Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original
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Any additional fragments of Hipparchus' works is of great interest to the history of mathematics and astronomy.
Apparently the only pre-modern people (i.e. pre-Giordano Bruno) recorded as making the claim were Anaxagoras and Aristarchus of Samos [0], but their ideas were completely rejected by contemporaries.
In retrospect, it just seems so blindingly obvious that I'm tempted to believe that I too would have seen through the Aristotelean BS.
But surely there must be aspects of reality that will seem similarly obvious to future generations, and yet I don't feel any insights coming on.
I should say, Aristarchus is the ideal of maximizing information from minimal data:
>Aristarchus of Samos (Samos is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea) lived from about 310 to 230 BC, about 2250 years ago. He measured the size and distance of the Sun and, though his observations were inaccurate, found that the Sun is much larger than the Earth. Aristarchus then suggested that the small Earth orbits around the big Sun rather than the other way around, and he also suspected that stars were nothing but distant suns, but his ideas were rejected and later forgotten, and he, too, was threatened for suggesting such things
That being said, I also believe that the ancients were well-aware that our Sun is a local star. And by extension, that stars are distant suns. I have been doing research on the Star of Bethlehem, and it is painfully, obviously clear that the Star sought by the Magi is the Sun itself, since when they met with Herod, they first described Springtime (late April through June) and then the Winter Solstice as they pursued the Sun to Bethlehem. Furthermore, anyone traveling for seven months, and only at night, in the ancient world, while bearing priceless treasures, would have been fools, unless they also carried torches, weapons, mercenaries, and medical supplies. Furthermore, any Hellenistic pagan reading the New Testament would've clearly discerned the identification of Jesus with the divine aspects of Phoebus Apollo (among other Olympians); the Sun metaphors continue to the present day. The Star of Bethlehem simply cannot be distant, dim, or anything but our own Sol.
Anyway, yeah, recently the descriptions of the large-scale copying at the Port of Alexandria has convinced me that the Library amassed a gigantic collection of knowledge and texts, and those were, for the most part, safely transferred "by angels" to Sinai when the time was right. And palimpsests notwithstanding, there are still tons of texts still unread, unindexed, and undiscovered in there.
Sadly, Aristarchus's hunch was way ahead of his times and one could not convincingly explain the absence of screaming winds, absence of stellar paradox, could not convincingly explain why weights dropped from a height were not left behind as the Earth below spun away at fantastic speed.
In this duel of ideas I think the critics of Aristarchus's idea's were great scientists as measured by current standards, although they were wrong, they were wrong for the right reasons.
There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.)
With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and gravitation to solves this, more or less.)
The Ptolemaic system is an adhoc form of Fourier analysis (circles upon circles). These are universal approximators (another universal class are the neural networks) of (preferably smooth) periodic functions. So with enough epicycles one can fit any complicated periodic motion. But it will not help extrapolate the motion of Pluto from the motion of Jupiter, it's a data fit description, not a causal description.
This is also why I worry about the recent trend of using DNNs in astronomy. We may go Ptolemaic with them.
Maybe if the solar system had more than one star, or there were other stars very close, people would have caught on a lot quicker.
Pt 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U
Pt 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFMaT9oRbs4
Commentary and Corrections: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/13/cosmic-distance-la...
Apollo 13 astronauts used this method, works pretty well
Most cultural phenomena, be is classified as religious, philosophical, political, etc, are double-edged swords. The transition of the Western Roman empire to a succession of leaders from outside that tradition did lead to major losses in living standards of most Europeans. On the whole the root causes are certainly multi-factor such as large epidemics [1] and reflect significant susceptibilities in Roman culture. Many of the seeds for the Renaissance were held safe in the religious monasteries of the Medieval period and Cahill makes the case for the extremely remote Irish redoubts as making a critical contribution. If they made errors in which palimpsests to overwrite, well it is a pity that there wasn't a St. Linus of Torvalds there to save them with git.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...
That’s not that clear, at least when it came to the median European. Amongst other things demographic collapse usually results in higher living standards in agricultural societies due to there being more land per capita.
I don't think it is right to say that population loss usually results in higher living standards due to more land per capita. For one, in a pre-industrial society agriculture is labor intensive and the amount of land that can be worked by a person does not scale with land availability. The Black Death [1] economic section works out some of the less than positive impacts.
That’s not the necessarily best metric either, though. Roman city sizes (especially Rome itself) very inflated due to centralized state redirecting a lot of tax revenue there.
However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.
Your point is well taken although I must point out that for the above to be true the cities could never exist in the first place.
