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I don’t like to accuse two highly respected public figures of lying. Lying, after all, presupposes an intention to deceive the people you are talking to, and not being a mind-reader, I’m loath to ascribe such a wicked intention to two people whom I’ve never met. But when two highly intelligent men make false statements, which they almost certainly know to be false, and they then use these statements for the purpose of scoring cheap points at someone else’s expense, then I think it is fair to say that they are guilty of distorting the truth. And to those who would distort the truth, I say: what you propose to do is bad enough, but if you are going to do it, then you should at least be clever about it. Getting caught telling an untruth only makes you look inept – and if you are exposed, you forfeit whatever public respect you may have once had.
I’ll leave it to my readers to decide whether the two gentlemen whom I’m about to expose have forfeited not only the respect of their readers, but also their credibility on all matters relating to religion. Loss of credibility is a much more serious thing: for whereas respect can (in some cases) be regained after making a full and public admission of wrongdoing, credibility cannot. Being sorry about past mistakes does not make you trustworthy in avoiding future ones.
The two highly intelligent men whom I’m writing about are well-known to most of my readers: the evolutionary biologist Professor Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago; and the British actor, broadcaster and author, Stephen Fry. Both of these individuals are also outspoken critics of Intelligent Design, and their grounds for criticism are very similar: one writes that “Intelligent design, or ID, is the latest pseudoscientific incarnation of religious creationism, cleverly crafted by a new group of enthusiasts to circumvent recent legal restrictions”, while the other describes ID as “a barbarously irrational mixture of pseudoscience and fallacious argument that poses itself ‘innocently’ as a credible alternative.” Finally, both men would define science as “evidence-based truth,” as contrasted with the so-called “revealed truth” of religion.
The miracle of the herrings
Which brings me to the subject of today’s post: what counts as good evidence for a miracle, and do we have any good reason to believe that Aquinas’ miracle of the herrings passes muster as a credible miracle? In a recent post titled, The Miracle of the Herrings: Why Thomas Aquinas is a saint (6 August 2013), Professor Jerry Coyne made the astonishing claim that St. Thomas Aquinas, a thinker who is respected by Christians of all stripes and who is widely considered to have been the Catholic Church’s greatest theologian and philosopher, was officially declared a saint on the basis of a bogus miracle, based on third-hand evidence. The Catholic Church normally asks for a supernatural sign from God – in other words, a miracle – before officially declaring a person to be a saint, in a process known as canonization. In fact, the Church usually – but not always – asks for two.
Towards the end of his brief post, after having exposed the sham miracle that was allegedly used to justify St. Thomas Aquinas’ canonization, Professor Coyne triumphantly exclaimed to his readers: “There you have the standard of miracles the Catholic authorities consider dispositive.” Science, as Coyne never tires of reminding us, is based on observational evidence, which is (generally) replicable; whereas religion is based on faith, backed up by hearsay and rumor. Score: science 1, religion 0.
What, you may ask, was the basis of Professor Coyne’s astonishing claim about the miracle that propelled St. Thomas Aquinas to sainthood? Apparently, it was a Youtube clip sent to him by a reader, of a popular TV show called QI (Quite Interesting), which is hosted by the British actor, comedian and author, Stephen Fry:
Alert reader Grania, an ex-Catholic, sent me a YouTube clip of the “QI” show hosted by Stephen Fry, which apparently specializes in esoteric knowledge. If you watch the clip at the link, you’ll see, a few minutes in, a discussion about a fish-related miracle used to canonize Thomas Aquinas.
The show that Professor Coyne is referring to is more than four years old: it was aired on January 28, 2009.
What Stephen Fry said on the QI show, about the miracle of the herrings
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I’ve taken the trouble to transcribe what Stephen Fry said on the QI show on January 28, 2009, on the subject of the miracle of the herrings, which is ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas:
(0:03)
Stephen Fry (to his studio guests): Tell me, if you will, the tale of the miracle of the herrings.Studio Guest: Is that a miracle as in the act of an interventionist God? Absolutely didn’t happen?
Stephen Fry: Yeah, you’re right. It so didn’t happen, but it is an official miracle. It’s just one of the more pathetic fables…
(At this point, the conversation veers off-topic, as Fry and his guests exchange humorous banter about the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, narrated in the New Testament. Finally, after about a minute, Fry steers the conversation back on-topic.)
(1:26)
Stephen Fry: As you know, [the] Roman Catholic Church likes to appoint… (er) after they’re dead, it likes to do this thing to holy dead people: it makes them a saint.Studio Guest: They’re fast-tracking one at the moment, aren’t they? There’s Padre Pio: they’re trying to fast-track him.
Stephen Fry: And they’re trying to fast-track Mother Teresa, of course. But this is one of the great 13th century, divine creatures, as it were – a theologian-philosopher called Thomas Aquinas, and they wanted to make him a saint. Now he was a Dominican friar, but he didn’t mortify his flesh, as he was supposed to – there he is. (An image of a rather corpulent Aquinas is displayed on the television screen.)So they couldn’t… you know, that was a bit bad. He didn’t seem to do any particularly good works while he was around. (Chuckles loudly.) He wrote splendidly; he was a great philosopher. And they had to try and find a miracle for him, and there was no miracle, until someone told a story that apparently on his deathbed, he said, “Oh, I really fancy a herring. Some herrings, have we got some herrings?” Now, they’re in the Mediterranean, where there are no herrings, so they thought, “We’ll give him some pilchards, he won’t know.” So they gave him some pilchards, and he went, “Mmm. Very [good]. They’re the best herrings I’ve ever tasted!” And so – this is genuinely true – the Catholic Church decided to interpret that as the miracle of the herrings: that the pilchards had turned to herrings in his mouth. (Audience laughter.) And therefore he qualified as a saint, and therefore he is to this day St. Thomas Aquinas…
(3:09)
Anyway, there we are. The miracle of the herrings was attributed to Thomas Aquinas so that he would qualify for sainthood.
What Stephen Fry got wrong
There are at least six things wrong with Stephen Fry’s account.
First, the Catholic Church doesn’t make people saints. God does that. What the Catholic Church does, after an examination of the evidence, is declare them saints.
Second, a theologian-philosopher such as St. Thomas is certainly not a “divine creature”; he’s not a divine anything. He’s just a mortal man.
It turns out that St. Thomas Aquinas was a very humble man. In order to back up that assertion, I’d like to quote from a document containing the proceedings of the first canonization inquiry for St. Thomas Aquinas, held in Naples in 1319 (forty-five years after the saint’s death at the age of 49). The document was posted on the Web ten years ago, back in 2003. Stephen Fry may not have heard about this document, although he should have known about it, since his QI show specializes in esoteric knowlege, and if you are hosting a show like that, you really do need to be on top of your facts. However, Professor Coyne certainly has heard of the document: he even cites it and accepts as genuine in his post, The Miracle of the Herrings: Why Thomas Aquinas is a saint. Now, I should point out that the document Coyne cites is found on the Website of an extremely eccentric group of people who claim to be “more Catholic than the Pope” – so much so that they think the current Pope isn’t even a valid Pope, and that the last valid Pope died 55 years ago, back in 1958! One needs to exercise due caution when assessing the veracity of documents on such Websites. Still, I have looked at the document carefully, and judging from the language used – which is very similar to that of an ecclesiastical trial held in seventeenth century Spain, which is also on the Web – it appears to be the real McCoy. I’ve also looked at other papal documents listed on the home page of the Website in question, and I can affirm that these documents are quite genuine. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that the document is indeed what it claims to be: an official canonization inquiry into the personal sanctity of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the miracles wrought by God on his behalf.
