The Framing is the Picture

While genuine curiosity is always present in humanity, institutionalized forms of it depend on the presence of a suitable ideology. Scientific study of so-called miraculous events, for example, is not undertaken. The scientific ideology just can’t work with the phenomena as these are actually experienced. Let us take something odd like bi-location, thus a person appearing in two places at the same time. Based on the scientific view, bi-location is impossible. Those who claim to have observed it are simply labeled credulous. If such a claim is ever scientifically investigated, the aim of the study is to prove its falsity. Similarly, the Vatican does undertake careful investigation of miracles, but always as part of a process of canonization, not as a general (scientific) undertaking. Thus the Vatican does not investigate claims of miracles surrounding Hindu or Muslim saints. Much as science has a strong view of the necessarily physical causation of any symptoms others might label miraculous, so also the Vatican has a strong view of the causation of miracles; these are necessarily God’s interventions.

For these reasons, we always find evidence for the miraculous in settings where the ideology colors the whole situation. Here and there, in the last two centuries, we’ve seen some few departures from this general tendency. These have been rare because a person, however well-qualified as a scientist, will draw tribal attacks if he or she wanders off the reservation. In the nineteenth century, before the establishment of Science with a leading cap, we have the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research by an elite. An example from our own time is Ian Stevenson, a trained medical man and biochemist, who investigated reincarnation. Near Death Experience studies represent another interesting cluster, also initiated by a doctor, Raymond Moody. NDE work has taken on a certain legitimacy precisely because Moody’s work was then taken up by multiple teams of other physicians—always those who were exposed to the phenomenon directly.

The point I’m after today, however, is not that “fringe” elements in science have “dared” to “dabble” in heresy—and have to some extent “gotten away” with it. Especially in NDE work, fame and fortune—if not in academic circles—may be achieved by heresy. The thought I had was that if the medium is the message, sometimes the framing is the picture. The extraordinary gifts that infrequently become visible surrounding saints or would-be saints—I’m thinking here of Padre Pio, who is, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth who isn’t yet, and Bruno Gröning who never shall be—appear to me to be of the greatest interest. These are modern people; they’ve all lived during my life time; indeed I once lived a mere handful of miles away from Therese’s town during and after World War II. But I know of many scores of others who’ve lived in the past—and in every culture of the globe. The same stories surround them—albeit figures with stigmata are strictly in Catholic realms, which is itself worthy of careful note. The linkage between reincarnation studies and stigmata has never been noted, except, perhaps, by me (here). But as for other capacities these people have displayed, they are the same: bi-location, precognition, healing and other powers. Each is embedded in a religious culture which explains each in his or her own framing. The total phenomenon, as an established reality, has never been examined as it were objectively, as phenomena but yet with full acceptance of the observed realities. By full acceptance here I mean that to understand these people’s lives, experiences, and actions necessarily requires acceptance of a much more extended kind of reality than we believe surrounds us. (Here I provide this link to some reports on Padre Pio by way of illustration of the nature of this evidence—and how we actually encounter it).

Time still hides many things. The inertial pull of this dimension is enormous, but in due time genuine knowledge of these phenomena, which straddle the zones of here and over there, may become better understood—although, I suspect, never by more than just a minority. As genuine curiosity is always present, there will always be those with one foot in the borderzone.

The Miraculous as Proof

In Western cultural spheres we associate the miraculous with God. The word itself has much less explicit roots. In Latin it comes from “wonder,” or “to wonder at” (mirari). Translators of the Bible from the Greek used “miracle” for three Greek words that occur in scripture: “sign” (semeion), “wonder” (teras), and “power” (dynamis). Translated into Latin, in turn, these are signum, prodigium, and virtus. (My source is the ever-helpful Online Etymology Dictionary here).

