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.
Throughout his account, Eire agonizes over the difficulty of giving credence to otherwise credible testimony that falls short of proof, as well as the inadequacy of merely setting aside the question of whether the testimonies are in fact true. Permitting myself to speak immoderately, I take this to imply that the profession of history has developed methodological norms at odds with the writing of good history. For surely the options are not restricted to either demonstrating or bracketing the actuality of events. There is vast and fruitful ground between these poles. It seems to me that historical accounts are fundamentally hermeneutic endeavors—narratives intended to offer a good interpretation of the available evidence. Given a body of evidence, there are almost certainly going to be better and worse interpretations. Crucially, a compelling interpretation may fall short of proof while still providing reasons to think it is true, or at least raising our credence in that account.
And this is where Eire shows himself to be a better historian than he is willing to admit. Despite his sense that it is unsatisfying by the lights of his field, he writes good history. He knows he is violating norms, but he is too much of a craftsman to let that stop him. As a philosopher, I occasionally wanted him to argue the point that the prevailing norms are confused. Proof is much too stringent a standard for knowledge, let alone a high degree of credence. Historically speaking, I cannot prove that I have ever eaten curry and rice. But if you know me to be a truthful person, surely you can know that I have done so based on my testimony. Furthermore, it may interest Eire to know that Hume’s argument against rational belief in miracles is not very strong, as arguments go. (The entry for “Miracles” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a detailed accounting of its woes.) But Eire isn’t a philosopher, and, in any case, I don’t think engaging the arguments directly would be more persuasive than what he in fact does by providing a clear analysis of the grounds for accepting the veracity of at least some of this unusual testimony.
However, those readers who’ve been persuaded that some of the events may have really happened (such as I) may find themselves asking a further question. And this would be the same question that exercised the concerned parties in the seventeenth century: What—or who—is responsible for these supernatural manifestations? Are they divine or diabolical? Or—to consider a possibility that would have been less plausible at that time—are they neither? Maybe these signs and wonders were merely a misunderstanding of natural phenomena. As I read the accounts in Eire’s text, certain details struck me as suggestive, and so, perhaps incautiously, I will here briefly propose an answer to this remaining question.
In these early modern cases, it was often unclear to those immediately present whether the wonders were beneficial. Typically, confessors and overseers discouraged the mystics from these miracles. Some of those who had manifested wonders—such as Magdalena de la Cruz (1487–1560)—went on to confess they had done so in league with demonic entities, and so a cloud of suspicion hung over such episodes. This is why, for instance, Church authorities kept moving Joseph to more and more remote monasteries to keep him out of the public eye. Indeed, it was often unclear to the mystics themselves whether their episodes were beneficial. Teresa was left in severe pain for days following her more extreme ecstasies. Teresa, Joseph, and Maria each begged God to end their levitations and catatonic states, and for Maria, these conditions did cease. The benefit of hindsight does not suggest much benefit either. The wonders do appear to have bolstered the faith of some who saw or heard about them, but they just as much inflamed the sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants—the Protestants being adamant that the wonders were the work of the Devil.
Furthermore, each of these mystics was an extreme ascetic. Maria, for instance, constantly wore a hair shirt, slept on bare, rough boards, and attached needles to the back of a crucifix so that she would stab herself whenever she clutched it tightly to her breast. Joseph tortured himself so severely with hair shirts, self-flagellation, and extreme fasting that he became chronically ill, teetering on the edge of starvation, his skin one big open sore. This was not a man in a fit state to make sound judgments about anything.
More controversially, these mystics’ episodes sometimes included elements that today’s students of the supernatural would tend to associate with spiritual evil. The Internet has made the strange experiences of thousands available to all, and numerous podcasts are now dedicated to these troubled souls sharing their unusual stories. However, across these many cases, certain commonalities emerge. On this basis, I note the following associations: Each of Eire’s subjects experienced catatonia in their episodes, which is common today in experiencers of the spiritually malign as sleep paralysis. (For a deeper look, watch the 2015 documentary The Nightmare.) Both Teresa and Maria describe what seem like out-of-body experiences, which are often described as a sinister means of contacting spiritual beings. Most ominously, during one of Maria’s ecstasies, “a resplendent globe of light descended from above, extremely clear and beautiful, and it hovered for a long time…taken to be a heavenly prodigy.” Such “globes of light”—once known as “will-o’-the-wisps” or “fairy lights”—are now called “orbs” and are often associated with spiritually evil presences, accompanying hauntings, nightmares, and alleged abductions. Make of these associations what you will, but each of the mystics recognized that diabolical forces were present, complaining as they did of near-constant torment by demons.
But perhaps most telling are the ways these seventeenth-century wonders influenced the core practices and pivotal doctrines of the Christian faith. Eire makes it clear that the supernatural displays were typically occasioned by the mystics’ attempted participation in corporate worship. “Celebrating Mass was a constant trigger,” he notes, and sometimes the episodes completely derailed the proceedings. One Pentecost Sunday, Joseph flew into the air during Mass, “gyrating like a lightning bolt around the chapel, blasting out a strange booming scream” that panicked the friars, driving them out into the yard. Because Communion induced her episodes as well, Maria came to avoid that sacrament altogether.
In describing her many ecstasies, Maria claimed to have spoken with Mary, the Mother of God, upwards of five hundred times. During these meetings, Mary dictated her autobiography to Maria. The resulting text was more than 2,500 pages long and was eventually published as The Mystical City of God. While the work told the alleged life story of Mary in exhaustive detail—including her routine conversations with the Godhead—its primary goal was to elevate Mary’s status closer to that of divinity. Reporting statements she attributes to God, Maria emphasizes that—just like Christ—Mary had a virgin birth, is a redeemer of mankind, and is a mediator between God and man. Superficially, these are not especially controversial claims within the Catholic tradition. On the basis of her giving birth to the redeemer and mediator, for example, she had long been represented as participating in these activities—albeit in a subordinate sense. But Maria’s narrative goes further, pushing Mary closer to Christ’s status, eroding Christ’s claim to uniqueness, promoting Mary to the edge of divinity. Maria goes so far as to characterize Mary as “complement of the ineffable and most holy Trinity.” Given that “complement” means that which improves, completes, or perfects, this is a striking claim.
This theological innovation came with a practical implication. In her accounting, God tells Maria she has been chosen to reveal these new truths, which had been intentionally left out of the gospels and saved for the troubled seventeenth century. God’s proposed solution for this wayward age was not that Christians should cling to Christ with renewed vigor but turn instead to Mary’s intercession. These assertions may seem to some like finicky points of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy. But within the tradition, there is little that is more significant than the identity of God and his relationship to humanity. Divinity and humanity overlap in precisely one person, and that is not Mary. Insofar as Maria’s new revelation undermines this idea, it would seem to threaten the foundational tenets of the Christian religion.
But enough theology. Taken together, these suggestive details paint a certain picture: The signs and wonders of these early modern mystics were not clearly beneficial, either to their subjects or to the Church. The authorities of the Church were likewise mostly unconvinced. The mystics were committed to the destruction of their bodies, practices that affected their minds and called into question the soundness of their judgment. Categories of supernatural phenomena refined by further testimony since the seventeenth century classify many elements of the mystics’ episodes as spiritually evil. Maria received a revelation that attempted to refocus Catholic doctrine and practice toward the deification of Mary. The mystics’ episodes themselves coincided with Mass and disrupted the worship of God.
In this light, the wonders of our three mystics seem to point in a particular direction. If the wonders were mere natural phenomena, this apparent teleology would be an unexplained coincidence. If they were from God, then it would be inexplicable why they seem so ordered to the frustration of the religion. The third possibility, however, would make sense of this apparent teleology. It would also dovetail nicely with the testimony of those priests and nuns who eventually confessed that they had operated in league with the powers of darkness.
They flew, but perhaps this is cause not for wonder but for horror.