Gregory of Tours, Walter Goffart, and Miracles
Three Hierarchies says
I have begun reading Gregory, Bishop of Tours (AD 536-594), known generally for his History of the Franks. Fortunately, however, I am also reading Walter Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History (ah, now you see the connection to the Mongol empire), which puts the work much more effectively in context than the translation’s introduction.
Gregory, or at least Goffart, does sound worth looking into. The point is that natural wonders and miracles are not as different as we might think. I’ll have to think whether that’s relevant to my Concealment Argument.
Gregory sets out a straightforward argument: philosophers, in their learned leisure, have singled out seven miracula “as more marvellous than others”; they include Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple as well as classical splendors, such as the Colossus of Rhodes, the Theater at Heraclea, and the Pharos [lighthouse] of Alexandria; these wonders, even if some were built pursuant to God’s command, were “none the less established by men” and therefore have perished or are subject to destruction; there are other wonders, however, that come directly from God, “which in no age grow old, by no accident fall, by no loss are diminished, except when the Maker shall have ordained that the universe be destroyed”; these are
the tides,
the annual fruitfulness,
the phoenix,
Mt. Etna,
the springs of Grenoble,
the sun, and
the moon and stars.
. . . Before detailing the reckoning of time from the stars, he wished to remind readers emphatically that stellar motion, like the tides and courses of the sun proceeds from God and is not an inevitable operation of nature (pp. 131-32).
Regardless of the distinctions pre-Christian sages might make, [in Gregory’s view] ostensibly ordinary and regular operations of nature did not differ from sudden, arbitrary acts of divine power; a continuum existed between expected and unexpected aspects of God’s providential rule; and these facts dissolved human pretensions to wisdom and proved them vain. Opennness to wonders was the true and only science offering men liberation from the death-bringing life they endured.
In this perspective one should not expect the eight books of Miracula to be a record of amazing happenings . . . To grade wonders by degree of supernaturalness hardly concerned Gregory; his object, rather, was to multiply them; “no [ecclesiastical author] has related more miracles than Gregory of Tours.” One basis for disbelief had always been that miracles were a thing of the past, richly documented in the Gospels but vanished from the world of everyday experience. The whole thrust of Gregory’s Wonders is to illustrate the ordinariness of the miraculous, available today, near at hand, in the most commonplace objects….