According to the proceedings of the first canonization inquiry for St. Thomas Aquinas, those who knew the saint all agreed that he was “always gentle and humble, never windy-worded or pretentious,” as Lord Bartholomew of Capua, Chancellor and Protonotary of the kingdom of Sicily, put it (see section LXXVII of the document), and that he remained “unalterably humble, gentle, and courteous,” even when engaging in theological disputations. The abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova testified under oath (see section VIII) that even when St. Thomas Aquinas was gravely ill, he refused to allow his companions to bring him bundles of wood, to keep the fire burning in the fireplace of his room. Whenever St. Thomas saw them doing him this favor, he would struggle to his feet, protesting, “Who am I that holy men should bring me my fire-wood?” Aquinas would surely be mortified to hear himself described as a “divine creature.”
Third, the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas had a rather large frame doesn’t mean that he didn’t engage in self-mortification. As a priest who belonged to the Dominican Order of Friars Preachers, St. Thomas would have taken several vows, requiring him to engage in self-mortification. which are described in an article in The Catholic Encyclopedia:
The Preachers adopted from the monastic life the three traditional vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty; to them they added the ascetic element known as monastic observances; perpetual abstinence, fasting from 14 Sept. until Easter and on all the Fridays throughout the year, the exclusive use of wool for clothing, and for the bed a hard bed, and a common dormitory, silence almost perpetual in their houses, public acknowledgment of faults in the chapter, a graded list of penitential practices, etc… They suppressed in their order the title of abbot for the head of the convent, and rejected all property, revenues, the carrying of money on their travels, and the use of horses.… The Preachers consequently made study their chief occupation, which was the essential means, with preaching and teaching as the end… The Friars had to vow themselves to the salvation of souls through the ministry of preaching and confession, under the conditions set down by the Gospel and by the example of the Apostles: ardent zeal, absolute poverty, and sanctity of life.
Does that sound rigorous enough for you, Mr. Fry?
But there’s more. At the first canonization inquiry for St. Thomas Aquinas, witnesses were unanimous in their testimony that St. Thomas had led an exemplary life as a member of the Order of Friars Preachers, so we can only assume that he kept his Dominican vows, which required him to engage in extensive self-mortification. Additionally, several witnesses described St. Thomas as “temperate” in his appetite for food and drink, and one witness also alluded to his fasting. Brother Octavian of Babuco, who had known St. Thomas for several years, testified under oath that “Thomas was a man of pure and holy life, chaste, temperate in food and drink, diligent in prayer, fasting and study; that in prayer he shed tears; that he was most charitable, compassionate and humble, full of devout wisdom in his dealings with God and man.” Another witness, Brother James of Caiazzo, who knew St. Thomas Aquinas in Naples and Capua, described him as “temperate, so that he never demanded special food, being content with what was served to him.” A third, Brother Conrad of Sessa, who also knew Aquinas for several years, described him as “[t]emperate in food and drink, so that he never asked for anything special,” adding that he was “[u]nconcerned about his clothes.” A Dominican priest, Fr. John of Boiano, who personally knew St. Thomas Aquinas, described him as “humble, temperate, and chaste.” Lastly, Brother Peter Capotto testified that St. Thomas was “most temperate, never minding what he ate or even noticing it, so detached and absorbed he was in contemplation.”
Fourth, Stephen Fry is doubly wrong in his assertion that there was no miracle for St. Thomas Aquinas, until someone told a story about the miracle of the herrings that allegedly occurred on his deathbed. First of all, Fry is wrong about the timing: according to the testimony of Nicolas, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova, who testified at St. Thomas Aquinas’ canonization inquiry, the miracle of the herrings didn’t occur on Aquinas’ deathbed, but about one month before his death, “when Thomas lay sick in the castle of Maenza” (see section VIII of the document). According to the abbot, St. Thomas was heard by several people to say: “If the Lord has chosen this time to come for me, I had better be found in some religious house.” He was then carried to the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, about six miles (ten kilometers) from the castle, and there he lay sick for about a month, before passing away in the year 1274.
Fry’s second mistake is that he apparently fails to realize that miracles performed during the life of a saint, or even on his or her deathbed, cannot make that person a saint; the miracles must occur after that person’s death. (Think about it. We all have free will. If the miracles occur before the person’s death, then what’s to stop the person from backsliding into sin and going to Hell? And even on a person’s deathbed, that person might have a change of heart, for better or worse, right up until the very last moment. That’s why Catholics ask the Virgin Mary to “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” We really mean it.) Indeed, popes have insisted on the requirement for posthumous miracles from the twelfth century onwards. As far back as 1198, Pope Innocent III declared: “Two things are required, so that somebody may be considered a saint in the Church Militant, namely works of piety during his life, and miracles after death.” (See also here and here.) So the miracle of the herrings, even if it had occurred on Aquinas’ deathbed, couldn’t have propelled him to sainthood, as he was still alive. And if occurred one month before his death, well, forget about it.
Fifth, Stephen Fry’s claim that “the Catholic Church decided to interpret” what Aquinas said about the pilchards tasting like herrings “as the miracle of the herrings: that the pilchards had turned to herrings in his mouth” is also inaccurate on two counts. In the first place, the documents of the first canonization inquiry for St. Thomas Aquinas, held in Naples in 1319, totally refute Stephen Fry’s baseless canard that the sole evidence that the pilchards in the miracle story had actually turned to fish was Aquinas’ assertion that they tasted like fish. Here’s what brother Peter of Montesangiovanni testified under oath at the canonization trial (see section L):
Asked for his authority for this story, the witness said that the event took place within the four days that he himself spent at Maenza, along with the prior and the other monks mentioned above. He was present and saw everything and also ate some of the herrings–as also did brother Thomas himself and all the company, including Thomas’s niece the Countess Frances (who was wife to Annibaldo de’ Ceccano, lord of Maenza) and many other persons both secular and religious.
… Asked who were present at the event, he mentioned himself and his prior and John of Piedemonte, and brother Fedele of Tuscany, and Reginald of Priverno, and an attendant on brother Thomas called James of Salerno. Asked if these men were still living, he said ‘no’; he was the only one left. Asked why he happened to be then at Maenza, he said he had gone with his prior, under obedience, to visit brother Thomas. … Asked how he knew that the fish were herrings, he said that he had seen salted herrings at the papal court at Viterbo, so that he knew herrings when he saw them. Besides, brother Reginald, who had eaten fresh herrings in the countries across the Alps, declared that these were herrings too. Asked how they had been cooked, he answered that some were boiled and some fried.
