Prophecy and Miracles*

My problems are contained in three documents:

1. The decree of the Vatican Council that the prophecies and miracles of Moses and the prophets and Christ supply solid external arguments for the truth of Christianity.**

2. The warning in Deuteronomy:

If there rise in the midst of thee a prophet or one that saith he hath dreamed a dream, and he foretell a sign and a wonder, and that come to pass which he spoke, and he say to thee: Let us go and follow strange gods, which thou knowest not, and let us serve them, thou shalt not hear the words of that prophet or dreamer. (Dt 13. 1-3)

3. Lessing’s ‘On the proof of the Spirit and of Power’.*** Lessing says ‘It is one thing to experience the fulfilment of prophecy; fulfilled prophecies of which I know only as a matter of history that others are supposed to have experienced them, are quite another thing.’ And the same for miracles. The ‘proof of the Spirit and of power’ of which St Paul speaks in I Corinthians, he says, was to work miracles and to prophesy. Origen could refer to such a proof because of the known existence of such things in his own time. But reports of fulfilled prophecies are not fulfilled prophecies, reports of miracles not miracles. ‘Those that take place before my own eyes have their effect in an immediate way; the others are supposed to have their effect through a medium that deprives them of all power.’

Note that unlike Deuteronomy Lessing does not impose any restrictions on what effect (on my beliefs) witnessing fulfilled prophecy may be permitted to have, other than that one could not believe the prophet if he contradicted part of one’s own experience that was as certain as one’s observation of his performance.

He goes on to say that he does not in the least doubt that Christ worked miracles and fulfilled prophecies; but this can only be as certain as any historical event.

We all believe that there was such a person as Alexander, who conquered almost all Asia in a short time. But who would stake something of great and permanent importance, whose loss was irreplaceable, on this belief? Who, in consequence of this belief, would forswear for ever all knowledge that should conflict with it? Certainly I should not. I have at present nothing to object against Alexander and his conquests; but it would after all be possible that they were founded on a mere poem of Choerilus who accompanied Alexander, just as the ten year siege of Troy is founded on nothing but Homer.

Similarly:

That Christ, against whose resurrection I have no significant historical objection, gave himself out as the son of God on account of it; that his disciples believed he was that on account of it; this I readily believe. For these truths, as truths of one and the same class, follow quite naturally one from the other.

But now, leap from that historical truth to a quite different class of truths, and to demand of me that I should transform all my metaphysical and moral concepts accordingly; to expect me, because I can set no trustworthy evidence against the resurrection of Christ, to alter all my fundamental ideas of the deity - if that is not a metabasis eis allo genos then I don’t know what Aristotle meant by that term.

Of course [he says], you say: this Christ, who rose from the dead - which you admit as an historical fact - this Christ said that God had a son of the same nature as himself and that he was that son. - Splendid! If only the fact that Christ said this were not equally merely historically certain.

He goes on, very surprisingly, to counter the argument that the authors are inspired and so cannot err, by saying that it is only historically certain that these authors were inspired. Of course one would expect him to say: but that’s only certain to one who already believes the Christian religion. That he says such an extraordinary thing must come of the background against which he wrote. Conceivably he meant: that these texts we have before us are the texts which were supposed to be inspired, is only historically certain. This is indeed a rather strong point as far as concerns an unlearned man’s arguments from a single passage; for all he knows, it is a doubtful bit of the text, and so not part of the canon as received in the early times of the Church.

The most central part of his argument comes in the following passage:

Who denies it - I do not - that the reports of those miracles and prophecies are just as trustworthy as any historical truth can be? - But now: if they are only so trustworthy, why are they so used as suddenly to make them infinitely more trustworthy? How? By building quite different things, and more things, on them, than one is entitled to build on historically evidenced truths. If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then neither can anything be demonstrated by historical truths. That is: accidental historical truths can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.

I do not know much about the history of ideas; but I suspect that Lessing, in this and in other writings about religion and religious controversy, has been very influential: so many things that, in a distorted and vulgarised form, were for long commonplaces, are to be found in him with a seeming stamp of originality and freshness.

His argument in this paper is, I think, more intricate than it seems to be. I will try to separate out various points he makes.

1. In the argument about Alexander, it at first seems strange that he should use the fact that we might have known of Alexander only through a poem of Choerilus, to prove that we cannot base anything with perfect certainty on the existence of Alexander. But there are two reasons for this remark.

(a) I think there is certainly a dig at the fact that we know of Christ’s words and actions ultimately only through one source - the New Testament. ‘This one book’ he calls it elsewhere. It is of course several books, not one; but this point may not seem important, as all were written by members of a close knit group of men.

