1
Preliminary Considerations
Why should anyone, living at the dawn of the twenty-first century, be interested in miracles? For three centuries the capacity of science to explain events as the result of natural forces has seemed to make reference to divine causes unnecessary, even harmful. In times of crisis, hoping for assistance from supernatural saviors seems a dangerous distraction from the challenge of solving our own problems. Yet, around the world stories of wondrous acts continue to be retold in religious communities where they are invested with profound meaning: Krishna straightening a womanâs curved spine, Moses parting the Red Sea, Buddha levitating in the air while fire and water streamed from his body, Jesus walking on the Lake of Galilee, and Muhammad ascending into heaven from Jerusalem. Many religions were founded on accounts of miraculous events, acts of transcendent power remembered in stories that evoke transformative responses in readers. Further, belief in miracles receives fresh encouragement today in religious communities across the world with the rise of traditionalist forms of piety and action.
Meanings of Miracle Stories
What significance do contemporary readers find in these tales? The answer is complex. First, miracle stories support the hope that humans are not bound within the limits of the material world and that the future is not already fixed as the consequence of past events. For Hindus, the stories of Krishnaâs triumph over demons include their release from punishment for former deeds, encouraging present-day readers to hope that they too may escape karmic debt. The stories of Jesusâs healings give Christians confidence that their own diseases may be cured or their addictions broken. For believers, miracles signify the ultimate freedom of the human spirit from the world of material forces. Miracle stories open narrative worlds in which what is impossible in the readerâs customary experience becomes possible, even anticipated. Belief in miracles is the confidence that, at rare and wondrous moments, grace may overcome fate.
Second, miracle stories serve to confirm the belief that there is a reality that surpasses, or is transcendent to, this world and that manifests its power by altering material conditions. Belief in the transcendent in one form or another is basic to most religions; and miracles are often cited as warrant for that belief. For Hindus, the ability of fully concentrated yogis to levitate supports their claim to have achieved a transcendent state of consciousness. For Muslims, the miracle of the Qurâan as divine revelation to Muhammad, an âunlettered prophet,â is demonstrated by its âinimitabilityâ that prevents any human poet or philosopher from duplicating its language. Miracle stories signify that belief in transcendent reality is not private fantasy, but a claim capable of public verification.
William James (1842â1910), founder of the American school of philosophy known as pragmatism, argued that religion âis not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light . . . But it is something more, a postulator of new facts as well.â He believed that this pragmatic view of religion âhas usually been taken as a matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave.â Their view gives religion âbody as well as soul, it makes its claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own.â1 For believers, miracle stories present ânew factsâ that could not be produced by, or deduced from, the world of ordinary experience and, thus, serve as evidence of the transcendent reality required for their explanation.
Third, miracle stories serve the pedagogical purpose of illustrating teachings or insights of a religious tradition and inspiring adherence to those teachings. When Buddha appeared to his kinsmen, floating above the river they were about to fight over, his levitation signified the necessity of rising above self-interest in order to achieve peace and bring an end to suffering. For a Muslim mystic, the truth that God is Supreme Reality is demonstrated by the ability, while in ecstatic trance, to appear and disappear at will. The mysticâs passage from being to non-being and back serves to illustrate the Islamic teaching that everything is created by God from nothing in each moment. Those who witness or hear of this miracle are thus taught to maintain a spirit of unbroken gratitude to God for the gift of continuing existence.
Fourth, miracle stories give symbolic expression to a communityâs desire for political freedom. In the triumph of a deity or hero over demons, people often see a coded reference to their own authority to overthrow powers that oppose their well-being, including unjust rulers. In Tibet, the belief that each Dalai Lama is a divine incarnation, a living miracle, supports a sense of national identity under his leadership and encourages resistance to Chinese rule. Jewish mystic masters often exercised their miraculous powers to protect or deliver Jewish communities under persecution in Christian or Islamic states. Miracle stories, as narratives of power, reflect the political situations of the storytellers. But miracles are instances of disruptive power and, as such, signal revolutionary desire. For discerning readers these stories are not innocent fantasies.
Stories of miracles, then, signify hope in radically new possibilities for this world, express confidence in transcendent reality beyond this world, provide visual aids to instruct believers in the values and wisdom of their tradition, and sometimes inspire political action. The abiding appeal of traditional stories and popular interest in their contemporary parallels indicate that miracles continue to have meaning for religious believers today as signs of transcendent power. That the term miracle (and its many variants in other languages) also occurs in secular discourse about startling events, unprecedented developments, and inexplicable healings suggests it resonates in all human speech as an echo of a common yearning for freedom. The purpose of miracle stories is to make that freedom imaginable, even realistic.