Stephen Fry’s second error in claiming that “the Catholic Church decided” that the miracle of the herrings was an authentic miracle is that he fails to realize that the Catholic Church, in canonizing a person, nowhere declares that all, or even one, of the miracles ascribed to that person were actual miracles. All it officially declares is that the person in question is in Heaven. And that’s it. As Father Edward McNamara, Professor of liturgy at Regina Apostolorum University, succinctly put it in an article titled, Canonizations and Infallibility, “the object of canonization is that the person declared as a saint is now in heaven and can be invoked as an intercessor by all the faithful.”
As far as I can tell from my online research, Catholics are not bound to believe that the two miracles normally required for someone to be canonized as a saint were genuine miracles. What they are bound to believe – and I’m taking the common theological view that canonizations are infallible declarations, even though not all Catholic theologians agree on this point – is that even if it were to turn out that these “miracles” were not genuine, the person who was canonized is genuinely a saint, and is now in Heaven. (In other words, Catholics believe the Holy Spirit would somehow protect the Church from canonizing an individual who was not actually in Heaven.)
Catholics are certainly not bound to believe that all of the miracles listed in the records of a saint’s canonization trial are genuine. The trial records simply contain the entire testimony – good, bad and indifferent – of those who gave evidence under oath as to the sanctity and/or miracles relating to the saint in question. It goes without saying that much of this testimony is of inferior quality, and some of it is simply rubbish.
I might add that although Catholics are required to believe that a canonized saint is now in Heaven, they are not required to believe that the saint was of exemplary character, or free from faults. Even saints are flawed people, in their characters and in their judgments, and the author of the Catholic Encyclopedia article on beatification and canonization is perfectly correct when he observes that “sanctity does not necessarily imply the exercise of heroic virtue.”
This is a very important point, since we know for a fact that some canonized saints had very considerable character flaws – St. Jerome, for instance, was notoriously irascible – while other saints made decisions which were, objectively speaking, gravely wrong, sometimes with terrible consequences: St. Thomas More, for instance, personally approved the burning of half a dozen people at the stake as Lord Chancellor, and ordered the confiscation of people’s Bibles – even Catholic ones – from their homes, while Pope St. Pius V encouraged English Catholics to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, whom he denounced as “the pretended queen of England and the servant of crime.” In our own time, Pope Francis has announced the upcoming canonization of Pope John XXIII, who was by all accounts a saintly individual, but he was also the author of the 1962 document Crimen sollicitationis (based on an earlier, almost identical 1922 document), which ordered Catholic bishops, under pain of excommunication, not to publicly divulge cases of child sexual abuse occurring in their dioceses, making it impossible for them to contact the police (ecclesiastical trials were to be held instead, if the evidence was deemed strong enough).
The reason why I’ve brought up the bad decisions made by St. Thomas More, Pope St. Pius V and Pope John XXIII is that Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens alluded to these terrible decisions, in a 2009 debate against British Conservative M.P. Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop Onaiyekan of Nigeria, on the motion, “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the World.” I’d now like to address this objection head on.
At this point, some of my Catholic readers may be wondering how a flawed individual could possibly go straight to Heaven when he or she dies. For according to Catholic doctrine, those people who die in God’s grace, but who have not yet achieved the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven, are required by God to undergo a spiritually cleansing purification, called purgatory, before they can enter Heaven. On this way of thinking, then, it appears that if some saints were flawed in their characters and/or their moral judgments, then they would have had to go to purgatory when they died, instead of Heaven. (Protestants of course reject the doctrine of Purgatory as unBiblical; Catholics think otherwise.)
It might surprise readers to know that the Catholic Church leaves open the possibility that even a canonized saint may have to pass through purgatory. Here’s what Catholic Answers apologist Michelle Arnold has to say on the topic of whether even canonized saints may (in some cases) have to go to Purgatory, before entering Heaven:
Canonization simply means that the Church knows for certain that particular individuals are now in heaven; it does not consider whether they experienced purgatory before they arrived in heaven. It is possible that canonized saints go directly to heaven; it is also possible that they experience purgatory.
American apologist Jimmy Akin, director of apologetics and evangelism at Catholic Answers, is of the same opinion, writing: “I can find no Church teaching to back up the idea that anyone who ends up as a canonized saint by definition avoided purgatory.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1030-1032) describes purgatory as a “cleansing fire” and a “purifying fire,” and though it does not state whether this fire is real or metaphorical (on that point, see this article), the Catechism is clearly referring to to a very severe kind of purification. Now let’s recall the three saints I spoke of earlier, who made decisions that were, objectively speaking, gravely wrong: St. Thomas More, Pope St. Pius V and Pope John XXIII. The canonizations of St. Thomas More, Pope Pius V and Pope John XXIII took place (or, in John XXIII’s case, will take place) 400, 140 and 50 years after their deaths, respectively. Of course, souls in Purgatory would obviously not be subject to Earth time, and nobody knows what a year of Earth time would corresponds to in purgatory. However, it should be clear that if some saints have to go to purgatory before going to Heaven (as the Catholic Church permits its members to believe), then there has been ample opportunity for these three saints to have been thoroughly purged by the “cleansing fire” of purgatory of whatever faults they had. This, then, is my answer to Fry on the subject of flawed saints.
I might add that St. Thomas Aquinas himself, despite his great humility and gentle character, sanctioned the burning of heretics (Summa Theologica II-II q. 11 art. 3), for reasons explained by Michael Novak in his essay, Aquinas and the Heretics (First Things, December 1995), and his views on what God could justly command (Summa Theologica I-II q. 94 art. 5, reply to objection 2) are so shocking that they will make many readers’ jaws will drop to the floor in amazement. Let me state clearly: the Catholic Church, in canonizing an individual, does not thereby endorse his or her views on moral matters, which may be quite flawed.
Stephen Fry’s sixth and final error can be found in his statement that “the miracle of the herrings was attributed to Thomas Aquinas so that he would qualify for sainthood.” This is also doubly wrong. For starters, it overlooks the fact that a single miracle wouldn’t normally be enough for a person to be declared a saint, anyway. Theological opinions on how many miracles were required for someone to be declared a saint varied, up until the seventeenth century; however, barring exceptional cases like martyrdom (where the miracle requirement might even be waived by the Pope’s decree), it was generally held that one miracle was not enough, and the 1917 Code of Canon Law required a total of at least four (two at beatification and at least two more for canonization). This requirement for a total of four miracles was pared back to two in 1983 by Pope John Paul II. Recently, Pope Francis, invoking his papal authority, dispensed with the requirement for a second miracle for the canonization of Pope John XXIII, but this was an extremely rare case.
Furthermore, Fry’s statement that “the miracle of the herrings was attributed to Thomas Aquinas so that he would qualify for sainthood” assumes that this was the sole miracle attributed to Aquinas. This is complete and utter rubbish. The documents of the first canonization inquiry for St. Thomas Aquinas, held in Naples in 1319, show that over a dozen miracles, including miracles of healing from illnesses such as blindness and paralysis, were attributed to Aquinas. It was also publicly verified that his body remained incorruptible, for many years after his death, and that it gave off a sweet odor, even though the sacristan swore that it had not been artificially treated (see section LXV). I’ll say more about these miracles below.