(b) But the main reason for this argument becomes apparent when he talks about accidental historical truths not becoming the proof of necessary truths of reason. What is to be believed about God, about what can be ascribed to God, he thinks of as a ‘necessary truth of reason’, a metaphysical truth, I suppose; and a metaphysical truth, like a mathematical truth, could not possibly follow from a historical fact: if it could follow, then the historical fact would have to be as certain as metaphysical truths are supposed to be; but a historical fact could be quite uncertain, as Alexander would be if we only knew of him through a poem of Choerilus. I think that is the argument; it is not at this point an argument from the actual uncertainty of Alexander. I think it is not worth attention, because the assumption that anything believable about God must be ‘a necessary truth of reason’ is worse than doubtful; it is incoherent. It possibly derives from Leibnizian notions of ‘necessary being’, which I hope we can regard as exploded: and it goes with Lessing’s idea, which has become so widespread, that the truths of religion must all be such that the human race could in the end have thought them out for themselves.

2. From the point of view of the Vatican decree, Lessing’s insistence that historical truths can never be quite certain may be unimportant. For there is nothing there about a demonstration of the truth of Christianity; only about ‘solid external arguments’; it is even, I believe, heresy or near heresy to hold that the mysteries of faith can be demonstrated (No one says ‘Jesus is Lord’ but by the Holy Ghost, St Paul says; but you can follow a demonstration without the Holy Ghost); hence high probability - which Lessing is quite willing to concede - may be enough to constitute ‘solid external arguments’. Of course in view of the point we have already considered, he would object to a merely probable argument for ‘necessary truths of reason’. But while that need not detain us, there is of course the central objection against faith itself: it is certain, its grounds - if it has grounds - at best probable: what excuse can one have for it, then? The excuse, someone might say, must be something that makes the things called ‘probable grounds’ utterly irrelevant. A person may have what strike him as probable grounds, and embrace Christian faith, and then discover that his probable grounds were nothing but gimcrack arguments and historical errors; but he is supposed to hold on to faith just the same. So his ‘grounds’ were nothing but the ladder which he kicked away, important only psychologically; and it must be a mistake to think that any such ladder rightly leads to faith - unless any ladder will do. There is probably something of this in Lessing’s remark about ‘building things on historical truths which one is not entitled to build’; and this remains, even if one discards his view that anything to be believed about God must be a necessary truth of reason.

3. Quite apart from Lessing’s central criticism of the contemporary argument for Christianity from prophecy and miracle, it is important to notice that his position is certainly incompatible with Christian belief at all. In this essay he appears to be arguing only against a certain argument, not against Christian beliefs: he appears to be saying ‘If you hold them, it is on other grounds, not these’; he even ostensibly holds them - for other reasons; namely, their admirable content. But it is very clear that the Christian religion is false if, say, Christ is a myth. The role of Christ is not, as some people, who I suppose are in some line of descent from Lessing, would say: to show how noble a human being might be, and so inspire us. And that Christ was not a myth but a real person is historical fact. Therefore the Christian religion is incompatible with the falsehood of certain historical statements. But Lessing’s position about what can be believed about God would not merely show that it could not be derived from any historical knowledge, but also that it could not be incompatible with any antecedently possible historical statements. And in fact I imagine he might have admitted this. It is very clear that he regarded Christ just as a teacher: and in a teacher it is the teaching that is important; it really does not matter whether the alleged teacher existed or not, so long as the teaching is there. Lessing was one of those who distinguished between the ‘religion of Christ’ (which he explained as ‘the religion which he practised and acknowledged’) and ‘the Christian religion’ (mainly characterised by the belief that Christ was the son of God): it may be that he was one of the originators of this long commonplace distinction. He was, of course, too informed to deny that the ‘Christian religion’ occurred in Christ’s reported utterances, but insisted on distinguishing between what was hopelessly obscure and what was marvellously clear in these; the ‘Christian religion’ occurred only in what was obscure, not in what was clear. He dignified what was clear by the name ‘the religion of Christ’. He himself draws the analogy I have used earlier between religious and mathematical truths: what would it matter if, historically, some fraudulent procedure led to a mathematical truth, he asks.

4. The proof of the Spirit and of power is in contemporary miracles and prophecies. I think Lessing greatly exaggerates the certainty (from an external, impartial point of view) which Origen may have had about these. Here it is useful to be a Catholic, since Catholics don’t say as others do and Lessing did ‘there are no more miracles now’. I don’t know Origen’s biography; but it seems very likely that he knew of them as much from hearsay as we usually do now; even if, as seems the case, miracles were ever so much more common then, they were all the same thoroughly astonishing events; and presumably unbelievers regarded them with as much incredulity and lack of interest as unbelievers now show in regard to such things, which Catholics accept. Signs and wonders, even in Apostolic times, and done by Christ himself, are rare enough for most people only to hear of them. But perhaps all this is only for the sake of argument, and Lessing was in fact quite sceptical about all miracles and prophecies: I don’t know.

