Impossible Things in the Age of Reformations

THEY FLEW: A HISTORY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE. By Carlos Eire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. xviii + 492. Hardcover, $35.00; paperback, $24.00; e-book, $24.00. How should scholars of religion interpret or explain miracles or other events that appear to transcend the realm of natural causation? This question is at the heart of Carlos Eire’s latest book, the intriguing and provocative They Flew, a work that both documents early modern responses to supernatural events and challenges present-day historians who engage with religion to rethink their methods of study. They Flew, therefore, has two aims. First of all, it offers in part what its subtitle promises, “A History of the Impossible.” More specifically, Eire focuses on people believed to have performed feats of levitation, bilocation, or teleportation. They Flew is not a comprehensive history of such phenomena, of what Eire calls (following William James) “wild facts” (4): the majority of his examples come from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, although his opening chapter sets the phenomena within a historical backdrop that stretches back into ancient Greece and India. Towards the latter part of the book, where suspected witchcraft and demonic influence come to the fore, Eire discusses cases across Europe, but the core of the work is early modern Iberia (the “Land of Enchanted Beings” as he calls it) (258), a setting with which Eire is deeply familiar, as it was the focus of several of his earlier, highly accomplished works. Out of this enchanted land, Eire selects six major case studies: three performers of the impossible generally accepted as genuine in their day—Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663), and María de Jesús de Ágreda (1602–1665)—and three exposed as frauds—Magdalena de la Cruz (1487–1560), María de la Visitación (1551–1603), and Luisa de la Ascensión (1565–1636). Those interested in the religious culture of this period will learn much from the juxtaposition of these figures and how they did or did not succeed in navigating the judgment of authorities both enthusiastic and distrustful. Eire sets all these alleged impossible activities within the context of early modern Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward the supernatural, tracing what they reveal of “the relation between the natural and the supernatural realms” (17). Eire’s historical account of how the boundary lines between these realms were drawn is directly connected to his second task in They Flew: to confront assumptions in our own time about how we ought to study religion in the past. Framing his case studies are a Preface, Introduction, and Epilogue that make this challenge explicit. Eire delineates the often unstated premises we hold about the supernatural and points out how they underlie the usual practices of academic history writing, which he describes as relying in general on “strictly materialist interpretations” (xiii). Eire takes particular issue with historians who study miraculous or unnatural events but sidestep the big question raised by accounts of such events: “Did that really happen?” Instead of asking that question, Eire says, historians “bracket” the “wild facts” which “we cannot prove,” set the wild ones aside because they cannot be proven (4, 20). Eire has deliberately chosen unexplained phenomena which are difficult to ignore: levitations rather than, for instance, an unusual healing, which everyone might acknowledge to have occurred while disagreeing about its cause. Either the levitation happened or it did not, and the historian must reckon with the testimonies of people who claimed that they saw it. By showing how an earlier age viewed the boundary line between supernatural and natural as more permeable than today, Eire highlights a historical shift in epistemology and ontology and suggests it need not be seen as an inevitable advance. They Flew is thus an exercise in considering what aspects of our own contemporary lives might be obstacles to comprehending the past. In short, Eire is asking, what insights have we lost? Immediately after criticizing the bracketing practices of professional historians, Eire acknowledges: “the issue of whether so-and-so really flew cannot be addressed;” and “No one’s testimony from the distant past ... can be taken as absolute proof” (20). What appears at first as a contradiction seems to be Eire’s way of distancing the outcome of historical narratives from “proof,” that is, from empirical certitude. Eire resists equating the explanatory power of modern scientific methods with a complete explanation, especially of human religious experience. For the historian, the goal is a plausible narrative, rather than one of airtight certainty. To be unable to “prove” that something such as Teresa of Ávila’s levitations happened is not a reason, for Eire, either to explain them away or ignore them. Hence, his proposed suspension of both belief and disbelief (“being evenhandedly skeptical”) (xiii): agnosticism rather than atheism. What They Flew urges, therefore, is an expansion of the range of plausible conclusions a reader might draw. The question of how historians should describe unusual events is, of course, not a new problem; indeed, it might be called one of the defining concerns of the craft of history writing. At the very beginning of the practice, we find Herodotus articulating the dilemma of what to do with wondrous events or fabulous tales: “I do not know if this is exactly true; I write down just what I am told” (1987, IV.195). Herodotus’ early reputation among some as the “father of lies” highlights the ancient conflict on this issue at the heart of historiography. Christian miracle stories caused the same