Section 9. The Power of Speech continued to the African Confessors deprived of their Tongues{369} 220. ARIANISM, though speedily exterminated from the Roman Empire, had taken refuge among the Barbarians of the North, who were then hanging over it, and soon to overwhelm it. Among these nations were the Vandals, who in the early part of the fifth century took possession of the Roman provinces on the African coast. Genseric forthwith commenced, and his successors continued, a terrible persecution of the Catholic Church, which they found there. Hunneric his son, to whose reign the miracle which is to be related belongs, began his series of cruelties by stationing officers violently to assault and drag off all Vandals whom they found attending the Churches, and by sending off the dependents of his court who were Catholics to work in the country as agricultural labourers. Others he deprived of their civil functions, stripped of their property, and banished {370} to Sicily and Sardinia. Next he summoned the nuns out of their convents, accused them of the vilest crimes, and submitted them to the most miserable indignities. Further, he caused them to be hung up without clothes, with weights to their feet, and to be tortured with red-hot irons in various parts of the body, in order to make them admit the charges he brought against them. His next measure was the wholesale cruelty of banishing a number of bishops, priests, deacons, and others, as many as four thousand nine hundred and sixty-one [Note 1], to the desert. He began by assembling them in the two towns of Sicca and Laribus; and in one or other of these places Victor, who has preserved the history of the transaction, saw them. His account is too horrible to be translated. They had been shut up, how long does not appear, in a small prison, and when Victor entered he sank up to his knees in the filth of the place. At length they set forth for the desert, with their faces and clothes in this defiled condition, chaunting the words, "Such glory have all His saints." They journeyed chiefly by night, on account of the heat of the days; when they flagged, their conductors goaded them and pelted them, or if this did not quicken them, they tied them by the feet, and dragged them after them along the rocky roads. {371} Those who survived the journey found themselves in places abounding in venomous reptiles, and the food given them was the barley provided for the beasts of burden. 221. In the beginning of 484 Hunneric convened four hundred and sixty-six Catholic Bishops at Carthage, for the purpose of holding a disputation on the faith of Nicæa; and, to intimidate them, he began by burning Lætus alive, who was one of their most learned members. This not succeeding, he dismissed them again to their homes, allowing them neither the beasts of burden on which they had come, nor their servants, nor their clothes, and forbidding all persons to lodge or feed them; when they remonstrated, he set his cavalry to charge them. Jealous of their orthodoxy as a bond of union with the Catholic world, he next proposed to them to swear allegiance to his son and successor, and abstention from all ecclesiastical correspondence beyond sea. Forty-six refused it on the plea of our Lord's prohibition in the Sermon on the Mount; three hundred and two, on the stipulation that their flocks and themselves should be restored to their churches, took it. The latter he distributed as serfs up and down the country, as having broken the Gospel precept against swearing; the former he transported to Corsica to cut timber for his navy. Of the rest, twenty-eight had succeeded in escaping from Carthage, and eighty-eight conformed. A general {372} persecution followed, in which neither sex nor age was pitied, nor torture, mutilation, nor death was spared. 222. These particulars, which form but a portion of the atrocities which this savage was permitted to perpetrate, have here been mentioned, because they form a suitable antecedent, and (if the word may be used) a justification of the miracle which followed. It was no common occasion that called forth what was no common manifestation of the wonderful power of God. The facts, as stated by one who in such a case cannot be called a too favourable witness, were as follows: "Tipasa," says Gibbon, "a maritime colony of Mauritania, sixteen miles to the east of Cæsarea, had been distinguished in every age by the orthodox zeal of its inhabitants. They had braved the fury of the Donatists; they resisted, or eluded, the tyranny of the Arians. The town was deserted on the approach of an heretical Bishop; most of the inhabitants who could procure ships passed over to the coast of Spain; and the unhappy remnant, refusing all communion with the usurper, still presumed to hold their pious, but illegal, assemblies. Their disobedience exasperated the cruelty of Hunneric. A military Count was despatched from Carthage to Tipasa; he collected the Catholics in the Forum, and, in the presence of the whole province, deprived the guilty of their right hands and their tongues. But the holy Confessors continued {373} to speak without tongues." [Note 2] "The gift continued through their lives. Their number is not mentioned by any of the original witnesses; but is fixed by an old Menology at sixty." [Note 3] Such was the miracle; the evidence on which it rests shall next be stated. 