The Phantom World; or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c.

This proposition is false, and contrary to the doctrine and practice of the church; and it is not true that it is the opinion of the greater number of the fathers; he should have cited some of them.[659 - They are cited in the letter of the Marquis Maffei.]

He says that "the Book of Job and the song of Hezekiah are full of testimonies that the Holy Spirit seems to have taught us, that our souls cannot return to earth after our death, until God has made angels of them."

It is true that the Holy Scriptures speak of the resurrection and return of souls into their bodies as of a thing that is impossible in the natural course. Man cannot raise up himself from the dead, neither can he raise up his fellow-man without an effort of the supreme might of God. Neither can the spirits of the deceased appear to the living without the command or permission of God. But it is false to say, "that God makes angels of our souls, and that then they can appear to the living."

Our souls will never become angels; but Jesus Christ tells us that after our death our souls will be as the angels of God, (Matt. xxii. 30); that is to say, spiritual, incorporeal, immortal, and exempt from all the wants and weaknesses of this present life; but he does not say that our souls must become angels.

He affirms "that what Jesus Christ said, 'that spirits have neither flesh nor bones,' far from leading us to believe that spirits can return to earth, proves, on the contrary, evidently that they cannot without a miracle render themselves visible to mankind; since it requires absolutely a corporeal substance and organs of speech to make ourselves heard, which does not agree with the spirits, who naturally cannot be subject to our senses."

This is no more impossible than what he said beforehand of the apparitions of angels, since our souls, after the death of the body, are "like unto the angels," according to the Gospel. He acknowledges himself, with St. Jerome against Vigilantius, that the saints who are in heaven appear sometimes visibly to men. "Whence comes it that animals have, as well as ourselves, the faculty of memory, but not the reflection which accompanies it, which proceeds only from the soul, which they have not?"

Is not memory itself the reflection of what we have seen, done, or heard; and in animals is not memory followed by reflection,[660 - The author, as we may see, is not a Cartesian, since he assigns reflection even to animals. But if they reflect, they choose; whence it consequently follows that they are free.] since they avenge themselves on those who hurt them, avoid that which has incommoded them, foreseeing what might happen to themselves from it if they fell again into the same mistake?

After having spoken of natural palingenesis, he concludes – "And thus we see how little cause there is to attribute these appearances to the return of souls to earth, or to demons, as do some ignorant persons."

If those who work the wonders of natural palingenesis, and admit the natural return of phantoms in the cemeteries, and fields of battle, which I do not think happens naturally, could show that these phantoms speak, act, move, foretell the future, and do what is related of returned souls or other apparitions, whether good angels or bad ones, we might conclude that there is no reason to attribute them to souls, angels, and demons; but, 1, they have never been able to cause the appearance of the phantom of a dead man, by any secret of art. 2. If it had been possible to raise his shade, they could never have inspired it with thought or reasoning powers, as we see in the angels and demons, who appear, reason, and act, as intelligent beings, and gifted with the knowledge of the past, the present, and sometimes of the future.

He denies that the souls in purgatory return to earth; for if they could come back, "everybody would receive similar visits from their relations and friends, since all the souls would feel disposed to do the same. Apparently," says he, "God would grant them this permission, and if they had this permission, every person of good sense would be at a loss to comprehend why they should accompany all their appearances with all the follies so circumstantially related."

We may reply, that the return of souls to earth may depend neither on their inclination nor their will, but on the will of God, who grants this permission to whom he pleases, when he will, and as he will.

The wicked rich man asked that Lazarus[661 - Luke xiii. 14.] might be sent to this world to warn his brothers not to fall into the same misfortune as himself, but he could not obtain it. There are an infinity of souls in the same case and disposition, who cannot obtain leave to return themselves or to send others in their place.

If certain narratives of the return of spirits to earth have been accompanied by circumstances somewhat comic, it does not militate against the truth of the thing; since for one recital imprudently embellished by uncertain circumstances, there are a thousand written sensibly and seriously, and in a manner very conformable to truth.

He maintains that all the apparitions which cannot be attributed to angels or to blessed spirits, are produced only by one of these three causes: – the power of imagination; the extreme subtility of the senses; and the derangement of the organs, as in cases of madness and in high fevers.

This proposition is rash, and has before been refuted by the Reverend Father Richard.