Depending on where you put the cut-off point of "premodern" the contact between precolumbian and European cultures in North America had some notion that people on the European side would sometimes immigrate to Indian culture but not vice versa. "The Down of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow [0] goes into transcultural impacts at length. A more original source can be found in a letter by Ben Franklin in 1753 [1]:
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and
habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one
Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that
this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from
this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young
by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends,
and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among
the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of
life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the
first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is
no reclaiming them.
1. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter...
This is not to say that tons of material was not lost, or only preserved in other places (e.g., Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East), but it ignores the learning and innovations of the medieval period (scientific, legal, theological, etc.), and of course the fact that so many classical texts were only preserved because of those monks copying them down.
Not all the Middle Ages were really Dark, but some of them were.
> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views
But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
And sure, the Reformation was made possible by internal forces within the religious institutions, slowly building ideological foundation for it.
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe. The lifestyle and thoughts of an English peasent in 600CE would be drastically different from the lifestyle of a Spanish or Frankish one, and would differ even more so between 600CE and 900CE.
2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
3. The Reformation didn't start until the 16th century, long after the Dark Ages are considered to have ended. Generously you could say it started with the Hussites in the 1400s but that's still skipping over the Renaissance entirely which is the absolute latest end for the Dark Ages since the whole point of it as a historical context is "rediscovering" the Classical works.
This is a non-answer. Yes, political systems were different. The ARE still different.
But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
> 2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
Ireland is often cited as one such place, thanks to early Christian monasteries. The Carolingian Renaissance was significant in Central Europe, and there were important cultural developments in Slavic lands, though perhaps not involving 'science' as such.
That seems different from what you originally argued but either way, that's also not really accurate. I'm going to assume you're referring to "Western Europe" here since you're clearly aware of Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire still existing, but that still leaves Al-Andalus, the Carolingian Renaissance, agricultural advancements like the three-field system, wheelbarrows, multiple types of milling technology, and during the latter end you start getting advanced compasses, bells, mechnical watches, and other metallurgy.
Where all of these done in one or two specific places? No, continuing to ignore Byzantium here, but there was a still a variety of advancements happening all the time without which the Renaissance couldn't have happened.
> It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
I mean, you can think that but that's not how or what the term "The Dark Ages" usually refers to. It sounds like you have your own constructed time period in mind and I'm not interested in discussing something I'm not aware of.
> If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
A very pointed date to choose.
> there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
If you define ~800 AD as the end of the dark ages then yes. By Charlemagne’s time that had already changes.
It wasn’t exactly flourishing in Gaul, and Germany during the Roman times either. Those regions had arguably surpassed their Roman peak by the end of the dark ages.
And of course science and scholarship were preserved in Constantinople during the entire period (of course they had some very dark moments too)
No, it is not. As Stryan noted in another response to your comment, the idea that medieval Europe was somehow one uniform culture is incorrect.
I would also add that the term "Dark Ages" is used in different ways by different people. People who don't know much about the Middle Ages often use that term to describe the whole of the Middle Ages, from roughly the fifth century to the end of the fifteenth (and Christianity had already spread around the Roman Empire by the fifth). Others just the early Medieval period (about 500 to 1000). Some limit the term to periods where we just don't have many sources, or it is perceived that we don't (e.g., I've heard it applied to Visigothic Spain).
Fourteenth-century Humanists (who lived at a time often considered to be part of those so called "Dark Ages"!) first used the term to contrast what they thought were the centuries between their lives and the classical period. They even went so far as to emulate the handwriting of the classical texts they favored, thinking they should because that's how the Romans wrote. They didn't realize they were copying eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian hands instead, texts copied by monks and clerics and court scribes because they valued them. (Lower case letters in modern languages that use the Latin characters, like English, are still based on Carolingian minuscule.)
And mind you, I'm not saying that it stopped _completely_, but it slowed down to a crawl.
Well it did in fact sped to an almost unparalleled pace after 1000 AD or so. How much progress do you think there was before the dark ages? The Roman Empire was rather stagnant (especially technologically and there were significant advances in agriculture, metallurgy and industry in the dark ages even before even before 1000 AD
But more importantly it wasn't static (or "almost entirely stopped")! It's an erroneous conception that, as I said, started with people who lived in the Middle Ages. People in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period would often repeat this, so now many people do too. That doesn't make it correct.