223. Victor, Bishop of Vite, who has been already mentioned, published in Africa his history of the persecution only two years after it took place. He says, "The King in wrath sent a certain Count with directions to hold a meeting in the forum of the whole province, and there to cut out their tongues by the roots, and their right hands. When this was done, by the gift of the Holy Ghost, they so spoke and speak, as they used to speak before. If however any one will be incredulous, let him now go to Constantinople, and there he will find one of them, a sub-deacon, by name Reparatus, speaking like an educated man without any impediment. On which account he is regarded with exceeding veneration in the court of the Emperor Zeno, and especially by the Empress." [Note 4] It has been asked why Victor refers his readers to Constantinople, instead of pointing out instances of the miracle in the country in which it is said to have taken place [Note 5]. But {374} persecution scattered the Catholics far and wide, as St. Gregory observes in a passage which is to follow; many fled the country; others concealed themselves. Under such circumstances, a writer would not know even where his nearest friends were to be found; and in this case Victor specified one of the Confessors who had been welcomed by an orthodox capital and court, and had the opportunity of exhibiting in security the miraculous gift wrought in him. 224. Æneas of Gaza was the contemporary of Victor. When a Gentile, he had been a philosopher and rhetorician, and did not altogether throw off his profession of Platonism when he became a Christian. He wrote a Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul and the Resurrection of the Body; and in it, after giving various instances of miracles, he proceeds, in the character of Axitheus, to speak of the miracle of the African Confessors: "Other such things have been and will be; but what took place the other day, I suppose you have seen yourself. A bitter tyranny is oppressing the greater Africa; and humanity and orthodoxy have no influence over tyranny. Accordingly this tyrant takes offence at the piety of his subjects, and commands the priests to deny their glorious dogma. When they refuse, O the impiety! he cuts {375} out that religious tongue, as Tereus in the fable. But the damsel wove the deed upon the robe, and divulged it by her skill, when nature no longer gave her power to speak; they, on the other hand, needing neither robe nor skill, call upon nature's Maker, who vouchsafes to them a new nature on the third day, not giving them another tongue, but the faculty to discourse without a tongue more plainly than before. I had thought it was impossible for a piper to show his skill without his pipes, or harper to play his music without his harp; but now this novel sight forces me to change my mind, and to account nothing fixed that is seen, if it be God's will to alter it. I myself saw the men, and heard them speak; and wondering at the articulateness of the sound, I began to inquire what its organ was; and distrusting my ears, I committed the decision to my eyes. And opening their mouth, I perceived the tongue entirely gone from the roots. And astounded I fell to wonder, not how they could talk, but how they had not died." He saw them at Constantinople. 225. Procopius of Cæsarea was secretary to Belisarius, whom he accompanied into Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and to Constantinople, in the years between 527 and 542. By Belisarius he was employed in various political matters of great moment, and was at one time at the head of the commissariat and the fleet. He seems to have conformed to Christianity, {376} but Cave observes, from his tone of writing, that he was no real believer in it, nay, preferred the old Paganism, though he despised its rites and fables [Note 6]. He wrote the History of the Persian, Vandalic, and Gothic War, of which Gibbon speaks in the following terms: "His facts are collected from the personal experience and free conversation of a soldier, a statesman, and a traveller; his style continually aspires, and often attains, to the merit of strength and elegance; his reflections, more especially in the speeches which he too frequently inserts, contain a rich fund of political knowledge; and the historian, excited by the generous ambition of pleasing and instructing posterity, appears to disdain the prejudices of the people and the flattery of courts." [Note 7] Such is Procopius, and thus he speaks on the subject of this stupendous miracle: "Hunneric became the most savage and iniquitous of men towards the African Christians. For, forcing them to Arianize, whomever he found unwilling to comply, he burnt and otherwise put to death. And of many he cut out the tongue as low down as the throat [Note 8], who, even as late as my time, were alive in Byzantium, and talked without any impediment, feeling no effects whatever of the punishment. But two