For a goodly portion of his life, when presented with the Eucharist, Friar Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663) would let out a deafening shriek and fly around the chapel. In an ecstatic state brought on by the prospect of Holy Communion, he would sometimes end up in the rafters. Joseph’s flights and screams were witnessed by hundreds, if not thousands of people, Catholics and Protestants alike. Nearby in Iberia, Sister Maria of Ágreda (1602–1665) claimed to have bilocated more than five hundred times, during which she was taken in bodily form by angels to proselytize to Native Americans in the American Southwest while at the same time remaining in her convent in Spain. Her testimony was supported by accounts from the tribes she claimed to visit, the witnesses having been interviewed later by Catholic missionaries in what is present-day New Mexico. A few decades earlier, Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) frequently went into catatonic reveries—often accompanied by levitation—during which she claimed mystical union with God. Teresa was displeased with these irruptions of the extraordinary and requested her fellow nuns to hold her down whenever she began to rise off the floor.
These are but a few tantalizing tidbits among hundreds of similar accounts Carlos Eire relates in his book They Flew: A History of the Impossible. While this book provides a fascinating window on a very different culture during a time of civilizational upheaval, none of these stories could really be true.
Or could they? I am not so sure. Nor do I think the author is either. Admittedly, Eire, a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University, introduces his narrative with several dozen pages discussing the current norms of the discipline of history, which is apparently beholden to a narrowly empiricist Enlightenment epistemology. While he recognizes that there are dissenters—and catalogs them in the epilogue—he makes clear that his profession, as a rule, prefers to reject any appeal to the supernatural. He quotes D.P. Walker, an authority on the occult: “Whatever their personal beliefs, historians should not ask their readers to accept supernatural phenomena.” The rationale for this sort of exclusion seems to be the difficulty of obtaining proof. As Eire observes, “The issue of whether so-and-so really flew cannot be addressed…for there is no way anyone today can prove that someone really hovered or flew…in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.” He also appeals to David Hume’s infamous argument against the possibility of rationally believing that a miracle occurred. On the strength of these observations, Eire says we must bracket the question of whether these events really took place and instead study the fact that many people once claimed and believed they took place.
That is what Eire says. But his treatment of the testimonies tells a different story. Eire’s lengthy, detailed accounts of these alleged miracles are based not merely on the untrustworthy hagiographies of the mystics profiled but also on numerous testimonies given to agents of the Inquisition. For interesting political reasons, the Roman Catholic Church’s investigating office was disinclined to automatically accept these reports of the miraculous. The inquisitors were often cunning agents seeking to discredit the orders from which these mystics hailed, and they successfully exposed many fraudulent claims to the miraculous. But sometimes, too, the inquisitors judged the episodes to be genuine. Perhaps most tellingly, both Catholics and Protestants—then the bitterest of enemies—tended to agree that many of these events were really happening. In a particularly striking case, Johann Friedrich, a Lutheran duke from Saxony, broke down in tears and converted to Catholicism after witnessing Joseph of Cupertino levitate for fifteen minutes during a Mass in 1649.