Bernadette of Lourdes

[Longmans, Green, $&.50

FROM the demoralizing and disrupting influence of the belief in magic, modern science freed itself only by dint of prodigious effort and incalculable suffering, and scientists cherish their hard-bought freedom and guard it zealously. But that religion suffers from a similar though less acute fear of regression to magic is less well known. This is one of the most striking facts brought out in Mrs. Blanton’s extraordinarily clear, simple, sympathetic, but very objective account (the first by a non-Catholic) of the life of a girl whose experiences formed the basis for the foundation of a shrine which now attracts millions to it in the hope of cure.

The Church has good reason for recognizing few miracles; one miracle too many and it is doomed, as its hierarchy well knows. Science, on the other hand, cannot conceive the possibility of a single miracle. But, in the instance of Bernadette of Lourdes, science, the civil authorities, and the Church all suffered the same fate; they were all baffled by the course of events stemming from the life of a miserable, ignorant, mistreated, and in no external way distinguished girl.

Born into a poverty-stricken family of low estate in southern France, suffering from cold, hunger, and disease throughout her childhood, at the age of fourteen Bernadette thought she saw (nineteen times) a beautiful miniature woman in white in a cleft of the rock above a small stream in the mountains. The lady smiled and executed the sign of the cross in a particularly graceful way — this to a child denied not only all the niceties of life but even the benefit of formal religious training. No one else ever saw the lady, but observing Bernadette was sufficient to convince hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of the reality of the apparitions.

After the few months in which these occasional moments of ecstasy occurred, Bernadette’s life once more resumed a course of drabness and misery. Unimpelled toward arrogance, expansiveness, vanity, or any wish to exploit her experiences, she was none the less criticized, rebuked, cross-examined, humiliated, and exploited. The order of nuns that adopted her were by that time well aware of the advantages of claiming her, but were apparently overanxious not to allow her any self-satisfaction or exaltation of spirit, and she was consistently humiliated, depreciated, and reminded that she was of no importance at the very moment when bishops were coming to kneel before her, and people picked up scraps of cloth or wood that she had touched. ‘It isn’t a sacrifice,’said Bernadette in Mrs. Blanton’s moving account of her death, ‘to leave a poor life where one meets so many difficulties in order to belong to God.’

Deep psychological, philosophical, and medical problems are raised by this unpretentious but powerful book. Why, in a world where there are millions of hallucinated individuals, should the visions of this particularly unimpressive little pauper have so convincingly impressed her fellow citizens? It should not be forgotten that the hallucinations of Joseph Smith, Joan of Arc, and many others formed the basis for powerful enthusiasms and extraordinary achievements. But why should the alleviation of illness be the purpose to which the place of these experiences was devoted? Even though I am a physician, I would certainly agree that illness is not the greatest problem in the world today, nor was it at the time of Bernadette. It was not Bernadette’s chief problem, although it was true that she was chronically ill, Bernadette herself apparently had no interest in the curative function of the grotto; as far as she was concerned, it was a place where a sweet lady smiled at her and gave her a little love.

To the reviewer the answer to the last question seems answerable thus: this is a clear manifestation of a psychological principle which is no magic, no miracle, no contradiction to other scientific principles. It is a demonstration of the validity of the psychoanalytic tenet that disease is related to a lack of love, and that the cultivation of love and a conviction of one’s own lovability lead to a neutralization of the self-destructive impulses that determine the effectiveness of the physical and chemical processes which appear in disease.

Bernadette’s life was saved through this victory of her own life instinct, which took the happy form of hallucinating a lovable image of a woman who was at the same time her idealized self, her mother, and the mother of Jesus. Conventionally, she was recognized only as the latter. Bernadette found love in the canyon of the Gave, and thereby revived the hopes of many others that they too could find love and repudiate their surrender to their own self-destructive hate. And some, like Bernadette, succeed.

KARL MENNINGER, M.D.