I find this fascinating. The Latin-rooted “miracle” principally points to our reaction or emotion to something astonishing, thus to our wonder. But in Biblical reference that same word also points at sign, omen, or portent (all contained in the meaning of a prodigy). That meaning suggests a higher source beyond the visible without specifically naming it. Miracle is also used to translate power, but presumably a power unusual enough to be wondered at. To sum this up, a miracle suggests a message as well as an unusual power—and one or both elicit our wonder.

That this communication comes from God is an assumption—or a projection that we make. Nothing wrong there if “God” is used as a word to signify “the greater unexplained.” In our theologies, however, we have vastly expanded on that phrase and given this word many and dense meanings in addition. The mere presence of a miracle, however, does not identify the source of the sign or of the power in any explicit way. The traditional habit within Christendom, however, has been to assign this fact to God, and to define God from other sources as being such-and-such a Being. But I’d insist that our assignment of a phenomenon to a source is not a proof of the source.

C.S. Lewis provides a good example of a Christian apologist who uses Jesus’ miracles in efforts to prove that Jesus was God. What Christian traditions tell us is that Jesus performed miracles or that such occurred in his vicinity (the woman healed by touching his robe, for instance). Anything beyond that is a projection. In the Christian tradition miracles performed by saints or taking place in their vicinity are not used to assert that the saints themselves were God. Here, therefore, we have two very different ways of explaining the miraculous. In one case the person was divine. In all other cases, God was still at work, but the person was just an ordinary if a holy human being. The New Age would call the saint a “channel.”

We do not, of course, view miraculous events as natural events. They’re unexpected, unexplained, and extraordinary. Does that mean that God cancels the laws of nature he has himself ordained? That view introduces an arbitrary element into reality (at least as I see things). An alternative explanation of the miraculous may work equally well. It is that miraculous events represents manifestations of an order of nature not usually visible in our dimension but nonetheless still a natural power that is perfectly at home in this realm too—and that its source is a power (dynamis) not usually seen. The power develops in individuals whose actions (or mere presence) give expression to it. Here I would emphasize the plural. Many people have manifested such powers over time. Meanwhile the three definitions of the miraculous remain intact. The presence of this power is indeed a sign—of other realms of possibility. And our wonder is, of course, simply a reaction to the unusual.

The presence of this power has effects that seem to transcend nature—but miracles are signs, not conceptually framed messages. The doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, cannot be derived in any way from the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. What miracle makers do does not seamlessly support what miracle makers say. If a hard link existed between the doing and the saying, conceptually contradictory doctrines arising in different traditions would all have to be true, and Aristotle wouldn’t like that. Thus, for instance a trinitarian doctrine of Christianity and a unitarian doctrine in Islam would both be true in the same way and in the same respects. Miracles are associated with both traditions—indeed are reported in every religious tradition of humanity, some of which have yet other and awkward conceptual formulations of reality.

What miracles prove, as best as I can make it out, is that our concepts of the limits of nature are too narrowly drawn, that powers exist beyond what we consider normal, that their manifestations are associated with faculties that emerge in a few human beings, and that what these people say has merit, but not absolute divine sanction. That the miraculous is Good, and that by implication it also teaches The Good, is also clear to me. But the conceptual formulation of that good is a human construct always and ever strongly influenced by then prevailing knowledge and circumstances.

Physical Aspects of Faith Healing

I note that at least one visitor to this blog reached it by using what might appear to be a strange search phrase: “bruno groening neck.” Odd although it is, I understood the search phrase immediately. This famed healer had what seems to be a contradictory medical history—which gives me the opportunity to comment on the physical aspects of faith healing. The wider context here? I referred to Bruno Gröning in a recent post on miracle cures and healers.

First some facts. The searcher’s question was no doubt occasioned by the fact that in many photographs, Bruno Gröning appears to have an abnormally swollen neck. Gröning also died at the relatively young age of 53 of cancer. Two of his sons died in their childhood. Why didn’t he cure his children? Why could he not heal himself?