of them, having allowed themselves to hold converse with abandoned women, ceased to speak." [Note 9] {377} 226. Our next witness, and of the same date, is the Emperor Justinian, who, in an edict addressed to Archelaus, Prætorian Prefect of Africa, on the subject of his office, after Belisarius had recovered the country to the Roman Empire, writes as follows: "The present mercy, which Almighty God has deigned to manifest through us for His praise and His Name's sake, exceeds all the wonderful works which have happened in the world; viz., that Africa should through us recover in so short a time its liberty, after being in captivity under the Vandals for ninety-five years, those enemies alike of soul and body. For such souls as could not sustain their various tortures and punishments, by rebaptizing they translated into their own misbelief; and the bodies of free men they subjected to the hardships of a barbaric yoke. Nay, the very churches sacred to God did they defile with their deeds of misbelief; some they turned into stables. We have seen the venerable men, who, when their tongues had been cut off at the roots, yet piteously recounted their pains. Others after diverse tortures were dispersed through diverse provinces, and ended their days in exile." [Note 10] 227. Count Marcellinus, Chancellor to Justinian before he came to the throne, is the fourth layman to whose testimony we are able to appeal. He too, as two of the former, speaks as an eye-witness, and the {378} additional circumstances, with which he commences seem to throw light upon Æneas's singular account that the Confessors spoke "more plainly than before." "Through the whole of Africa," he says in his Chronicon, under the date 484, "the cruel persecution of Hunneric, King of the Vandals, was inflicted upon our Catholics. For after the expulsion and dispersion of more than 334 Bishops of the orthodox, and the shutting of their churches, the flocks of the faithful, afflicted by various punishments, consummated their blessed conflict. Then it was that the same King Hunneric ordered the tongue to be cut out of a Catholic youth, who from his birth had lived without speech at all; soon after he spoke, and gave glory to God with the first sounds of his voice. In short, I myself have seen at Byzantium a few out of this company of the faithful, religious men, with their tongues cut off, and their hands amputated, speaking with perfect voice." 228. Victor, Bishop of Tonno in Africa Proconsularis, another contemporary, and a strenuous defender of the Tria Capitula, which were condemned in the Fifth Ecumenical Council, has left behind him a Chronicon also; which at the same date runs as follows: "Hunneric, King of the Vandals, urging a furious persecution through the whole of Africa, banishes to Tubunnæ, Macrinippi, and other parts of the desert, not only Catholic Clerks of every order, {379} but even Monks and laymen, to the number of about four thousand; and makes Confessors and Martyrs; and cuts off the tongues of the Confessors. As to which Confessors, the royal city, where their bodies lie, attests that after their tongues were cut out they spoke perfectly even to the end. Then Lætus, Bishop of the Church of Nepte, is crowned with Martyrdom, etc." It is observable from this statement that the miracle was recorded for the instruction of posterity at the place of their burial. 229. Lastly, Pope Gregory the First thus speaks in his Dialogues: "In the time of Justinian Augustus [Note 11], when the Arian persecution raised by the Vandals against the faith of Catholics was raging violently in Africa, some Bishops, courageously persisting in the defence of the truth, were brought under notice whom the King of the Vandals, failing to persuade to his misbelief with words and offers, thought he could break with torture. For when, in the midst of their defence of the truth, he bade them be silent, but they would not bear the misbelief quietly, lest it might be interpreted as assent, breaking out into rage he had their tongues cut off from the roots. A wonderful thing, and known to many senior persons; for afterwards, even without tongue, they spoke for the defence of the truth, just as they had been accustomed {380} before to speak by means of it ... These then, being fugitives at that time, came to Constantinople. At the time, moreover, that I was myself sent to the Emperor to conduct the business of the Church, I fell in with a certain senior, a Bishop, who attested that he had seen their mouths speaking, though without tongues, so that with open mouths they cried out, 'Behold and see; for we have not tongues, and we speak.' And it appeared to those who inspected, as it was said, as if, their tongues being cut off from the roots, there was a sort of open depth in their throat, and yet in that empty mouth the words were formed full and perfect. Of whom one, having fallen into licentiousness, was soon after deprived of the gift of miracle." [Note 12] 230. Little observation is necessary on evidence such as this. What is perhaps most striking in it is the variety of the witnesses, both in their persons and the details of their testimony, together with