Professor Coyne cites “evidence” for Stephen Fry’s fantastic claim – but he mis-cites his own sources!
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In his post, The Miracle of the Herrings: Why Thomas Aquinas is a saint (6 August 2013), Professor Jerry Coyne tells his readers that he was initially a little skeptical of Stephen Fry’s claim about the miracle of the herrings, so he decided to check it out. And what do you know, it turned out to be true! Coyne writes:
I found this hard to believe, but, sure enough, the internet has the document used to support Thomas’s canonization in 1319, a 19-page screed (when printed out in 12-point Times font) called “The Sanctity and Miracles of St. Thomas Aquinas; From the First Canonisation Enquiry“. The examination of miracles apparently took place at the Archbishop’s Palace in Naples from July 21 to September 18, 1319.
But Professor Coyne either did not read the document he printed off, or he willfully suppressed statements in the documents that contradicted the assertions he made in his post. He tells us that the miracle of the herrings is in Section IX of the document, and proceeds to quote it verbatim:
IX. Asked if he knew of other miracles attributed to brother Thomas, the witness said that he had heard of many; and in particular that when Thomas lay sick in the castle of Maenza and was urged to eat something, he answered, ‘I would eat fresh herrings, if I had some.’ Now it happened that a pedlar called just then with salted fish. He was asked to open his baskets, and one was found full of fresh herrings, though it had contained only salted fish. But when the herrings were brought to Thomas, he would not eat them.The witness spoke too of a Master Reginald, a cripple, who was cured at the tomb of brother Thomas. Asked how he knew of these two miracles, he replied that that about the fish he had from brother William of Tocco, prior of the Friar Preachers at Benevento, who himself had it from several people at Maenza, where the event occurred. The other story he had from brother Octavian (mentioned above) who averred that he had seen it happen. And in the monastery these miracles were common knowledge.
Comments Coyne:
There you have the standard of miracles the Catholic authorities consider dispositive. Thomas apparently didn’t work or inspire many miracles in his life, so they had to use incidents from the bottom of the [fish] barrel. Note, too, that this one is documented third hand.
Game, set and match? Not quite. It turns out that there’s another description of the miracle of the pilchards in the very document cited by Coyne – this time, one given by an eyewitness.
The miracle of the herrings – what really happened?
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The eyewitness to the miracle of the herrings was brother Peter of Montesangiovanni, an old monk and also a priest, who personally knew St. Thomas Aquinas for a period of ten years – and he states in his testimony that there were at least six people who personally witnessed the miracle, not counting Aquinas. Here is Brother Peter’s sworn account, which is taken from the First Canonisation Enquiry into the Sanctity and Miracles of St. Thomas Aquinas (held in Naples in 1319):
Peter of Montesangiovanni
XLIX. On Wednesday, 1 August, brother Peter of Montesangiovanni, an old monk of Fossanova and a priest, was called as witness and took the oath. He said he had known brother Thomas for a long while and in several places … the castle of St. John at Marsico, at Naples and at Maenza, and at Fossanova itself. Asked how long he had known him, he said for ten years in all; they used to meet from time to time, and he always saw Thomas following the same way of life, right to the day of his death when the witness was able to minister to him…
L. Asked if he knew of any miracles worked by Thomas in life or death or after death, the witness narrated the following which happened during that stay at Maenza. Thomas’s health declined while he was there, and his socius [companion or associate – VJT], seeing his weakness, begged him to take some food: whereupon Thomas said, ‘Do you think you could get me some fresh herrings?’ The socius replied, ‘Oh, yes, across the Alps, in France or England!’ But just then a fishmonger called Bordonario arrived at the castle from Terracina with his usual delivery of sardines; and the socius (Reginald of Priverno) asked him what fish he had and was told (sardines). But on opening the baskets, the man found one full of fresh herrings. Everyone was delighted, but astonished too, because fresh herrings were unknown in Italy. And while the fishmonger was swearing that he had brought sardines, not herrings, brother Reginald ran off to tell Thomas, crying, ‘God has given you what you wanted – herrings!’ And Thomas said, ‘Where have they come from and who brought them?’ And Reginald said, ‘God has brought them!’
Asked for his authority for this story, the witness said that the event took place within the four days that he himself spent at Maenza, along with the prior and the other monks mentioned above. He was present and saw everything and also ate some of the herrings–as also did brother Thomas himself and all the company, including Thomas’s niece the Countess Frances (who was wife to Annibaldo de’ Ceccano, lord of Maenza) and many other persons both secular and religious.
… Asked who were present at the event, he mentioned himself and his prior and John of Piedemonte, and brother Fedele of Tuscany, and Reginald of Priverno, and an attendant on brother Thomas called James of Salerno. Asked if these men were still living, he said ‘no’; he was the only one left. Asked why he happened to be then at Maenza, he said he had gone with his prior, under obedience, to visit brother Thomas. … Asked how he knew that the fish were herrings, he said that he had seen salted herrings at the papal court at Viterbo, so that he knew herrings when he saw them. Besides, brother Reginald, who had eaten fresh herrings in the countries across the Alps, declared that these were herrings too. Asked how they had been cooked, he answered that some were boiled and some fried.
So there we have it. Whatever you think of it, the fact remains that the miracle of the herrings was witnessed by several people, who saw and tasted the herrings themselves. I sincerely hope that Jerry Coyne and Stephen Fry will eat their words and acknowledge that they were wrong on this point, and that whether the miracle genuinely happened or not, it was well-attested.
A blind man is instantly healed by touching the dead body of St. Thomas Aquinas, in front of 100 witnesses
But wait, there’s more! The same witness also attested to other miracles worked by St. Thomas Aquinas: the saint, shortly after his death, healed a man of blindness, in front of 100 eyewitnesses:
LI. Asked if he knew of any miracle worked by Thomas at the time of his death or afterwards, the witness said that while the corpse still lay in the bed in which he had died, and before it was washed, the then sub-prior of the monastery, John of Ferentino, who had lost his sight, was about to kiss the dead man’s feet – as they all were doing because of his holiness – when it was suggested to brother John that he should lay his eyes against the eyes of Thomas. So he did this; and at once he recovered his sight fully and clearly.
Asked how he knew this, the witness said that he was present and saw this happen, in fact he was one of those who advised brother John to do as he did. Asked about the time—the month and day–he repeated that it was the day on which Thomas died, though he could not recall the exact day of the week nor the month…. Asked who else was present, he mentioned Francis, bishop of Terracina (of worthy memory), and the aforesaid brother Reginald, and four or five Friars Minor and many Friar Preachers and monks and lay-brothers of the monastery, to the number, in all, of about a hundred. … Asked who had called him to see this miracle, the witness said that no one had called him; he had been continually at brother Thomas’s bedside as he lay ill and was there when he died, ministering to him; in fact he was standing just beside the dead body; and he remained there afterwards, with some other monks, to wash it. So he saw the whole thing. Asked then what words brother John had used when he laid his eyes on Thomas’s, the witness said he had not heard; the brother had prayed mentally. Asked how long he had seen this man suffering from loss of sight, he said for twenty days, during which time he could not recognise people and was unable to read. Asked how long he had known brother John subsequently enjoying the use of his eyes, the witness said that thenceforth for thirty years he saw him enjoying good sight.