* * *

These points are merely by way of preamble, to clear the ground before considering Lessing’s central argument against the arguments for Christianity from miracles and prophecies fulfilled. Of course, this boils down to its being reasonable to say ‘But these things may not be true, so how can I use them to support Christianity?’ Put like that, Lessing’s argument appears quite strong. And, put like that, it is fairly clearly in conflict with the decree of the Vatican Council. His argument is valuable, because it does not confuse the issue by attacking the truth of the recorded miracles and fulfilments of prophecy.

What makes the Vatican decree of extraordinary interest, I think, is that it is probably common among us to believe in fulfilled prophecies and miracles because we believe the Catholic religion and they are part of our doctrines. Besides, the passage from Deuteronomy, as well as reasonable reflection on the requirements of faith, would incline us to say that a prophet or wonder-worker is to be judged in the light of the Christian religion. If prophecies and miracles offer ‘solid external arguments’, they would seem to need to be established as prophecies and miracles before belief in Christianity is introduced: but isn’t there a theological element in calling something a fulfilled prophecy, and even more, a miracle?

Returning to Lessing, I will try to say what seems right and what wrong about his contentions. First, as to miracles: I think that it must be conceded him that the reports of them could not be expected to appeal to an external judge as certainly true. The most famous - and the only one, I believe, still used in apologetic - is Christ’s resurrection. Lessing concedes that it is as certain as any historical fact. I do not agree. In fact, this concession is one which I think it important, not merely for philosophical but for apologetic purposes, to oppose. In arguments on the subject, doubters are usually pressed for an alternative explanation. Why should they have one? What is unreasonable about saying ‘Heaven knows what happened to produce this belief; I do not. And I know much too little about what may go on in human minds in the origins of embracing a new religious belief, to draw any conclusions (as I am so often pressed to do) from the subsequent careers of the Apostles (supposing them to be truly related in the main) or from the sudden appearance and growth of a new religion, which after all is all I am really perfectly certain of. I do know one thing: new religions sometimes spread like wildfire. How this works, and how it gets established in them is obscure. I concede that this is an impressive religion too; but then it had a very impressive religion behind it: that of the Old Testament. Remember that beliefs in miraculous events in connexion with the founders and heroes of religion are quite common. The most I can grant is that the record is quite as if these things had happened: the manner is not legendary, though the matter is!’

Lessing appears to me certainly wrong in saying ‘that no historical certainty can be strong enough to be absolute’; hence, if it is strength of certainty that is really in question, it is not true that historical certainty is always too weak to base absolute certainty upon it. I do not here say that strength of certainty is what is in question; but Lessing certainly treats it as what is important in some of what he says, though of course there is a hint of something else in his talk of jumping to a different class of truths. But for the moment I will concentrate on strength of certainty. I should not mind staking anything whatever on the existence of Alexander, or forswearing for ever any proffered appearance of knowledge that conflicted with it. It is indeed not open to me to stake salvation upon it; but that is because Alexander has never been given any such role.[1] If he were to be given such a role, then, so far as the certainty of his existence is concerned, it would be possible.

How many people who ostensibly at least knew people who knew Alexander have left writings about what he did? I neither know nor need to know in order to be certain he existed. It may be said that direct or near direct knowledge of him in our sources is unimportant: he is like Stalin - very widely known of in his own time, and in the wideness of the knowledge of him in his own time, he is superior to Christ, whose position is perhaps more comparable, as far as that is concerned, to that of Joanna Southcott, or perhaps of John Wesley, or someone half-way between them.

The question gets a bit more complicated if I wonder whom I mean by ‘Alexander’. Do I rule it out, say, that the heir of Philip’s throne died and an imposter took his place half-way through his victorious career? I do rule it out: it is so vehemently improbable. And here Lessing is on to me: this is where probability comes in, as opposed to plumb certainty. But I wish to say it does not begin to come in before this: that is to say, I object to his lumping together everything historical as of inferior certainty to my own experience. I am more certain that there was a great conqueror Alexander (and for that matter, more certain that there was a female religious imposter Joanna Southcott) than that I met Dom Illtyd Trethowan**** here last year - and that, without having gone into the evidence in either case. This is so, though I am very certain that I did meet Dom Illtyd here last year; so that I should look for some strange explanation, or think that I had got completely bemused in some way, if it turned out that the monk of that name was in Australia at that time so that I could not have met him. But it could turn out that he had been; whereas things making it remotely probable that there was no Alexander are inconceivable; there could be no reason to think one knew what any historical evidence suggested at all, if a great range of things in history were not quite solid. Experience, unless it is made right by definition, is not more but less certain; and what I judge from experience may, some of it, more easily be wrong.