Working Definition of Miracle
This book is a study of miracles and the meanings assigned to them in five religious traditions: Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. The discussion will focus on a few examples in each tradition that illuminate the significance religious believers assign to miracles. To fully understand the range of meanings miracles have in these different traditions, we will also explore the wider systems of ideas about reality that provide the intellectual rationale for belief in supernatural or transcendent power intervening in the world of ordinary experience. The purpose of this broader investigation is to show that belief in miracles is not arbitrary, but is grounded in some coherent view of reality. (Of course, not all religious believers are fully educated in the metaphysics of their traditions; but each tradition offers one.) For that reason, miracles have meanings specific to each tradition; yet across traditions they are commonly regarded as rare and wondrous signs of a domain of being that utterly surpasses the laws and limits of our world. So we begin with this working definition of miracle:
A miracle is an event of transcendent power that arouses wonder and carries religious significance for those who witness it or hear or read about it.
There may be two surprises in this definition. First, there is no mention of divine beings because in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism there are no divine agents. In those traditions, miracles are manifestations of the power of the human mind to transcend natural limits. Second, there is no mention of benefits in the definition. In most of the miracle stories in this book, transcendent power manifests itself in ways that are helpful to human beings, but not always. Punishing acts of the gods also fit our definition of miracles as events of transcendent power that arouse wonder, particularly in apocalyptic visions. In the well-known Bible story of the parting of the Red Sea, the appearance of dry land that allowed the Israelites to escape from Egypt was no more miraculous than the closing of the waters that drowned Pharaoh and his army. Our definition is intended to include within the category miracle every event of transcendent power, whether enacted by gods or yogis and whether resulting in weal or woe.
Like every serious book, this one is also out to get you. That is, I do have a thesis to argueâand as you likely detected in the first paragraph, I do not assume at the outset that miracles are impossible or that the people who believe in them are irrational. Rather, my thesis is this: Despite the dominance of scientific explanation in the modern world and despite powerful philosophical criticism, belief in miracles remains strong in all religious traditions and continues to call forth official regulation and faithful dissent. By official regulation I mean that miracle claims are controlled by religious institutions because they are potent sources of authority that miracle workers sometimes use to support criticism of established powers. By faithful dissent, I refer to the resistance that develops within each tradition by a loyal opposition whose members pose religious objections to belief in miracles. We shall see that not all who believe in miracles are irrational, and not all who reject them are irreligious.2
How Miracle Stories Mean
The poet and teacher John Ciardi once said that the most fruitful way to interpret a poem is to ask not âWhat does it mean?â but âHow does it mean?â3 That is, how does the language accomplish the task of communicating the poetâs experience and insight? The British philosopher J. L. Austin called such creative use of words âperformative language,â and we can say that miracle stories are instances of such language at work. The meaning of a miracle story may vary for each listener, depending on context, language, location (in time, space, history, and geography), and imagination, the wild card in the game of interpretation. The story of a miracle performs its effect in interaction with its audience and the power of the story depends upon the audience playing the role of what the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser called âthe implied reader.â That designation was invented to describe readers who can fill in the inevitable gaps in any text by means of imagination, a creative process of âreader-response.â Such a reader âmust think in terms of experiences different from his own; indeed, it is only by leaving behind the familiar world of his own experience that the reader can truly participate in the adventure the literary text offers.â4 But that participation cannot be a full immersion in the illusion of the text, as in the effortless escape into a mystery novel. The meaning of a literary or religious text is neither the readerâs fantasy nor a transparent truth; rather, âit arises from the meeting between the written text and the individual mind of the reader with its own particular history of experience, its own consciousness, its own outlook.â5 Thus, even readers within a shared tradition may respond in quite different ways to a common story.
A miracle story, as performative language calling for a creative response from readers and listeners, is both like and unlike other kinds of stories. Is it like a myth or a poem or a folk tale? Are the stories of miracles like news reports or parables? If a miracle story is an enacted parable, then is its meaning limited to each individualâs response to it? Christian scholars think that Jesus did not interpret his parables, let alone assign a single meaning to each of them. We also know that Zen Buddhist masters do not interpret koans, the puzzling statements they assign students to meditate on, leaving it up to each individual to discern the meaning. For example, if a master assigned you the koanââWhat was your true face before your parents were born?ââit would be foolish to search a sonogram image of your mother as a fetus for a clue because the answer is private and must be uniquely your own. The koan does not have a public answer that could be provided by everyone in the same way. Thus, to the extent that a miracle story is like a parable or koan, it does not have a normative meaning.