J’accuse!
I have to confess my utter bewilderment and bafflement at how a scientist of the stature of Professor Jerry Coyne could withhold evidence like this from his readers. It stinks – and more than any dead fish could. I don’t wish to accuse the man of intentionally deceiving his readers; but at the very least, he is guilty of not even bothering to read a document on Aquinas’ miracles that he personally printed off – all 19 pages of it, as he tells us – and then pretending that he had read it.
I wrote at the beginning of my post that if you’re going to distort the truth – which is, of course, a reprehensible thing – then you should at least be clever about it, or you’ll invite well-earned ridicule. So I am baffled as to why Professor Coyne would be foolish enough to provide his readers with a hyperlink to the very document that would refute his claim that no eyewitness miracles were attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. To be sure, Coyne doesn’t use those exact words in his post, but he clearly implies as much: he ridicules the miracle of the herrings on the grounds that it is “documented third hand,” adding derisively that “Thomas apparently didn’t work or inspire many miracles in his life, so they had to use incidents from the bottom of the [fish] barrel.” He then states in passing, at the very end of his post, that “There are many other miracles for St. Thomas,” before listing a poorly attested and ridiculous-sounding miracle about one of Aquinas’ bad teeth, which was troubling him, and which conveniently happened to fall out, just before he had to deliver an important speech. The reader is invited to guffaw, and left with the impression that this is the level of evidence for all of the other miracles attributed to Aquinas. What rot.
I stated above that the records of a canonization trial contain the entire oral testimony of those who gave evidence under oath as to the sanctity and/or miracles relating to the saint in question. I added that some of this testimony is simply rubbish. For Professor Coyne to quote from the “rubbish” miracle reports while completely ignoring the more impressive ones is to distort the evidence, which is something I wouldn’t expect a scientist to do.
No two ways about it: Professor Coyne is covering up the truth here, even if he is not lying.
Another miracle wrought at the tomb of St. Thomas Aquinas: A knight is healed of paralysis of his right arm
The following testimony by a knight named Peter Grasso of a dramatic miracle wrought by St. Thomas Aquinas after his death, was made under oath, and is taken from The Sanctity and Miracles of St. Thomas Aquinas From the First Canonisation Enquiry (held in Naples, at the Archbishop’s Palace, from 21 July to 18 September 1319):
Peter Grasso
VI. Peter Grasso of Naples, a knight and functionary in attendance on the king; about sixty years old. Having declared that he himself had received miraculous favours from the said brother Thomas of Aquino, he was called before the lords Inquisitors and took the prescribed oath to speak the simple truth on whatever he knows, whether by sight, hearing or other men’s report, about the life and miracles of brother Thomas; also to answer all questions truthfully, taking no account of love or hatred, prayers, or bribes, favours or inducements of any kind whatsoever…
VII. Asked about miracles worked by brother Thomas, the witness gave the following account of one. He had been afflicted with a complete paralysis of his right arm, so that he could not even raise his hand to comb his own hair or tie a scarf under his chin without help. This continued for about ten months until, in the Lent of 1316, he happened to be journeying to Rome, and, coming into the neighbourhood of Terracina, he turned aside to visit the grave of brother Thomas at the abbey of Fossanova. He had been told that Thomas lay buried there, and it had crossed his mind that perhaps the merits of the holy man might help to cure his arm; indeed he soon began firmly to believe that he would be cured. So, with two companions – Nicholas Filmarini and Henry Caracciolo, both knights of Naples like himself, and both eager to visit the tombs–he turned aside to Fossanova, leaving the other travellers to continue their journey to Rome. And entering the monastery courtyard, he met a monk who directed him towards Thomas’s grave, pointing to it from some way off. It lay, the knight says, to the left of the high altar, covered with a sort of carpet. This he had removed, and then, kneeling on the ground and facing the grave, he prayed in these words: ‘Lord God, who art wonderful in thy saints, through the merits of this thy saint restore strength to my arm.’ Then he lay down flat on the grave; and at once he felt his arm grow stronger. For a while a kind of numbness remained about the joints as though the muscles were still sluggish; but this too had vanished by the end of the same day. Next morning he found his arm restored to perfect health; not a trace of the paralysis remained. Asked for dates, he said that the paralysis began in May I315 and continued until May of the year following, when the cure took place. Asked about the place and witnesses, he answered as above.
St. Thomas the incorruptible?
When discussing the miracle of the herrings above, I quoted from the testimony of brother Peter of Montesangiovanni, an old monk who was also a priest. The same priest also attested at St. Thomas Aquinas’ first canonization trial that the body of St. Thomas remained incorrupt for several years, following his death. What’s more, it gave off a very mysterious fragrant odor:
LII. … The witness added that after Thomas had been buried seven months in the chapel of St. Stephen, he was exhumed and taken to a place before the high altar, where they buried him again. But when they exhumed him a sweet smell came out of the grave and filled all the chapel and even the cloister. And the clothes in which the corpse was wrapped were whole and entire, as was the corpse itself, except that the tip of the nose was missing. And some of the monks in order to make sure of that fragrance, came and put their noses right down on the body and so assured themselves that the sweetness came from the body and its clothing.… Then after seven years, the witness himself having now been elected abbot, he had the body again exhumed and transferred to a more honourable place, namely to the left of the altar (as one approaches it) and under a tombstone raised above ground level. And in this disinterment also the same sort of fragrance was experienced, and again the body and its wrappings were found whole and undecayed, except that a part of the thumb of the right hand had gone.… Asked how he knew all this, the witness said that he was present at both translations of the body, and the second one he himself ordered, as abbot of the monastery. Asked concerning the times – the days and months – he said the first translation was seven months after brother Thomas’s death, and the second one seven years after the first. The months and days he could not recall exactly, they were so long ago now….
And what about that missing thumb, you might ask? According to
John of Boiano, an old Friar Preacher and a priest, who knew St. Thomas when he was in Naples and who testified at the first canonization trial, the thumb also remained perfectly preserved:
LXXXIX. … Asked about miracles,… the witness said that fifteen years after the death of brother Thomas he went, as prior of Durazzo, to the Provincial Chapter of the Friar Preachers at Anagni, where he was shown a thumb taken from one of Thomas’s hands. This thumb had been given by Reginald of Priverno, the usual socius [associate or companion – VJT] of brother Thomas, to the lord brother Hugh, the bishop of Ostia. The hand itself was in the possession of the lady countess, Thomas’s sister. The thumb (said the witness) was whole and healthy; in fact, it seemed fresh, with the skin, nail, flesh, bones, and colour, like the thumb of a living man.…
Here’s what another witness, brother Nicholas of Priverno, had to say about St. Thomas Aquinas’ incorrupt and fragrant corpse, at his first canonization trial in 1319:
Nicholas of Priverno
XIX. On Thursday, 26 July, at the same place, Nicholas of Priverno, a lay-brother at Fossanova, was called as a witness, and, having taken the oath in the form described, was asked first concerning the life of brother Thomas of Aquino….