Now, that Christ claimed to be the Son of God, and that he rose from the dead, is not solid in this fashion. What is solid in this fashion is that he existed, preached, like an Old Testament prophet, and was at least ostensibly crucified under the Roman authority; and that believers took him for the Messiah and the Son of God and believed he had risen from the dead. Something - as it might be a report in Tacitus - suggesting something else, e.g. that they thought he had gone into hiding, would never die, and came in secret to visit believers, would not seem to be evidence suggesting that we are misinformed as to the beliefs of Christians then; it would be evidence that Tacitus gave ill-informed accounts of things. Tacitus actually says that the Jews worshipped a donkey because one had led them to find water in the desert; we do not take this as evidence for the beliefs of Jews in his time. What we know about this is, on the contrary, a standard for judging what Tacitus said. Similarly, if we found some reference (in some Rabbinical tradition, let us say as a fancy for the sake of example) suggesting that the Son of Mary and Joseph, the putative parents of the pseudo-Messiah worshipped by the Christians, was simply an artisan turned thief who got himself crucified by the Romans, and never preached a word; no one would judge it to be evidence of anything but Jewish spite. As for the actual death, disappearance from the tomb, and reappearance of Christ, and also the claim to be the Son of God, these belong to the very large realm of historical assertions which it would indeed be absurd to claim certainty for, but the time for disproving which is past. I think that Lessing is unconscious of the existence of this class of historical assertions too; with them there is no danger of running up against a disproof of them, and the greater part of them must be true: but of any particular one, we cannot say it is perfectly certain. We may note that the death of Christ would be refuted, in normal circumstances, just by his reappearance alive.

Sticking to things that are absolutely solid (since Lessing’s argument requires us to do this) we can say in the same way: that Christ predicted the siege and destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jews is not solid in this fashion; but it is solid that it was anciently written down as a prophecy that Jerusalem would be trodden underfoot by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles was up; and in fact Jerusalem has been in the hands of the Gentiles from the Roman siege until now. The prophecy would be falsified, or at any rate deprived of any particular sense, if the Jews had possessed, or now came to possess, Jerusalem without any noteworthy and permanent change in the status or condition of the Gentiles. If Lessing tells me that the ancientness of the prediction is something I know ‘only historically’, I reply that this sort of historical certainty is as good as any certainty.

Now prophecies whose ancientness, priority, and fulfilment are really clear and certain to a quite detached observer are necessarily few. This is chiefly because of a point that Lessing makes elsewhere: in order to say ‘This was predicted, and it happened’ we have to judge that the thing that happened, not merely was describable in the words occurring in the prediction, but was what was predicted: otherwise ‘fulfilment’ equals ‘applicability of these words’; and can’t this just be an accident? Thus the fact that the words ‘they pierced my hands and my feet’ occur in a psalm; and the words ‘he who would touch the unjust must be filled with iron and the shaft of a spear’ in the last words of David, could be seen as prophetical by believing Christians, or by pious Jews awaiting the ‘consolation of Israel’, who, having Christ preached to them ‘searched the scriptures daily to see whether these things should be so’, like the synagogue of Berea when St Paul came there; but can just be noted as mysterious utterances in ancient texts by anyone else. This holds true of a large number of the passages of the Old Testament which automatically make a Christian think of Christ.

There are however special difficulties about the notion of the applicability of prophetical words as accidental. If someone says something true about the past, and it then turns out that he knew nothing of those events, then it was just an accident that his words applied. But it is impossible to know the future of the world and of human affairs; so this test for accident cannot be made. This point needs stressing: someone who believes in a possibility of ‘precognition’ comparable to ‘memory’ is thereby rendered incapable of understanding the nature of prophecy at all.

Since we can’t test whether a prophet meant such and such future events by whether he knew of them, then if like Lessing we are going to demand that it should be clear that this is what he meant, we thereby restrict the range of possible prophecy very severely. I think we restrict it to predictions containing proper names and predicates with a very definite sense, like the death of a man or the desolation of a site. If I say: ‘Father Ryan will be dead before the year is out’ that is clear enough; the trouble about such predictions, of course, is that we hardly ever know of their priority with certainty. If I say Chicago will be desolated by an earthquake, will be abandoned, and never again inhabited; it will be all ploughed fields where Chicago was, and there will never be a city there again; then that is definite too. We have such a prophecy in Isaiah concerning Babylon, whose priority and fulfilment have the absolute certainty about which Lessing disputes; priority, because Babylon did not become desolate until after the establishment of Seleucia in the second century B.C.; and certainty, since the prophet is extremely explicit, so that it would be safe to say that the present day establishment of any town on the site of Babylon would be a falsification of the prophecy. ‘The Arab will not pitch his tent there’, the prophet said: nor will he: he believes the place to be devil-haunted. Other cases are: the final destruction of the great city of Tyre (not unequivocally accomplished until the fourteenth century) and the prophecy that Egypt should never again be a great nation after being conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, and should have its cities scattered among ruined and abandoned cities. Apart from cities and countries, peoples have proper names; and the prophecies concerning the Jews, their being scattered all over the world, their sufferings, down to horrid details like being driven to eat afterbirths (verified in the Roman siege and again in Hitler’s camps), the downfall of their enemies, and their return to Palestine - all this appears to have been fulfilled or (I hope) to be being fulfilled. But here, of course, it would be possible to argue that what the prophets ‘meant’ was the scattering over the known world at the Exile and the return under Cyrus: possible, that is, to the impartial unbeliever, who can write off the association of their return with the advent of a conquering and triumphant Messiah as a fantastic hope for the immediate future on the part of the writers. Thus, if you want to be able to say ‘This is what the prophet meant’, you are under very severe restrictions. Even a prophecy with an attempt at dates in it - which you might suppose to be rather definite - is necessarily obscure unless you have a certain chronology and a certain terminus a quo. The example for this is the prophecy in David, that forty-nine and 434 years after the going forth of the order to build up Jerusalem, Messiah the Prince should be killed. What did the terminus a quo mean to the writer? The Edict of Cyrus? The permit of Darius? The first permission of Artaxerxes? The later edict of Artaxerxes? The fact that if we take one of these it brings us out to the time of the crucifixion, and that no other yields any result even by a rough approximation may by impressive; but not to someone who first wants to know just what was in the writer’s mind. Now if the writer was writing after the event to which the words are taken to have applied, the whole question falls to the ground: but if before, then there is no such thing as his having that event in mind: for future events aren’t there to have in mind, except in so far as they lie in their causes which are present; but that is not the case for such events.

