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Augustine and the Miracle Lists of Hippo

If you could choose one page of the patristic record to put in front of a cessationist, it would be this one. Not because Augustine is the most spectacular witness — he is not — but because of who he is and what he did. The most influential theologian of the Latin West after Paul spent his last years collecting, verifying, and publishing an archive of healings worked in his own diocese. And he tells us, in writing, that he had once believed the gifts had ceased.

That combination is unique: a man with every institutional incentive to defend his church's settled teaching, who changed his mind in public, on the evidence, and then built a process for gathering more of it. Whatever one concludes about the individual miracles, the episode is a case study in how the doctrine of cessation is formed — and in how it can be corrected.

The claim

The most influential theologian of the West began as a functional cessationist and revised his view under the weight of documented testimony. That is a fact about how the doctrine is formed. The assumption that the gifts have ceased is not, in the first instance, an exegesis of a text. It is an inference from absence — and Augustine is the honest witness to having made it.

The earlier view

Augustine was bishop of Hippo in North Africa from 395 until his death in 430. In his Retractations, written near the end of his life, he went back through his own books and corrected them. One of the corrections concerns the miraculous gifts. He records that he had once thought the gifts of healing had ceased in his own day, and that he had come to see he was wrong.

The passage is worth handling with care, and we will not pretend to quote it. What matters is its shape. Augustine is not repudiating a doctrine he was taught; he is correcting an assumption he had absorbed. The assumption was natural, and it was formed the way such assumptions always are: he had not seen the gifts, the church's public life ran on Word and sacrament, and the age of the apostles was long past. The conclusion followed almost without being argued.

That is exactly how functional cessationism works in most people. It is not a considered position reached from 1 Corinthians 13. It is the weather of a particular church at a particular time, and it becomes a doctrine afterwards. Augustine had the honesty to notice that his weather had changed.

What changed at Hippo

The occasion was an accident of history. In 415 the relics of Stephen, the first martyr, were discovered in Jerusalem, and portions were distributed around the Mediterranean. Some reached North Africa within a few years, at Uzalis and then at Hippo. What followed, Augustine says, was a stream of healings. He began to collect the accounts.

In City of God 22.8 he tells the stories. A former imperial official named Innocentius, living at Carthage, had a fistula that the surgeons were preparing to cut. The night before the operation he and his household prayed, and by morning the fistula was gone; the physicians, Augustine says, examined him and could find no trace of it. There is a blind woman who received her sight at the shrine. There is a boy crushed by a cart, dead when they lifted him, who was laid at the shrine and revived. There are others: a young woman freed from a violent demon, a man released from a long illness, and more of the same kind.

Augustine did not leave the stories as rumours. He had them written down, and he had them read publicly to the congregation, so that they would not slip out of memory. He says that within a short span some seventy cases had been recorded at Hippo alone, and that he had ordered the narratives to be kept and recited. This is a bishop creating an archive and a liturgy of testimony — the ancient equivalent of a documented case file.

He was not naive about it. He interviewed witnesses, cross-examined the healed, and was wary of miracle mongering. His argument in 22.8 is not "believe everything"; it is that the same power which founded the church is still at work, that the evidence is local and therefore easily overlooked, and that the greatest miracle is the conversion of the world without arms.

Why the reversal matters

Watch the order of Augustine's reasoning, because it is the reverse of the cessationist's usual order.

  1. Experience. He did not see the gifts, and assumed they had ceased.
  2. Assumption. The absence became a settled expectation.
  3. Testimony. Reports reached him, from his own region, with names and witnesses.
  4. Revision. He changed his mind, publicly, and built a process to test what he was hearing.

The modern argument for cessation usually stops at step 2. "We do not see them today, therefore they have ceased." Augustine is the counter-example: a man who took step 3 seriously and found that the absence was not as total as he had assumed. His congregation had the evidence; his assumption had kept him from asking for it.

This is why the episode belongs in a discussion of how doctrine is formed. The cessationist impulse is old: Chrysostom says in his homilies on 1 Corinthians that the gifts of his day had ceased, and Augustine's earlier view shows the same assumption in the air at the end of the fourth century. What is post-Reformation is the doctrine — the settled teaching, with a mechanism (the apostles' death or the canon's close) and a proof text (1 Corinthians 13:10). The assumption is ancient; the system is not. And the greatest of the Latin fathers, having held the assumption, did not hold the system.

What this does and does not prove

It proves: that a theologian of the first rank, with no incentive to undermine his church's teaching, came to believe that the gifts were still operating in his own day; that he based the change on testimony he had collected and had read publicly; and that the doctrine of cessation was, for him, a correctable assumption rather than an apostolic tradition.

It does not prove: that every miracle at Hippo was genuine, that the theology of relics which framed them is sound, or that a modern healing claim should be believed on the same terms. The Hippo records are ecclesiastical testimony, not medical records; some cases Augustine had at second hand. They are strong evidence, and they are not proof. What they destroy is the claim that the church's memory knows nothing of the gifts after the apostles. Augustine made sure it would not.

Further reading

  • Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Penguin Classics), Book 22.
  • Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Mary Inez Bogan (Fathers of the Church, Catholic University of America Press, 1968).
  • Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (revised ed., University of California Press, 2000).

See also