Christian History, Summer 2000

What Would Augustine Say?
The fifth-century theologian answers five crucial twenty-first-century questions.

Signs & Wonders
Miracles Ended Long Ago�?Or Did They?
by Bruce L. Shelley

During his pastoral ministry, Augustine came to know a woman in Carthage named Innocentia. A devout woman and highly regarded, she tragically discovered that she had breast cancer.

A skillful physician told her the disease was incurable. She could opt for amputation and possibly prolong her life a little, or she could follow the advice of Hippocrates and do nothing. Either way, death would not be put off for long.

Dismayed by this diagnosis, Augustine reports, "she turned for help to God alone, in prayer." In a dream, Innocentia was told to wait at the baptistry for the first woman who came out after being baptized, and to ask this woman to make the sign of Christ over the cancerous breast.

Innocentia did as she was told, and she was completely cured. When she told her doctor what had happened, he responded with a contemptuous tone, "I thought you would make some great discovery to me!" Then, seeing her horrified look, he backpedaled, saying, "What great thing was it for Christ to heal a cancer? He raised a man who had been dead four days."

This story, reported in City of God, shows how dramatically Augustine had changed his mind on the subject of miracles.

In North Africa in Augustine's day, belief in miracles was as widespread as today's obsession with angels in America. Early in his ministry, Augustine mocked these popular claims.

In On True Religion, written in 390, he asserted that miracles like those in the Bible ended in the apostolic era. "These miracles," he wrote, "were no longer permitted to continue in our time, lest the mind should always seek visible things, and the human race should be chilled by the customariness of the very things whose novelty had inflamed them."

But later in Augustine's ministry, some of his colleagues traveled to Jerusalem and returned to North Africa with relics of the body of an apostle. Little chapels called memoriae containing sacred dust sprang up in country estates around Hippo. As biographer Peter Brown puts it, Augustine had to deal with miracles on his own doorstep.

The bishop, who had once scoffed at such folk religion, now found himself preaching to huge crowds drawn by a little bit of dust. He saw the power of the shrines: he knew of a thief in Milan who was compelled to confess his deeds at the tomb of the saints. He needed to modify his earlier, anti-miracle stance.

So Augustine, late in life, decided to examine and record the miracles that he personally encountered and to give the verifiable miracles maximum publicity. In fact, he writes that when he learned Innocentia had not told others about her healing, "I was indignant that so astounding a miracle, performed in so important a city, and on a person far from obscure, should have been kept a secret like this; and I thought it right to admonish her and to speak to her with some sharpness on the matter."

When Innocentia did tell her friends what had happened, "They listened in great amazement and gave praise to God." Augustine's hope was that, as apostolic miracles had aided the growth of the early church, miracles in his own day would draw people to Christianity.

Unfortunately, pagans and heretics boasted of miracles, too. Augustine did not deny the pagan miracles, but he likened them to the wonders performed by Pharaoh's magicians, in contrast to the miracles wrought by Moses. Pagan miracles occurred, but as they did not bring glory to the true God, they must be dismissed.

Heretics' miracles, according to Augustine, never happened: "Either they are deceived, or they deceive." Heretics are incapable of performing miracles because, by their schismatic nature, they show that they have not love, and he who has not love is nothing. If a heretic claims to have performed a miracle, Augustine warned, he is a false prophet, seeking only to lead people away from Christ.

Augustine's exuberance for true miracles in City of God shows that he no longer saw them as sham spirituality but as physical manifestations of God's work in the world.

He wrote, "What do these miracles attest but the faith which proclaims that Christ rose in the flesh and ascended into heaven with the flesh? �?God may himself perform them by himself, through that wonderful operation of his power whereby, being eternal, he is active in temporal events; or he may effect them through the agency of his servants�? Be that as it may, they all testify to the faith in which the resurrection to eternal life is proclaimed."

Bruce L. Shelley is senior professor of church history at Denver Seminary and author of Church History in Plain Language (Word).

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
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