The straightforward answer to these questions is that for Gröning himself, the healing stream (Heilstrom), as he called it, wasn’t something airy-fairy but a real energetic flow. He experienced it in his body, and it seemed to concentrate in his neck. He felt that he had to use this energy in healing others; if he did not, it actually harmed him. He is quoted as saying (here), “If I am prevented from doing my work, I will burn up inside.” But he was prevented—by a series of lawsuits—in his healing mission. And, evidently, he did burn up. The surgeon who last treated him is quoted on the site already referenced (Bruno Gröning-Freudenkreis) as saying, “The damage in Bruno’s body is terrible, it is a total internal incineration. How he could live so long and without suffering terrible pain is a mystery to me.”

His ability to use his power was also evidently limited and required the active, perhaps inner, participation of the “patient.” His own first wife did not believe in his powers and did not want him treating the children. His sons died years apart. He could also not heal himself; he thought that he was forbidden to do so, but that may be viewed as an interpretation of what he experienced—namely failure.

Now, to be sure, in my own posting on miracle cures, I was not, repeat not, suggesting that such cures are transcendental in character. Rather, I emphasized the fact that some kind of energy is involved—entirely in conformity with facts such as the above. One of the oddities of our perception is that the unfamiliar and the rare appear to us as transcendental; they don’t have to be so in fact. My objective in all of these postings is to enlarge our sphere of understanding. There is more to reality than our conventional modes of thought recognize.

A Modern Platonist

It is an odd characteristics of human behavior that labels give us comfort even when we don’t properly understand a thing. We give it name. We get used to the name. And after a while we feel as if we understand something just because we’ve classified it. Miraculous healings are a case in point. We assign them to a higher order; we endow this order with limitless powers; doing so we escape the burden of explanation; we can avoid specifying exactly how the higher order achieves a miraculous healing. Some people—those who won’t buy the “higher order” explanation—also adopt magical tactics of explanation. They speak of spontaneous healing without explaining how it could possibly have worked—how this particular very rapid spontaneous healing differs from the ordinary slow kind. Alternatively they deny the health condition: there was nothing wrong in the first place, the ailment was imagined. And so it goes.

While this is a characteristic human approach, good theories are also formulated by careful observation, the discovery of where the limits of knowledge are, by naming or circumscribing the unknown element, and then trying to penetrate that region in some new way. An example of this approach, which might have some relevance to miraculous healings, is the concept of morphic fields proposed most recently by Rupert Sheldrake (1942-), a British biologist. You pursue this idea in detail in Sheldrake’s two books on the subject: The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988) and A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (2005).

Morphic field theory has (in my opinion, anyway) a close kinship to the Platonic concept of eternal forms, but in a modern variant. The term itself is taken from the Greek for “form.” The idea is that any organized aggregate or any kind has a field associated with it; this field may be likened to a memory of how something is organized, thus as a deposit or a record. The field and the organized entity are linked one to the other, as we are to our memories. Thus we continuously add to our memories and, when needed, we retrieve them and they guide us in our activities. Substitute morphic field for memory, and you have a reasonable grasp of Sheldrake’s theory. In Sheldrake’s scheme our own personal memories, however, are just one instance of a morphic field. Our bodies have their own field; the bodies of humanity as a whole have another. In this theory, morphic fields are associated with all organized entities. The fields hold the patterns that describe each—individual or collective. Actual events are taken up into the field and stored there, modifying the pattern.

An interesting idea. It is structurally much the same as hylomorphism, suggesting that everything is a duality of matter (hyle) and form (morphē), an Aristotelian proposal. We’re already used to that idea, therefore it doesn’t strike us as outlandish—whereas Sheldrake’s much more detailed concept of “fields” out there, somewhere, holding a more dynamic sort of form—and zillions of them, for individuals as well as whole species and subspecies—strikes us as weird. But the idea produces less and less resistance as you ponder it over time. At least that is what happened in my case. My reflexive reaction was to say: “We don’t need another whole order of things out there.” Then, later, it occurred to me that I did not object to the Platonic/Aristotelian form-matter conceptualization when I first heard it, although the same “doubling” of everything is also implied there. Why didn’t I object to that? Because I was younger? But enough. Let me continue and sketch in how this idea first surfaced.