To show the character of prophecies without proper names, take the prophecy in Daniel, that after Nebuchadnezzar’s should come two great empires, and then a fourth ‘iron’ empire, very great and powerful, which should split up into many states getting their character from it, but never able to coalesce. If someone says this here and now, in the past tense, the reference to the Roman Empire is clear and the description commonplace. If - to mention something that Lessing, who was so great a dramatic critic, would have appreciated - in a modern play words describing history known to the audience are put in the mouth of someone supposed to be speaking in an earlier time, the impression created is necessarily bogus; everyone knows what the author means. But if such words are really found to have been uttered in a former time, then they at once become vague and problematic. This is a logical point: of the many, many utterances we might make now about the present or the past, which have a good sharp sense, by far the greater number would look hopelessly obscure if said earlier, of the future: even ones with proper names: e.g. ‘Suez was unnavigable for sunken ships’: we all know what that means; ‘Suez will be unnavigable for sunken ships’ as a prophetical utterance written in 1850, would have been hopelessly unintelligible. Now let us take an unfulfilled (eschatological) prophecy of Zechariah: ‘I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to battle’, about which one feels pretty vague; and imagine the effect on those words of a set of events which fitted the whole chapter and included an attack on Jerusalem by a United Nations expeditionary force! That is the kind of effect that the history of the Roman Empire and of its break-up into many states has on Daniel’s prophecy. These considerations result in an interesting point: the critical principle that prophetical writings must have been clearly intelligible in their own times is itself a denial of the possibility of all but prophecy of a very restricted type.

That is to say: for almost all prophecies, to see them fulfilled is to interpret them; and this is because of the difference between past and future. To ask whether a prophet had these events in mind is senseless. The most we can do is to distinguish between cases where the prophet - professing to prophesy - utters words which have a natural application, considering his whole context, to the events we think they prophesied; and cases where all that can be said is that one can see how someone might apply those words, ripped out of context and taken by themselves, to this event. For example, the application of Jeremiah’s prophecy about Rachel mourning for her children to the slaughter of the Innocents is of the second kind. Prophecies like ‘They pierced my hands and my feet’, and that of Isaiah addressed to the disobedient among the Jews ‘I shall call my servants by another name’ are of the first kind, as is the prophecy of Daniel. Prophecies like Zechariah’s ‘They shall look upon one whom they pierced’ are of the first kind in their most obvious application, namely to the second coming of Christ, as St John uses them in the Apocalypse; and of the second in the application St John makes of them in the Gospel: there the words are reft out of their context and applied in isolation; but of course the reference of the ‘piercing’ to the Crucifixion is of the first kind; that is why I can adduce this example, even though the ‘looking upon’ intended by the prophet is eschatological.

But the question arises: why on earth should one be impressed by prophecy at all? Why should it even interest one? We have almost certainly all heard anecdotes of old prophecies in some sense verified: I can supply one, which I know sufficiently directly to know that it is true. There was a row of heads of English monarchs being placed in Llandaff Cathedral: the prediction, told as such in the early thirties, was that when the last place was filled, a disaster would befall the country. The last head was Edward VIII’s; after that, a landmine hit the Cathedral in the second world war. What has one for such stories but a shrug and a smile, even when one actually knows them to be true (which of course is usually not the case)?

