I’ve been intrigued for a while by Carlos Eire’s new book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, which “argues” that we should take medieval testimonies of miraculous flight and bodily bilocation more seriously than most of us do. He doesn’t just mean that we should respect the beliefs and experiences expressed in these reports, but that we should take them seriously as evidence of fact: “The assumed impossibility of [these] events deserves closer scrutiny,” Eire writes.
I’ve read a number of reviews, none of which convinced me to read the book. Erin Maglaque in the NYRB has convinced me not to—at least for now:
They flew. They flew! That is Carlos Eire’s claim, in this deeply unserious book. Salvador and Teresa; the idiot savant Joseph of Cupertino, patron saint of airplane travelers; Saint Francis of Assisi, who with flames of love pouring from his face and mouth lifted his friend Masseo up in the air with his breath, uttering “Ah! Ah! Ah!” These enchanted men and women rose to church rafters and to crucifixes, they flew so high that roof tiles had to be removed; they flew to the topmost branches of the trees and perched there like birds. They flew at the slightest provocation—a lamb that reminded them of Christ, the perfection of a tidy flower, the reedy music of a flute blown by a shepherd. All enough to rend the veil of nature and send them up—up—up.
Maglaque takes these ideas seriously, along with their subsequent reception, as Protestant reformers urged a break between the natural and supernatural worlds, confining miracles to the Bible, and the Catholic church pitched criteria for canonization.
What she does not take seriously is “Eire’s contention”—under a cloud of irony—“that these miracles actually happened.” For instance:
Eire writes that, since most of these levitations were outside, Joseph couldn’t possibly have used trampolines or ropes to fake it. “Why,” he asks in another one of those rhetorical questions, “has he been relegated to the history of the ridiculous rather than to the history of the impossible, or to the science of antigravitational forces?”
The problem, for Maglaque, is not the question whether "belief offer[s] special access to the elements of early modernity … that [exceed] ‘rational’ or secular attempts at interpretation”—a question she also takes seriously—but that “Eire does not approach [it] with the rigor and care [it] deserve[s].”
Rather than deeply involving himself in the faith of his early modern subjects, he rationalizes their beliefs in the terms of the same scientific epistemologies he claims to criticize: the irruption of the supernatural into the natural world bears an “eerie resemblance to the multiverse cosmology proposed by some astrophysicists in our own day and age,” for example. One of the strange ironies of They Flew is that Eire’s re-enchanted history leaves the past less clear, less real, and less vivid than the secular histories of the miraculous that—precisely because of their secularism—have to work harder to understand early modern faith on its own strange terms.
BONUS CONTENT: I wrote about nostalgia and regret for the TLS.
Checking this out in a local bookshop, I was intrigued that the author was from Yale. So he's serious (or that's what's it says on the packet).
Also, I'm a sticker for taking sources seriously. The more surprisingly the better. But your review shows how it's all for naught because the author doesn't use it to do proper time travel, entering another time's way of understanding the world.