Faithful to our own, we here place ourselves at the historical point of view. Convinced that ideas have a history, and are most clearly and surely defined by their very evolution, we shall confine ourselves to following and describing that evolution. We shall seek in the first place to ascertain the notion of miracle that was current in antiquity; after that we shall see what became of it in mediæval theology; and lastly we shall see into what elements it has resolved itself in modern times, as much at the point of view of science as of piety. As religious inspiration, properly speaking, is but a particular miracle, a miracle of the psychological order, the solution available for the one will apply to the other.
The primitive conception of Nature was animistic. In everything _astonishing_, extraordinary, men used to see the action of spirits like themselves, with whom their religious imagination peopled the heavens, the earth, the seas. They lived in miracle. It would be easier to enumerate the things that were not than the things that were to them miraculous. The word Nature, which has become so familiar and so indispensable to designate the regular course of things, does not exist in primitive languages. One does not meet with it even in the language of the Old Testament. This is because the conception it represents only came into existence later, and by a slow and laborious process, in the philosophy of the Greeks. The cosmos, ordered and harmonious and fixed, is the sublime creation of Hellenic reason. Elsewhere, no doubt, with experience of life and the daily return of phenomena, a certain order, the effect of custom, would exist around man and be established in his mind. He learned to distinguish between the habitual course of things and the prodigies which caused him wonder, fear, or hope, and in which he always saw the effect either of the favour or the anger of a demon or a god. His imagination, to which his ignorance gave free play, and his credulity, which religious terror held open to all impressions, stories, legends, wrapped his life in an atmosphere of marvel, gentle or terrible, but incessant. Eclipses, earthquakes, thunder, lightning, rainbows, deluges, accidents, maladies, etc.--these were the work of particular actors, personal, impassioned like man, hidden behind the scenes. Add to this the inventions of sorcerers and priests; ... transport yourself into this first effervescence of the human faculties, into this luxuriant vegetation of poetical creation in the early human mind, and you will have some idea of what, for centuries on centuries, must have been the mental state of primitive historic humanity. Such, however, is the comparative poverty of human conceptions, that, when you come to catalogue these marvels, you see them reduced to a small number of miracles which turn up everywhere and again and again among all peoples. Their similarity approaches to monotony.... The question for the moment is not whether these miraculous facts are real or not, but how the men who have transmitted them to us represented them. There is no doubt on this point. To them they were not simply astonishing facts that admitted of a natural explanation. Modern theologians and savants who seek and find for them explanations of this kind do not perceive that they contradict themselves, and that to explain miracle in this way is to destroy it. No; that which is miraculous in these events--to the contemporaries of Tarquin in Rome, of Joshua in Palestine, to the people in our own day--is this, that they are produced, contrary to the natural course of things, solely by a special intervention of the divine will. That is the mark and characteristic of ancient miracle. Efface it, for any reason whatever, and miracle disappears. That which makes it possible is ignorance of Nature and its laws: that which supports it is the religious belief in the existence of these supernatural wills and in their unexpected invasion of the succession of accustomed things. "Without this belief," as M. Ménégoz remarks,[1] "the birth of a myth or of a legend could not be explained. St. Denis, decapitated, would not have been able to carry his head." In fact, the miracles you find in the apocryphal legends are exactly of the same nature as those which are met with in narratives held to be more historical.