Transcript for Interview with Carlos Eire on Christian Levitation

0. Introduction

Yale's Carlos Eire is one of the most respected historians in the country who's known for his methodical and rigorous scholarship of early modern Europe. His latest book, however, takes on a far more fantastical subject, the history of levitation. And its thesis is captured in its shocking title: They Flew. Humans actually levitated. Before I picked up this book, I was so skeptical that something like this could even be studied, let alone be true. But after combing through the mountains of evidence and grilling him for two-and-a-half hours, I walked away believing in the possibility of levitation.

In fact, studying this book led me to witness what I think to be a literal miracle with my own eyes, which I'll talk about at the beginning of this interview. If you listen to this conversation with an open mind, you'll see how investigating the supernatural is far from trivial, but one of the most fundamental questions at the heart of intellectual history, philosophy, and politics. So even if you walk away completely unconvinced of the reality of miracles in history, you're going to gain a profound appreciation for how thinking about the miraculous has shaped history.

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Johnathan Bi: How strong is the historical evidence that someone actually levitated?

Carlos Eire: Well, the evidence is there across time and across cultures. This is not just a Christian phenomenon. And as a matter of fact, whenever I would tell my colleagues who work in Asian religions about my project, their response was that they were totally non plus and like, yes, of course, of course, this is what happens to holy people. So we've got plenty of evidence. Nobody knows for sure how many have been recorded and who records them and how they're recorded until we got to the 16th century and the new canonization process which makes hagiographies, because that's what we had before, lives of saints, technical term hagiography from the Greek hagios. So the closer you get to the 16th century throughout say the medieval period from 11th century to 16th century, yes, there are numerous hagiographies and they're not as trustworthy about accounts of levitation as the stories that come after the canonization system is put into place.

Johnathan Bi: So when you say that the evidence and the strength of the evidence for levitation varies, let's just talk about the Christian tradition widely across different accounts. What do you think are the most compelling accounts that is the hardest to imagine that this was fraudulent, like single events of levitation?

Carlos Eire: Well, several conditions make certain levitations more believable. The extremity of vertical distance as well as horizontal distance covered by levitators especially in large spaces or even more convincing, outdoors, where it is difficult to imagine any equipment that could have been rigged up. Small levitations, let's say a foot off the ground, it's faked all the time. One of my fraudulent nuns actually faked it with platform shoes inside her habit. Nobody could see she was wearing platform shoes so they were like, oh, you're taller, you must be up in the air. So it's the circumstances and the extent of levitating that make it less possible that this could have been staged, which then leaves you with the option, okay, so are the testimonies all lies or not? And this is where some critics of my book have said not only that I am passing off the testimony of liars as true but even worse, I know they're lying yet...

Johnathan Bi: Right. You're also in on it.

Carlos Eire: Yes, I'm also in on it. Yes, yeah, I'm lying too. So you can't win, right?

Johnathan Bi: Right. Okay. So those are the things that you look for, right? The extremity... Basically how difficult it is to fake and then how good are the testimonies.

1. Joseph of Cupertino, Levitator

Johnathan Bi: Can you tell a few stories about the accounts of levitation that you think fulfill these criteria the best?

Carlos Eire: Yeah. Well, Joseph of Cupertino wins the prize hands down because he will rise to the very top of a large church inside to the ceiling. He will go forwards and backwards up several feet above the floor, like literally flying flat-out backwards and forwards, sideways. Outdoors there's one event which has been depicted in several paintings of Joseph of Cupertino sees that these workmen are trying to erect a very large cross outdoors, basically like a large life-size cross. And they're having trouble. It's too heavy. So he flies up, picks up the cross and puts it in the hole they had dug for it.

And this is one of the most off represented levitations of Joseph of Cupertino. It's hard not to compare him to Superman in the Superman comic books in the 20th century. But there's one that is also described in the canonization inquest of him seeing a lamb and taking the lamb in his arms and going outdoors with the lamb in his arms and ending up on a tree and then coming out of his ecstasy in the tree and having to be rescued with a tall ladder to come down from the tree.

Johnathan Bi: And what was the testimony for these instances? Was it the workmen? Was there one person in this time...

Carlos Eire: Well, for the one with the workmen, there were workmen and the people who saw this happen in that location. And I think that was kind of when he was in his younger years. I'm not too clear on the chronology of each of these but the lamb occurred I think in front of a substantial number of people who then testified at the inquest because in the case of Joseph of Cupertino's life, he kept being sent from one place to another.

So the inquest had to be distributed, the questionnaire had to be distributed in different places and you have different eyewitnesses in different crowds who testified to this or that miracle. The lamb one is one. There's another where a young man who was having... We would call them psychological problems or psychiatric problems, he was insane. Joseph puts his hand on his head to cure him and he goes up with the young man, he goes up with Joseph, they stay up there for a while and it's a double miracle, he's healed and it's this double levitation.

Johnathan Bi: Right. And there are also instances in Joseph's history that you mentioned in the book where there's a lot of trustworthy civic authorities like prince and dukes. Let me just quote your book and share one of these stories.

After meeting with Joseph in his cell, [Juan Alfonso] the count-duke viceroy, reported to his wife who was traveling with him, “I have seen and spoken with another St. Francis.” Enthralled by such an assessment of Joseph, the wife begged for an audience with him. Ordered to meet with her and her ladies in waiting in the basilica of St. Francis, Joseph complied saying, “I know not whether I'll be able to speak,” due to his aversion to mingling with females. But as it turned out, Joseph never had to utter a word or come close to any woman for as soon as he entered the huge church through a side door, he shrieked and flew 12 feet above the heads of his illustrious visitors, hovered for a while in ecstasy before 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 and the count-duke viceroy simply stood still “in a stupor with his arms spread wide bereft of all feeling as if somewhere between life and death.” Meanwhile the viceroy's wife had to be revived with smelling salts and a generous amount of holy water sprinkled on her face.

(Carlos Eire, They Flew)

So for a lot of these events, there's a large retinue, a royal retinue in attendance.

Carlos Eire: Oh yes. Yeah. And not only that, there's a long list of requests being made by powerful people to visit Joseph of Cupertino and it's actually mentioned as one of the reasons that he had to be moved from Assisi to a more remote location because at Assisi the superior of all the Franciscans has to handle these requests. Now, how do you turn down powerful people? It's difficult. And all sorts of nobility, especially, request permission to come visit Joseph.

And Joseph is basically a burden... At this point becomes a burden to this Franciscan community because all these nobles have to be put up in the proper kind of rooms and room has to be made for their retinues and so on and so forth. It becomes so complicated they start turning down important people. And these important people, of course, like all important people, make noises to the higher-ups. They're probably sending letters to Rome saying, what's with this? I was not allowed to come to Assisi and it's just too much of a burden.

Johnathan Bi: Right. That's what I was really surprised by, by the relationship between these miracle workers and the church or the monasteries they were in was that even when the church didn't think they were demonic or fraudulent, their relationship was still very uneasy. Like it was almost hostile. And that's very counterintuitive because you'd think that the church would be glad to have these peoples, these literal signs from God there. But the relationship is actually a lot more hostile than you’d think, as he was placed in a cell, right?