the consistency and unity of that testimony in all material points. Out of the seven writers adduced, six are contemporaries; three, if not four, are eye-witnesses of the miracle; one reports from an eye-witness, and one testifies to a permanent record at the burial-place of the subjects of it. All seven were living, or had been staying, at one or other of the two places which are mentioned as their abode. One is a Pope; a {381} second a Catholic Bishop; a third a Bishop of a schismatical party; a fourth an Emperor; a fifth a soldier, a politician, and a suspected infidel; a sixth a statesman and courtier; a seventh a rhetorician and philosopher. "He cut out the tongues by the roots," says Victor, Bishop of Vite; "I perceived the tongue entirely gone by the roots," says Æneas; "as low down as the throat," says Procopius; "at the roots," say Justinian and St. Gregory. "He spoke like an educated man, without impediment," says Victor of Vite; with "articulateness," says Æneas, "better than before;" "they talked without any impediment," says Procopius; "speaking with perfect voice," says Marcellinus; "they spoke perfectly even to the end," says the second Victor; "the words were formed full and perfect," says St. Gregory. 231. One of the striking points then in this miracle, as contained in the foregoing evidence, is obviously its completeness. We know that even deaf and dumb persons can be made in some sense to utter words; and there may be attempts far superior to theirs, yet wanting in that ease and precision which characterize the ordinary gift of speech. But the articulateness, nay, the educated accent of these Confessors is especially insisted on in the testimony. "A cure left thus imperfect," says Douglas, speaking of a Jansenist miracle, "has but little pretension to be looked upon as miraculous; because its being so imperfect naturally points {382} out a failure of power in the cause which brought it about." [Note 13] Whatever be the truth of this position, it cannot be applied to the miracle under review. 232. The number on which it was wrought is another most important circumstance, distinguishing this history from others of a miraculous character. It both increases opportunities for testimony, and it prevents the interposition of what is commonly called chance, which could not operate upon many persons at once in one and the same way. This is the proper answer to Middleton's objection, that cases are on record of speech without a tongue, when no special intervention of Providence could be supposed. Not to say that a person born without a tongue, as in the instance to which he refers, may more easily be supposed to have found a compensation for her defect by a natural provision or guidance, than men who had ever spoken by the ordinary organ till they came suddenly to lose it. "If we should allow after all," says he, "that the tongues of these Confessors were cut away to the very roots, what will the learned Doctor [Berriman] say if this boasted miracle, which he so strenuously defends, should be found at last to be no miracle at all? The tongue, indeed, has generally been considered as absolutely necessary to the use of speech; so that to hear men talk without it might easily pass for a miracle in that credulous {383} age." [Note 14] And then he mentions the case of a girl born without a tongue, who yet talked as distinctly and easily as if she had enjoyed the full benefit of that organ, according to the report of a French physician who had carefully examined her mouth and throat, and who refers at the same time to another instance published about eighty years before, of a boy who at the age of eight or nine years lost his tongue by an ulcer after the small-pox, yet retained his speech,—whether as perfectly as before, does not appear [Note 15]. 233. Now, taking these instances at their greatest force, does he mean to say that if a certain number of men lost their tongues at the command of a tyrant for the sake of their religion, and then spoke as plainly as before, nay, if only one person was so mutilated and so gifted, it would not be a miracle? if not, why does he not believe the history of these Confessors? At least he might believe that some of them had the gift of speech continued to them, though the numbers be an exaggeration. It is his canon, as Douglas assures us, that while the history of miracles is "to be suspected always of course, without the strongest evidence to confirm it," the history of common events is "to be admitted of course, without as strong reason to suspect it." [Note 16] Now here all the reason or evidence is on the side of believing; yet he {384} does not believe it; why? simply because, as common sense tells us, and as he feels, it is a miraculous story. It is far more difficult to believe that a number of men were forbidden to profess orthodoxy, did continue to profess it, were brought into the forum, had their tongues cut out from the roots, survived it, and spoke ever afterwards as they did before, without a miracle than with it. But Middleton would secure two weapons at once for his warfare against the claims of the Catholic Church:—it is a miracle, and therefore it is incredible as a fact; it is not a miracle, and therefore it is irrelevant as an argument. 