The word supernatural, however, left the confines of the
schools and began to lose its precise technical meaning. It be-
came associated with the unusual, the marvelous, the surpris-
ing. Robert Lenoble (1968) has shown a continuity, from an-
tiquity to the present day, in what he calls “marvel
psychology.” Popular thought makes rough distinctions be-
tween what is natural, what is artificial, and what is miracu-
lous: Water flows down into valleys, human beings build
dams, and the Virgin diverts floods from villages when dams
break down. What characterizes common thinking about the
subject is uncertainty about the precise borders between the
natural, the artificial, and the miraculous. When the dam
breaks down, does it do so by itself, through wear and tear,
or because some man has put explosives in it or some woman
has cast a spell upon it? And does the water spare the village
because of its situation—the village is on high land—or be-
cause of divine intervention? While medieval theologians
had used the term supernatural to refer to the moral and spir-
itual dynamics of salvation, ordinary Christians came to call
supernatural any extraordinary occurrence that could not be
accounted for by the usual explanations at hand.
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century rad-
ically transformed the idea of cognition. With the mechanis-
tic revolution came, certainly for some human beings, a pre-
cise knowledge of the limits of the natural. “Natural” causes
have come to explain increasing amounts of experience, and
it is commonly assumed that in time, natural causes will be
found for events that currently resist explanation. Nature is
seen to be a rigid, coherent system that works like a clock,
does not pursue moral ends, and is indifferent to human as-
pirations. Modern humans know how to build dams that are
fail-safe; they know for sure that those dams cannot be de-
stroyed by spells; and they do not count on the Virgin to in-
tervene in the event of an accident. Nature, then, always
works according to rigorous laws and, by definition, excludes
the miraculous. (The older nature was malleable: It was quite
willing to see God—who ruled over it—reorder its workings
momentarily or locally to bring about a miracle for some spe-
cial purpose.) At first, the new nature was deemed to magnify
God even more than the older one: Its strict regularity and
its order seemed to testify to the awesome grandeur of its cre-
ator. That it was not a model and had nothing to teach hu-
manity was deemed at first only to serve the interests of the
dialogue between man and God. René Descartes (1596–
1650) taught that human beings and God are alike in that
both are spirits. The human being, a finite spirit, cannot
create ex nihilo, but like an engineer, can shape everything:
The whole of nature is matter in his hands (Lenoble, 1968).
At the same time, however, for reasons that had to do
with the aftereffects of the wars of religion, the rise of the
modern state, and the new demands for social conformity,
the Baroque taste spread in Christian lands. What was infi-
nite, awesome, powerful, overwhelming, and stunning was
considered to convey a sense of God. Religious architecture
and furniture became calculatedly impressive; oratory be-
came stately. Miracles as powerful disruptions of nature’s
laws appeared, then, necessary to the cause of religion. Many
theologians thus taught that human beings must regard the
supernatural as contrary to nature: God, they said, intervenes
providentially, and occasionally suspends the course of na-
ture; he also reveals supernatural truths that humans must
obediently accept even though their truth is not manifest to
one’s unaided reason. Rare were the theological voices like
that of William Law (1686–1761), who taught that “there
is nothing that is supernatural but God alone.” Since it was
evident that nature would always be what Newton said it
was, salvation tended to become less cosmic and more interi-
or. Nature and grace remained isolated: Humans would
enjoy redeemed existence only in heaven. Eighteenth-
century philosophers such as Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon,
for their part, gave currency to the idea that the supernatural
was a notion accepted only by the ignorant and the cred-
ulous.
The far-reaching impact of the Baroque on sensibilities
may be observed in the novel, a literary form whose real de-
velopment began in the eighteenth century. The supernatu-
ral, the Gothic, and the fantastic were predominant themes
in early examples of this mass-appeal genre. Suspense, terror,
and pleasure were sustained by stories of desolate houses,
mysterious dogs, vampires, murderous plants, doomed in-
fants, premature burials, and preternaturally lascivious
monks. An abundance of torture, carnality, magic, and soli-
tary horror placed the protagonist and the reader in a world
totally unlike the safe everyday middle-class world, and kept
them thrilled, constantly on the verge of terrifying doom or
unspeakable bliss. There was also a constant epistemological
suspense, a specifically modern feature in fantastic tales:
Were the events or apparitions caused supernaturally, or
were they in reality some clever manipulation of appear-
ances? The protagonist’s and the reader’s senses of reality
were kept constantly off balance, precisely at a time when sci-
ence and society worked together to give them a world as safe
as possible (Penzoldt, 1952). The entry of the supernatural
into literature raised interesting questions: Did readers who
enjoyed these novels believe in the existence of supernatural
beings and the possibility of supernatural occurrences? One
might agree that people believe anything while they are read-
ing it, but what happens to their belief when they are not
reading but instead dealing and coping with their everyday
world?
APPLICATION OF THE NOTION TO THE STUDY OF RELIGIOUS
AND CULTURAL SYSTEMS. Among scholars of the nineteenth
century it came to be commonly admitted that belief in what
Herbert Spencer has called “the supernatural genesis of phe-
nomena” characterized religious people. All religions were
said to feature belief in supernatural beings. Émile Durkheim
(1858–1917) noted that religion thrives on the sense of
things surpassing human knowledge, and he quoted Spen-
cer’s reference to the omnipresence of something inscrutable.
But Durkheim also stressed that the idea of the supernatural
appeared only very late in religious evolution, and that manySUPERNATURAL, THE 8861