Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts in the Second Through Nineteenth Centuries, Part 4: From the 13th to the 18th Centuries

Part 1 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Part 2 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Part 3 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

Richard M. Riss presents evidence for the operation of the gifts of the Spirit throughout the Church Age.

 

Clare of Montefalco

Among several thirteenth-century figures we have discussed, St. Clare of Montefalco (d. 1308) has had a number of miracles attributed to her, as well as frequent ecstasies and supernatural gifts, which she used for the good of people both outside her convent and within it.⁷⁴ One of her biographers, Mosconio, wrote that an unbelieving physician,, Philip, admitted that he had listened enviously when Clare uttered praises to the Lord and “engaged in holy conversations, speaking heavenly words about heavenly things.”⁷⁵

 

Bridget of Sweden

One of the most important saints of the fourteenth century was Bridget (A.D. 1303-1373) who founded the Order of the Most Holy Saviour (the Brigittines) in Sweden. It was her personal revelations that had made her famous. In the late 1340’s, she received a command of the Lord to go to the royal court and warn King Magnus of the judgement of God on his sins. She did this, and also warned the queen, the nobles and the bishops. For a while, the king repented. He provided a great deal of money for the founding of a monastery at Vadstena that Bridget had decided to begin in response to another vision. During the fifteenth century this monastery became the literary center of Sweden.

Bridget was beloved by the people of Sweden. She would travel about the country looking after the material and spiritual needs of the people. Soon, many of them were converted, and many miracles of healing at her hands confirmed the preaching of her chaplains.

Among the most well know event in the life of Bridget were the many revelations that she received from God on the sufferings of Christ and on events that were about to happen in certain kingdoms. Her prophecies and revelations were directly related to most of the important political and religious issues of her time in both Sweden and Rome. At one point she prophesied that the pope and emperor would soon meet peaceably in Rome, and this was fulfilled between Pope Urban V and Charles IV in 1368. Bridget always submitted her revelations to the judgement of the pastors of the church. In Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, it is written that “to have the knowledge of angels without charity is to be only a tinkling cymbal; both to have charity and to speak the language of angels was the happy privilege of St. Bridget.”⁷⁶

 

Vincent Ferrer

At a slightly later period, Vincent Ferrer (A.D. 1350-1419), a Dominican preacher, became known for the miracles that accompanied his ministry. Particularly between 1401 and 1403, whenever he went to preach, crowds flocked to hear him and “everywhere innumerable conversions and remarkable miracles were reported.”⁷⁷ When he was in the Netherlands in 1405, an hour was set apart every day for the healing of the sick, who would come from many places seeking healing. Alban Butler wrote in Lives of the Saints as follows about his gift of tongues:

Although we know from the saint himself that beyond his native language he had learnt only some Latin and a little Hebrew, yet he would seem to have possessed the gift of tongues, for we have it on the authority of reliable writers that all his hearers, French, Germans, Italians and the rest, understood every word he spoke, and that his voice carried so well that it could be clearly heard at enormous distances. … He pursued no definite order, but visited and revisited places as the spirit moved him or as he was requested.⁷⁸

Vincent’s gift of languages was such that, wherever he went, although he preached in the Valencian idiom, he was perfectly heard and understood. In conversation, he spoke French, Italian, English, and German, according to the country in which he was located, “with the ease and fluency of his mother-tongue.”⁷⁹ One of his early biographers, Ranzano, wondered how the Bretons could understand his language so easily when their language bore no affinity to the Latin.⁸⁰

Vincent Ferrer had many gifts of revelation. At Barcelona, a man named Louis Cataldo came to him seeking healing from severe head pains, but he answered, “I am neither God, nor a doctor, to cure you.” At this, Cataldo recognized that Vincent Ferrer had known what was in his heart. After Vincent laid his hands upon him and prayed, he was cured.⁸¹ Another individual, Gaja, who had desired to become part of his company, was told by Vincent that he should first sell all that he had and distribute the money to the poor. He did so, but he kept back half the money and returned to inform Vincent that he had done as he had been requested. Vincent replied that he should go, that he had only given half the money to the poor, and that he was not welcome as a member of his company. The man repented and finally allowed to join.⁸² When Vincent heard confessions of sinners he was able to discover faults that had escaped their memory.⁸³ While preaching, Vincent would sometimes fix his eyes upon those whom he had never seen and would begin talking about the very things that they knew they were guilty of having done.⁸⁴

Vincent Ferrer spoke much upon the imminent return of Christ and the nearness of the day of judgment. In the beginning of the fifteenth century, most of Europe was so vividly affected by his call to holiness that his biographers concluded that God’s judgment had been forestalled by the response of the people in their repentance, just as it was in the days of Nineveh when Jonah preached.⁸⁵