234. Another remarkable peculiarity of this miracle is what may be called its entireness, by which I mean that it carried its whole case with it to every beholder. When a blind man has been restored to sight, there must be one witness to prove he has been blind, and another, that he now sees; when a cure has been effected, we need a third to assure us that no medicines were administered to the subject of it; but here the miracle is condensed in the fact that there is no tongue, and yet a voice. The function of witnessing is far narrower and more definite, yet more perfect, than in other cases. 235. A further characteristic of this miracle is its permanence; and in this respect it throws light upon a remark made in a former page to account for the deficiency of evidence which generally attaches to the {385} Ecclesiastical Miracles. It was there observed that they commonly took place without notice beforehand, and left no trace after them; and we could not have better or fuller testimony than that which happened to be found on the spot where they occurred [Note 17]. The instance before us, however, being of a permanent character, and carrying its miraculousness in the very sight of it, admitted of being witnessed in a higher way, and so it is witnessed. Supposing the miracles of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus or St. Martin to have had advantage of similar publicity, at least they would have been disengaged from the misstatements and exaggerations which at present prejudice them;—are we sure they would not have gained, instead, a body of testimony to their substantial truth? 236. It may be thought a drawback on this miracle that it produced no impression on the brutal Prince who was the occasion of it. He continued the persecution. Yet it must be recollected that his death followed in no long time; and that, under that horrible and loathsome infliction with which it has in other cases pleased Almighty God to visit those who have used their power, committed to them by Him in cruelties towards His Church. 237. And now, after considering this miracle, or that of the recovery of the blind Severus by the relics, as described in its place, or the death of Arius, how unreal {386} real does the remark appear with which Douglas concludes his review of the alleged miracles of the first ages! "I shall only add," he says, "that if ever there were any accounts of miracles, which passed current without being examined into at the first publication, and which consequently will not bear the test of the third rule which I laid down in this treatise, this may be affirmed of the miracles recorded by writers of the fourth and fifth ages, when Christianity, now freed from the terrors of persecution, and aided by civil magistrates, began to be corrupted by its credulous or ill-designing professors, and the foundation was laid of those inventions which have gathered like a snow-ball in every succeeding age of superstitious ignorance, till at last the sunshine of the Reformation began to melt the monstrous heap." [Note 18] Surely, if there are miracles prominent above others in those times, in that number are the three which I have just specified; they are great in themselves and in their fame. What then is meant by saying that in Arius's death the Church was "aided by the civil magistrate?" or that she was "freed from the terrors of persecution" when Severus was restored to sight? or that the report of the power of speaking given to Reparatus and his brethren "passed current without being examined into?" But if these are true, why should not others be true also, whether at this day they have evidence {387} sufficient for our conviction or not? That superstitions and imposture accompanied the civil establishment of Christianity, all will allow; but they could but obscure,—they could not reverse or undo,—and why should they prejudice?—that true work of God in his Church, of which they were but the mockery. Notes1. The number is given differently; Gibbon says
four thousand and ninety-six; Fleury four thousand nine hundred and
sixty-six; that in the text is as it stands in the Bibl. Patr. Par.
1624. 2.
Hist. Ch. xxxvii. 3.
Ibid. 4.
Hist. Pers. Vand. iii. p. 613. 5.
This is suggested in the article on Miracles in the Encycl. Metrop. [i.e.
Essay i. supr. p. 87, [Note
26]], in which I could wish
some correction of opinion, but more of tone, in my treatment of the
primitive miracles. The Essay aims, indeed, at bringing out the
characteristics of the evidence for the Scripture Miracles, in
contrast with all others so considered; but Middleton and Douglas are
unsafe guides, and it is no exaltation of Christ to lower His Saints. 6.
Cave, Hist. Liter. Procop. 7.
Hist. Ch. xl. 8.
[Ap' pharungos]. 9.
Bell. Vand. i. 10. 10.
Cod. Just. lib. i. tit. 30, ed. 1553. 11.
This date is a mistake of St. Gregory's; also he calls them Bishops. 12.
Dial. iii. 32. 13.
Page 111. 14.
Page 184. 15.
[Vid. Note at the end.] 16.
Page 26. vid. supr. n. 73. 17.
n. 103. 18.
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