Now a prophecy fulfilled, or a miracle done, is supposed to attest something. In the story I have told, nothing is attested except the prediction itself, since it turned out true in some sense: but to say it was attested is to say nothing but that it turned out true. But let us take an example where there might be thought to be something to attest. It is widely reported - the story comes, I believe, from Walter Starkie - that a gypsy woman said of Leslie Howard just before he was killed in an air crash: ‘I will not stay in the room with that man: there is death in his face’. Naturally, I do not know whether this story is true, since I neither was there nor know the author of it. You have to know a man, and to know him extremely well, to judge his truthfulness about that sort of story: a point which I think makes ridiculous the argument that we have to believe what the earliest Christians said they had observed, or said they had from people who had observed them. People love wonderful stories. However, let us suppose that I knew the story to be true, say from having witnessed it myself; for I can say in the manner of Lessing that I have nothing against it. Then it might be suggested that it attested the gypsy. But in what sense? That it attested other predictions she might make? But why should she always be right; or even if she was always right in sincere prophecies, why should she never lie? What possible good reason could I have to say that it attested her in any way: let alone that it attested, say, her religion (for there is a Romany religion, which might be hers) or her advice? I should say: none. Now if someone says: there must be some explanation; at least such events prove that gypsies have strange powers of telling the future, I reply that such events, if they occur specially among gypsies, prove that such events occur specially among gypsies, and nothing else at all. Nor do I agree that there must be an explanation. But if there must, then if we are to deal in occult matters at all, one can offer a different explanation: namely, that God permits the devil to prompt people who would like to claim such powers to make such utterances in the presence of people who may thereby be tempted to occultism. If you ‘must’ have an explanation when you are outside the sphere of natural knowledge, there can be no ‘must’ about the explanation you offer. This point is neglected by psychical researchers who are ready to speak of ‘what only so-and-so could have known’ - in the natural course of events - as evidence that it was so-and-so who imparted it - in a quite abnormal way, but if it could be imparted in a quite abnormal way, then the argument from ‘only so-and-so could have known it’ falls heavily to the ground.

There is a sense of the term ‘accidental’ other than that in which Lessing used it. As we saw, he called the fulfilment of prophecy accidental if the words of the prophecy had a natural enough application, but the event was not in fact what the prophet meant; and as we also saw, this restricts the kind of prophecy that is possible at all very considerably, because it is not possible to ‘mean’ any but a very restricted range of future events in the way in which one can ‘mean’ present [or] past ones; if we are going to allow prophecy a wider range than that, the only criticism on the ground that it was not what the prophet ‘meant’ would be that it can be told from the context that that was not the kind of thing the prophet meant - as, if somebody now said that there would be a parliament in Saudi Arabia too, and later some witches’ assembly issued edicts there, we could say it wasn’t the kind of thing he had meant. Now supposing that I seriously, not just as a philosophical example, say here and now ‘Johannesburg will be captured by Ghana’, and it goes on record that I say it in 1957; and in 1990 it happens. To say ‘this was accidental’ is to say ‘this was not a prophecy’; that is, this is itself a theological remark. If I said it as a philosophical example, then it has some sense to say ‘the fulfilment was accidental’: if I uttered it as a prophecy - i.e. a prediction not based on judgment of future events from their present causes, and not, of course, as an expression of intention on my own part - then to say ‘it was accidental that it was fulfilled’ can only mean (a) the ‘fulfilment’ wasn’t the kind of thing she meant, or (b) we do not allow this to be prophecy, where ‘prophecy’ has a theological meaning. Except in the following types of case where one can say: this is the very sort of thing for that man, or these men, to have said; e.g. if I hated a politician and say: he will come to a bad end - and he does come to a bad end - then it might well be said, hating him so, this was the very thing for me to say. So if it is part of the Jewish religion to believe that there will never cease to be Jews, or of the Christian religion to believe that ‘this gospel’ will be preached all over the world, and ‘this church’ never fail, this seems no more prophetical than Horace’s ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’. Thus though the disappearance of the Jews would refute both Judaism and Christianity, the fact that it would refute Christianity is more impressive, since Christianity would still be there to be refuted, if they did disappear, and the belief in their remaining does not seem to be ‘the very thing’ for Christians to profess.

* * *

Now if all this is so, the impartial, indifferent observer is confronted quite certainly only with a few scattered prophecies relating to cities and peoples; and with reports of miracles and of fulfilments of prophecies which it is absurd to pretend he must regard as certainly true. So what becomes of the ‘solid external arguments’ of the Vatican decree? I will sketch my answer to this, very briefly. It can be summarised in one sentence: Only if a man is impressed by the Old Testament, to the extent of being inclined to take it as his teacher, has the argument from prophecies and miracles any serious weight. And that is why the argument is not found at the present day; since with the exception of an occasional Jew, that is a very uncommon position for a man to be in, though an entirely solid and reasonable one.