XX. Being asked whether he knew of any miracles worked by brother Thomas, either while still alive or after death, the witness said that a long while – about seven months – after Thomas’s death, when his body was taken from the chapel of St. Stephen to the grave in front of the high altar, the witness saw the body intact and smelled a strong and sweet scent that came from it. And later, about fourteen years after Thomas’s death, the grave was reopened at the request of one of his sisters, the Countess Theodora, who desired a relic of him; and one of the hands from the body was given to her. And the body was still intact and very fragrant.
Asked how he knew these things, the witness said he was present and saw them and smelled the fragrance both times. Asked about the times, he answered as before; but he could not recall the exact month or day. Asked who was present, he said that at the first opening of the grave nearly the whole community was there: they carried the body in procession with the cross and holy water and all solemnity; but at the second exhumation when the hand was given away, he named only brother Peter of Montesangiovanni, then abbot of the monastery, as present.
Cynics may scoff, and suggest that the body was skilfully embalmed, but did you ever hear of an embalmer that could make a body give off a pervasive, fragrant odor, fifteen years after its death? (I should acknowledge, however, that even the most perfectly preserved bodies of saints tend to go a little brown after a few centuries. Don’t ask me why – I have no idea. I’m just reporting this stuff.)
Those who are curious about the bizarre phenomenon of incorruption might like to read a very balanced, fair-minded article by Josh Clark on the subject, titled, How can a corpse be incorruptible? This short article on the subject is also well worth reading.
The miracle of the herrings: does it fare well against Hum’e critique of miracles?
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David Hume, painted by Allan Ramsay in 1766. Image courtesy of Scottish National Gallery and Wikipedia.
The Scottish empiricist philosopher voiced a well-known objection to the possibility of miracles:
When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should have really happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of the testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.
(David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd. ed. 1902; Oxford, 1972, p. 116.)
Hume’s argument that miracles were antecedently unlikely was as follows:
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A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as could possibly be imagined.
(David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd. ed. 1902; Oxford, 1972, p. 114.)
In his article on Miracles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Dr. Timothy McGrew puts forward the most plausible-sounding modern reconstruction of Hume’s original argument, made by commentator Alan Hájek:
Alan Hájek (2008: 88) offers a more detailed reconstruction of this argument. The first stage corresponds to the argument in “Of Miracles,” Part I:
1.A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.
2.A law of nature is, inter alia, a regularity to which no exception has previously been experienced.Thus,
3.There is as compelling a ‘proof’ from experience as can possibly be imagined against a miracle.
4.In particular, the proof from experience in favour of testimony of any kind cannot be more compelling.
5.There is no other form of proof in favour of testimony.Therefore,
6.The falsehood of the testimony to a miraculous event is always at least as probable as the event attested to (however good the testimony seems to be).However,
7.Hume’s balancing principle. The testimony should be believed if, and only if, the falsehood of the testimony is less probable than the event attested to.Therefore, (by 7 and 8):
8.Conclusion 1. Testimony to a miraculous event should never be believed—belief in a miracle report could never be justified.
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Part of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, which was assembled after his death by Babbage’s son, using parts found in his laboratory. Image courtesy of Andrew Dunn and Wikipedia.
Actually, the mathematical flaw in Hume’s argument against miracles was pointed out long ago by the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (2nd ed., London, 1838; digitized for the Victorian Web by Dr. John van Wyhe and proof-read by George P. Landow). I’d like to quote here from David Coppedge’s masterly online work, THE WORLD’S GREATEST CREATION SCIENTISTS From Y1K to Y2K:
Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (hereafter, NBT) is available online and makes for interesting reading … Most interesting is his rebuttal to the arguments of David Hume (1711-1776), the skeptical philosopher who had created quite a stir with his seemingly persuasive argument against miracles. Again, it was based on the Newtonian obsession with natural law. Hume argued that it is more probable that those claiming to have seen a miracle were either lying or deceived than that the regularity of nature had been violated. Babbage knew a lot more about the mathematics of probability than Hume. In chapter X of NBT, Babbage applied numerical values to the question, chiding Hume for his subjectivity. A quick calculation proves that if there were 99 reliable witnesses to the resurrection of a man from the dead (and I Corinthians 15:6 claims there were over 500), the probability is a trillion to one against the falsehood of their testimony, compared to the probability of one in 200 billion against anyone in the history of the world having been raised from the dead. This simple calculation shows it takes more faith to deny the miracle than to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses. Thus Babbage renders specious Hume’s assertion that the improbability of a miracle could never be overcome by any number of witnesses. Apply the math, and the results do not support that claim, Babbage says: “From this it results that, provided we assume that independent witnesses can be found of whose testimony it can be stated that it is more probable that it is true than that it is false, we can always assign a number of witnesses which will, according to Hume’s argument, prove the truth of a miracle.“ (Italics in original.) Babbage takes his conquest of Hume so far that by Chapter XIII, he argues that “It is more probable that any law, at the knowledge of which we have arrived by observation, shall be subject to one of those violations which, according to Hume’s definition, constitutes a miracle, than that it should not be so subjected.”
How improbable is a miracle, using Hume’s own criteria?
Babbage’s point about the testimony a sufficient number of independent, reliable witnesses being sufficient to establish a miracle can be illustrated mathematically as follows. All the events that have occurred throughout history, in accordance with natural laws, can be considered together, as constituting a mass of inductive evidence rendering it overwhelmingly unlikely that the next event we observe will be a supernatural miracle. But how many of these events are there, altogether? There are two ways we could try to compute this figure. First, we could take the total number of events (or “elementary logical operations”) that could have occurred in the observable universe since the Big Bang, which has been calculated as no more than 10 to the power of 120 by MIT researcher Seth Lloyd, in his 2002 article, Computational capacity of the universe (in Physics Review Leters 88 (2002) 237901, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.88.237901). Alternatively, we could try to compute the number of events witnessed by human beings throughout recorded history. Given that the total number of individuals who have ever lived is estimated at about 100 billion or 10 to the power of 11, and that the number of seconds in an average human lifetime throughout history would be around 1 billion (30 years), and that humans are certainly not capable of consciously observing and registering more than (say) 10 events per second, this would give us a figure of 10 to the power of 21 events that might have been witnessed by human beings, through the course of history. (Some readers might want to add the total amount of digital information in the world, which in 2012 was about 2.7 x 10^21 bytes, or 2.16 x 10^22 bits.)
What’s the a priori probability of a miracle?
