We are delighted to host Dr. Carlos Eire, T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, this April for our annual Holmer Lecture which features leading Christian scholars in the humanities. Dr. Eire is a distinguished historian of early modern Europe whose many books include the sweeping Reformations: The Early Modern World (Yale University Press, 2016) as well as the National Book Award-winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press, 2003).

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The following excerpt is from his most recent book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press, 2023) that examines the widespread, well-documented accounts of levitating and bilocating saints in early modern Europe. In undertaking this historical investigation, Eire not only helps us better understand the mental world of early modern Christians, but also raises significant questions about our methods in studying the past: How should historians deal with accounts of past supernatural phenomena? To what extent should our present judgments of possibility and impossibility constrain our interpretation and judgment of the past? As the following excerpt from the book’s introduction makes clear, They Flew challenges any simple account of “modernity” as the progressive triumph of naturalistic over supernaturalistic construals of reality. We hope that you’ll join us for Eire’s visit in April for a provocative wrestling with accounts of the supernatural in history!

In the Whiggish¹ view of history, phenomena such as witchcraft and levitation are powerful markers of cultural difference, telltale traits of an older, inferior civilization, of the “superstitious” and “magical” culture of the ancient and medieval worlds. In fact, it is precisely these markers that provide one of the most certain boundaries between what is “modern” and what is not. Supernatural phenomena are modernity’s foil, significant foci for the articulation of the norms of “modernity” itself. They are also markers that distinguish what is important from what is not. And this is not only true of Whiggish history, which puts forward the Protestant rejection of medieval piety as the first step toward “modernity.” It is also true of postmodern history.

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Conversely, witchcraft and magic are seen as “important” subjects because they bespeak of Whiggishness itself and of all attempts by elites to dominate their subalterns. Witches and New World natives share the same universe of meaning for postmodern and postcolonial history. Both are victims of the ancien régime² writ large—that is, the hyperrationalist, exploitative, moralizing, male-dominated, patriarchal, homophobic, sexist, chauvinist, exploitative, Eurocentric imperialist world order. Nuns and friars who levitate, and, incidentally, reject the central values of Eurocentric hegemony in their monastic vows, somehow do not seem to belong in that same universe of trendy significance. Why not? That is a post-postmodern question waiting for an answer. Perhaps the question itself is a marker of the boundary between the postmodern and whatever may succeed it? The post-postwhatever?

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Levitating saints raise questions that no historian should avoid. Never mind the metaphysical questions, that floating ten-ton anvil that historians dare not touch, much less acknowledge. Aside from the fact that they reify social constructions of reality, levitating saints allow us to peer into the very process of cultural change, offering unique insights into an essential component of the transition to modernity. Their flying and hovering reveal complexities about an epistemological revolution that up until very recently was assumed to follow a steep and well-defined upward curve: the triumph of rationality over primitive credulity and superstition. When Max Weber argued in the early twentieth century that the Protestant Reformation was instrumental in the gradual “disenchantment” of the world and the rise of rationalism and empirical science, the miraculous and supernatural had already been stripped of legitimacy.⁴³ Some bits and pieces of this history have been claimed—as in the case of witchcraft—by those who have found it useful for the promotion of certain social, cultural, and political causes in their own day. Some historians have been an exception to this rule, straining to understand the past on its own terms and accepting the transition to modernity as a very complex process in which the redefinition of the boundaries between the natural and supernatural did not always follow a Whiggish or Weberian upward curve.⁴⁴

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Anyone who examines the early modern period carefully should eventually discover that the public sphere in Western Europe was rife with levitating saints and flying witches and other impossible events. This should seem odd, not only because this was the age of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz but also because—as Weber assured us all—Protestantism had already “disenchanted” the world.⁴⁵ Under the Weberian formula, how can one explain the Protestant belief in flying witches? How does one account for the fact that Protestants left the devil in full control of his preternatural powers while they stripped God of his supernatural powers on earth? And how does one account for the fact that John Frederick of Saxe-Lüneberg, a Lutheran prince converted to Catholicism as a result of Joseph of Cupertino’s levitations, was Leibniz’s patron? Or that Newton, born in 1643, could have journeyed to Fossombrone or Osimo as a young man to lay eyes on Saint Joseph, “the Flying Friar”? 

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In the past few decades, some historians have begun to call attention to the way in which both Catholics and Protestants started redefining the concepts of natural and supernatural.⁴⁶ Much of this work stresses the fact that the epistemological and metaphysical gap between Catholics and Protestants was one of their principal battle lines. Since Protestants tended to reject the miraculous as impossible, most of this recent work has focused on Catholics and on how they tried to identify “real” miracles or on how they tried to argue rationally for their occurrence, relying on the concepts of natural and supernatural or preternatural that were commonly shared by priest, minister, and scientist alike.⁴⁷ Precise definitions and boundaries were of immense concern for Protestant and Catholic alike in the early modern period, as were those individuals who seemed to trespass the laws of nature. Levitating saints and flying witches were no sideshow but part of the main act, as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age and as much a part of history as Newton’s apple.⁴⁸ Distinguishing between the natural and supernatural was as crucial as telling right from wrong and as necessary as classifying the airborne as either “good” or “evil.” The shocking truth is that both Protestants and Catholics professed belief in human flight and tried to sort out the airborne among them. No one can deny that the sorting took place at the very same time that calculus, empirical science, and atheism emerged in Western culture. 

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That is a fact. 

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But what does this fact tell us about the impossible? What does it tell us about the past and the way we strain to understand it or the present and its concerns and unquestioned assumptions? Why do we have high-speed magnetic levitation trains but feel the need to bracket all reports about hovering saints or witches? How can millions of us humans be in multiple locations simultaneously via the internet, day after day, but still feel the need to scoff at bilocation? Why is the only fact that we can accept about human levitation the fact that others, long ago, thought it was possible? What difference does that make? More than a question mark? Yes. Much more than the question mark missing from the following sentence: 

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“They flew.”