Two Essays on Biblical and on Ecclesiastical Miracles (review)

In April 1826, Newman completed an article on scriptural miracles that had been commissioned for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In it, he maintained that the age of miracles was limited to the Old and New Testaments, ending with the end of the apostolic age. He argued that miracles were only necessary at the beginning of the Church to secure its foundations. In the preceding month he had completed another article for the Encyclopaedia on “The Life of Apollonius Tyaneus, with a Comparison of the Miracles of Scripture and Those Elsewhere Related”; Apollonius was a neo-Pythagorean philosopher credited with many miracles that Newman consigned to the category of magic. Newman pointed out, although miracles are anomalous events in the natural world as we understand it, they may be quite normal in the divine scheme of things. He realized that miracles would not convert the atheist. Miracles are only likely on the “antecedent probability” that the Creator is likely to intervene in his creation—just as some occurrences are unlikely to qualify as miracles, because, for example, their object is trivial.

Newman’s second essay on miracles appeared as the preface to an 1842 English translation of The Ecclesiastical History of M. L’Abbé Fleury. His acceptance now of the postapostolic miracles that he had rejected in the earlier essay simply reflects the development of his own ecclesiology from a Protestant to a Catholic sense of the supernatural nature of the Church. He also came to connect the earlier denial with the flippant way he had spoken about the Fathers, an irreverence that he saw as part of his drift toward liberal theology under the influence of the Oriel “Noetics.” Now he sees a continuity between the history of the Old and New Testaments and that of the postapostolic Church. Since the latter also is sacred history, there is an expectation that miracles are likely to occur. To deny that miracles are still possible is to fall into the same skepticism as that of Hume toward the miracles of the scriptures. As for the argument that postscriptural miracles tend to have a legendary look about them, Newman observes that the miracles recorded in the scriptures would similarly have looked to contemporaries like Jewish sorcery. Whether or not we believe in the postapostolic alleged miracles depends, he argues, less on the evidence producible than on whether we think they are likely—that is, antecedently probable.

Geoffrey Rowell’s informative introduction is unfortunately marred by two sentences that do not make sense (pp. xxv, xxviii) and have strangely escaped the notice of the editor, the general editor of the series, and the copyeditor. The composition of the second essay also is wrongly dated to 1824 (p. xii).The notes are copious and detailed, indicating an aspiration, as in previous volumes in the series, toward the status of a critical edition.