The author recounts all that he has said of the spirit of St. Maur, in causing the motion of the bed in the presence of three persons who were wide awake, the repeated shrieks of a person whom they did not see, of a door well-bolted, of repeated blows upon the walls, of panes of glass struck with violence in the presence of three persons, without their being able to see the author of all this movement; – he reduces all this to a derangement of the imagination, the subtilty of the air, or the vapors casually arising in the brain of an invalid. Why did he not deny all these facts? Why did he give himself the trouble to compose so carefully a dissertation to explain a phenomenon, which, according to him, can boast neither truth nor reality? For my part, I am very glad to give the public notice that I neither adopt nor approve this anonymous dissertation, which I never saw before it was printed; that I know nothing of the author, take no part in it, and have no interest in defending him. If the subject of apparitions be purely philosophical, and it can without injury to religion be reduced to a problem, I should have taken a different method to destroy it, and I should have suffered my reasoning and my imagination to act more freely.

CHAPTER LXIII.

DISSERTATION BY AN ANONYMOUS WRITER

    Answer to a Letter on the subject of the Apparition of St. Maur.

"You have been before me, sir, respecting the spirit of St. Maur, which causes so much conversation at Paris; for I had resolved to send you a short detail of that event, in order that you might impart to me your reflections on a matter so delicate and so interesting to all Paris. But since you have read an account of it, I cannot understand why you have hesitated a moment to decide what you ought to think of it. What you do me the honor to tell me, that you have suspended your judgment of the case until I have informed you of mine, does me too much honor for me to be persuaded of it; and I think there is more probability in believing that it is a trick you are playing me, to see how I shall extricate myself from such slippery ground. Nevertheless, I cannot resist the entreaties, or rather the orders, with which your letter is filled; and I prefer to expose myself to the pleasantry of the free thinkers, or the reproaches of the credulous, than the anger of those with which I am threatened by yourself.

"You ask if I believe that spirits come back, and if the circumstance which occurred at St. Maur can be attributed to one of those incorporeal substances?

"To answer your two questions in the same order that you propose them to me, I must first tell you, that the ancient heathens acknowledge various kinds of spirits, which they called lares, larvæ, lemures, genii, manes.

"For ourselves, without pausing at the folly of our cabalistic philosophers, who fancy spirits in every element, calling those sylphs which they pretend to inhabit the air; gnomes, those which they feign to be under the earth; ondines, those which dwell in the water; and salamanders, those of fire; we acknowledge but three sorts of created spirits, namely, angels, demons, and the souls which God has united to our bodies, and which are separated from them by death.

"The Holy Scriptures speak in too many places of the apparitions of the angels to Abraham, Jacob, Tobit, and several other holy patriarchs and prophets, for us to doubt of it. Besides, as their name signifies their ministry, being created by God to be his messengers, and to execute his commands, it is easy to believe that they have often appeared visibly to men, to announce to them the will of the Almighty. Almost all the theologians agree that the angels appear in the aërial bodies with which they clothe themselves.

"To make you understand in what manner they take and invest themselves with these bodies, in order to render themselves visible to men, and to make themselves heard by them, we must first of all explain what is vision, which is only the bringing of the species within the compass of the organ of sight. This "species" is the ray of light broken and modified upon a body, on which, forming different angles, this light is converted into colors. For an angle of a certain kind makes red, another green, blue or yellow, and so on of all the colors, as we perceive in the prism, on which the reflected rays of the sun forms the different colors of the rainbow; the species visible is then nothing else than the ray of light which returns from the object on which it breaks to the eyes.

"Now, light falls only on three kinds of objects or bodies, of which some are diaphanous, others opake, and the others participate in these two qualities, being partly diaphanous and partly opake. When the light falls on a diaphanous body which is full of an infinity of little pores, as the air, it passes through without causing any reflection. When the light falls on a body entirely opake, as a flower, for instance, not being able to penetrate it, its ray is reflected from it, and returns from the flower to the eye, to which it carries the species, and renders the colors distinguishable, according to the angles formed by reflection. If the body on which the light falls is in part opake and in part diaphanous, like glass, it passes through the diaphanous part, that is to say, through the pores of the glass which it penetrates, and reflects itself on the opake particles, that is to say, which are not porous. Thus the air is invisible, because it is absolutely penetrated with light: the flower sends back a color to the eye, because, being impenetrable to the light, it obliges it to reflect itself; and the glass is visible only because it contains some opake particles, which, according to the diversity of angles formed upon it by the ray of light, reflect different colors.

"That is the manner in which vision is formed, so that air being invisible, on account of its extreme transparency, an angel could not clothe himself with it and render himself visible, but by thickening the air so much, that from diaphanous it became opake, and capable of reflecting the ray of light to the eye of him who perceived him. Now, as the angels possess knowledge and power far beyond anything we can imagine, we need not be astonished if they can form aërial bodies, which are rendered visible by the opacity they impart to them. In respect to the organs necessary to these aërial bodies, to form sounds and make themselves heard, without having any recourse to the disposition of matter, we must attribute them entirely to a miracle.