The idea was first proposed, not using the same phraseology, by a very important biologist and thinker, Hans Driesch (1867-1941); he is considered the father of embryology. Driesch discovered something rather astonishing. He was experimenting with sea urchin embryos. He cut them in half and then waited to see what would happen. To his astonishment, the embryos developed despite having been halved. They developed into real, living sea urchins, but much smaller ones than those that nature normally produces. This work became the foundation of modern embryology. Driesch, however, came to be classified as a vitalist, thus placed outside scientific orthodoxy in retrospect. Why? He could not explain the phenomena he was observing without recourse to what he called “a unifying non-material mind-like something…an ordering principle which does not add either energy or matter” to the process. This “something” is what Sheldrake later called the morphic field. The term itself is actually a generalization of a more narrow descriptor introduced around 1907 by another biologist, the Russian Alexander Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch spoke of “morphogenetic fields”; he offered it as a suggestive hypothesis, little more than that; his use of the “genetic” suffix limits the concept of biological development, whereas Sheldrake enlarges it to any organized phenomenon. Ross Granville Harrison and others went on to explore this “field” phenomenon in experiments, but their work was marginalized later by emerging mechanistic theories. What this shows is that Sheldrake has a lineage in scientific exploration and speculation, all arising from the puzzle that embryonic development produced—and still does. To this day we do not know with any kind of precision what guides embryonic development. The modern view that chemical feedback loops do the whole job would have to be proved by detailed mapping of all the chemical reactions, showing that they take place by rigid determination, each step necessarily forcing the next. We have no such proof.

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Now it might be objected that “morphic field” is also nothing but a label, nothing more useful than “miraculous.” But here I would point out that a theory of morphic fields—separate from the actual organism—is a much more useful concept for understanding phenomena like miraculous cures. Let’s take it seriously for a moment. Let’s say that every body is formed from a pattern stored “off-line” as it were, thus in a field at least analogous to electromagnetic fields; those also exist, mysteriously, “out there.” Sheldrake describes the interaction between a morphic field and the organism as taking place by what he calls a resonance. He largely leaves it at that, but the suggestion is something akin to a frequency or a vibration; the frequency to be sure, would have to be of a much more complex sort than we associate with electromagnetic waves. Here I would use the example of a memory which has multiple modalities: image, sound, emotion, even smell: a complex experience retrieved as a packet. A morphic resonance related to the body, would similarly have chemical, structural, and dynamic aspects, including electromagnetic states, temperature, and so forth.

Now let us assume that states of disease or malformation come about, in part at least, because something interferes with the proper communication between the organism and its field. Let us assume, further, that a powerful flow of psychic energy, such as a healer is able to generate, stimulates the body of the sick person once more to “tune in” to its field. If that actually happens, rapid healing may take place. It would, indeed, be spontaneous—in the sense that processes that would have taken place slowly and naturally anyway now take place rapidly, possibly helped by the excess energy also present.

This sketch represents a somewhat more thinkable alternative to the concept of a miraculous healing—but that’s all it is, a thinkable hypothesis. This field has not been developed. The reason for that is simply that current theories have no room for non-material mind-like somethings. Sheldrake appears intent in persuading his fellow scientists to engage in meaningful experiments that will definitely establish the reality of morphic fields. His aim has not been to commit cosmology, to echo George Will. Therefore he has avoided speculations of the sort that arises as corollaries to his ideas: What comes first? The field or the organism? Is this a purely naturalistic phenomenology? If yes, pure materialism is better, is more parsimonious. Morphic fields are obviously less than perfect—else we’d never have deformed embryos and malformed babies. I regret, to be sure, that orthodox science is as hostile to metaphysics as it is to theories that wander across the borderzone in search of explanations—which may be the right ones, once fully fleshed out. Not in the current form, to be sure. But the direction may be the right one.

What Does "Higher Power" Mean?

