The Natural History of a Neapolitan Miracle: The Secret of San Gennaro’s Blood

On August 4, 1943, the Allies bombed Naples and since a bomb fell near the city’s Duomo, rumors spread that the ampoules containing the blood of Saint Gennaro, the city’s patron saint, had been broken. Many persons began to repeat. “O sanghe, o sanghe, (the blood, the blood).” At the beginning, they repeated those words softly, then obsessively addressing to each other, while they were going to the church for news. The Italian writer Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) recalled that “despite the millions of dead scattered throughout Europe, it seemed that not even a drop of blood had touched the earth. And behold, at the announcement that the two precious caskets had been shattered, that those few drops of aggrandized blood had been lost, it seemed that the whole world was covered with blood, it seemed that all the veins of mankind had been cut to quench the insatiable earth’s thirst” (qtd. in De Ceglia, p.2).The news was incorrect and the ampullae have been preserved to this day. The reaction of the Neapolitans, however, emphasizes the very intimate bond that their city had created with that scarlet relic whose destruction would represent the destruction of Naples and its inhabitants as well. This is because Saint Gennaro is not a patron saint like any other, but he is constantly present and acting in every part of the city through his own blood, which, each time it returns to “life,” renews the covenant with its protégés. And woe when this does not happen! According to common belief, in fact, the blood of Saint Gennaro, usually melts on September 19, the liturgical feast of the saint. If this is so, apologists argue, it must really be a miracle, because there is no natural phenomenon that has such “intelligence” as to occur only on liturgically relevant dates.Francesco Paolo de Ceglia’s book explores the complex history of this miracle from 1389, the year in which the first mention of blood and its liquefaction is recorded, to the present day. The result is an erudite product that is anthropologically sound, historically intriguing, and imbued with the subtle irony that is the author’s hallmark. What does it mean to write the “natural history” of a miracle, which by definition lies beyond the limits of what is naturally investigable? It is the author himself who explains this in the prologue: “the natural history that we wish to outline here is not that of the miracle in itself but that of the culture that has identified it as a miracle, to either sustain or eventually challenge it” (6). More concretely, De Ceglia reconstructs the history of the efforts women and men of the past made in order to conceptualize the event as a miracle or, depending on who was speaking, as a trivial natural phenomenon, or as either an “occult” occurrence or, finally, as a scam the Neapolitan clergy had organized. That is why the most diverse and colorful characters populate the volume. These include, of course, ecclesiastics of all kinds, sovereigns, astrologers, and foreign travelers of the grand tour era, who were astonished by the alleged gullibility of the Neapolitans. Present are also scientists, some in favor of the miraculousness of that strange melting, some against. And above all, a host of performers, who, in various contexts, showed, with the most varied tools and using recipes that de Ceglia managed to recover, that they were able to replicate the alleged miracle.From this point of view, the book offers an insight into historical anthropology that uses the miracle of Saint Gennaro, Naples, and its picturesque stories as a window through which to look at the more complex evolution of the relations between the natural and the miraculous in Western Europe and of the very notion of credibility. At the end of that journey, the perception of nature is historicized and, with it, the possibility of divine intervention, which in Catholic theology changed according to how nature was perceived. When nature was understood in Aristotelian terms as non-normative, the miracle had to present itself as normative (the blood melted “whenever” it met the anthropomorphic reliquary with the saint’s head); when the miracle acquired the concept of “natural law,” it began to show itself as abnormal (the blood “decided” not to melt before unworthy people, such as enemy rulers or people professing another religion). Finally, when it was discovered that nature sometimes behaves normatively and sometimes not, it was anchored to the variable “time,” precisely because there can be no natural phenomenon that can occur only on liturgically relevant days. This “discovery” forgot, however, to take into account the fact that the blood is melted only on dates dear to the saint (not only on September 19), because the blood is exposed to the veneration of the faithful only on those dates. On other days it is locked in a tabernacle and no one can know what state it is in.What is appreciable in de Ceglia’s volume is how he manages to interweave the thread of historical events (and very tasty episodes) with an argumentative thread involving theology, philosophy, anthropology, and the history of science, in which he is an expert. All these features along with an iconographic apparatus, that is missing in the Italian version of the book, powerfully draw the reader into a Naples that is both far away and very close to us. The author and the publisher should be praised for allowing those who cannot read Italian to have access to this fascinating analysis. Let us hope that the paperback version of the volume will be published soon.