They Flew: A History of the Impossible
by Carlos M. N. Eire.
Yale University Press, 492 pp., $35.00
Have you ever bitten into a piece of fruit so delicious, so ripe and perfect in its flavor and sweetness, that you vibrated, just a little, with pleasure? The Franciscan beggar Salvador de Orta did. He sliced into a pomegranate and—seeing in the multitude of tiny seeds a microcosm of everything beautiful in God’s perfectly ordered world—rose into the air in ecstasy. God was there in the fruit.
He was in the kitchen, too. Teresa of Ávila told her spiritual daughters that “God walks amidst the pots and pans, helping you with what’s internal and external at the same time.” So when the nuns found Teresa suspended in the air, transfixed in ecstatic union with God, a frying pan still clenched in her hand above the cooking flames, they may not have been surprised. It was God, helping her with both the internal (lifting her soul up to heaven) and the external (the frying of, perhaps, an egg).
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.
In , Eire offers what he calls a “history of the impossible”: a history of the early modern men and women who levitated and of those who bilocated, that is, who were in two places at once, whether inside isolated chambers within convents and evangelizing indigenous communities in New Mexico or on their knees before altars in remote Spanish churches and in Japan, giving spiritual succor to missionaries. More than other forms of the miraculous, Eire argues, levitation and bilocation force us to confront the status of the supernatural in history writing. So far, our feet remain on firm scholarly ground. For all of Eire’s protests that his subject