concerns for Augustine of Hippo: “Nor do I myself wish all the marvels which I have here cited to be believed in rashly. (...) I have resolved neither to deny nor affirm them” (1998, XXI.7). I cite these earlier writers because Eire’s critique of contemporary “bracketing” raises questions about what an alternative to currently accepted practices of history writing would look like. These current practices have helped the discipline of history make undeniable advances in understanding the past. Yet Eire is concerned that this discipline relies on a particular set of assumptions that limit the sorts of questions we attempt to answer. Here, he advances a line of argument articulated by another historian of the Reformation, Brad Gregory, who has maintained that the secular presuppositions of academic history reduce people of faith to naturalistic motives, imposing modern ontologies on them (Gregory 2008). Of course, historicizing a prevailing worldview does not establish which worldview ought to prevail. If historians of religion reconsider how they draw their boundary lines between natural and supernatural phenomena, will their descriptions of events come to resemble those of earlier ages that mixed these two realms more expansively, albeit not unquestioningly? What are the gains and losses of such an approach? Could the discipline of history accommodate such a change without losing a shared consensus, a pluralistic way for those of many faiths or none to engage in a shared discussion without the polemics of earlier confessional histories? Or is the neutrality of consensus actually an imposition of rules by those of a rigidly empirical mindset, that is, the triumph of the secularist confession? One place to look for possible answers is They Flew itself. Eire urges agnosticism over atheism when treating the impossible, so we can rightly ask, what does agnostic history look like? How different is the historical account that does not bracket the impossible but rather lives with uncertainty? Eire’s own narrative of early modern levitators and bilocators is hardly unrecognizable: it relies on standard historical methods of assessing sources and takes account of numerous explanatory factors. While They Flew is open to the possibility that, for instance, accounts of Joseph of Cupertino’s flight are what they purport to be—eyewitnesses relating what did actually happen—the book also documents the pervasive suspicion of such claims at the time, not least from the Inquisition, and it treats on fairly equal footing the efforts of the fraudulent to deceive others about the impossible. Thus, there are ways in which the book unfolds according to Herodotus’ maxim: it simply reports what has been said, whether initially believable or not. It does so, however, by taking seriously the possibility that those who said they witnessed such events were not credulous fools but sophisticated observers aware that they might be wrong. Yet, the agnostic suspension of judgment in the face of the impossible also has its limitations. This becomes clear if we put ourselves in the place of those living through the events which Eire described, those who quite often had to make judgments about plausible causation. Consider one of the subjects of Eire’s chapter on witchcraft, the sixteenth-century physician Johan Weyer (331), who urged that poor, mentally ill women cease being persecuted as witches because they were not in fact doing what many alleged they were doing. For Weyer to rest in uncertain open-mindedness about the possibility of witchcraft in such cases would seem to bring less understanding of the situation, not more. The historian, too, needs a way to make judgments about events, albeit with less urgency than Weyer. Eire does, in fact, recognize that one of the tasks of the historian is to make such judgments, to help readers understand and assess the events described. Indeed, the historian’s narrative is a judgment of the best way to explain something—through the selection of evidence, emphasis on particular causes, or organization of storyline. Thus, despite occasional assertions that “the history of the impossible is all about questioning” (xiii), the title of Eire’s book is not the open-ended, inquisitive “They Flew?” but rather a declarative “They Flew.” And the final sentence of his book alters this declaration into a bold, exclamatory “They flew!” (378). This transformation, from question mark to exclamation mark, suggests ultimately not agnosticism but rather a judgment about the likelihood that Joseph of Cupertino and Teresa of Ávila—though not someone like Magdalena de la Cruz—flew. That question mark in Joseph of Cupertino’s case becomes an exclamation mark despite the accounts of fraudulent levitators of Joseph’s time, despite the acknowledgment that Joseph the historical personage is “largely inaccessible and irretrievable,” more an “archetype” of sanctity or a “paradigm than a human being” (98–99). This is a slender thread for history to pull upon, if it seeks out the reality of impossible events in Joseph’s life. Those looking for a new approach to the impossible will want to know, therefore, is Eire’s judgment here one that a historian can offer to other historians or other readers of different worldviews and assumptions, who might then be able to assess it with established methodologies and find it plausible? Is the historian in this instance like the example (alluded to by Eire in his Introduction) of an agnostic doctor at Lourdes who assesses each physical cure to determine whether it might plausibly be the miraculous effect of a transcendent cause? Is that the model Eire would like historians to aspire to? Or, is his judgment about Joseph one that is made with the eye of faith? And would this make such a judgment, therefore, inaccessible to others because