To explore C.S. Lewis’ notion, in Miracles, that miracles are not interventions in reality of something outside of it, that they don’t in fact disrupt the natural order (hard claims to which to give assent), and particularly the far more intriguing claim that they amount to God’s signature on his creation (to borrow a word from Whitman that expresses much the same notion) or his characteristic artistic flourish—this is worth a moment’s pause. What miracles would not be, then, would be the get out of jail free card touted by virtually everyone who promotes them—the quack television and mega-church evangelists peddling false hope and false religion and reaping for this personal fortunes from the easily duped. Miracles are not the way around cancer or kidney disease. Though a miraculous cure is not out of the realm of the possible with a God who actually does miracles, it would have the status of a random event from nearly every perspective—not a cure earned by a good life or fervent prayer or a prayer chain set up around the globe, like a power boost in a video game (which would make God the champion of the popular or well-resourced, the God whom the New Testament insists would prefer to bless the lonely woman, homeless and friendless, than the pope, who ought to have faith enough anyway to endure not just cancer but an actual cross if need be. The miracle is a phenomenon, strategically deployed, as it were, to say, in effect, “I am God,” (the signature) and, “If I had it my way you would not have to endure this suffering.”
Why God can’t have it his way is a separate question, addressed, at great length though not necessarily with great success by that other Pope, Alexander, in his “Essay on Man.”
Miracles then in a curious way align the Christian world with the Greek world of Tragedy. The union of Judaism with Platonism produced Christianity, as is well attested, but the connection of Judaism with that other, and rival, Greek notion of Tragedy has been, as far as I know, a lot less explored. But here there is a connection.
The most fundamental aspect of tragedy, to my mind, one which Aristotle himself never quite hit upon, is this: It should not have to have been. Any muthos (is that Ricoeur’s word?) that leads the reader to this understanding of the absolute necessity of a resolution that should have been able to have been stopped, that heady glot of countervailing forces—that is tragedy. There should have been a way to prevent the tragedy of Oedipus. But there could not have been any way and nothing could have stopped it. If only we’d known what we could not possibly have known we could have done the thing that there was no possibility of doing. This must be the position in which a Christian, though he does not ever articulate it as such, must believe God sits. The miracles show that God does not want the world to suffer its way back to the lost paradise. But there is no other way. And what ties the omniscient God’s hands we can’t know. For whatever reason. (Lewis does an excellent and I think important job of laying out the necessity of the fundamental ignorance we must have of what we can only call “being itself,” the universe as God “sees” it, the universe as it is. We can know neither it nor our ignorance of it any more than our beloved dog and can know what we people are up to in any way that does not involve her. No need to go into all that again.)
Miracles then have an element of sadness to them, the “wish I could do more,” of a doctor who instead of curing the patient gives her an aspirin, the fireman who in lieu of saving the house rescues a teddy bear.