1000-1400s AD was a period of extremely rapid (by historical standards) economic, societal and technological progress. Just compare with the highly stagnant (in relative terms) Roman Empire between 0 AD and 400 AD. It was the opposite of the dark ages…
500-800s AD were not great, but plague, climate change and extreme political instability likely had a bigger impact on that than Christianity…
For example, monasteries were the primary centers of literacy and education in Europe during the early middle ages, and they acted as the primary bridge for the survival of Greco-Roman intellectual heritage in the West. Not always intentionally, but they were the only sanctuary for books during those times.
Besides, this is not how history works. Civilizations come and go and times of transition always take a toll. An eye-opening recent book on these questions I can recommend is Tom Holland's "Doninion: The Making of the Modern World".
The writings of St. John Climacus were also far more useful and interesting to people at the time since they dealt with what for them were practical matters of how to lead the life of their community. This isn’t because they were narrow-mindlessly religious. Monks also had to busy themselves with calendrical calculations — and therefore astronomy. These were works of what we would call practical philosophy or ethics, like the famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It would also have been tragic to potentially lose those culturally significant writings in favor of astronomical or mathematical texts.
All of this is valuable, both the cultural knowledge and the scientific. I doubt the monks realized the gravity of their choice so long ago.
Okay just kidding, but also people stealing what they think are good ideas, discarding the rest, and passing off what is passed along as their own? Everyone does that. Anyone who says different is blind to their own behavior.
And let's take a moment to appreciate the word 'value', one of the true heavy lifters in the world of words.
I mean, the star chart was probably something equivalent to a text book for us. Many texts were uniquely preserved at St. Catherine's since they had Mohammed's letter of protection not to mention being a fortress in the middle of a desert.
At the time the monks probably thought it was a common enough text to not worry about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent
According to this article his writings pre-date the Islamic conquest (639).
Of course, there was also this: https://www.sinaimonastery.com/index.php/en/history/mohammed
And St Catherine's is a fortress in the middle of the desert so who knows what it's status was, it was an interesting time (beginning of Islamic conquests).
Also, the monks and scribes creating palimpsest were not thoughtless. In the West we enjoy a very wide collection of ancient texts specifically through the diligent work of making and distributing copies. They were remarkably literate and intentional in their work.
A lot of these palimpsest were not entire books, but fragments or loose pages that had built up over centuries and then bound and repurposed. They were not any more sentimental with them than you would be with a pile of old journals from a thrift shop. A collection of celestial observations done by the eye were certainly not of particular interest to them.
It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.
Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
How to do real research, when you have to align every insight with some old book or face the stake? Only very restricted, in secrecy and not in open exchange.
So also in non christian societies people were killed for having the wrong ideas, but comparing greece or early rome with the christian empires, it seems obvious to me why progress was slowed down for so long.
I see you're one of today's lucky 10,000! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution#Great...
"So also in non christian societies people were killed for having the wrong ideas, but comparing greece or early rome with the christian empires"
Why do you think you told me something new?
"nothing comparable in religious history before the persecutions of Christians"
Rome's culture and traditional was fundamentally broken; it no longer served the needs of the Roman people, and if Christianity hadn't popped up, it would have been some other system of reform instead. The status quo was unstable, rapidly deteriorating. You may idealize the religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of the people?
Rome in the end was a decadent, but brutal empire full of slaves. And to a slave christian salvation sounds great.
But before there was a empire with emperors taking up the idea of becoming gods themself, there was a republic. And also after it became an empire, they did not have a institution like the inquisition shaping thought and banning heresy baked into their system.
This is the fundamental difference that I see.
In medieval times being expelled from the church was pretty much a death sentence. In roman and greek times for most of its existence not really.
Also, the Roman Republic were prolific slavers too. I say this because you speak of the Empire and slavery but then go into a "But the Republic.." This isn't Star Wars, you can't divide it into good guys and bad guys, the Republic and Empire were both imperial sons of bitches who conquered territory and took civilians as slaves. The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born.
My point here was about freedom of thought. And that seems to have been way more valued in the republic, than in the empire. (In general, good and bad are relative terms to me)
"The demand for reform that would eventually motivate mass conversions to Christianity was already well established before Caesar was even born."
And maybe so. But christianity in general was not really about freeing slaves, either.
This is a modern view with hindsight bias. In the ancient world, the existence of many gods did not imply peaceful co-existance, but very heated rivalry and politics.
Ironically pagan authors of late antiquity were the "conservatives" in our modern sense. Pagan literally means "farmer" - it might have similar implications to how we would call someone a "redneck" today. At the time, they were opposed to foreign gods and new influences on their traditional and respectable Pantheon.