"It is thus that angels have appeared to the holy patriarchs. It is thus that the glorious souls that participate the angelic nature can assume an aërial body to render themselves visible, and that even demons, by thickening and condensing the air, can make to themselves a body of it, so as to become visible to men, by the particular permission of God, to accomplish the secrets of his providence, as they are said to have appeared to St. Anthony the Hermit, and to other saints, in order to tempt them.

"Excuse, sir, this little physical digression, with which I could not dispense, in order to make you understand the manner in which angels, who are purely spiritual substances, can be perceived by our fleshly senses.

"The only point on which the holy doctors do not agree on this subject is, to know if angels appear to men of their own accord, or whether they can do it only by an express command from God. It seems to me that nothing can better contribute to the decision of this difficulty, than to determine the way in which the angels know all things here below; for if it is by means of "species" which God communicates to them every day, as St. Augustine believes, there is no reason to doubt of their knowing all the wants of mankind, or that they can, in order to console and strengthen them, render their presence sensible to them, by God's permission, without receiving an express command from him on the subject; which may be concluded from what St. Ambrose says on the subject of the apparition of angels, who are by nature invisible to us, and whom their will renders visible. Hujus naturæ est non videri, voluntatis, videri.[662 - St. Ambrose, Com. on St. Luke, i. c. 1.]

"On the subject of demons, it is certain that their power was very great before the coming of Jesus Christ, since he calls them himself, the powers of darkness, and the princes of this world. It cannot be doubted that they had for a long time deceived mankind, by the wonders which they caused to be performed by those who devoted themselves more particularly to their service; that several oracles have been the effect of their power and knowledge, although part of them must be ascribed to the subtlety of men; and that they may have appeared under fantastic forms, which they assumed in the same way as the angels, that is to say, in aërial bodies, which they organized. The Holy Scriptures assure us even, that they took possession of the bodies of living persons. But Jesus Christ says too precisely, that he has destroyed the kingdom of the demons, and delivered us from their tyranny, for us possibly to think rationally that they still possess that power over us which they had formerly, so far as to work wonderful things which appeared miraculous; such as they relate of the vestal virgin, who, to prove her virginity, carried water in a sieve; and of her who by means of her sash alone, towed up the Tiber a boat, which had been so completely stranded that no human power could move it. Almost all the holy doctors agree, that the only means they now have of deceiving us is by suggestion, which God has left in their power to try our virtue.

"I shall not amuse myself by combating all the impositions which have been published concerning demons, incubi, and succubi, with which some authors have disfigured their works, any more than I shall reply to the pretended possession of the nuns of Loudun, and of Martha Brossier,[663 - Martha Brossier, daughter of a weaver at Romorantin, was shown as a demoniac, in 1578. See De Thou on this subject, book cxxiii. and tom. v. of the Journal of Henry III., edition of 1744, p. 206, &c. The affair of Loudun took place in the reign of Louis XIII.; and Cardinal Richelieu is accused of having caused this tragedy to be enacted, in order to ruin Urban Grandier, the curé of Loudun, for having written a cutting satire against him.] which made so much noise at Paris at the commencement of the last century; because several learned men who have favored us with their reflections on these adventures, have sufficiently shown that the demons had nothing to do with them; and the last, above all, is perfectly quashed by the report of Marescot, a celebrated physician, who was deputed by the Faculty of Theology to examine this girl who performed so many wonders. Here are his own words, which may serve as a general reply to all these kind of adventures: —A naturâ multa plura ficta, à Dæmone nulla. That is to say, that the constitution of Martha Brossier, who was apparently very melancholy and hypochondriacal, contributed greatly to her fits of enthusiasm; that she feigned still more, and that the devil had nothing to do with it.

"If some of the fathers, as St. Thomas, believe that the demons sometimes produce sensible effects, they always add, that it can be only by the particular permission of God, for his glory and the salvation of mankind.

"In regard to all those prodigies and those common spells, which the people ascribe to sorcery or commerce with the demon, it is proved that they can be performed only by natural magic, which is the knowledge of secret effects of natural causes, and several by the subtlety of art. It is the opinion of the greater number of the fathers of the church who have spoken of it; and without seeking testimony of it in Pagan authors, such as Xenophon, Athenæus, and Pliny, whose works are full of an infinity of wonders which are all natural, we see in our own time the surprising effects of nature, as those of the magnet, of steel, and mercury, which we should attribute to sorcery as did the ancients, had we not seen sensible demonstrations of their powers. We also see jugglers do such extraordinary things, which seem so contrary to nature, that we should look upon these charlatans as magicians, if we did not know by experience, that their address alone, joined to constant practice, makes them able to perform so many things which seem marvelous to us.

