Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Contra Hume · Great Bishop of Geneva! Atheists Tend to Take Over a Protestant Attitude to Catholic Legend
As already mentioned — Protestants of the 17th and 18th C. had very certainly all, as probably most already in the 16th C. abandoned hope of working miracles. I do not speak of Pentecostals, I speak of Lutheran, Zwinglian, Buceran, Anglican, Calvinist sects. The "usual suspects" of Anti-Catholic violence in times of upheaval. Many of them tyrants on nation state level, all of them at least some places on a local level.
As a consequence, they had a great motivation, rather than theoretical good reasons to deny miracles continuing in the Catholic Church after the Apostolic age.
That is a huge deal when it comes to the longer versions of legends of saints, the popular one, the Legenda Aurea. The martyrologies often speak of "many miracles" but usually do not enumerate them. The Legenda Aurea, or Butler's Lives of the Saints, that is what the people would read, and that is what a non-Catholic foreigner, like Hume, would encounter first. The miracles are often enough described as clear as in the Gospels (canonic) or III Maccabees (variously held as canonic by Orthodox and typically apocryphal by Catholics).
Some of the miraculous survivals of attempts to martyr someone finally martyred are also recorded in the martyrology.
Again, Protestants, before they later on typically became Atheists, would regard this as nonsense.
Some other things could occasionally contribute. St. Christopher was described as having a dog's head. I think this description in antiquity often enough meant someone with slit eyes, because the dog breeds known today as pit bulls and similar in antiquity have slit eyes. But it could also mean someone, I suppose at least, very hirsute, someone "suffering" from (or enjoying, as the case may be) hypertrichosis. I mean, dogs have hairs in the regions corresponding to facial, so such a description makes sense.
Now, if instead of thinking "hypertrichosis" or slit eyes, you think full canine anatomy of the head, like an Anubis statue, you probably may be in two minds. Or outright reject St. Christopher for that alone.
Yesterday had a similar topic, not in the martyrs, but in the ones martyring them.
14 Januarii, main feast Sancti Hilarii, Episcopi Pictaviensis, Confessoris et Ecclesiae Doctoris; qui pridie hujus diei evolavit in caelum. But that's just the main feast.
Now, when I saw the fifth feast, it made me jump a bit:
In Rhaithi regione, in Aegypto, sanctorum quadraginta trium Monachorum, qui, pro Christiana religione, a Blemmiis occisi sunt.
In the Rhaitus region (wherever that is) of Egypt, holy forty three Monks who, for the Christian religion, were killed by Blemmii.
By what?
Yes, I thought I saw Blemmyes too. And that's probably what I did see.
Various species of mythical headless men were rumoured, in antiquity and later, to inhabit remote parts of the world. They are variously known as akephaloi (Greek ἀκέφαλοι 'headless ones') or Blemmyes (Latin: Blemmyae; Greek: βλέμμυες) and described as lacking a head, with their facial features on their chest. These were at first described as inhabitants of ancient Libya or the Nile system (Aethiopia). Later traditions confined their habitat to a particular island in the Brisone River,[a] or shifted it to India.
Well, how did they get their name? Two theories:
Samuel Bochart of the 17th century derived the word Blemmyes from the Hebrew bly (בלי) "without" and moach (מוח) "brain", implying that the Blemmyes were people without brains (although not necessarily without heads).
... Leo Reinisch [de] in 1895 proposed that it derived from bálami "desert people" in the Bedauye tongue (Beja language). Although this theory had long been neglected,[8] this etymology has come into acceptance, alongside the identification of the Beja people as true descendants of the Blemmyes of yore.[9][10][11]
I agree with Leo Reinisch, obviously, the ones killing the 43 monks were "bálami" or "desert people" ... Herodotus had heard of them, and probably via an intermediate which would have been prone to distort the name in the Semitic etymology meaning "without brains" (by enmity) and then in a twisted type of humour transmitting the info on what it meant, namely even as "headless people" ... perhaps because they didn't know the Greek word for brain.
But this would have been unknown and not considered for the rare Protestants who came across the 43 monks martyred by Blemmyes, in Butler or in Golden Legend.
However, I will not deny the possibility of the marvellous and the preternatural, as today's saint, also in Egypt, St. Paul the First Hermit, once was visited by St. Anthony, who, on the way to him, met a faun and a centaur.
A third source of Protestant disbelief in Catholic legend is however disagreement about the moral content. When Calvin (with ludicrously inaccurate estimates) objected to the relics of the Holy Cross, obviously he has a moral incentive or gives Calvinists a moral incentive to disbelieve the Finding of the Holy Cross, celebrated on 3.V.
When Luther bemoaned his having disobeyed the father who didn't want him to become a celibate priest, he invented a new moral theology not just about monastic vows (in and of itself a source of disgust with lots of Catholic legend in Protestants back then), but also about what kind of obedience one owes to one's father.
Believing St. Barbara was with God, who had vindicated her disobedience (or as Catholics with some scholastic background would argue rather being non-obedience, not the same thing) against her Pagan father, that did not sit well with Lutherans. Dito for Sts. Francis and Clare of Assisi.
And, getting back to St. Christopher ... according to the full legend in Legenda Aurea, he had proposed he would serve "the greatest king" ... here are his three successive loyalties :
- an earthly king who trembled when he saw
- Satan, who in his turn was afraid of
- an image of Jesus Christ, to whom Christopher turned at last, and to Whom he remained true.
It doesn't sit all that well with this kind of Protestants (who, remember, were not at all Pentecostals back then) that a man having made a compact with the Devil should save his soul, or that the way in doing so would involve works of penance (part of what Protestantism turned away from and what St. Christopher examplified).
So, Protestants turned away from the legend that Child Jesus had appeared to St. Christopher, first asking to be carried over, and then asking the saint to plant his staff (dead wood), which thereon came to life, sprouted leaves and grew roots, before his very eyes. Plus, obviously, the Protestant prejudice against appearances of Jesus or of Mary or of some saints to someone alive and later sainted.
One huge dealbreaker with me over rejecting the Novus Ordo was actually that at least temporarily Sts Barbara and Christopher were taken out of the martyrology and of feast days. That is obviously not the last indication that the Novus Ordo establishment is unduly influenced by Protestants — the other day, Cacey Cole, a Novus Ordo Franciscan, repeated Protestant talking points about Boniface VIII.
But as mentioned, the main heirs of this Protestantism, this rejection of Catholic legend, and this disagreement with Catholic morals too, is not the Novus Ordo. It's outright Atheism. I have said before, and will probably have to say it again, that Atheists are Protestants who lost the remainders of Christianity that the Reformation had left them with.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Paul the First Hermit
15.I.2024
