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Updated: June 15, 2025
The exorcist and the thaumaturgus have alike passed away; but the religious reformer will live eternally. Even those who did not believe in him were struck with these acts, and sought to be witnesses of them. The pagans, and persons unacquainted with him, experienced a sentiment of fear, and sought to remove him from their district.
Two large frescoes. In the first, the Vision of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, and Heretics bitten by Serpents. In the second, St. John Damascene and St. Ildefonso miraculously rewarded for defending the Majesty of the Virgin. A large fresco, representing the four Doctors of the Church who had especially written in honour of the Virgin: viz.
In a general sense, it is therefore true to say that Jesus was only thaumaturgus and exorcist in spite of himself. Miracles are ordinarily the work of the public much more than of him to whom they are attributed.
Painting, sculpture, and engraving were constantly repeating the features of this Thaumaturgus. Poets wrote verses to be inscribed on the pedestals of the busts, or below the portraits. Those by Palisot deserve to be quoted, as one of the most curious examples of poetic licences: "Behold that man the glory of his age! Whose art can all Pandora's ills assuage.
But who does not see that no miracle ever took place under these conditions? but that always hitherto the thaumaturgus has chosen the subject of the experiment, chosen the spot, chosen the public; that, besides, the people themselves most commonly in consequence of the invincible want to see something divine in great events and great men create the marvellous legends afterward?
As, however, it ought to be possible always to repeat an experiment to do over again what has been done once; and as, in the order of miracle, there can be no question of ease or difficulty, the thaumaturgus would be invited to reproduce his marvellous act under other circumstances, upon other corpses, in another place.
When his enemies asked a miracle of him, especially a celestial miracle, a "sign from heaven," he obstinately refused. We may therefore conclude that his reputation of thaumaturgus was imposed upon him, that he did not resist it much, but also that he did nothing to aid it, and that, at all events, he felt the vanity of popular opinion on this point.
A thaumaturgus of our days, unless of an extreme simplicity, like that manifested by certain stigmatists of Germany, is odious; for he performs miracles without believing in them; and is a mere charlatan. But, if we take a Francis d'Assisi, the question becomes altogether different; the series of miracles attending the origin of the order of St.
If the thaumaturgus had effaced in Jesus the moralist and the religious reformer, there would have proceeded from him a school of theurgy, and not Christianity. Matt. viii. 27, 34, ix. 8, xiv. 27, xvii. 6, 7, xxviii. 5, 10; Luke iv. 36, v. 17, viii. 25, 35, 37, ix. 34. The Apocryphal Gospel, said to be by Thomas the Israelite, carries this feature to the most offensive absurdity.
Also to some of the miracles of the third century, especially to one extraordinary instance, the account of Gregory, bishop of Neocesarea, called Thaumaturgus, delivered in the writings of Gregory of Nyssen, who lived one hundred and thirty years after the subject of his panegyric.
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