I’m not sure there necessarily was that much progress before that, though? With some exceptions ancient societies were highly stagnant especially technologically in contrast to high-late medieval Europe.
Also plague, climate change and demographic collapse kind of directly kickstarted the dark ages.
And in ancient greece there were already concepts of a steam engine. I call that signs of progress not happening for a long time after that.
> already concepts of a steam engine
And it remained a concept (or was forgotten entirely for hundreds of years). So it hardly means much..
We also need to consider that these sorts of texts did survive because of monks. They kept the embers alive. Without them, we would have nothing, not living among the stars.
St John Climacus' writings are some of the most interesting in the history of Christianity. Probably the most mystical of all Christian writings and give an amazing insight into the history of Christian monasticism. Also still held in high regard for sure in the Orthodox Churches.
Darkly amusing is the Vatican. Reading about piety, service, generosity and kindness while beggars suffer at the entrance queue. The contrast between words and actions couldn’t be more striking.
Begging barefoot at zero degrees, poor health, dirty and miserable. I don’t see this as anything other than grinding poverty.
If I’m wrong, a sum that doesn’t matter to me was grifted.
Your explanation is convenient for the conscience.
> Abstract:
> Several Italian judges, including the members of the Supreme Court, have defined begging with children as a "Roma cultural practice". In response, the Italian Parliament enacted law no. 94/2009, which severely represses the practice. The article contests that begging is a Roma cultural practice and claims, instead, that it is an economic practice which may sometimes connect to other elements of Roma culture. The article critiques both the cultural argument put forward by Italian judges, and Italian law no. 94/2009, neither of which serves to defend the rights of Roma children. It concludes by suggesting a different kind of legal approach to child begging, more respectful of the constitutional duty of solidarity and protection of the family, and based on social policies rather then criminal repression.
and references to Article 669-bis C.P. talking about this 2018 law "re-introducing" limits to begging, so I suspect that the "impersonating a gypsy" bit was a mis-understanding and it was really "impersonating a person in need".
> If I’m wrong, a sum that doesn’t matter to me was grifted.
"Give to anyone who asks" is a fine approach, one that I follow too.
I’ve definitely been caught out by a fake, sad story before. In Santiago a guy had a story. The next day I saw him in different clothes with a new story.
As it is we have cabals of bankers and technocrats applying every mathematical and scientific advancement in attempting to construct their own version of global authoritarian priest classes. For now it stands they are only being held back by the other things learned from other humanist disciplines...
There might have been some hope that it could gradually transition to a somewhat more modern style of economic development, but this was hindered by the Barbarian invasions especially of the Huns, so this whole dynamic only really took hold much later, in the Middle Ages.
Not sure the Huns were the biggest direct threat either (unless we think that they are directly responsible for the Gothic migrations/invasions who were the ones who took over significant parts of the empire).
> provinces and basically amounted to plunder.
Also redistribution. The mid/late Roman state spent had huge taxes and spent almost all of it paying for its professional army almost all of which was stationed in the provinces.
As a consequence the Roman economy was highly monetized, long distance trade was widespread and different regions economically interdependent which again seems rather modern.
Also when talking about “plunder” in the ancient world it's almost entirely slaves not gold/silver or moveable goods. That had mostly dried up during the imperial period.
Of course there were significant regressions but the Roman world wasn’t exactly some pro-science utopia. Where do you think Christians got the idea of burning witches?
Climate change, the plague and extreme political instability (that already was ripping the Roman world apart for centuries) and the resulting societal, economic and demographic collapse pretty much made the dark ages inevitable (and the church was the only thing keeping the lights on however dim they were).
Witches and "cunning folk" are people who use metaphysical, occult means of spirituality to influence people and the environment. Witchcraft does not appear, to the dispassionate observer, to be scientific, evidence-based, or empirical at all.
Christendom was in the business of supporting many liberal arts and sciences, in terms of architecture, literacy, mathematics, chemistry/alchemy, exploration, R&D and building of war materiels and sea vessels.
It was the witches who were meddling and using occult means, such as divination, augury, psychological manipulation, and treachery to achieve their ends. It was witchcraft that was chaotic and working against orderly scientific inquiries about the natural world.
The witches were typically working clandestinely, stereotypically in a little hut in the woods, in the shadows. The scientists of Christendom were founding and running universities, seminaries, hospitals, and other institutional centers of learning. They were highly organized and orderly endeavors, and witchcraft threatened the natural and political order of things, which seems to be what science represents, even to the present day.
