Strange Evidence: The Stigmatics

Sometimes I find it difficult even to approach certain kinds of evidence. I’m thinking here of phenomena that humanity tends to walk around. The entire subject of the miraculous belongs into this category. When treated at a high level of abstraction, it is easier to handle: modernists can readily dismiss it, traditionalists can accept it without fear of being strangely eyed by modern colleagues. The more detail we add, the more difficult the evidence becomes. A particularly unusual and delicate subject is that of people who have the stigmata, thus wounds on hands, feet, and in the chest in imitation of the crucifixion of Jesus. Stigmatics arise in small but persistent numbers, and have done so since the thirteenth century, as assumed by the Catholic Encyclopedia based on a study, but I’ve been aware of only two such cases in my own time. One was the Capuchin priest Padre Pio (1887-1968); another was a Bavarian peasant woman, Therese Neumann (1898-1962). Padre Pio has been made a saint; Therese Neumann is being considered for that status by Vatican at present.

The turbulence of World War II moved our family from Hungary to Germany, landing us in the town of Tirschenreuth in Bavaria right as the war was ending. I was nine. Therese Neumann was then 47 and lived about 11 miles or so away in Konnersreuth just north of us. We heard about her fairly soon, as we settled down. By the time she died we were in America. I never saw her myself; this is not a personal account; I note this proximity by way of emphasizing that such phenomena are here with us, right here and now, not something in the dark past of another age. In the case of both of these people—and I do hope that Neumann will be made a saint—we have ample modern evidence (photographs, etc.) for their extraordinary lives and miraculous deeds. It is always thus with stigmatics: the physical manifestations are, you might almost say, minor compared to other very strange things they knew and did. Healings and knowledge of selective events in the future were reported about both.

My focus on this subject in the present context—the context being the possible interaction between soul and matter, the subject of the last several postings—is to suggest that there is striking evidence for it in these cases provided that the cause of the stigmata is assigned to the individuals who have them rather than to miraculous interventions by a higher order.

Now, to be sure, in one sense—and precisely the sense that I present in the last two postings—namely that life itself is the product of another spiritual order “invading” or “trespassing upon” the physical, then, indeed, stigmata are caused by a higher order. The saints who have them, under that assumption, are from another order. In that case stigmata are simply unique expressions of a power manifesting with more force in this dimension than it usually does. These individuals are able to concentrate another kind of energy, that which originates in the realm of soul, more effectively than the rest of us. Their intense devotion to a particular belief, their identification with Jesus and Jesus’ suffering on the cross, combined with their greater spiritual energies, produce mirroring effects. The stigmata are one expression of this concentrated spiritual power; their ability to heal others, to have visions of future events, to appear in two places simultaneous (reported of Padre Pio) are other expressions of the same intensified ability. This seems to be a reasonable explanation for these strange phenomena, but that is not what “miraculous intervention” normally means. By “miraculous” people usually mean that other agencies, not the saints themselves, are reaching across the border and temporarily lifting the laws of nature.

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It is clearly not possible to reconcile these two different interpretation unless we attempt to see the phenomenon from a more sophisticated perspective perhaps. Let me, for starters, examine the subject of agency. The saints themselves neither think nor feel that they are causing their own experiences. Many of these experiences, not least the stigmata, are painful. The agents experience them passively. But in this regard they resemble genuine artists. Artists don’t claim that they produce their own inspiration. They don’t claim that their poetry, melodies, or visions are made. They are found, discovered. They arrive. They strike—like lightning. They also experience the inspiration of the Muse in a passive way. Ask the real artist: he or she will tell you. It’s a gift. I just write it down. Later I marvel… The artist frets because giving the inspiration its mundane expression is where the trouble begins; that’s where failure is possible. But to receive and then to transform such energy, which comes from another order, the instrument itself, it seems to me, must originate there as well. Thus the two cases are joined.

Thus we have here a two-fold situation: there is an agency capable of receiving—and an inflow that the agent then directs. Let’s call this inflow by the mundane name of “energy.” Energy is perhaps a very suitable concept because its expression may take all kinds of forms—and the forms it takes are modulated by the receiving instrument, in this case the personality. If the energy results in stigmata, it may well be because the receiving mind is fixed in certain rigid ways on a certain delimited pattern, a certain mind-set. The same energy, reaching another person of a more flexible and developed mentality, may produce quite another outcome.

Here Brigitte reminded me of my favorite saint, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). To put it in a single word, she was a genius. I enjoyed some proximity to her as well; in my Army days I used to drive through her town many times, being stationed to the south of her in Bad Kreuznach. This “great seeress and prophetess, called the Sibyl of the Rhine,” (as the Catholic Encyclopedia properly calls her, here) was also an abbess, a poet, a scientist, composer, author, visionary, and public figure of her time. In Hildegard of Bingen, a highly developed instrument, the energy that flowed expressed itself in a higher sphere than the merely physical. But the interaction between two orders is more concretely or obviously exemplified by the sufferings of the stigmatics.
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A good introduction to Therese Neumann is provided by the eponymous book written by Albert Vogl, Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1987, and available here.