ONLY one Archbishop of Canterbury is on record as levitating. St Dunstan (909-98) is said to have scraped the ceiling of Canterbury Cathedral, observed by many witnesses. The great height of his ascent is among the earliest recorded in Catholic hagiography.
Early modernity experienced a boom in levitations, especially in Italy and Spain. The most famous levitator of the era is perhaps Teresa of Ávila. Though most liable to ascend while receiving communion or chanting the office, she was once observed rising upwards, together with St John of the Cross, as they discussed the Holy Trinity from either side of the grille in her convent’s guest parlour.
Levitators often found their experiences unwelcome and disconcerting, and they could land them with uncomfortable scrutiny from the Inquisition, as Teresa found out. Even when they were vindicated as neither frauds nor demonically possessed, the consequences could be unpleasant. The Franciscan Joseph of Cupertino (1603-63), patron saint of aviators, found himself a prisoner shuttled between an ever remoter succession of monasteries and forced to live isolated from the other brothers.
Carlos Eire acquaints us with these characters in a lively way and elucidates the apparent “take-off” in the number of hovering holy folk. That frame includes the pressure to respond to Protestant attacks on Catholic miracles and the advent of scientific scepticism.
Eire contends that such levitation accounts shouldn’t be dismissed as “irrational”. Rather, uncertainties observed at the edge of contemporary physics (e.g. the paradoxes of quantum mechanics) should make us wary of materialist dismissal of miracles. People of faith, including Church Times readers, are likely to sympathise more with this line of argument than have some of Eire’s academic colleagues. The book, however, is problematic in its unwieldy opening out from levitation into a (long) general discussion of miracles in Post-Reformation imagination, during much of which levitation itself disappears from view.
AlamySt Joseph of Cupertino in Ecstasy (first half of the 18th century, private collection) by the Veronese artist Giambettino Cignaroli (1706-70). Joseph was canonised in 1767
Revising Weber’s “Disenchantment” thesis, Eire posits a series of interlinked cleavages in Protestant thought by which the Reformation “desacralised the world”. Accordingly, Protestantism thus, allegedly, changed how “matter relates to spirit . . . the natural relates to the supernatural . . . [and] how human nature relates to the divine”. Magisterial Reformers’ assault on Catholic miracles, and their claim that the “Age of Miracles” ceased with the apostles, had knock-on effects. Miraculous happenings once viewed as manifesting the (divine) supernatural were banished from authentic Christian experience: they now appeared demonic.
This argument is unworkable. Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli expounded the doctrine of the “Cessation of Miracles”, but did not thereby create a new mentality. Subsequent Protestant attitudes differed significantly.
John Foxe included miraculous occurrences in the stories of early church virgin martyrs (and contemporary Protestant ones) in Actes and Monuments — a book that shaped English Protestant culture. Protestant English monarchs conducted miraculous healings by “touching for the King’s Evil” (scrofula) up to, and including, Queen Anne’s reign. Long ago, Alexandra Walsham’s Providence in Early Modern England (OUP, 2001) proved that God had a habit of interrupting their subjects’ daily life in very physical ways. Eire, grudgingly, acknowledges similar evidence for Lutheran regions of Germany, while minimising its significance.
Protestantism reconfigured God’s surprising interventions in daily Christian life; it did not abolish it. Eire’s argument is unconvincing, but his free use of the split infinitive ensures that this a work which seeks to boldly fly where no early-modern historian has flown before.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.
They Flew: A history of the impossible
Carlos Eire
Yale £30
(978-0-300-25980-3)
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