Suspensions of Disbelief

They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Carlos Eire, Yale University Press, 2023, 492pp, £30, hardback

In 1645, at Copertino in the Puglian heel of Italy, an auspicious audience took place. Luisa de Sandoval Padilla, wife of the Papal ambassador and Spanish viceroy Juan Alfonso Enriquez de Cabrera, had requested to meet Father Joseph, a Franciscan friar who had, after a troubled progress into the novitiate, acquired a certain renown. Luisa’s husband had, some days before, visited Joseph in his cell and witnessed him levitating in a state of spiritual ecstasy. Now Luisa had been granted a meeting, along with several of her retinue of ladies-in-waiting, at the Basilica of St Francis. Joseph had a fastidious aversion to being in the presence of women, but graciously agreed to make an exception for the viceroy’s wife.

If they had any doubts about what they were about to see, these were dispelled the moment Joseph arrived. Carlos Eire takes up the story:

as soon as he entered the huge church through a side door, he shrieked and flew twelve feet above the heads of his illustrious visitors, hovered for a while in ecstasy above an image of the Virgin Mary, shrieked again, flew back to his takeoff point near the door, and returned to his cell silently, his head bowed, his face hidden from view by his cowl … the count-duke-viceroy’s wife and all the ladies in her retinue fainted … [she] had to be revived with smelling salts and a generous amount of holy water sprinkled on her face.

The moment is captured in a line engraving by Gioan Antonio Lorenzini in the Wellcome Collection in London. It shows the viceroy sunk on one knee, caught between chivalrous concern for his unconscious wife and astonished besotment at the extravagantly haloed friar who hovers, arms outstretched, immediately above her head.

Eire’s aim in this capacious, deeply researched and often perplexing book is to account for episodes of the miraculous from a historian’s perspective, seen through the retrospective lens of what has become known, if not universally, as the post-secular age. The three principal themes are levitation events, instances of bilocation – the phenomenon by which the same living person appears in two different places, often separate continents, at once – and other miscellaneous acts of what the medieval world knew as witchcraft. The author is right to point out that another meticulously rationalist dismissal of such alleged phenomena adds nothing to the sum of knowledge, but sets out to poke the hermeneutical hornets’ nest by accepting these events as both widely witnessed and believably true.

There is, Eire acknowledges, a tragic aspect to the miraculous, which often devolves on the severe testing of those who claimed to have experienced or witnessed it. In centuries gone by, the Catholic church resorted to inquisitorial methods, not excluding the hideous tortures that are passed over rather lightly in the narrative here, to establish the truth of what flying nuns and stigmatic priests were claiming. There is as much melancholy salience in the fact that many of these people testified that they wished they had not had these miracles bestowed on them, as there is in the fact that the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, as it used to be known, regularly suppressed claims of supernatural events where it suspected deliberate fraud, or some other intent to deceive. St Teresa of Avila, whose biography Eire has also written, always claimed to be a reluctant levitator, and reported in her personal memoir that she experienced a bittersweet mix of suffering and joy, pain and bliss, during her aerial episodes, describing her condition as a ‘violent, delectable martyrdom’.

Cases like those of Saints Joseph and Teresa multiply throughout the book, together with one or two that were investigated and found to be crude fakes that had nonetheless fooled many eyewitnesses. María de la Visitación, the so-called Nun of Lisbon, born Benedetta Carlini, was found by the Inquisition in 1588 to have feigned her trances and self-inflicted some of the wounds of her stigmata, while daubing on the rest with paint. Her levitations were achieved by means of wooden poles hidden under her habit, and her celestial luminescence was a phantasmagoric effect of lamps and mirrors. She was sentenced to lifelong isolation in a convent outside Lisbon, where she served thirty-five years as a penitent. Some authorities feel that her sexual relationship with another nun had played an unacknowledged part in her banishment.

Such incidences go to the heart of what Eire’s book is asking us to consider. If people were prepared to fake miraculous visitations and supernatural events, as they have been in all eras, they cast inevitable doubt on those that seem to have greater claims to veracity. There is more, however, to this debate than just the reiterated conflicts of science versus religion, reason against faith, the material world of concrete, verifiable and falsifiable phenomena and the metaphysical realm that continues to impinge on human consciousness, no matter how much of empirical trust we have in physical outward reality. At the heart of this book is a more profound inquiry into belief itself, about what we are prepared to accept in what other people say about what some other people, four centuries ago, say they saw.

In a telling coinage, Eire claims that ‘doubt always rubs faith raw’. This comes in the immediate context of pointing out that too many miracles, such as there were in the early modern era on which his book focuses, tend to devalue the currency. If the supernatural keeps happening, at what point does it become the natural? What he fails to address is the obverse of this proposition. What if there are too few miracles? How are certain branches of the Christian faith – historically the Roman Catholic church, but also, increasingly, the Evangelical and Pentecostal communities at the outer edges of today’s Protestant universe – to maintain their devotional potency to their congregations, if they do not continue to offer evidence, or at least claims, that fly in the face of everyday observance? The beatification and canonisation procedures of Catholicism depend on permissible evidence that the candidate has been responsible post mortem for miraculous occurrences, notably of healing, in the present world. Is there not, to put it bluntly, a vested interest in miracles?