To describe this position, I will invent a character. I will suppose a man who believes in God and despises the worship of idols and the fear of spirits; I won’t suppose him to be a ‘seeker after God’ like Enoch, but already to acknowledge God as the author of seasonal benefits; and to suppose that it is ‘impious’ e.g. to commit great injustices. I will suppose this man to have heard little of Christianity; and to happen to have his interest caught by the Old Testament, for one reason or another, sufficiently to read it with attention and to come to admire the Mosaic Law, both in its public, juridical character and in its prescriptions for private persons. He skips the ceremonial and purificatory prescriptions as of no interest to him. He does not admire this Law just because it prescribes things that accord with his own views; it does that in part, no doubt; but in part he finds it instructive. For example, it greatly heightens his own notion of the paramountcy of God; it absolutely forbids superstition, ‘seeking truth from the dead’, concern with omens, soothsaying; if we suppose him acquainted with, say, Arabian tribes of the fiercer sort, we can also suppose that he is struck by the prescriptions tending to check the licence and bloody revenge natural among such people; the arrangements tending to make impossible the casual jettisoning of wives and the killing of those who have suddenly or accidentally killed your relations. For while revenge was forbidden as a matter of personal ethic, it is also made difficult as a matter of public law by the establishment of the cities of refuge. He notes the prohibition on punishing any but the offender - remember that even Roman law, as codified by a Christian Emperor, permitted the destruction of the family and close associates of a man found guilty of treason against the state; but the Mosaic law forbade it. He notes the restriction on stripes as a punishment to forty ‘lest thy brother become vile in thy sight’***** - equally astonishing when you think of Roman floggings, or floggings in the British navy up to quite recent times. There is no torture in the Mosaic law: remember again that the Code of Justinian retained the requirement to torture slaves as witnesses. He notes the fact that if you so much as knocked out the tooth of a slave, he was to go free; the asylum to runaway slaves from the nations round about, the prohibition on man-stealing; the provision whereby you could not send a slave or bondman away if he had married in your house and chose to remain; the provisions forbidding persecution of poor debtors. He sees the contrast between the estimation of offences against property (the penalty being n-fold restitution, n ranging from 2 to 6, to be worked off if it could not be paid off) and offences against the person and sexual offences. He sees the death penalty prescribed for idolatry, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, bestiality, adultery, and even fornication by or with a betrothed virgin: and this indeed strikes him as perhaps rather doubtful, so much death penalty for some rather common offences; but in every other regard he is impressed by the law and the ethic as something incomparably superior to what is usually found in codes of law, which usually seem designed in some way at least to flatter avarice and power and for the respect of persons and the oppression of many of those subject to them and above all for the glorification of those who have supreme power. I have given only the roughest outline, since there is no time here to refer to the many details and institutions, which have an extraordinary particularity about them, seemingly designed to circumvent the natural meanness and cunning of human beings. The Hebrew ethic has for so long been upon the whole just ‘morality’ to the West that it was difficult to see and admire it. So much against the shedding of innocent blood - who could find that remarkable in the last few centuries? Now with the West abandoning this ethic, it becomes possible to see it again. Ave atque vale.

I will suppose this man to be so impressed by this law, which is so ancient, that he begins to regard the Old Testament as a source of instruction and to form his mind in accordance with it, and even to say to himself that he can entertain the idea that the law really was given by God, and the prophets sent by God to re-teach it. (Here one may ask: how has he come to regard these books as a unity? For of course they are just a lot of separate books. Bind up Homer, a few Greek tragedies, comedies and histories, and a few dialogues of Plato into one volume and call this the Greek message - it is possible that this volume would, so to speak, have a physiognomy. I will suppose my man to be aware that there are a lot of separate books and to discover, with astonishment, that they have more than a physiognomy, but are really one in doctrine and in point.) Now if he is in this frame of mind, he may begin to wonder about the many other things to be found in these books. We can suppose him first to have read the earliest stories as legends of origin, and not to concern himself with what it can be supposed to mean that someone received commands from God to sacrifice his son, or be circumcised, or slaughter a lot of people. But what he next notices is the promises and prophecies relating to an eternal Golden Age under a just ruler, not only for the people of the books, but for everyone. Such promises and prophecies could not especially interest him at first otherwise than by appealing to natural longings for a Golden Age, and so appearing as the expression of such longings; but once he is, so to speak, converted to the veneration of the law and the prophets, he may begin to take them more seriously.

It is at this stage, and, I think only at this stage, that the fulfilment of the prophecies that I have mentioned can begin to have any weight. If he notes them, and allows himself to entertain the idea that the whole range of books is a revelation; if he begins to hunt for what the promised Messiah is, in more detail (for so far he has of course no impression beyond that of the conquering just king of the Golden Age) - then he will find a great many puzzles; a great deal that seems contradictory and incomprehensible. It is at this stage that I will suppose him to encounter the New Testament, having soaked himself in the Old in the kind of way I have described, and to find in the New both a manifest continuation of what he has already read, and a solution of much that seems inexplicable; principally in the teaching concerning the two comings of the Messiah, first to suffer and to die, and then to rule in power, which immediately makes clear a great many extreme obscurities in the Old Testament; and concerning the divinity as well as the humanity of the Messiah, which is again and again implied and indicated in the Old Testament, but only set forth as doctrine in the New.