Necromancy and divination are practices depicted in the Old Testament. Everyone knows they are real, and dangerous.
The fact of practicing occultism or magic is that it may work by summoning/manipulating evil forces. That it may work by messing with things beyond human control and authority.
The Abrahamic religions uniformly forbid superstitions, occultism, witchcraft and all kinds of magic, not because they "are impossible" but because they're uncontrollable and dangerous, for anyone, anytime.
I suggest not making blanket claims about other people's beliefs.
Also, beliefs are not an argument for or against anything. There are a lot of widespread contradictory beliefs.
Well during the “dark ages” and much of the middle ages it was certainly the official position of the Catholic church that witchcraft did not and could not exist.
They tried banning it many times (the belief in witchcraft) and it was certainly considered heretical to think you were capable of performing magic or accusing anyone else of that.
Besides the theological arguments, it just wouldn’t have made any sense to legitimize pagan beliefs (which were still widespread at the time) by admitting that they were anything else that superstition.
Of course that kind of changed in the early modern period. Generally the protestants were quite a bit more into these type of superstitions and paranoia but of course the Catholic Church succumbed to it to.
However e.g. the Spanish Inquisition generally continued prosecuting people who believed in witchcraft or accused others of being witches.
That is definitely not true and it is impossible that an "official position" would be held and revoked later. This is not something that happens with doctrine or dogma.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15674a.htm
Supposing that the belief in witchcraft were an idle superstition, it would be strange that the suggestion should nowhere be made that the evil of these practices only lay in the pretending to the possession of powers which did not really exist.
Feel free to cite a refutation. Your assertion means nothing. You've made many assertions about church/European history and you must consider yourself well-read in the topic, so surely you know sources that support your (crazy, unfounded) assertion?
But before you refute anything, I urge you to carefully examine the article I cited, which in turn cites primary sources, and gives a thorough overview of condemnations throughout the "Dark" and "Middle" Ages we're discussing! No impossible or nonexistent practice could be condemned or punished, right?
Christian teaching has always insisted that magic, witchcraft, or occultism was "false" or superstitious and dangerous, but "false" does not mean "nonexistent" or "impossible".
Bottom line. The hostility of science against religion, and the perception of hostility of religion vs. science, is very new. It is completely novel. Christianity (and Islam and Hinduism alike) all encouraged scientific inquiry into the natural world, discover, architecture, engineering, and many projects stood atop the support of church patronage. Many engineering projects in the Middle Ages were accomplished by religious orders (cf. Carmelites built aqueducts in Spain, etc.) and if you ask Wikipedia for a list of scientists who were also clergymen, you'll see just how intertwined were faith and reason for the entire history of religion and science itself.
What can I say.. look up the council of Paderborn and canon law in general during the period.
> impossible that an "official position" would be held and revoked later
You don’t know much about the Catholic church do you? That’s kind of its thing…
> No impossible or nonexistent practice could be condemned or punished, right?
Belief in witchcraft and supernatural was of course widespread.. that’s why the church considered it heresy that they had to crack down on. Since effectively it challenged the legitimacy of Christian faith..
> examine the article I cited
Which you surely did not bother reading yourself.
> does not mean "nonexistent" or "impossible".
Belief in witchcraft is logically incompatible with non Gnostic Christianity, since only God can perform miracles.
> of scientists who were also clergymen
Yes, scientific method as we know it was to a large extent developed by Christian theologians back in those days. Not sure what does that have to do with magic and witchcraft?
Paderborn is particularly mentioned in the article I linked.
Paderborn condemned the pagan belief in witches. They condemned the pagan accusations and persecution of witches. They condemned the pagan practices of cremating them and of eating their flesh. Paderborn opposed the view that paganism or occult practices were "efficacious", in other words that they worked for people, doing what it says on the tin, and that they may not be dangerous.
> That’s kind of its thing…
Discipline vs. doctrine and dogma; public policy vs. beliefs and teachings; governance vs. faith and morals.
It is interesting, because you will find Christians and Catholics who insist that pagan gods do not exist. Or that they're not divine. Or that they are "false", or some are demons.
And that was exactly the controversy when Moses (I mean Yahweh) brought plagues on Egypt, and when Elijah went to sacrifice on Mt. Carmel, and when St. Paul preached before the Altar of the Unknown God in Athens. It's more or less a matter of framing, isn't it?
> only God can perform miracles.
This is true. And this is also why the evaluation of alleged "private revelation" or purported "miracles" may hand down a decision called "Constat de non supernaturalitate".
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/answers/discernment-of-priv...