One of the things foretold by Vincent was that “a society of apostolic men would rise up in the latter time, who would be eminent for their piety, and whose zeal would be extraordinary.”⁸⁶

 

Colette

At one point, while Vincent Ferrer was praying for the conversion of souls, he had a vision of a nun of the Order of St. Francis doing as he did. She was weeping profusely, at the feet of Christ. The Lord then revealed to him that this nun was Colette.⁸⁷ Colette, also, is known to have spoken in tongues, specifically Latin and German, without any knowledge of those languages.⁸⁸ According to Alban Butler, her fame spread far and wide, enhanced by the many miracles associated with her ministry. The duchess of Bourbon wrote, “I am dying to see that wonderful Colette, who raises people from the dead.”⁸⁹

 

The Zwickau Prophets

If the Rituale Romanum of the Roman Catholic Church served to hinder those who spoke in tongues from publicizing the fact, the early events of the Protestant Reformation only reinforced public prejudice against the recognition of tongues and other prophetic gifts as God-given. The Reformation brought with it many excesses. In December of 1521, the Zwickau prophets began to disturb Wittenberg, the city to which Martin Luther had felt responsible as pastor. Although his flock resided at Wittenberg, Luther himself was in hiding at Wartburg Castle because his life was in danger. The Zwickau prophets did much to discredit the supernatural gifts, because in addition to boasting of visions, dreams and direct communications with God, they rejected the written Word of God, and seemed ready to use violence to overthrow the existing order of things in order to bring about the millennial reign of Jesus Christ upon the earth.

Luther found it necessary to return to Wittenberg against the wishes of his protector, Frederick, the elector of Saxony, trusting in God’s providence to keep him safe from harm. Luther had a deep pastoral concern for his people at Wittenberg, and he felt that it was essential that he return to Wittenberg in order to deal with the situation. He was successful in accomplishing this purpose, and he was careful not to speak evil of anyone; he simply preached the Word of God and trusted that God would bring order, which indeed He did.

 

Luther’s Belief in Miracles

However, Luther himself was not without belief in miracles. When his life was in danger, he left Wartburg trusting that God in His providence would keep him safe. This consciousness of God’s sovereign protection is particularly evident in his correspondence with Frederick the Elector of Saxony, who had told Luther to remain in hiding at Wartburg Castle.⁹⁰

Much later in his life, Luther wrestled with God in prayer at the bedside of the dying Philip Melanchthon. Then, with firm confidence, he went up to the sick man who felt that his last hour had come, and taking him by the hand, said, “Be of good cheer, Philip, you shall not die,” and from that very hour, Melanchthon revived.⁹¹

 

Anabaptists and Tongues

The gift of tongues was in evidence during the time of the Reformation, but it came to be associated with those who were thought to advocate violence, particularly among the Anabaptists.⁹² Although there was a manifestation of violence among Anabaptists at Muenster led by John Matthys, many of the Anabaptists were pacifists who were severely persecuted for their belief in religious freedom. Outbreaks of healings and tongues were especially evident among Anabaptists experiencing persecution. George H. Williams writes as follows about an incident that occurred near Erfurt:

Nearby was a prophet in the abbatial territory of Fulda whose rebaptized followers, excited by mass hypnosis, experienced healings, glossolalia, contortions, and other manifestations of a camp-meeting revival, similar to the Pentecostal outbreaks among the St. Gall Anabaptists of an earlier date. A large and determined group of these revivalists were besieged in their fortified house for six months in 1532. When finally captured, several were beheaded.⁹³

Because the Anabaptists had become associated with extreme and violent behavior, it is certain that the manifestation of glossolalia (tongues) in their midst only served to discredit the gift in the collective consciousness of mainline Protestantism.

 

Louis Bertrand in Latin America

The sixteenth century, for Europe, was the era of the Reformation, but for America, it was the era of missions to the Indians. Among the countless Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit priests who gave their lives for the sake of missions in the New World was Louis Bertrand (A.D. 1526-1581), a Dominican who left Spain in 1562 to preach the gospel to the Indians in America. He spoke only Spanish and had to use an interpreter, but, according to his bull of canonization, the gifts of tongues, prophecy and miracles were conferred by Heaven on this apostle.⁹⁴ Within three years, in the isthmus of Panama and in the province of Cartagena, thousands of people were converted to Christianity.

The experiences of Louis Bertrand may not have been unique; it is possible that many others who gave their lives for American missions were accorded the gift of languages in their attempts to preach to the savages in North and South America.