One of the more interesting books around—especially for people who read such blogs as this one—is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The book is by Rupert Sheldrake and is subtitled “And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.” The amazon.com link to the paperback is here. I read the book in fascination. I consider Sheldrake to be one of our time’s most original thinkers about biology. He is also a creative experimenter and a genuine scientist. In certain narrow circles of scientific orthodoxy, to be sure, he is a heretic. But never mind them. What the book demonstrates is that dogs as well as other animals appear to have what for them—for us too, for that matter—are “higher powers.” Telepathic abilities are classed as paranormal at least. Animals also evidently have powers of orientation in the wild inexplicable by ordinary sensory capacities. They seem to have a kind of sight that, traditionally, we call “second sight.” Yes, they’re at home in border zones much as some people are. And, as with us as well, the talent isn’t uniformly present. Nor are these capacities limited to mammals; birds display such powers too.

I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.

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By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.

People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.

I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”

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Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.

The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.

When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?

Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.

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I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.

Miracle Cures and Healers

If no human being had ever experienced a miracle, faith healing, or the operation of some kind of strange, inexplicable power, I am sure that we’d still have religious practices, but they would all be of the variety we know as the worship of the collective. All rise. And now some celebrity will sing the National Anthem, possibly in a way we don’t even recognize. Three soldiers stand down there with the flags. And many people have a hand over their heart. State religion. Patriotism. Play ball.

We carry within us a vague intuition that all this stuff around and about us isn’t the be-all and the end-all here, but when we encounter the transcendental up close and personally, then we really know something. Then we take it seriously. And nothing gets our attention more swiftly and fully than hearing about cures. It is an astonishing fact—but nonetheless a fact—that great healers keep appearing among us, not many, but they keep appearing, and they do so no matter what stage of culture we have reached. When they do arise, a cult will invariably form around them either within the bosom of some established church or external to it.

Solanus Casey (1870-1957), a healing saint and a Capuchin priest, is one such figure in my own neck of the woods. As the author of the brief Wikipedia article about him puts it: “Many miraculous cures have been associated with Father Solanus’s intercession, both when he was alive and after his death. Pilgrims from around the world continue to make pilgrimages to the tomb of Father Solanus.” Casey is on the way to sainthood, having been given the “Venerable” designation by the Vatican. He is an example of a healer whose cult is embedded in a church.

Another modern example is the German Bruno Gröning (1906-1959). He was a carpenter by trade and later earned his living as a factory and general laborer. He emerged from obscurity in 1949 and became a very popular faith healer; his powers caused him to become embroiled in controversy. Controlling elements of the medical community opposed him; the state eventually forbade him to engage in healing activities. Thanks to the efforts of Greta Häusler, one of his early followers, the Bruno Gröning Circle of Friends has become a global organization with footprints in many countries. We find the same patterns wherever we go, never mind the locally dominant religions. Hopeful believers visit the graves of many famous Muslim saints with the same expectations—and occasional miraculous healing experiences—as they visit Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish figures.

The fascinating aspects of this phenomenon are three-fold. The healing power flows through a person, comes to be associated with a fixed place—hence pilgrimages to grave-sites or regions where the figure was active—and cures continue to take place after the individual passes away. It is also evident that the powers of the healer, and most likely the power of the person to be healed, both arise spontaneously. In the healer the power comes first; alignment with some religion or independent activity follows. Neither Casey nor Gröning were intellectuals. Gröning had very little formal education; and Casey, although he graduated from seminary, was ordained a “simplex” priest; this meant that he could neither hear confessions nor give homilies: his superiors didn’t think he had the intellectual capacity for such tasks. One smiles. The power in the person healed manifests, it seems to me, in response to the stimulus of the healer—but the healer need not be there. Otherwise post-mortem healings would not take place.

