and for many others who have dared to attempt to efface it where it was." "We have not greatly advanced the ques- tion of the stigmata/' he confesses in closing,41 "but if any of our readers, affected by an inclination to attribute all these phenomena to natural causes, has come in the end to doubt this conclusion or to understand that the question is always an individual one, and cannot be resolved in one sense or the other except after examination, and inde- pendently of all analogy, we shall not have entirely lost our time." It seems not an unfair paraphrase of this to say that the stigmata are in themselves no signs of the divine action ; anybody can have them ; but when he who has them is a saint it should be understood that they have been sent him by God. This, however, is obviously to make the saint accredit the stigmata, and not the stigmata the saint. And it clearly removes them out of the category of miracu- lous manifestations.
Such a cautious method of dealing with the stigmata is certainly justified by the facts of the case. The single cir- cumstance that only ecstatics receive them42 is suggestion enough of their origin in morbid neuroses.43 It is sufficient to read over an account of the phenomena, written by how- ever sympathetic an observer — say, for example, that by Joseph von Gorres in his great book on Christian Mysti- cismu — to feel sure that we are in the presence of path- ological phenomena. It is a crime to drag these suffering women into the public eye; and it is a greater crime to implant in their unformed intelligences45 that spiritual pride which leads them to fancy themselves singled out by the Lord for special favors, and even permitted by Him to share His sufferings — nay, to join with Him in bearing the sins of the world. For we do not fully apprehend the place given to stigmatization in the Roman system of thought until we realize that the passion of the stigmatics is not expended in what we call the "imitation of Christ" — the desire to be like Him, and to enter into His sufferings
88 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
with loving sympathy — but presses on into the daring am- bition to take part in His atoning work, and, by receiving the same bodily wounds which He received, to share with Him the saving of the world. "The substance of this grace," explains Aug. Poulain,46 "consists in pity for Christ, participation in His sufferings, sorrows, and for the same end — the expiation of the sins increasingly committed in the world.'" The matter is expounded fully by G. Dumas, professor of religious psychology at the Sorbonne, in the course of an admirable general discussion of "Stigmatiza- tion in the Christian Mystics," printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes for the ist of May, 1907.47 We avail our- selves of his illuminating statement.
"First of all," says he, "it is scarcely necessary to point out the symbolical and profound sense which all the mystics attach to the very fact of stigmatization.
"To bear the marks of the cross, of the crown of thorns, of the lance, or of the nails is to be thought worthy by Jesus to participate in His sufferings ; it is according to the very words of a historian of mysticism, 'to ascend with Him to the Calvary of the crucifixion before mounting with Him the Tabor of the Transfiguration.'48 All the mystics, accordingly, suffer violent pains in their stigmata, and they hold these pains to be the essential part of their stigmatiza- tion, without which their visible stigmata would be in their eyes only an empty decoration. They experience under the cross, under the crown, under the nails, under the lance the same sufferings as Jesus; they really languish and die with Him; they participate in His passion with all the force of their nerves. We have seen Francis and Veronica suffer in their ecstasies all the pains of the crucifixion ; they all do this. Catherine de Ruconisio experienced violent pains under the crown of blood which she let John Francis de la Mirandola see; Archangelica Tardera seemed at the point of rendering up her soul during the scene of her flagel- lation; and Catherine de' Ricci, on coming out of the
SUFFRAGAN SAVIOURS 89
swoon in which she was marked, 'appeared to her associ- ates so wasted and so livid that she looked to them like a living corpse.'