Not all the miracles which Augustine includes in this anthology were wrought, however, by the bones of Stephen. Even before these bones had been discovered, miracles of the most astonishing character had occurred within his own personal knowledge. He tells us, for example, of the restoration of a blind man to sight at Milan — "when I was there," he says — by the remains of the martyrs Pro- tasius and Gervasius, discovered to Ambrose in a dream. And he tells us with great circumstantiality of a miraculous cure of fistula wrought in Carthage — "in my presence and under my own eyes," he says — when he and Alypius had just returned from Italy. A special interest attaches to these early instances, because Augustine, although an eye- witness of them, and although he insists on his having been an eye-witness of them as their attestation, does not seem to have recognized their miraculous character until long afterward. For Augustine's hearty belief in contemporary miracles, illustrated by the teeming list now before us, was of slow growth. It was not until some years after his re- turn to Africa that it became easy to him to acknowledge their occurrence. He arrived in Africa in 388, but still in his treatises, On the True Religion, which was written about 390, and On the Usefullness of Believing, written in 391 or 392, we find him speaking on the hypothesis that miracles no longer happened. "We perceive," he writes in the former of these treatises,6 "that our ancestors, by that measure of faith by which the ascent is made from tem-
AUGUSTINE'S EARLY DOUBTS 41
poral things to eternal, obtained visible miracles (for thus only could they do it) ; and through them it has been brought about that these should no longer be necessary for their descendants. For when the Catholic Church had been dif- fused and established through the whole world, these mir- acles 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." Similarly, in the latter treatise, after enumerating the miracles of our Lord, he asks,7 "Why do not these things take place now?" and answers, "Because they would not move unless they were wonderful, and if they were customary they would not be wonderful." " Even the marvels of nature, great and wonderful as they are," he continues, " have ceased to sur- prise and so to move; and God has dealt wisely with us, therefore, in sending his miracles once for all to convince the world, depending afterward on the authority of the multitudes thus convinced."
Subsequently at the close of his life, reviewing these pas- sages in his Retractations, he supposes it enough to say that what he meant was not that no miracles were still wrought in his own day, but only that none were wrought which were as great as those our Lord wrought, and that not all the kinds our Lord wrought continued to be wrought.8 "For," says he,9 "those that are baptized do not now re- ceive the Spirit on the imposition of hands, so as to speak in the tongues of all the peoples; neither are the sick healed by the shadow of the preachers of Christ falling on them as they pass; and other such things as were then done, are now manifestly ceased." What he said, he in- sists,10 is not to be taken as meaning that no miracles at all were to be believed to be performed still in Christ's name. " For I myself, when I wrote that book " — the book On the True Religion — "already knew that a blind man had been given his sight at Milan, by the bodies of the
42 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
martyrs in that city; and certain other things which were done at that time in numbers sufficient to prevent our know- ing them all or our enumerating all we knew." This ex- planation seems scarcely adequate; but it suggests that the starting-point of Augustine's belief in contemporary mir- acles is to be sought in Milan — although it appears that some time was required after he had left Milan for the be- lief to ripen in his mind.