I have no doubt that some kind of energy does flows from or through these saints—but I suspect that it is always all around us. They manage somehow to concentrate and to direct it. It flows through them with great strength perhaps because something in us that normally blocks or weakens it is absent in them. It is very difficult to credit that the healing power is associated with a geographical location—easy to assume that it is everywhere. Casey lived decades in New York before he arrived in Michigan. But location—a grave-site, for example—may have bearing on the person to be healed. The healing may be a process in which receptivity to the “current of healing,” to use Gröning’s phrase, must first be stimulated. This receptivity may be enhanced by faith. Being at the place where the saint is buried or where he or she spent a life may heighten the receptivity.

There is ample evidence from many cases that the “faith” required to be healed is not something intellectual. Complete unbelievers are actually healed. But how great, really, was their disbelief? They went to see the healer, after all. This coincidence of intellectual doubt but contradictory action of the will illustrates how complex we are. What we think is often not even half the story. And many of us are far from sufficiently integrated.

More Comments on Cosmic Maps

One of the reasons why cosmic models interest me is because the starting point for everything, for me, is to build up a big picture as rapidly as possible. Whenever in the past we’ve moved into a new area, I’ve always wasted a lot of gas getting a feel for the whole metro area, quickly and hands on, of course. Look and see. Long before I knew my own neighborhood even reasonably well just north of Detroit, I’d driven the whole length of Interstates 94, 696, 275, 75, 96 and the Lodge Freeway and knew what they were trying to do. I start with a map and then try to fill in the details, the big chunks first. In the process you discover that some freeways aren’t finished yet, that Outer Drives are broken, that beltways aren’t buckled, etc.

When it comes to border zones, particularly the regions beyond the border at the entrance of which barriers bar the way, the difficulties are much greater, but not insurmountable. Some people claim to have been over there. You can read reports and study ancient maps. In this process geographies of the beyond are possible—but they do resemble the strange things medieval authors produced, all from hearsay, just sitting someplace in a monastery. Foolish of me to be one of these monks, but the itch is irresistible.

A certain discipline helps in building or judging models. That discipline is to subject models to a test of comprehensiveness. Let me illustrate this. Despite my very strong conviction that the human mind, the soul, or consciousness (I tend to use these words interchangeably) is radically different from matter, a difference in kind, not merely of degree, I’m very resistant to cosmic models that make humanity the center of reality or of a divine project. Why? Because the visible universe is incomprehensively vast. It’s incommensurable with the human. Now, mind you, I’ve no problem crediting that an invisible, subtle, spiritual cosmos may coexist with the physical—indeed that the two may be meaningfully related. Such a hypothesis seems reasonable to me. But I’m forced to conclude that the human phenomenon itself (even extended to include all life) is most decidedly a minor something—even if I assume, as I actually do, that it is part of a greater spiritual reality. I see us as temporarily marooned, as it were, marooned in matter. That we should take ourselves seriously is good and proper. We have our own legitimacy. I merely object to making human fate central—because we are so incredibly small.

Another aspect of applying a test of comprehensiveness is to see if a model accommodates the whole range of reasonably discoverable experiences reported by humanity. Where dogmatic elements in some cosmology deny such experiences ex cathedra I see a problem. Two examples are Christian denial of the possibility of reincarnation and materialists’ denial of miracles. I also have problems with the way most faith systems explain miracles. But I have no difficulty accepting Thomas Aquinas’ definition in Summa Contra Gentiles: “Those things are properly called miracles which are done by divine agency beyond the order commonly observed in nature.”* My inclination, to be sure, is to understand “divine agency” in my own way, thus not in a manner that narrows the agency to the usual, narrow human conception.

A final comment on cosmologies derived from revelation as this word is usually understood in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim faiths. I accept the notion of revelation much in the same way as I accept miracles, thus as something that reaches us from a higher order. But revelation is acquired by means of the human consciousness and is therefore subject to filtering by existing knowledge, culture, and understanding. Genuine truth reaches us, but the interpretation of it as the literal word of God is, when subjected to a test of comprehensiveness, contradicted by the contents of these scriptures themselves. A real stumbling block, for me, for instance, is the concept of a chosen people.
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*I found this quote in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Miracles,” here.

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.