The giving tree.

Miracles at the Jesus Oak Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe Craig Harline Doubleday, $22.95, 309 pp.

There is perhaps no greater flash point in the religious world than the subject of miracles. A person's reaction to the miraculous shows where he or she stands on a crucial religious fault line in the modern world. Believers in miracles see them as central to their confidence in a personal God who is actively involved in the world. Then there are those others who are quite happy with a universe explained simply by the strictures of science. They find the assertion that the natural order is at times invaded by some supernatural reality ludicrous and fanciful, and more fitting to a credulous or superstitious age than to our own. Finally, there are still others who artfully try to adjudicate between these extremes by suggesting an idea of God as one who exists and functions within the regularity of nature. Miracle stories per se may be crude renderings of the seamless and spiritual way in which God truly responds to the world but, when properly spiritualized, they take on value. Whenever the cry goes forth that a miracle has taken place--whether it be at Lourdes, Knock, or in the pulsating world of third-world Christianity--these three options inevitably appear.

Craig Harline--whose earlier work with Eddy Put, A Bishop's Tale, focused on the lived religion of seventeenth-century Belgium--has chosen a different tack in this book. Having discovered in an ancient Belgian abbey library a "miracle register" containing a series of accounts of miracle claims, he presents them here as a collection of "microhistories," illuminating (in his words) "the otherworld of Reformation Europe." Through these accounts the reader is shown what miracles meant for those who experienced them.

In themselves they are delightful stories. The reader encounters the shrine of the Jesus Oak, to which men and women traveled to ask for healing, and which became a source of struggle between two competing towns. He or she learns of Maria Abundant, a poor widow who through the help of the Virgin receives the gift of milk from her previously barren breasts to feed her hungry children. Readers also discover the story of the prostitute Aldegonde and hear of her attempts to use the consecrated host for magical purposes. Finally, one encounters Jean Baptiste van Helmont, a distinguished medical doctor who fell under ecclesiastical scrutiny because of suspicion that his views on healing undercut the church's miracles.

The volume is more than simply a collection of delightful tales. Involved in each of these stories is a "problem" concerning the miraculous. The story of the Jesus Oak deals with the "business" of miracles. Then, as now, when miraculous healings break forth, crowds follow, and with them the crowd's money--and the question of who controls the sacred place is also about who controls that income. Likewise, the story of the prostitute Aldegonde illuminates the tricky interface between the miraculous and the magical. The two most interesting questions concern the cases of Maria Abundant and Dr. Helmont. As the author notes, Maria's case was championed by the Jesuits, while her doubters were the secular or parish clergy. Why this division? Two factors seem to have been at work. The first was practical. Miracles pulled the faithful away from their parishes to special shrines, often managed by religious orders such as the Jesuits. It is no wonder that parish clergy would be more skeptical than the Jesuits about miracle claims. Yet something deeper was involved, and it concerned the question of the purpose of miracles. For the Jesuits, they were weapons in the great battle over the soul of Europe. Miracles testified to the power of the true Catholic faith vis-a-vis the Protestant heretics. As the leading shock troops of the Counter Reformation, the Jesuits saw miracle claims as a valuable part of their arsenal. Maria's critics saw things differently. For them, miracles all too often misdirected the focus of true religion, leading people to seek external wonders rather than the inner transformation of the soul. The surfeit of miracle claims could delude the faithful and provide fodder for the church's critics, by associating the Catholic faith with credulity. It was best to be always cautious when it came to the subject of miracles.

In the case of Dr. Helmont, the deeper question involved the makeup of the natural order. Helmont was part of a seventeenth-century movement that challenged the ancient cosmology inherited from figures such as Aristotle and Galen. Those who followed the old learning "could discuss the origins of every conceivable ailment, but could cure not a single one." The universe pictured by Helmont was radically different, and only by jettisoning the ancients could medicine advance. Helmont saw the cosmos as a living, spiritual organism with no rupture between heaven and earth. True healing rested on an understanding of the hidden laws connecting the material and the spiritual orders. It was this cosmology that got the doctor into trouble. The church's traditional understanding of miracles presupposed the Aristotelian division between nature and supernature. If Helmont were correct, the great miracles of the faith were not the result of divine action but the working out of hidden laws. Miracles would disappear and become merely part of the world of nature. Like New-Age shamans of the twenty-first century, Helmont expanded the category of the spiritual in a way that seemed to swallow up the categories of the supernatural and the miraculous.

Miracles at the Jesus Oak is not simply a book about the seventeenth century but about the perennial challenge of the miraculous. The author concludes by noting that in Western Europe alone there are still more than six thousand shrines visited by 60 to 70 million pilgrims annually. Miracles still enthrall. Many of these people bear strong parallels with the characters found here, sharing their faith and follies, hopes and limitations. If the draw of the miraculous is still with us, so too are the questions the volume highlights. We continue to argue passionately over the purpose of miracles and the relationship between the idea of the miraculous and an understanding of nature. We may in truth be not far away from the author's "otherworld."

Robert Bruce Mullin is professor of history at the General Theological Seminary and author of Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (Yale).