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So the next question we need to answer is: given these vast numbers of events, how low should we rate the anterior probability of a miracle, assuming purely for the purposes of argument that no reliably attested miracle has occurred in all of recorded history? My answer is: (1 / 2n), where n is the number of events observed to date. I also think that we should restrict ourselves to observations by human beings (and perhaps, by their instruments as well, including all the information stored in the world’s digital images), rather than counting all 10^120 events – the vast majority of which are unseen by us – occurring in the lifetime of the observable cosmos. After all, we don’t really know what’s out there in the cosmos: before the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 photographed the far side of the moon in 1959, we had no way of knowing that it was not teeming with miraculous events. So my rough answer for the anterior improbability of a miracle is: 1 in 2 x (2.16 x 10^22), or about 1 in 4 x 10^22, or 2.5 x 10^(-23), or 0.000000000000000000000025.
“OK, where do you get the (1 / 2n) figure from?” my readers will be asking. I originally thought of using Bayes’ rule, but then I changed my mind, as a more intuitive approach became apparent to me. Consider the expectations formula: E = n x p. The idea here is that if you’re rolling a die that’s not loaded, the probability p of it coming up on a given number (say, 4) will 1/6. So if you roll the die 600 times (that’s n, the number of trials), then you would expect it to land on 4, about 100 times (600 x 1/6 = 100). That’s E, the expected number of times the die will land on a 4.
When you are born, you leave the security of the womb. You find yourself thrust into the outside world. At this stage, your mind is like a tabula rasa, or blank slate. Things happen all around you, and are caused by you-know-not-what. Eventually, your mind learns to makes sense of this buzzing, blooming mess: you learn to recognize people, recognize objects – and, in short, recognize recurring patterns in the outside world. You go to school, and you learn about more patterns. Many of these patterns can be described by mathematical equations, which scientists call laws of Nature.
You also learn that some people believe that there are publicly observable events called miracles, which are planned by some Higher Intelligence at work in the cosmos, and which fall outside the regular patterns that scientists like to call laws. But whenever you ask to see one of these events, you are disappointed. Nothing happens. (At this point in my story, I’m being very generous to the skeptic: many religious people would say that they frequently see miracles occurring in their midst, and that unbelievers would observe these events as well, if they only cared to open their eyes.)
So you decide to sit down and hunt for miracles, by making a giant catalogue of all the events you observe, and seeing if any of them falls outside the laws of science and looks like it might be a manifestation produced by some Higher Intelligence – say, a message, or something like that. (Perceptive readers will note that this is quite different from the Intelligent Design quest, which does not look for exceptions to the laws of Nature, but for extremely unlikely patterns which are independently specifiable. ID doesn’t necessarily require miracles.)
Your friends suggest that you include all the events you’ve witnessed in your childhood, but you reply: “I wasn’t looking for miracles then. Perhaps they happened, and passed me by: maybe I didn’t register them, because they didn’t fall into a pattern I knew. This time, it’s different: I’m hunting for miracles. My mind is alert and ready. So I’m going to start from scratch.”
You catalogue 100 events. No miracle yet. At this point, what should your estimate of the frequency of miracles be? I’d say: 1 in 200. Here’s why. Let’s say that the relative frequency of miracles in human history was 1 miracle for every 100 events. If that were the case, then using the E = n x p formula I mentioned above, you would expect to have observed one miracle (100 x 1/100 = 1). You haven’t observed one, so it’s a pretty reasonable bet that the relative frequency of miracles in human history is less than 1 in 100. That’s your ceiling. How low could it be? It might be zero. That’s your floor. In the absence of further information, you’d be rational to split the difference between these two figures, and provisionally estimate the relative frequency of miracles in human history at 1 in 200.
Seventy years pass, and by now you’re an old man. About 2 billion seconds have elapsed, and you still haven’t seen any miracles yet. (To help you in your search, you keep a camera running while you’re asleep.) You figure that you can consciously register at most 10 events per second, so the number of events you’ve consciously observed is 20 billion. By now, your estimate of the anterior probability of a miracle will have fallen to half-way between zero and 1 in 20 billion – in other words, 1 in 40 billion.
Just before you pass away, your friends beg you to count their observations, as well. “We’re conscious human beings too,” they say. “Why should you place yourself in a privileged position? Aren’t our observations just as valid as yours? It’s true that we aren’t spending every waking moment hunting for miracles, as you are, but we’re all looking for a miracle: after all, who wouldn’t want a sign from God? Don’t you think we’d report one if we saw one? And what about the 100 billion people who have lived and died in the course of human history? Aren’t you going to factor them in, too?” You reluctantly agree that this reasoning makes sense, and you revise your estimate to: 1 in (40 billion x 100 billion), or 1 in 4 x 10^21 (that’s 1 in 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). And then someone suggests counting all of the 2 x 10^22 bits in all the world’s digital images as observations of non-miraculous events, and you revise your estimate of the antecedent probability of a miracle to 1 in 4 x 10^22, just before you draw your final breath and expire.
Thus the a priori probability that the next event we observe will be “lawless” and potentially miraculous can be calculated as 1 in 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, if we confine ourselves to events witnessed by human beings and their computers and cameras.
The next question we have to ask is: how unreliable are normal witnesses (I’m not including drunkards or people with psychoses), when reporting lawless phenomena? After all, we do not normally credit the testimony of a single individual who claims to have seen or been abducted by a UFO. On the other hand, our senses are pretty reliable, most of the time: if they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here, so the probability of an erroneous witness report can’t be too high. Let’s suppose that on any given occasion, when a reliable witness is observing something, the chance that his/her testimony is mistaken and that he/she is “seeing things” or hallucinating is 1 in 1,000, or 10 to the power of 3.
Now let’s suppose that a group of reliable witnesses observe a supernatural occurrence – say, a dead man being restored to life. If eight of them independently witness such an event, then the probability that all seven are seeing things is 1 in (10^3)^8, or 1 in 10 to the power of 24 (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). And if 40 such people independently witness the event, then the probability that all forty are seeing things is 1 in (10^3)^40, which is 1 in 10 to the power of 120, or the number of events that occur in the lifetime of the entire observable universe. Of course, the testimony of these witnesses needs to be independent, in order for this calculation to work. Nevertheless, it does show that a relatively small number of reliable, independent witnesses (at least 8, and no more than 40) is sufficient to overcome the overwhelming inductive evidence against the likelihood of a miracle which history furnishes us with.
I conclude that Hume’s objection is therefore mathematically groundless. Extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary proofs; all they require is the testimony of a sufficient number of reliable, independent witnesses, to back them up.
So, is the miracle of the herrings credible or not?
As we saw, the number of independent witnesses required to rationally warrant belief in a miracle, if you’re a skeptic, is eight. There were six witnesses to the miracle of the herrings – seven if we include St. Thomas Aquinas himself. Moreover, some of these people both saw and tasted the herrings, so for these people, there’s the independent witness of sight and taste. Such people can be legitimately double-counted, so we could certainly say we’ve passed the magic threshold of eight witnesses. So I’d conclude that based on the evidence presented at the first canonization trial of St. Thomas Aquinas, belief in the miracle of the herrings would have been rationally warranted, for the people present at the miracle and also for the trial judges in the early fourteenth century, who heard the sworn testimony about the event.