That is to say: when St Augustine said that the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ was the greatest proof of his divinity, what he said was true; but the proof requires a very special position on the part of someone who is to consider it. That is why the kind of apologetic that Lessing argued against, which did not assume that position, was so vulnerable and stupid.

The role of the miracles, which I have contended cannot possibly be accepted as certainly true occurrences by the indifferent historian, seems to me to be this: if one is seriously entertaining the truth of the whole revelation in the way I have hinted at, the miracles are consonant. That God attested Christ by miracles is possible, if Christ is Christ - i.e. is the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. Then the problem, how on earth these seemingly factual records came to be written, of such incredible things, is resolved by the hypothesis that they happened. If they did happen, what would one expect the records of them to look like? And if they did happen, do they not support the teaching? But I repeat, it is not reasonable to ask an indifferent historian to solve this problem, of how such records came to be written; he can reasonably just leave it unsolved.

With this we come to the problem of the notion of divine attestation at all. The mere fact that someone is a wonder-worker, or utters prophecies that are fulfilled, certainly does not show he is divinely attested.

So far as I can see there has to be a thesis of natural theology, as I might call it, that if someone works ‘a sign and a wonder’ or utters a prophecy which gets fulfilled, in God’s name, then he is divinely attested. Now what does this rest on? It might rest on faith. In Deuteronomy, when the Jews were forbidden to consult soothsayers and necromancers, and omens, they were promised prophets ‘like Moses’ whom they were to attend to instead. But, the passage goes on, they’ll want to know how to tell a prophet. And the answer is: if the prophet foretells something, and it doesn’t happen, then that was just his presumption. The implication seems to be that if a prophet of their people, apparently teaching according to the Law, foretells something and it does happen, he is attested.

That is to say: the teaching of the prophets must first be such as would reasonably be thought to belong to the truth as revealed by Moses; only if that is so does the question even arise. Then, if he foretells something and it happens, and if he does not try to lead them into idolatry after that, he is attested.

This might be taken as matter of faith. But if [what] constitutes divine attestation is only learned by faith, then what becomes of the ‘solid external arguments’ of the Vatican decree?

Are we to say God wouldn’t let a prophecy be fulfilled or a wonder be done, if it was done in his name, except by someone he was attesting? I think we should be chary of arguments about what God wouldn’t do.

I think the argument must be rather that if a prophet who is apparently teaching the truth, dares to foretell something contingent, then this is presumption of him unless he has it from God and must say it. Now if he teaches a lie straight away afterwards, or if the thing does not happen, then he is proved presumptuous. But if he is not proved presumptuous, then we ought not to dare not to believe and obey him: so long as what he says does not conflict with the known truth.

There is a well known, I believe well authenticated, story of a man, John Lee of Buckfastleigh, in our own time, who was convicted of murder on very good evidence. In prison, he said that he would not hang because he had an assurance of this from God (in a dream, or something of the sort) because he was innocent. He did not hang, because the trap would not fall; after three attempts, with planings of the trap, which worked perfectly when he was not on it, they desisted, and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Now if this story is true, and if there is no ground for supposing the hangman to have both communicated with Lee and hocused the mechanism, then it would appear to me reasonable to have feared that this was a divine attestation of his innocence, and to have let him free.

But, one may say, perhaps one can do something otherwise permissible, ‘because one dare not do otherwise’ in a case where there is no sign that the man is presumptuous and he does what is either from God or is presumptuous; but can one believe something for such a reason: namely that the man who says it is from God or presumptuous, and there is no sign that he is presumptuous? Surely one wants positive reason to believe, and not merely absence of positive reason to disbelieve?

This, it seems to me, is correct, and goes with the thesis that in some sense there cannot be a prophet with a new doctrine.

* From the undated typescript of a paper, probably delivered in 1957 (see p.33) to the Philosophical Enquiry Group which used to meet at the Dominican Conference Centre at Spode House, Staffordshire. (See Editor’s Preface.)

** Vatican Council I, Dogmatic Constitution ‘Dei Filius’, chapter 3 ‘De fide’. See H Denzinger & A Schönmetzer (eds) Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 36th edition (Barcelona-Freiburg-Rome: Herder, 1976), §3009 (p. 589).

*** There is an English translation in Lessing’s Theological Writings. Selections in translation with an Introductory Essay by Henry Chadwick (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1956), pp. 51-6. The translations in the paper seem to be Anscombe’s own.

**** Dom Illtyd Trethowan (1907-1993) was a monk of Downside Abbey where he taught philosophy and theology for many years. The author of a substantial body of both philosophical and theological writings, he was a participant in a number of the annual meetings of the Philosophical Enquiry Group that met at Spode House.

***** Deuteronomy 25.3

1 Having written this I let it stand; but I had forgotten that the career of Alexander is described at the beginning of the books of Maccabees: so I must and do stake my salvation on it after all.