"All the share that the demons have in the criminal practices of those who are commonly called sorcerers, is suggestion; by which means they invite them to the abominable research of every natural cause which can do injury to others.

"I am now, sir, at the most delicate point of your question, which is, to know if our souls can return to earth after they are separated from our bodies.

"As the ancient philosophers erred so strongly on the nature of the soul – some believing that it was but a fire which animated us, and others a subtile air, and others affirming that it was nothing else but the proper arrangement of all the machine of the body, a doctrine which could not be admitted any more as the cause of in men than in beasts; we cannot therefore be surprised that they had such gross ideas concerning their state after death.

"The error of the Greeks, which they communicated to the Romans, and the latter to our ancestors was, that the souls whose bodies were not solemnly interred by the ministry of the priests of religion, wandered out of Hades without finding any repose, until their bodies had been burned and their ashes collected. Homer makes Patroclus, who was killed by Hector, appear to his friend Achilles in the night to ask him for burial, without which, he is deprived, he says, of the privilege of passing the river Acheron. There were only the souls of those who had been drowned, whom they believed unable to return to earth after death; for which we find a curious reason in Servius, the interpreter of Virgil, who says, the greater number of the learned in Virgil's time, and Virgil himself, believing that the soul was nothing but a fire, which animated and moved the body, were persuaded that the fire was entirely extinguished by the water – as if the material could act upon the spiritual. Virgil explains his opinions on the subject of souls very clearly in these verses: —

'Igneus est ollis vigor, et celestis origo.'

And a little after,

'totos infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et toto se corpore miscet;'

to mark the universal soul of the world, which he believed with the greater part of the philosophers of his time.

"Again, it was a common error amongst the pagans, to believe that the souls of those who died before they were of their proper age, which they placed at the end of their growth, wandered about until the time came when they ought naturally to be separated from their bodies. Plato, more penetrating and better informed than the others, although like them mistaken, said, that the souls of the just who had obeyed virtue ascended to the sky; and that those who had been guilty of impiety, retaining still the contagion of the earthly matter of the body, wandered incessantly around the tombs, appearing like shadows and phantoms.

"For us, whom religion teaches that our souls are spiritual substances created by God, and united for a time to bodies, we know that there are three different states after death.

"Those who enjoy eternal beatitude, absorbed, as the holy doctors say, in the contemplation of the glory of God, cease not to interest themselves in all that concerns mankind, whose miseries they have undergone; and as they have attained the happiness of angels, all the sacred writers ascribe to them the same privilege of possessing the power, as aërial bodies, of rendering themselves visible to their brethren who are still upon earth, to console them, and inform them of the Divine will; and they relate several apparitions, which always happened by the particular permission of God.

"The souls whose abominable crimes have plunged them into that gulf of torment, which the Scripture terms hell, being condemned to be detained there forever, without being able to hope for any relief, care not to have permission to come and speak to mankind in fantastic forms. The Scripture clearly set forth the impossibility of this return, by the discourse which is put into the mouth of the wicked rich man in hell, introduced speaking to Abraham; he does not ask leave to go himself, to warn his brethren on earth to avoid the torments which he suffers, because he knows that it is not possible; but he implores Abraham to send thither Lazarus, who was in glory. And to observe en passant how very rare are the apparitions of the blessed and of angels, Abraham replies to him, that it would be useless, since those who are upon earth have the Law and the Prophets, which they have but to follow.

"The story of the canon of Rheims, in the eleventh century, who, in the midst of the solemn service which was being performed for the repose of his soul, spoke aloud and said, That he was sentenced and condemned,[664 - M. de Lannoy has made a particular dissertation De Causà Secessionis S. Brunonis: he solidly refutes this fable. Nevertheless, this event is to be found painted in the fine pictures of the little monastery of the Chartreux at Paris.] has been refuted by so many of the learned, who have shown that this circumstance is clearly supposititious, since it is not found in any contemporaneous author; that I think no enlightened person can object it against me. But even were this story as incontestable as it is apocryphal, it would be easy for me to say in reply, that the conversion of St. Bruno, who has won so many souls to God, was motive enough for the Divine Providence to perform so striking a miracle.

"It now remains for me to examine if the souls which are in purgatory, where they expiate the rest of their crimes before they pass to the abode of the blessed, can come and converse with men, and ask them to pray for their relief.

"Although those who have desired to maintain this popular error, have done their endeavors to support it by different passages from St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Thomas, it is certain that all these fathers speak only of the return of the blessed to manifest the glory of God; and of St. Augustine says precisely, that if it were possible for the souls of the dead to appear to men, not a day would pass without his receiving a visit from Monica his mother.