Is belief in the miracle still rationally warranted today? That depends on how much you trust the honesty of the people keeping the records between then (1319) and now (2013). A skeptic might balk at this point, and say that after 700 years, there’s room for pious fraud. Maybe, maybe. Still, given the humdrum, matter-of-fact tone of the canonization trial report, I can only say it doesn’t read like a forgery. I’d therefore be inclined to credit the miracle of the herrings.
Stephen Fry: A credible source on matters of religion?
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Earlier in this post, I refuted, point by point, Stephen Fry’s account of the miracle of the herrings. But on a more general note, we might ask: how credible is Stephen Fry as a source on matters pertaining to religion? The short answer is: not very. In 2009, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011, pictured above) took part in a debate – which they won hands-down, and deservedly so – against British Conservative M.P. Ann Widdecombe (pictured above) and Archbishop Onaiyekan of Nigeria, on the motion, “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the World.” Stephen Fry, in his opening argument, spoke for about 20 minutes. Among the factual blunders he made in the course of his talk were the following statements:
(1) Galileo was tortured for trying to explain the Copernican theory of the universe (2:57).
Response: This is a myth. See Mark A. Kalthoff’s review in First Things (October 2009) of Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, edited by Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard University Press). See also the Catholic Answers tract, The Galileo Controversy. (The claim that Galileo was at least threatened with torture also appears highly dubious: see this comment of mine below.)
(2) Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo both proposed the idea of Limbo (3:43), which meant that unbaptized babies would not know Heaven.
Response: What Aquinas actually maintained was that although these babies could not go to Heaven, the “children’s limbo” (limbus infantium) that they went to was a place or state of perfect natural happiness. Augustine, on the other hand, opposed the idea of limbo: he actually believed (incredible as it sounds) that unbaptized babies went to Hell, although he envisaged their punishment as very mild, and certainly preferable to annihilation. Fry could have easily discovered these facts, if he had done a little background reading on the subject. In 1985, Cardinal Ratzinger described limbo as a “theological hypothesis” that he would be willing to “abandon.” In 2007, as Pope Benedict XVI, he did just that: Catholics are now free to believe that when unbaptized babies who die, their souls go straight to Heaven.
(3) Under the medieval system of indulgences, two-thirds of a year’s salary could ensure that a dead loved one could go to Heaven (4:34).
Response: Absolute nonsense. The “two-thirds of a year’s salary” claim is fiction with no basis in fact; poor people could often obtain indulgences without paying any money, through performing acts of penance, such as fasting. And although the sixteenth-century preacher Johann Tetzel (whom Luther opposed, in his 95 theses) promised his audience that they could, by paying some money, guarantee that a dead soul in Purgatory would go straight to Heaven, this was never Catholic teaching. Indeed, the notion was rejected by the Sorbonne University in 1482, and again in 1518, and by the Thomist theologian, Cardinal Cajetan, who declared emphatically that, even if theologians and preachers taught such opinions, no credence need be placed in their claims. The common theological view in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was that the Pope had no authority over the souls in Purgatory, and that the Church could only intercede with God on their behalf. (See this article by Father Ryan Erlenbush, as well as this article and this one.)
(4) The maxim, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (Outside the Church there is no salvation) was used by the Catholic Church to excuse the rape and torture of the Aztecs (6:07).
Response: The Catholic Church has never excused rape, and an examination of the contemporary historical evidence shows that the Spanish conquistadors justified their destruction of the Aztec empire on the grounds that the Aztecs engaged in the barbarous practice of human sacrifice. It should also be noted that the Dominican preacher, Bishop Bartolome de las Casas, denounced the atrocities of the conquistadors.
(5) One of the principal burners and torturers of those who tried to read the Bible in English was St. Thomas More (8:00). More put people on the rack for daring to own a Bible in English. He tortured people for daring to own a Bible in their own language (8:30).
Response: Although it’s true that there were no Bibles available in the English tongue before the Reformation, it was available in other languages. According to Fr. John A. O’Brien, Ph.D., LL.D., author of the 1938 best-seller, The Faith of Millions (Our Sunday Visitor; reprinted 1963, 1974), Catholics had already published 14 complete editions of the Bible in High German and five in Low German before Luther published his German New Testament in 1522 (see p. 131; in a footnote, Fr. O’Brien cites Janssen, History of the German People, XIV, p. 388). Fr. O’Brien adds: “During the period of seventy years, from 1450 to 1520, Catholics had published 156 Latin and six Hebrew editions of the Bible, besides issuing complete translations in French (10), Italian (11), Bohemian (2), Flemish (1), Limousine (1) and Russian (1)” (ibid, p. 131. Reference cited: Falk, Die Bibel Am Ausganages des Mittelalters).
As for St. Thomas More: “the scholarly consensus is that there is no historical evidence that More engaged in torture,” according to an online article by Michael Moreland, Vice Dean of Villanova University Law School. It is true that six people were burned at the stake for heresy during the time when Thomas More was Lord Chancellor, and that More personally approved of these burnings, but I can find no evidence that More had anyone burned for the sole crime of owning an English Bible, although some were imprisoned. More’s views on the burning of heretics were savage, but he was not alone: R. W. Chambers, in his biography, Thomas More (Jonathan Cape, London, 1976), notes that “It was the view, held by all parties alike, that open defiance of authority in spiritual matters, of such a kind as to lead to tumult and civil war, might be punished with death” (pp. 274-275). Most Protestants shared this harsh opinion with their Catholic contemporaries in the early sixteenth century. Finally, More’s narrow-minded zealotry in implementing a rigid censorship of all printed books, and in outlawing the possession of English Bibles, is chronicled in detail by history lecturer John Guy of Bristol University, in an interesting article titled, Sir Thomas More and the Heretics (History Today, Volume 30, Issue 2, 1980). But as Guy himself acknowledges, even More was prepared to endorse the printing of an official English Bible, if the people abandoned all heresies. It is simply wrong to claim, as Fry does, that More was opposed to people reading the Bible in their own native language; what he opposed in his day, was the heresy he believed such reading engendered.
Well, that’s five major blunders on religion, just in the first eight minutes of Stephen Fry’s opening speech! Fry is an educated man; he graduated with honors in English literature, from Cambridge University. It is a pity that he did not check his facts more carefully. But now that my readers have seen how careless the man is with his facts, the question they need to ask themselves is: does Fry have any credibility, when writing on matters religious?
Conclusion
Perhaps there is a lesson we can all learn from this: the need for intellectual humility. The foregoing argument I have advanced in support of my view that eight witnesses are all that’s needed to make belief in a miracle rationally warranted may well be wrong. If it is, then I am sure others will expose its faults. Be that as it may, I have at least nailed my flag to the mast, and declared where I stand. It is my hope that this post of mine will re-open a healthy debate on a controversial issue. Finally, for what it’s worth, I wish Stephen Fry and Professor Coyne well, and I hope they reconsider their views. Cheers.