Metaphors of Society: “TRUE” AND “FALSE” MIRACLES THROUGH THE EYES OF ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORS: THE LIMITS OF BELIEVING IN MIRACLES IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Since the Reformation, the cult of saints and their relics has been heavily criticized as a deception of selfish priests. But is it true that all the things which from the modern point of view should be regarded as deception, i.e. conscious deviation from the truth, were seen as the same in medieval polemics? The article discusses where the boundary between the truth and the falsification (falsitas) lies in the sphere of medieval piety. Analyzing lives of saints, texts about the veneration of relics and sacred objects, and accounts of miracles, the author shows that in the medieval religious worldview “truth” was warranted not by experience but by the transcendence. That’s why such modern concepts as “falsification” and “gullibility” are fraught with anachronism. In the Middle Ages, the boundary between “truth” and “deception” did not lie where it lies now. The notion of truth itself was relative and the views of the clerics and ordinary people could differ. On the one hand, the whole medieval hagiography lay beyond the field of “true” / “false”, since accounts of exploits and miracles performed by the saints, which we consider today to be literary fiction, were an integral part of religious faith and a form of piety, and thus did not give rise to suspicion. On the other hand, the official Church considered miracles performed by self-proclaimed saints or heretics to be a “deception” and warned against honoring “false saints”. A single and unambiguous concept of “deception” did not exist in the medieval Christian piety. The researcher must therefore distinguish deception aimed at practical benefits (for example, the forging of relics) from unintentional deception (delusion, fiction) or cheating with a godly aim (pia fraus).