This I removed. The hands were both heavily covered with blood; in some places it had congealed, and looked very dark; but in the centre, between the fore and little fingers, on the upper part of the hand, the blood was quite fresh and flowed freely. Not knowing at the time that the wiping of the hands causes her intense pain, I proceeded to wipe off the hands, for a more perfect inspection of the wound on each hand. The wound, or stigma, on the right hand seemed more than one inch in length, about half an inch at its greatest width, and was of oval shape. Turning the hand, I saw a wound of the same form in the palm of the hand, and opposite the wound on the back of the same. The blood seemed to rise in bubbles, forming in rapid succession, flowing in a spread stream down to the wrist. Examining the wound itself, I was well convinced that the skin of the hand was not broken nor in any way injured; and there was no sign of a wound made by any material instrument, sharp or dull. And, withal, the blood oozing out of the wound appeared a reality, and complete in form."
The bishop evidently uses the term "wound" in a figurative sense, because he draws attention to the fact that the skin was intact, continuous. She bled from the dorsal and palmar surfaces of the hands in areas shaped like the wounds represented by painters on the hands of our Lord. While the bishop was examining her hands Louise went into an ecstatic condition.
If the Church defines that a bloody sweat or the stigmata of a saint are supernatural, that definition, of course, ends the matter for Catholics as far as the particular case is concerned;{351}but until such a decision has been made these conditions are all to be regarded as effects of natural causes working in a natural manner.
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 Mugwumplibera 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 assertion 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 sanctity, 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 Passion of our Lord, producing these bleedings in a sound body; or (3) as an effect of a rational, intense contemplation of the same Passion, 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 sanctity, and there is no deep knowledge without sympathy. Fact-grinding made Darwin "nauseate Shakspere." Science can not see in the dark as genius and sanctity 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 ÓMALLEY.
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