They Flew: A History of the Impossible

They Flew is an exquisite historical study of individuals in Spain, Portugal, and Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who floated or flew, according to archival data, extensive personal witness, or autobiographical testimony: particularly Saint Teresa of Avila (1515 – 1582), Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603 – 1663), and María de Agreda (1602 – 1665). The author, a Yale historian of early modern Europe, is a biographer of Teresa of Avila and so comes to this subject with significant background, including the literature around Teresa's friend and confessor, Saint John of the Cross, who also levitated in literature, art, and life.One can hardly fault the author for not considering other possible interpretive options. He indeed discusses numerous figures throughout Christian history who flew or floated, including three “failed saints”: Magdalena de la Cruz (1487 – 1560), María de la Visitación (1551 – 1603), and Luisa de la Ascensión (1565 – 1636). The first was ruled to be “in the league of the Devil” (the traditional “it's a demon” interpretation). The second was convicted of fraud and vast trickery (the standard “skeptical” answer). The third, though formally declared innocent by the Inquisition twelve years after her death, never recovered from the humiliation that ensued from the investigations during her lifetime. There is a lesson for us. Do we really want to be a part of that historical humiliation?What is so remarkable about the existence of this book is the author's ability to step out of the historical descriptions and ask very serious questions about what is at stake — pretty much everything — in how we tell these stories or interpret these histories.It is difficult (I am tempted to write, “It is impossible”) for me to express the depth of my enthusiasm for this author and this book. This “history of the impossible” is at once an experiment and an expression of a more adequate historiography that takes seriously, which is not to say literally or naively, anomalous phenomena instead of whisking them away with the usual breezy and unconvincing words: hallucination, legend, anecdote.The expression “the impossible” also names quite precisely my own project. This is, no doubt, one central reason for my excitement. Indeed, I host a lecture series at Rice University called “Archives of the Impossible.” By the impossible, I mean phenomena that are considered to be impossible within a particular framework — today in the academy, largely scientific, social scientific, and humanistic — but happen regardless, and in a remarkably common and global fashion. Such experiences and events are not impossible at all. We just think and say they are to prop up a largely modernist and secular worldview.There are huge holes in such a flat picture. The topic of They Flew, human levitation, is just such a hole. As Eire points out with considerable verve, this particular human experience, which is also an event that deserves the historian's focused attention, embarrasses and outrages the secular scholar. Human levitation violates, of all things, gravity in a most obvious way. The impossible, then, is not just a matter of history and the humanities (or the social sciences, if you prefer). It is a matter of science, too. Unlike so many other impossible experiences (what we call, for example, precognition or telepathy), human levitation can be seen by others. It can be witnessed. It enters physical history.Human levitation is often far from “conscious” or “willed,” as we too naively say. Indeed, as the historical record and Eire show in abundance, much of human levitation comes through radically altered states of consciousness and embodiment. One is raptured beyond or outside one's own choices in a state of ecstasy or vision. One prays to God for it to go away (and sometimes it does, sometimes it does not). Or the state of levitation occurs in a trance, or in a form of what looks like a possession. There are many local words for such superbodies in the history of religions, but they occur everywhere and always, and as far as we can see back. Today, one commonly speaks of “abduction” (usually with an arrogant sneer). The word speaks again to this “unconscious” or “unwilling” component.Human levitation does not just offend conventional historiography or science, though. It also outrages particular religious orientations that literally demonize it. What Eire demonstrates with consummate skill is that the earliest skeptical literature around levitation did not actually doubt the phenomenon itself. It doubted the agency or source of the phenomenon. Was this from God? Or was this from the devil? Proponents of the sanctity of those involved could opt for a supernatural interpretation. Opponents, often Protestant intellectuals (who were committed to denying the saints and miracles of the Roman Catholic Church), usually opted for a demonic one. Hence the late medieval or early modern development of demonology, basically our first skeptical literature, but “skeptical” in a very particular way that exceeds modern skepticism, which is a concomitant of modernist materialism.David Hume, whom Eire also briefly addresses but quotes as definitive for this same modern period, opted for a different approach that is still adopted today: These “miracles,” as they were called, violated natural law, therefore they did not happen. The problem with this argument is that it assumes a kind of presentism — that is, the notion that the science of the time explains and determines all that happens. That assumption seems highly dubious today. And this is before we get to the endless suspicions around Hume's very Protestant assumptions and legal-theological projections, as if the very notion of “natural law” is itself innocent.Eire expresses a sophisticated historical skepticism throughout the entire book, but he also understands what these histories call into question. Certainly, our re-creations of the historical past are at serious stake. But so is our most basic scientific understanding of the cosmos and our humanistic understandings of the place and role of human beings and their religions. Eire does not directly answer these questions, but he does ask them. And his own implied answer is really in the book's title, which also functions as its final words, but with an exclamation point added: “They flew!”