Levitation and bilocation: a courageous history of supernatural belief

When I first came across Carlos Eire’s recent book They Flew, I was awestruck at the courage of the man. He is a Catholic historian and a professor at Yale. And yet here he is, setting out to stretch our imaginations and our prejudices into new shapes, by confronting us with his exploration of “the history of the impossible”.

Of all the fascinating aspects of the miraculous, perhaps the one that takes the biscuit – the one that even I fight shy of, the one that pushes the envelope just too far – is the practice of levitation. Eire acknowledges that it is “strange stuff, for sure, and there is no predicting how anyone might react to it”.

As a professor of history, Eire goes in for careful documentation. In fact, it is the sheer bulk of eyewitness records that gives his work its weight and authority. When he presents evidence of saints hovering in the air, he does it as a scrupulous organiser of eyewitness accounts. And if levitation wasn’t enough, he also adds a bit of bilocation to the mix.

In order to write this book, a work that was 40 years in the making, Eire rummaged through scores of archival sources – primary  documents in French, Italian, Latin and Spanish, including reams of testimonies from eye witnesses and transcripts from courtroom hearings and ecclesiastic inquisitions – and hundreds of secondary accounts from the period.

This work is intellectual cheek of the highest order. Both levitation and bilocation are obviously completely impossible in a Newtonian universe – at least for those of us who think we know what Newton stands for. But as Eire reminds his readers, Newton wrote much more about alchemy and prophecy than he did about the laws of physics.

When we turn to Newton for reassurance about the world being constituted of unbreakable laws, we’re not always on the solid ground we think we are. David Hume isn’t much help, either. He urged on the wise a willingness to proportion their capacity for belief to the scale of the evidence. The trouble is that this works very strongly in Eire’s favour, because the source-evidence is thick on the ground.

The problem is prejudice. As part of a Reformation reaction to Catholic mysticism the spiritual and the physical had to be confined to entirely different realms, and miracles no longer happened. Our empirically-addicted enlightenment culture swallows this unproven prejudice whole; a sceptical secular atmosphere  declares anything unmeasurable impossible.

So, meet St Joseph of Cupertino (1603-63). The contemporary accounts of his flying up to the ceiling in spontaneous unrestrainable ecstasy are more numerous than any others – and yet you may not have heard of him. His levitations were not always predictable but could easily be triggered by anything that affected him spiritually. Simply hearing the names of Jesus or Mary could do it, as could sacred music or the beauty of nature. Prayer, especially, was a common trigger. Saying Mass caused him to rise in the air frequently, especially at the moment of consecration.

I particularly like the evidence of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick (1625-79). As Lutheran sceptics go, few came more rational and intellectual than him. In fact, it was he who snared the brilliant German polymath Gottfried Leibniz to come and work for him in his library at Wolfenbüttel – he was no gullible pushover. And yet it was when he slipped incognito into a Mass that Father Cupertino was celebrating he was utterly overwhelmed by Joseph’s inexplicable floating to the ceiling. He renounced his Lutheranism and became an enthusiastic Catholic instead.

Joseph’s levitation in fact became something of a problem to his community. It only got more complicated when the Pope took an interest. In an audience with Urban VIII he found himself hovering above the head of the pontiff, as he was caught up both figuratively and literally in rapture. It was only when his vows of obedience were invoked and he was sternly ordered down by his superior that he came back to earth.

Rather surprisingly, holy flying was equally well documented by those who lived with St Teresa of Avíla (1515-82). So far from being an attention-seeking trick, as some suspected, St Teresa begged God to relieve her of the burden of it. She also begged her sisters to grab her and hold her down if they saw any daylight begin to emerge under her feet and any hint of upward slippage. They tried, but they found it impossible to restrain her.

Eire quotes the great French historian Lucien Febvre: “To comprehend is not to clarify, simplify, or to reduce things to a perfectly clear logical scheme. To comprehend is to complicate, to augment in depth. It is to widen on all sides. It is to vivify.” As we struggle with the challenges that life presents us, it’s reassuring to know, as St Luke reminds us, that “with God nothing is impossible”.

They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire is published by Yale University Press (£30/$35)

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