Theological history has queried what it calls the ‘cessation of miracles’, namely the apparent fizzling out of miraculous healings and apparitions by the end of the first century of the Christian era. The disciples of Jesus continued, according to the Acts of the Apostles, to perform wonders after his death and resurrection, but after they had passed on, there were fewer and fewer reports of these phenomena. The argument of the Protestant churches was that this was because miracles were needed at this preliminary period in order to bring converts to the new faith, but once the church was installed at the institutional level in the Roman Empire, it could dispense with them. To the Catholic mentality, though, this always seemed a squalidly instrumentalist argument, and one it transcended by its persistent accreditation of miraculous events through the ages.

Eire makes a reasonably thorough job of assessing the arguments for and against the stance of the Catholic church throughout history, but by the time he has ventured out into the centre of the frozen lake, the ice proves perilously thinner. There is a persistent logical elision in They Flew that consists in stating that, because it is a fact that many people claimed to have witnessed these levitations and bilocations, we can treat their testimony as itself factual, while at the same time parenthesising the question of whether we are entitled to our own exercise of incredulity. A typical passage on St Teresa declares that ‘[w]hether or not one believes Teresa or the eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen her levitate is a moot point. The fact remains that we have many such testimonies and that she reified [sic] many Catholic beliefs that were being challenged in her day and age’. Whether one believes it is hardly ‘moot’. Indeed, it strikes at the very essence of this lengthy book. There is a valuational difference between doubting the word of Teresa herself and querying that of the many who claimed to have seen her ascend into the air, but given that both claims are hard to swallow, it is a fairly shabby sleight of hand, and one that is all too transparent, to pretend that it hardly matters, even while arguing pugnaciously that it was all true.

On the bilocations of María de Ágreda, a seventeenth-century Spanish nun, Eire concludes the first of two chapters devoted to her by stating ‘one must ask why something as impossible as bilocation was thought to be possible, at least in some cases, and how anyone could ever seek to prove it or believe it? But, in the case of Sor [Sister] María, suspending one’s disbelief was often necessary, for bilocation was only one of her incredibly impossible achievements’. But why is the suspension of disbelief imperative? The only reason given is that it was true, but that claim establishes nothing. One could answer Eire’s rhetorical question by saying that, while it is limitlessly possible to show why people believed it, it is conversely impossible to prove it. And here the logical conundrum of negative verifiability arises unacknowledged. The impossible cannot of course be proved to be possible, but nor can it be proved to be impossible. It may await explanation, or it may forever repose in the sacred groves of piety, but it gains nothing through being transposed into the canons of objective historical method.

In his Epilogue, Eire avows that such matters as incombustibility, the refusal of saintly mortal remains to be consumed by fire, are ‘facts to be reckoned with’, while again showing nothing more than the fact of some people’s belief in it. He rightly argues that the church has moved with the times, keeping pace with many of the scientific and medical discoveries that, for earlier eras, were among the mysteries of God’s created world. Ceremonies such as exorcism have been extensively reformed, even abandoned, and the church, by and large, is no longer given to torturing to death old women identified as witches, or insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth. What is missing from the book’s conclusion is any candid confrontation with the fact that levitations and other such events have become progressively much more scarce since the end of the eighteenth century, and, where they do still sporadically arise, it has not been possible to attest them with the multifarious recording technologies available now to virtually everyone in the developed world. Just as Victorian ghosts shied away from the cameras of the first generation of photographers, so levitating friars, if there are any, have declined to perform for a roomful of mobile phones.

Ultimately, this is not the philosophical-historical work it wishes to be, but a document of unavowed Catholic theology, as is evidenced by the dismally repetitive attacks on Protestants the author allows himself at regular intervals. Whether Protestants themselves will be upset by this is something like one of Eire’s ‘moot points’, but to the unaffiliated reader, the book keeps sinking into a slough of interconfessional invective that does nothing to make its arguments more persuasive. Any possible objection to the argument he wants to make about María de Ágreda’s memoir is subjected to the now familiar wafting hand: ‘It matters little – or not at all – that she has never met a Protestant, much less debated with one.

Her message is thoroughly Catholic and, whether she knows it or not, devastatingly anti-Protestant.’ One might wonder, on her behalf, whether María’s ecstasies mattered more to her than establishing which team her readers in later ages were on, but Inquisitions never sleep.

Or do they? A Spanish inquisitor in Navarra, Alonso de Salazar Frías, achieved the unthinkable feat in 1614 of persuading the Supreme Council of the church in Madrid to cease the persecutions and trials of witches. Not only were the extorted confessions full of contradiction, but there was no evidence whatever of devil worship or evildoing. The result was that the church pardoned those already condemned to being burned alive, and the witchcraft trials were brought to an end in Spain. In the ecclesial atmosphere of the day, and to the eventual relief of the pointless human suffering in which the church played an egregious and extravagant part, this counts at least as evidence of God’s will finding its way in the fallen world. More than airborne nuns and shrieking friars, here is pure, and wholly attestable, evidence of the existence of miracles.

 

Stuart Walton is a cultural historian, novelist and critic. He is author of An Excursion through Chaos: Disorder Under the Heavens (2021), Introducing Theodor Adorno (2017), In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling (2016), A Natural History of Human Emotions (2004), Intoxicology: A Cultural History of Drink and Drugs (second edn, 2016), and a monograph on the chilli pepper, The Devil’s Dinner (2018). His novel, The First Day in Paradise, was published in 2016. Sleepless Nights: The Faults and Failings of Love, a critical theory of romance, will be published by Academica Press in 2024.