 

The “French Prophets”

One of most remarkable records left to us in the annals of history with respect to spiritual gifts is that of “the little prophets of the Cevennes” at the close of the seventeenth century. About one hundred years earlier, in 1598, King Henry IV of France had issued the Edict of Nantes granting the French Protestants freedom of private worship, civil rights, and the right to public worship in many places. In 1685, however, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and there was a renewal of persecution of the Huguenots (French Protestants). More than half a million of them fled the country. Thousands of others suffered martyrdom, some renounced their faith, and a remnant of them fled to the Cevennes mountains. It is among this remnant that miracles of healing, prophecy, and tongues became manifest.⁹⁵ One of the most commonly reported phenomena there was that “people everywhere began to hear strange sounds in the air; the sound of a trumpet and a harmony of voices. They did not doubt the music was celestial.”⁹⁶ Gifts of the Spirit first became manifest among Huguenots who had not fled to the Cevennes mountains. On February 12, 1688, a young girl, Isabeau Vincent of Dauphiny, stood and spoke, exhorting everyone to repent. One of the earliest accounts described her prophetic gifts as follows:

For the first five weeks she spoke during her ecstasies no language but that of her country, because her only auditors were the peasantry of the village. The noise of this miracle having spread, people who understood and spoke French came to see her. She then began to speak French, and with a diction as correct as if she had been brought up in the first houses of Paris.⁹⁷

Isabeau Vincent would not recant, and she was therefore imprisoned at Greville, and later in the Tower of Constance. She said to her captors, “You may take my life, but God will raise up others to speak better things than I have done.”⁹⁸ According to a French historian, Peyrat, within a year of this event there were not less than a thousand prophets in Languedoc. The “contagion” had spread from Dauphiny to Viserais, and from there to the Cevennes mountains.⁹⁹ These people became known as the Camisards after King Louis XIV sent heavily armed troops against them from 1701 until 1710 and they attempted to defend themselves. Many of them became refugees in England, where they became known as the French Prophets, and were often the objects of ridicule. The Earl of Shaftesbury, in the Characteristics, wrote of a puppet show at St. Bartholomew’s Fair in 1708 at which these French Prophets were mocked.¹⁰⁰ In the same work, he mentions that one of them prophesied “in a pompous Latin style, of which, out of his ecstasy, it seems, he is wholly incapable.”¹⁰¹ Some of the French Prophets became refugees in America, and Benjamin Franklin wrote that his first employer, Keimer, the printer of Philadelphia, “had been one of the French Prophets and could act their enthusiastic agitations.”¹⁰² Some of the Cevennol prophets were very young children. In 1701, a fourteen-month old child who “had never of itself spoken a Word, nor could it go alone,” began exhorting in a loud childish voice “to the Works of Repentance,” in perfect, fluent French.¹⁰³ This was reported by John Lacy, one of the leaders of the Cevennol refugees in London. Sir Richard Bulkley, a wealthy English baronet who became a convert to their faith, said that he heard Lacy repeat long sentences in Latin, and another of them in Hebrew, “neither one of whom could speak a single word in these languages when not in spiritual ecstasy.”¹⁰⁴ In an unfavorable study of the gift of tongues, George Cutten admitted that among the French Prophets “the most important phases of the gift were the extraordinary fluency of the young and the illiterate, and the speaking in correct French, which was so different from their native patois.”¹⁰⁵ In another unfavorable work on the gift of tongues, Alexander Mackie wrote:

The Stories of the Cevennes abound in miracles. It is only to be expected that John Lacy and the London French Prophets would expect and would attempt to perform miracles.¹⁰⁶

Mackie includes a story about Betty Gray, who laid her hand upon John Lacy and prophesied that he would make the blind to see. She admitted that she did not believe this prophecy, and she was struck blind, later to be healed by John Lacy.¹⁰⁷ Mackie ends this account of healing with these words:

With the gift of prophesying and the gift of healing, we naturally expect—and we are not disappointed—the gift of tongues.¹⁰⁸

The remaining pages of Mackie’s volume, which continues in an attempt to discredit the claims of the French Prophets, contain a few anecdotes, including a description of John Lacy’s gift of languages, which enabled him to speak in Latin when he was at Chelsea.¹⁰⁹

 

The Jansenists

Another eighteenth-century group in France, the Jansenists, were Catholics who were persecuted because of their leanings toward Protestantism. In 1731, miracles were said to have been performed at the tomb of the archdeacon of Paris, who had defended the doctrines of Jansenius. Cutten wrote of them as follows:

Some people while visiting that tomb experienced ecstasy and convulsive movements that became contagious, and many who were thus seized prophesied and uttered unintelligible expressions in an unconscious state. They often used absolutely senseless combinations of sounds, which passed for words from foreign languages. They believed, as do the Camisards, that their organs of speech were controlled by a superior power.¹¹⁰

The miracles among the Jansenists had actually begun many years previous to this time, the first being the well-attested healing on March 24, 1656, of Marguerite Perrier, the young niece of Blaise Pascal (A.D. 1623-1662), the famous French mathematician and apologist. She had suffered for a long time from a serious ulcer of the tear duct of one of her eyes. A historian of Jansenism, B. Robert Kreiser, wrote of the healing as follows:

Mile. Perrier had been suffering for a long time from a serious and disfiguring lachrymal fistula in the corner of one eye. She was suddenly healed when a Holy Thorn recently presented to the sisters of Port-Royal-des-champs, where she was a pensionary, was simply touched to her ulcerous sore. Despite vehement Jesuit denunciations and attempts to explain it away, the miracle, supported by substantial medical evidence and duly authenticated a short time later by the diocesan authorities, made a profound impression on the public. So great was the impact of this extraordinary event that the queen mother herself accepted the cure as miraculous and allegedly induced Mazarin to hold off the persecution of the Jansenists for another five years because of it.¹¹¹

As a result of these events Blaise Pascal began a long and fruitful series of reflections on the miracles recorded in the Bible and the relationship between miracles and religious truth.¹¹²

 

PR

 

Next Issue:

Part 5 (Fall 1999): The 18th and 19th Centuries
Part 5 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts

 

Notes

⁷⁴ Alban Butler, The Lives of the Saints, August 17, in Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater, eds., Butler’s Lives of the Saints (New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1956), vol. 3, p. 341.

⁷⁵ Stanley M. Burgess, “Medieval Examples of Charismatic Piety in the Roman Catholic Church,” in Russell P. Spittler, Perspectives on the New Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976), pp. 21-22, citing Acta Sanctorum, Sugust 11, 687.

⁷⁶ Burgess, op. cit., pp. 21-22, citing Acta Sanctorum, August 11, 687.

⁷⁶ Butler, op. cit., October 8, vol. 4, p. 58.

⁷⁷ Butler, op. cit., April 5, vol. 2, p. 32.

⁷⁸ Ibid.

⁷⁹ Andrew Pradel, St. Vincent Ferrer (London: T. A. Dixon, 1875), p. 121.

⁸⁰ Ibid.

⁸¹ Ibid., p. 109.

⁸² Ibid., p. 110.

⁸³ Ibid., p. 112.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 117.

⁸⁶ Ibid.

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 104.

⁸⁸ Burgess, op. cit., p. 20, citing Acta Sanctorum, March 1, 532, 568, chapter 17, section 176.

⁸⁹ Butler, op. cit., March 6, vol. 1, p. 507.

⁹⁰ Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882-1910), reprinted by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., vol. 8, chapter 67, p. 171.

⁹¹ Theodore Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1874) p. 335.

⁹² George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962), p. 133.

⁹³ Ibid., p. 443.

⁹⁴ Butler, op. cit., vol. 4, October 9, p. 73.

⁹⁵ David Smith, The Life and Letters of St. Paul (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919), p. 219.

⁹⁶ R. Heath, “The Little Prophets of Cevennes,” Cont. Rev., January 1886, p. 121, quoted by George Barton Cutten, Speaking with Tongues (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), pp. 50-51.

⁹⁷ P. Jurieu, Lettres pastorales, III, p. 60, quoted by Cutten, ibid., pp. 52-53.

⁹⁸ S. Smiles, The Huguenots in France, p. 90, quoted by Cutten, ibid., p. 54.

⁹⁹ N. Preyat, Histoire des pasteurs du desert, cited by Cutten, ibid., p. 54.

¹⁰⁰ Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 21.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., pp. 32-33.

¹⁰² Benjamin Franklin, Works, ed., J. Bigelow, vol. 1, p. 66, as quoted by Cutten, op. cit., p. 56.

¹⁰³ John Lacy, A Cry From the Desert (London, 1708), p. 15, quoted by Williams and Waldvogel, op. cit., p. 76.

¹⁰⁴ Cutten, op. cit., p. 56.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., p. 61.

¹⁰⁶ Alexander Mackie, The Gift of Tongues (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921), p. 76.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., pp. 76-77.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., p. 77.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 78.

¹¹⁰ Cutten, op. cit., p. 67.

¹¹¹ B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 70-71.

¹¹² Ibid., p. 71.

 

Part 5 (Fall 1999): The 18th and 19th Centuries
Part 5 of Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts