Daniel Maria Klimek, Medjugorje and the Supernatural: Science, Mysticism, and Extraordinary Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
(Continued from my previous post.)
“A few years ago,” British historian Ronald Hutton wrote in 1999, “I was lunching in a hotel restaurant with a classic English county lady, from an old family, who was well educated and daintily mannered as most of her kind.” The lady had one unusual trait. According to her, “she had inherited through blood an ability to see apparitions of different kinds, at fairly regular intervals.”
How did she square these visions of hers with her Anglican faith? Hutton asked the woman. “She replied that the latter had been the one in which she had been brought up, and to which she still trusted in the great matters of religious allegiance and of salvation. She had also, however, long realized that there were aspects of life in this world which the modern Church of England did not seem to understand, and therefore were not its concern. Her propensity to see spectral beings was one of those, and since it was a family gift she regarded it as something entirely positive and interesting, to be lived with comfortably and privately in the manner of her forebears.”
I doubt if Daniel Klimek, whose book on the Marian visions at Medjugorje from 1981 and onward was the subject of my previous post, would care to classify the Virgin Mary as a “spectral being.” Yet the apparitions of Her, granted to Her chosen visionaries at strictly regular intervals–every day, late in the afternoon–are plainly in the same category as the entities seen by Hutton’s friend. Like the Anglican Church, contemporary science finds itself at a loss when confronted with them.
Does that make them, as Klimek seems to think, “supernatural”?
Hutton’s “classic English county lady” was far from unique. In the course of his researches, Hutton met many others like her, who persuaded him that “a significant minority of people”–mostly female, as at Medjugorje (and Lourdes and Fátima)–“regularly see, hear, or feel phenomena which most others do not perceive to be present, but which are very real to them. …
“Let no readers of these paragraphs feel that their personal belief systems are being challenged; the experiences concerned may be the product of chemicals in the brain, or of communications from God Almighty, the Goddess, angels, the spirits of the dear departed, or a range of other entities. The only limitation that I myself would place upon interpretation of them is that the empirical evidence causes me to reject the notions that they are caused by mere overactive imaginations, or by general mental imbalance. I also find it highly significant that modern Western society is apparently unique in the human record in that it provides no generally accepted frame of reference for them and no system of explanation within which they may be sustained or discussed.”
Therefore they must be mocked and dismissed. Or else worshiped.
My own bias in approaching these phenomena is scientific, with the caveat that today’s scientific paradigm is precisely that–not eternal truth but a paradigm, destined to pass away and be replaced as its predecessors have been. In the meantime it needs to be maintained: like Ptolemaic astronomy in its day, it’s proved its utility a thousand times over. You don’t junk a workable model of the universe because there are anomalies it can’t make sense of. In the meantime, the anomalies need to be respectfully recorded and preserved, against the day when a new paradigm is devised that will encompass them.
Which Klimek has done, and that is the great virtue of his book.
Not that Klimek would describe his achievement in these terms. Only at the end (page 278) does he raise the possibility that occurred to me from the start: that at Medjugorje we’re dealing with a natural phenomenon outside the bounds of present-day science. He dismisses it in a remarkably ill-tempered fashion:
“A devoted naturalistic-materialistic perspective might say that just because science cannot explain the apparitions now, that does not mean something natural is not happening–that science will eventually be able to explain it. But such a perspective remains metaphysical, claiming faith in a future that has not been demonstrably proven, that it is dogmatic worship given to the idol of scientism.” Rather, “the Medjugorje visionaries are having an experience during their apparitions that is unique–that it is so profound that it transcends scientific and natural understanding.”
In other words, “supernatural.” Which has to mean something permanently and necessarily beyond the explanatory power of any scientific paradigm, not just the current materialist one.
It’s possible for me to imagine some future science that incorporates life after death. (As the 19th-century agnostic Robert Ingersoll put it: “If we are immortal it is a fact in nature, and we are not indebted to priests for it, nor to bibles for it, and it cannot be destroyed by unbelief.”) It might even incorporate such agencies as God and the Virgin, provided their behavior is essentially lawful. Like the “spectral beings” encountered by Hutton’s people–not to mention UFOs–they would be natural entities, subject to natural laws no less than pigeons and giraffes and giant squids.
I remember reading somewhere in Spinoza that if we believe in miracles, we’re in danger of falling into atheism, since miracles undermine the faith in natural law that is the essential proof of God. The remark is paradoxical, and no doubt Spinoza made it tongue in cheek. Yet the reverence for lawfulness has a genuinely religious quality; there are parallels in the Bible itself. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” Abraham demands (Genesis 18:25); and God must concede, yes, He’s bound by His own justice, to which even His rage must submit.
Against this stands the “supernatural,” marked not so much by “profundity” (Klimek) as by arbitrariness. Some instances, as given by Klimek, verge on the grotesque.
The introduction to Medjugorje and the Supernatural tells of the statue of the Virgin, brought from Medjugorje in 1994 to Civitavecchia in Italy, that wept blood. Yes, real blood; and my instinct (“metaphysical perspective,” Klimek would call it) is to say it has to have been a trick of some sort, like the Indonesian woman who became an international sensation fifty years ago when her unborn baby could be heard reciting the Qur’an from her womb. No one, however, was able to come up with a persuasive account of how it might have been done. (Were there any magicians on the scene?)
The blood was collected and sent to a lab for analysis, which “showed the DNA from the blood to be that of a male in his mid-thirties.”
The conclusion–which Klimek reports without actually endorsing it, but he doesn’t distance himself from it either–was that the Madonna was weeping the blood of Jesus Christ.
So God acts lawfully, in that DNA analysis is authoritative. But also with outrageous unlawfulness, in that His will permits a plaster statue to exude the fresh, earthly blood of a human being who once walked the earth but whose resurrected body, blood vessels and all, was transferred to heaven (whatever and wherever that is) 2000 years ago. Of course He can do this; He’s God, after all. Tangible, perceptible phenomena are controlled by the whims of an entity who flouts His own rules when He pleases, while choosing to obey others.
The implication: any search for coherence and intelligibility in the universe can be thwarted by whim.
No wonder I came away from Klimek’s book feeling grumpy.
But there’s worse. The Lady comes to Medjugorje with a message of love, joy and peace. She also brings visions of the afterlife that include a place that’s the very antithesis of these things, and that goes on forever.
Here my grumpiness takes on a tone of outraged morality more than outraged science. Who am I “who am but dust and ashes,” as Abraham says (Genesis 18:27), to criticize God’s morals? Yet the passage in Dante where the Inferno is said to have been created by “the highest wisdom, and the primal love” has always revolted me. You can’t apply the words “wisdom” and “love” to a torture chamber without leaving them permanently disfigured and degraded.
“There was a big fire burning,” reports the visionary Marija, “and Our Lady allowed us to see this young girl, a very beautiful young girl. When she went into the fire she became like a beast. It was very frightening.” And the visionary Jakov: “I do not want to speak about Hell. Hell exists; I have seen it. Perhaps before, I had some doubts, but now I know it really exists.”
The visionary Mirjana, who refused even to look at Hell, raised a few Abrahamic questions. How can punishment go on forever? Can’t the people in Hell pray to God and invoke His mercy? To which the Virgin replied: people in Hell can’t pray, because after being tortured at God’s behest they hate Him too much to pray to Him. “In Hell, they hate God even more than they hated Him on earth.”
Gee. I wonder why.
The contrast between the candy-cane sweetness of the Virgin’s explicit message, and the stony cruelty of the visions She brings–which Klimek lets pass unremarked–hit me hard, and not just because of Her three post-mortem options (Purgatory included) I know pretty clearly which one I’m headed for.
Apply to these visions the psychological “reductionism” against which Klimek protests, treat them as manifestations of the human spirit rather than genuine visions of the Beyond, and it’s possible to comprehend and empathize with them. They’re examples of what the psychologists–Jung, for example, in chapter 13 of his classic meditation on the Christian Scriptures, Answer to Job–would call “splitting,” of the visionaries’ loving aspects from the rageful vindictiveness that’s just as truly a part of them. This is natural and human.
But attribute such “splitting” to a transcendent Supreme Being, and God help us all.
(To be concluded, and brought back to UFOs, in my next post.)
by David Halperin
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David, it’s strictly irrelevant, but as someone who teaches Dante and especially as someone who reads the Commedia every Easter Week, I must ask: you do know the logic of the punishments in Dante’s _Inferno_, the _contrapasso_, no?
No, I don’t, Bryan. But I’m always ready to learn.
There are two important points.
1. The sufferings of the damned are not arbitrary punishments. Rather each is a form of poetic justice whose specific features are inspired by how each sin departs from “the good of the intellect”. Dante’s cosmos is Thomistic, whose ethics is Aristotlean in framework. Like all things, the human being has a telos, a goal, end, or “good”, eudaimonia or happiness. Since the telos, goal, end or good of the intellect is to know the truth of things, ultimately God and His plan, any wilful departure from this goal, any choosing a lesser good (telos, goal, or end) than God, is sinful (sin is the distance from God, a la Augustine), and results, understandably, in suffering. Each suffering is emblematic of what the human being “lived for” in his or her life, rather than a punishment for a particular act. Each sinner “gets what he deserves”, though the poetic logic that inspires the image of each suffering is sometimes obscure. A rather straightforward example however is the suffering of the Schismatics in the Ninth “Pouch” in the Eighth Circle: as those who divided families, nations, or even faiths, each is “divided”, dismembered by a demon with a huge sword. The final figure in the region is Bertran de Born, who sowed betrayal in a royal family (I think), and who carries his severed head “like a lamp” and declares himself “the perfect contrapasso”.
2. Dante the Pilgrim, the character in the poem rather than its author, undergoes a harrowing education in this regard. He suffers horror and pity, throughout, until he and Virgil reach the deepest darkest depths of Hell where the righteous indignation he feels takes over. There are many, moving, tender moments when Dante expresses his shock and pity at what he witnesses. Two especial scenes are, first, when he meets his old tutor among the Sodomites and describes him in terms quite honorific (finally as the winner of a race), and, second, when Virgil admonishes Dante’s tears over, I think, the Sorcerers, Astrologers, and False Prophets (canto XX), that either “pity or piety must die”, that Dante had better get with the program and understand and assent to the justice of what he is witnessing.
This is all to say that the sufferings in the Inferno are far less obscure than those of Job, say (though I am sure there is a vast literature of commentary concerning that text!), that they are organized according to a logic, albeit one that belongs to a (teleological) cosmos we no longer inhabit, and that they quite clearly transcend the ability of the human being to ultimately understand and appreciate (a somewhat Jobean theme!), as depicted by the ambivalence of the Pilgrim’s reactions throughout. In the end, it is, after all, a poem.
Sorry for the long-windedness, an occupational hazard of the professional pedagogue.
I look forward to your third installment, and future posts!
This is very informative, Bryan. Thank you so much!
If either “pity or piety must die,” is that not a terrible dilemma for us as human beings?
The dilemma is posed by Virgil to his charge. If Dante pities the damned who suffer their just, self-imposed desserts, then he is being impious, at odds with the Divine Order; if he is pious and harmonizes his will with that order, then pity for the damned should disappear.
But that’s the logic of the dilemma. Dante the Pilgrim is a flawed, finite human being, and Dante the Poet is very humane and insightful as to the difficulties the mere human being has in coming to terms with the Divine Order.
Great poem! Though it should always be read with the Purgatorio and the Paradiso.