The meaning of miracles

An interesting piece on the First Things blog last week by Matthew J. Milliner recounts an experience he had while visiting a church in Crete that dated from the period of Venetian rule. Catholic Venetians and Orthodox Cretans had divergent liturgies, a problem that was resolved by building churches with naves on opposite ends of the structure so that services from each rite could be celebrated in the same space. I was unfamiliar with this bit of historic lore and so it caught my imagination at once. I like stuff like this.
Milliner was there in his capacity as an art historian, and while there he encountered an English speaking Cretan who was well-versed in the iconography on display. In response to an inquiry about a depiction of Mary consoling the infant Christ, the Cretan explained the story behind it.
"Mary was permitted, due to her wisdom, to study in the Temple from an early age. Because of her access to Solomon's mysteries, she knew what was to happen to her son. And so, as Gabriel confronts Christ in this icon with the instruments of the Passion, Mary comforts her son."
Milliner, not believing the historicity of this legend, launches into a meditation on how these mythic tales could be true and untrue at the same time. The story contains a code, the Cretan elaborated, something that needs interpretation to be intelligible. Because, how could it be literally true? He tells us about other legends that require similar readings, like the Turin shroud. Never fear. They do not contradict the gospels but amplify them.
This is familiar territory for me, a long time enthusiast for poetry in general and mythic literature in particular. The challenge for a poet is to transcend the limitations of language itself, just as a painter is challenged by the two dimensional limitations of his medium. This is somewhat easier to do when poetry is transmitted by a blind harper like Homer, a mythic character himself. He used gesture and vocal expressiveness to augment his words. Verse itself has no literal meaning but without verse the meaning of the words in the poem are diminished, even neutralized or altered to an entirely different meaning. A great poet, as opposed to a hobbyist versifier, turns these limitations into opportunities. The limitations amount to a kind of traction. Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" is an eye opening introduction to reading myth, if you can figure out what he's talking about while trying to separate out all his misdirections. But I'm convinced he understood myth better than anyone else I have ever read.
The specific problem Milliner mentions in the reading of that icon is Mary's presence in the temple. The story is new to me, and surprising. Were women taught religious doctrine in the Temple? Wasn't the Judaism of that date as patriarchal as Mosquism of today? Milliner doesn't say anything at all about the angel Gabriel. Does that mean he believes that part, or is he avoiding that question? I don't know.
But these are important questions in the context of Christian belief since the authenticity of the religion itself depends on the literal truth of supernatural events occurring in real, literal, historic time. IE, the Son of God, come to earth, suffering torture and death, only to come to life again for a few days before returning to heaven. Stories in the gospels of miracles he performed are important only if they actually happened.
A school of thought among Christian believers doesn't care for these tricks and would prefer to forget about them. As for me, I have never seen a miracle performed. I have never seen an angel. I have never seen or heard of a documented case of a dead man coming back to life. To the skeptical mind that seems preposterous, and I have a skeptical habit of mind. I always subject ideas and theories to critical assessment. For someone like me claims of a virgin birth, a resurrection, visitations by angels and so on are hard to accept.
At the same time dogmatic skepticism is a trap that unimaginative minds often fall into. The classic example is the case of the museum curator who didn't believe there could be such an animal as a platypus even after examining a preserved specimen. Skepticism shouldn't be a closing of the mind to unfamiliar phenomena. Often skepticism is a mask for the kind of intellectual laziness that doesn't want to go to the terrifying trouble of reexamining all previous premises.
The reason I can take the gospels seriously is not just because they are great literary works written by intelligent and honest men of serious purpose who set them down because of something utterly momentuous they had witnessed. The reason I am open to ideas of the miraculous events they recorded is that I already know life is an astonishing miracle. Nevertheless, I am still troubled over the built in limitations of my ability to know what it all means. These limitations are not transcended by means of reason or through an accumulation of information or an amplification of my sensory faculties. They are inherent. All I know is that there has to be something more to it.
That's where the 'tricks' in the gospels enter into the discussion. We do see people who set themselves up as gurus and prophets and anyone with half a brain can tell they are crackpots. Presumably things weren't much different in the Roman province of Judea, a place literally crawling with preachers and prophets. Mystery religions were a shekel a dozen. Can Pontius Pilate really be blamed for not wanting to get caught between warring factions in his own consulship? It would look bad on his resume, and interfere with the Roman penchant for accumulating plunder.
The problem for the gospel writers was to distinguish Jesus from all the other preachers, and the miracles were the proof. The kinds of miracles Jesus performed were contrary to the natural order. In the natural order of things corpses do not come back to life. In the natural order of things cripples do not throw their crutches away and leap in the air. In the natural order of things the blind remain blind. In the natural order of things loaves and fishes do not proliferate in baskets. According to the scriptures all these miracles occurred in the presence of witnesses. If a man was blind, he was known to all in the vicinity as a blind man. There would be no faking it. Even in the Temple in front of the most hostile of skeptics Jesus was said to perform miracles.
We are told Jesus' reasons for performing miracles. He was backing up his claim to be the Son of God. He was proving that he was not bound by the rules of the world. He was proving he was not as others so that when he submitted to the same sufferings as thieves and murderers the world would know that it was through his choice. Even more it was to prove to the descendants of Abraham that he was the Messiah and that he was therefore entitled to change the terms of the Covenant made with Moses. Through the miracles he left the skeptics with no option but to reexamine their doctrines.
We moderns don't have the evidence of plain vision before us. We only have the words of the gospel writers and in spite of my own habitual skepticism I find them convincing...though not quite enough to salve all qualms.
As for the icon in the Venetian church on Crete, I wish I could see it for myself, and I wish I knew more about the legend that goes with it. The gospels are the bedrock of Christian belief, but that doesn't mean the gospels were the only accounts recorded or memorized by the early congregations. The gospels were accorded privileged status by the early Church Fathers as a preemptive strike against promulgators of mainly gnostic cults that would have been fatal to the Church. For an excellent discussion on why heresies are so important to counteract I refer the interested reader to a website- The Great Heresies, by Hilaire Belloc. These issues never fade, but we have been disarmed by philosophical trends that trivialize their importance.
I would think feminist researchers into Christian history would be very interested in this icon...if their minds weren't so closed to anything but the blather preached by the sorority.