it lies beyond the capacities of the discipline of history? Eire might have helped answer these questions more fully by diving more deeply into an analysis of the sources for Joseph’s feats and responding in greater detail to the ways other historians have explained the existence of such testimony. Nonetheless, the larger issue that the questions point to would remain, for they reveal a deeper epistemological subtext of the book. One’s worldview, of course, shapes what one considers plausible, shapes the ways that one interprets evidence and its significance. This has long been apparent in historical debates, where, for instance, a Marxist interpretation of human actions might slug it out with a classical liberal understanding. Yet, expanding the range of the plausible that historians might now expect to reckon with also means contending with greater disagreements about what is plausible. It is hard to imagine a strict materialist ever being persuaded that St. Joseph flew. Conveying what is plausible to an audience requires a set of common assumptions about the possible meaning of events. As Eire would point out, however, those assumptions are only common if some people agree to leave their beliefs at the door. Many of Eire’s critiques of the universalizing rational epistemology of modernity echo those made by postmodern theorists, yet he aligns himself more with what he calls “postsecular” interpretation, with its focus on the compatibility of faith and reason, or the supernatural and the natural (372). In a new, postsecular approach to the discipline of history, where that shared consensus is gone, might we expect to see a further fragmenting of narratives into a wider variety of perspectives and greater divergences in methodological assumptions? Eire’s critique of modernity and its implications for the discipline of history has resonances with questions raised elsewhere about how religious traditions find their place in a wider culture. Brad Gregory, for instance, has written of what he calls our “hyperpluralist” society, one with numerous religious and secular commitments but without “any shared or even convergent view about what ‘we’ think is true or right or good” (2012, 11). If one accepts Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that different rationalities, different traditions, have their own, often mutually incomprehensible or incompatible narratives (1990), then one can see emerging in Eire’s book a counter-narrative to the secular rationality dominant among professional historians. Macintyre contends that a tradition requires stories to explain itself to its members, to help them make judgments about the world and how to live in it. Eire’s historiography could perhaps be the accompaniment to faith traditions that accept the miraculous. This is one of the more lasting reverberations of They Flew: the sense that something may be happening to historical inquiry in a hyperpluralist, postsecular society. For students and scholars from religious traditions, the price of admission to the secular academic world has been to make peace with the consensus assumptions of the modern empirical mind and to adopt a particular way of discussing ideas or events that is recognizable to non-believers. Is the consensus now fraying, and are the limits of fruitful pluralist dialogue being reached, relying as they do on staying within a certain range of answers? Eire seems to be wrestling with this dilemma, as though unsure about what ultimately his critique will lead to, or should lead to, in a newly emerging “post-” era. Thus, two possible implications of his book appear, one moderate, the other more radical. In his Epilogue (370), Eire classifies the Catholic Church’s approach to miracles in its canonization process as one that has indeed made peace with the modern empirical mind, operating generally within its rational assumptions, while maintaining some space for the miraculous to be discerned. They Flew, with its scholarly descriptions of early modern belief in miracles, can be read as a historian’s attempt to defend and expand the realm of faith within a secular age, insisting on more space for the supernatural, more space for people of faith to articulate the plausibility of that faith. In this scenario, as with the doctor at Lourdes, Eire wants to suggest the possibility of convincing an open-minded agnostic of the miraculous. The more radical implication of the book lies in the postsecular direction: if religious believers wish to take seriously the call to open up history writing to impossible events, they should develop new postsecular methods of history writing, ones that take into account the developments of the critical, modern age, but which now move firmly past it by re-enchanting it. Eire acknowledges in his Epilogue the wide range of postsecular approaches, which are in many ways just emerging and do not always cohere with each other, from Jeffrey Kripal’s explorations of unusual religious experiences to the medievalist Sylvain Piron’s social scientific study of medieval hagiography. Yet one result of postsecularism might be distinct forms of, for instance, Christian or Jewish or Muslim professional history that resisted finding a home in secular institutions. The historiographic landscape would look more fractured. Would it nonetheless be more honest about the variety of perspectives with which our hyperpluralist society’s members view reality? Those who wish to reckon with the future study of the impossible will find in They Flew more questions than answers, but they are questions well worth considering

Natural history · Realm · Subtitle · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Early Modern Women Writers · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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