On the other hand, miracle stories are social narratives: narratives insofar as they follow a plot line; social insofar as the response of readers or listeners is an essential element of the story. So, while a miracle story may challenge our view of the world in the way parables and koans provoke us to new perceptions and values, it seems to have significance that extends beyond individual hearers or readers. Richard Davis, teacher of Asian religious studies, notes that miracles ârequire an audience, a community of witnesses, who respond to the event with appropriate reactions of wonder, surprise, astonishment, and delight. Miracles also presume a set of socially shared expectations concerning what ought to happen, a common sense view of the normal way of things, from which the miraculous by definition deviates.â6 Miracles require witnesses for their performance, and the stories they tell must be read with attention to their construction as narratives.
Stories of wondrous events create worlds in which miracles signify possibilities of insight, action, and freedom that are not imaginable within the limits of a universe of implacable material forces. But creating narrative worlds is not an innocent enterprise. Contemporary readers are acutely aware of the layers of meaning, the strata of motives (conscious or not), and the maze of contexts (political, gendered, economic) involved in the construction of stories, let alone the worlds they project and sanction.7 We shall discover that narrative worlds in which miracles occur are often constructed as imaginative alternatives to the social or political conditions of the storytellerâs actual world. In these cases miracle stories are revolutionary proposals in disguise, sometimes aimed at competing views of reality within the storytellerâs religious community. Every story is told for a purpose; and every miracle story plays a role in larger contests over knowledge and power. Inasmuch as miracles are âsignsâ they require interpretationâand that need inevitably raises the question of authority.
That question is relevant not only to the stories in this book but also to the book itself. Each chapter constructs a narrative adapted for the purposes of this study: an overarching story of a religious tradition focused on the meaning of miracles in the tradition. Each tradition is presented primarily from the standpoint of those who perform wonders: avatars and yogis, prophets and rabbis, bodhisattvas and lamas, saints and healers, prophets and shaykhs. This approach seems to me a more productive way to proceed than to develop a typology of miracles since the same kinds of wondrous events appear in all the traditions under consideration. For example, we find cases of levitation by Hindu yogis, Christian saints, and Muslim shaykhs. The narrated acts of suspending gravity belong to the same category of miracle, but their meanings vary greatly in light of the different ways these religious virtuosi function in their traditions. The meaning of a miracle, then, is not only derived from what the act is but also from who performs it. For the purposes of this study we regard every miracle as a sign of transcendent power, but the process of interpreting its significance as a miracle requires attention to âhow it meansâ in the context of who exercises the power and who witnesses and benefits from its manifestation.
As a result, each tradition is by no means presented in its entirety but only in those aspects that illumine the meaning of miracles. The examples were chosen for the purpose of conducting this inquiry, so they should not be taken as representative in some general sense of the traditions from which they are drawn. Further, because each chapter tells a story in which miracle workers are central, it ignores or pushes to the background features of the tradition that many of its own adherents (and conventional historians) regard as far more significant than belief in miracles. So, while I have sketched in some of the beliefs and practices of each tradition, there was no attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of these world religions. Finally, because of the highly selective and intensely interested character of this study, the chapter narratives do not adequately account for struggles for dominance among various schools and branches of each tradition. While I have chosen a few examples of faithful dissent from each tradition, my selections serve to support my thesis that objections to belief in miracles may proceed from religious grounds as well as philosophical and ethical considerations. So, even when the analysis does consider internal discontinuities, it is guided by theoretical interests.
To focus on âhow miracles meanâ requires us to look at the narrative worlds in which they occur and the wider systems of signification in which the stories become credible. As the scholar Christoph Auffarth reminds us, âit is the task of the academic study of religion to examine miracles as social facts in their historical contexts, to analyze their social functions, and to seek to grasp the diverse ways in which miracles are perceived.â8 That task requires us to look beyond the literal meaning of miracle stories, and that method may well disappoint both believers and skeptics. The motives for the literal reading of religious texts are relative to the views of religion their readers hold. Devout Christians may insist that believing Jesus walked on water is essential to faith, while pious Muslims may hold that it is a test of faith to affirm that Muhammad rode a winged beast from Mecca to Jerusalem and then ascended into heaven. In these cases, literal readings are marks of respect for the texts as sacred revelation. On the other hand, unbelievers may insist on reading such stories literally so that they can confidently declare them absurd or superstitious and dismiss them as meaningless. Literal readings, whether by believers or skeptics, are often sadly devoid of empathy, respect, and imaginationânot to mention humor. Ensconced in their own worlds, literalists comfortably explain everything foreign in their terms, claiming to know better than storytellers what their stories mean, thereby shutting the door to the narrative world the story opens.
In our examination of miracle stories, we will try not to reduce the worlds their narratives create simply to the social and political conditions of the cultures in which the stories were performed. That method would miss the point of envisioning novel prospects for changing life under those conditions. We will also assume t...