On the use of the word miracle.

— The newspaper Vérité, of Lyon, of September 16, 1866, in an article entitled Renan and his school, contained the following reflections, concerning the word miracle.

“Renan and his school do not even take the trouble to discuss the facts; they reject them all a priori, erroneously qualifying them as supernatural and, therefore, impossible and absurd, opposing to them an absolute refusal of acceptance and a transcendent disdain. On this point Renan said a word eminently true and profound: ‘The supernatural would be nothing other than the superdivine.’ We adhere with all our energy to this great truth, but we point out that the very word miracle (mirum, an admirable thing, until then inexplicable) does not mean the inversion of the laws of Nature; far from it: rather it signifies a flexibility of these same laws, still unknown to the human mind. We will even say that there will always be miracles, because, the ascent of Humanity toward an ever more perfect knowledge being always progressive, this knowledge will constantly need to be surpassed and spurred on by facts that will appear marvelous at the epoch in which they are produced and will not be understood and explained until later. A much-esteemed writer of our school let himself be caught by this objection; (Allan Kardec) he repeats in many passages of his works that there is nothing marvelous, nor any miracles; it is an oversight resulting from the false sense of supernatural, completely rejected by the etymology of the word. We say that if the word miracle did not exist, to qualify phenomena still under study and emerging from common science, it would be necessary to invent it, as the most appropriate and the most logical. “Nothing is supernatural, we repeat, because outside Nature, created and uncreated, there is absolutely nothing conceivable; but there is the superhuman, that is, phenomena that can be produced by intelligent beings other than men, according to the laws of their nature, or produced, whether mediately or immediately, by God, according to His nature again and according to His natural relations with His creatures.”

Philaléthès.

— Thank God we are not ignorant of the etymological sense of the word miracle. We have proven it in many articles and, notably, in that of the Review of the month of September 1860. It is, then, neither by mistake nor by oversight that we reject its application to the Spiritist phenomena, however extraordinary they may seem at first sight, but with perfect knowledge of the cause and intentionally.

In its usual acceptation the word miracle has lost its primitive signification, like so many others, beginning with the word philosophy (love of wisdom), which they use today to express the most diametrically opposed ideas, from the purest spiritualism to the most absolute materialism. It is doubtful to no one that, in the thought of the masses, miracle implies the idea of an extranatural fact. Ask all those who believe in miracles whether they regard them as natural effects. The Church is so firmly fixed on this point that it anathematizes those who claim to explain miracles by the laws of Nature. The Academy itself defines this word thus: An act of the divine power, contrary to the known laws of Nature. – A true, a false miracle – A proven miracle – To work miracles – The gift of miracles. To be understood by all, one must speak as everyone does. Now, it is evident that if we had qualified the Spiritist phenomena as miraculous, the public would have been mistaken as to their true character, unless one employed each time a circumlocution and said that there are miracles that are not miracles, as they are generally understood. Since the generality attach to it the idea of a derogation of the natural laws, and since the Spiritist phenomena are nothing but an application of these same laws, it is much simpler and, above all, more logical to say clearly: No, Spiritism does not work miracles. In this way, there is neither mistake nor false interpretation. Just as the progress of the physical sciences destroyed a host of prejudices, and brought into the order of natural facts a great number of effects formerly considered as miraculous, Spiritism, by the revelation of new laws, comes to restrict still further the domain of the marvelous; we say more: it deals it the final blow, which is why it is not looked upon ill anywhere, any more than are astronomy and geology. If those who believe in miracles understood this word in its etymological acceptation (an admirable thing), they would admire Spiritism, instead of casting anathema upon it; instead of imprisoning Galileo for having demonstrated that Joshua could not have stopped the Sun, they would have woven crowns for him for having revealed to the world things admirable in another way, and which attest infinitely better to the greatness and the power of God.

For the same reasons, we reject the word supernatural from the Spiritist vocabulary. Miracle would still have its reason for being in its etymology, except as to determining its acceptation; supernatural is a foolishness from the point of view of Spiritism.

The word superhuman, proposed by Philaléthès, in our opinion is equally improper, because the beings that are the primitive agents of the Spiritist phenomena, although in the state of Spirits, do not cease to belong to Humanity. The word superhuman would tend to sanction the long-credited opinion, destroyed by Spiritism, that the Spirits are creatures apart, outside of Humanity. Another peremptory reason is that many of these phenomena are the direct product of incarnate Spirits, consequently men, and in any case, they almost always require the concurrence of an incarnate one; therefore, they are no more superhuman than supernatural.

A word that has also departed completely from its primitive signification is demon. It is known that, among the Ancients, they called daimon the Spirits of a certain order, intermediaries between men and those who were called gods. This denomination did not imply, in its origin, any bad quality; on the contrary, it was taken in a good sense. The demon of Socrates was certainly not an evil Spirit, whereas, according to the modern opinion, issued from Catholic theology, the demons are fallen angels, beings apart, essentially and perpetually devoted to evil.

To be consistent with the opinion of Philaléthès, it would be necessary, out of respect for etymology, that Spiritism also preserve the qualification of demons. If Spiritism called its phenomena miracles and the Spirits demons, its adversaries would have the cheese and the knife in hand! It would be rejected by three quarters of those who today accept it, because they would see in it a return to beliefs that are no longer of our time. To dress Spiritism in worn-out clothes would be an ineptitude, a fatal blow to the doctrine, which would find itself in difficulty to dispel the prejudices that improper denominations had nourished.