We are not yet, however, at the end of the matter. The same story is related by the heathen satirist Lucian,15 writing as far back as the third quarter of the second cen- tury— two hundred and fifty years before Augustine, and three hundred and fifty years before Gregory. Only, Lucian has this advantage over his Christian successors in his way of telling it, that he does not tell it as having
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really happened, but in a rollicking mood, laughing at the superstitions of his time. He brings before us a chance gathering of men, who, in their conversation, fall to vying with one another in "romancing" of their supernatural experiences. One of them, a Peripatetic, named Cleode- mus, makes this contribution to the conversation. "I had become ill, and Antigonus here was attending me. The fever had been on me for seven days, and was now aggra- vated by the excessive heat. All my attendants were out- side, having closed the door and left me to myself; those were your orders, you know, Antigonus ; I was to get some sleep if I could- Well, I woke up to find a handsome young man standing by my side, in a white cloak. He raised me up from the bed, and conducted me through a sort of a chasm into Hades ; I knew where I was at once, because I saw Tantalus and Tityus and Sisyphus. Not to go into details, I came to the judgment-hall, and there were JE&cus and Charon, and the Fates and the Furies. One person of a majestic appearance — Pluto, I suppose it was — sat reading out the names of those who were due to die, their term of life having lapsed. The young man took me and set me before him, but Pluto flew into a rage: 'Away with him,' he said to my conductor; 'his thread is not yet out; go and fetch Demylus the smith; he has had his spindleful and more!' I ran off home, nothing loath. My fever had now disappeared, and I told everybody that Demylus was as good as dead. He lived close by, and was said to have some illness, and it was not long before we heard the voices of mourners in his house."
The late James Payne, the novelist, used whimsically to contend that fiction did not imitate life as was commonly supposed, but, on the contrary, life imitated fiction; a romancer could not invent a motive, he said, however bizarre, but a lot of people would soon be found staging copies of it in real life. Perhaps on some such theory we might defend the reality of the occurrences related by Au-
80 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
gustine and Gregory as having happened within their own knowledge. Scarcely on any other. That the source of Augustine's and Gregory's stories lies in Lucian's is too obvious to require arguing; even the doomed smith is common to all three, and the strong heathen coloring of the story is not obscured, in Gregory's version at least, which clearly is independent of Augustine's. Heinrich Gunter has an ingenious theory designed to save the credit of the saints. He supposes16 that the story might have been so widely known that sick people would be likely to reproduce it in their fevered dreams. "To such an extent," he re- marks, "had certain imaginary conceptions become the common property of the people that they repeated them- selves as autosuggestions and dreams." 17 One would presume, even so, that when the dreamers woke up, they would recognize their dreams as old acquaintances ; and how shall we account for Augustine and Gregory not recog- nizing such well-known stories circulating so universally among the masses, when they were told them as fresh ex- periences of the other world?
Hippolyte Delehaye frankly gives up the effort to save the credit of all parties. "It is impossible to be mis- taken," he comments.18 "That friend of St. Gregory's was an unscrupulous person, who bragged of having been the hero of a story which he had read in the books. To say nothing of St. Augustine, Plutarch could have taught it to him, and better still, Lucian." Nothing is said here to save Augustine's reputation for truthfulness; and if Greg- ory's honor is saved it is at the expense not only of his friend Stephen's, but also of his own intelligence. Could not Gregory, as well as Stephen, have read his Plutarch or his Lucian, to say nothing of his Augustine, whom of course he had read, though equally of course he had not remem- bered him? And how could he have listened to and re- peated Stephen's tale without noting the heathen coloring of it, which alone should have stamped it to him as a bit
THE CREDIT OF THE SAINTS 81