Can saints fly? Perhaps levitation is a gift to humanity to puncture our pride—to remind us that we don’t have all the answers, and that our approach to all the things we take with such gravity ought to be spiced with a touch of levity.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote somewhere that “Scripture can only be interpreted through the lives of the saints”. The observation shifted my understanding of the interpretation of Scripture and the lives of the saints in a profound way. Suddenly I saw particular verses of ideas in the Scriptures fleshed out in the lives of the saints. So, for example, the verse teaching that “unless you become a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of God” is exemplified by the children of Fatima or St Thérèse of Lisieux—a child who teaches her “little way of spiritual childhood”. The idea of divine foolishness? – St Francis. The call for the strength and meekness of an ox? – St Thomas Aquinas. Putting on the full armor of Christ and being a warrior? – St Martin of Tours and St Ignatius Loyola.
In my book The Romance of Religion, I took the connections further and argued that, as Scripture is fleshed out in the lives of the saints, so the great fairy tales and legends are also made real in the stories of the Bible and the lives of the saints. Are you enchanted by the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk and all the stories of the boy who killed the giant? The Old Testament tells us it really happened. The boy was David. The giant was Goliath. Are you delighted by stories of dragons being slain? Consider St George, St Michael, or the valiant Virgin who tramples down the dragon. Delighted by Cinderella? Consider the peasant girl Mary visited not by a fairy godmother, but by an angel from God.
I was reminded of this parallelism in reading a recent book by Carlos Eire, the T.L. Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale. They Flew: A History of the Impossible is a thoroughgoing investigation of saints who levitated, bi-located and experienced transvection, Inedia, and various other astonishing mystical phenomena.
Eire takes a refreshingly objective look at a range of stigmatics, levitating saints, and mystical marvels, but he focusses his attention on St Joseph of Cupertino and Teresa of Avila’s levitation, and Maria of Agreda’s astonishing claims not only of levitation but also transcontinental bi-location. Eire’s is a serious, scholarly approach avoiding both credulous hagiography and cynical dismissal of the miraculous. He asks honest, simple questions about the various phenomena: “These amazing events are so convincingly witnessed and documented that it is impossible to simply dismiss them as pious legends. Why are they comparatively unknown?” “While there are examples of levitation in many cultures and religions down through the ages, why was there a surge of the phenomena in sixteenth century Catholic Europe?” “Since these phenomena are acknowledged as historical and actual, why has there been no attempt at a thoroughgoing study or a scientific explanation?”
After opening with some of these basic questions, Eire goes on to recount the lives and miracles of Teresa of Avila—famous not only for levitating, but also for resisting the miracle and pleading with God to deliver her from it. He goes into detail about the totally astonishing life of Joseph of Cupertino, the mouth-breathing “village idiot,” who bellowed and shrieked before flying up to the ceiling or perching on the top of a tree. Joseph levitated frequently for thirty-five years and was a well-known marvel, attracting crowds of the curious as well as the crowned heads of Europe. Maria of Agreda remained in her Spanish convent her whole life, but claimed to have traveled by some mystical means to evangelize the indigenous peoples around the world.
We need more books like They Flew, in which serious scholars investigate the claims of religion with a careful objectivity and cautious curiosity. One of the strengths of the book is that it opens a pandora’s box of possibilities. Eire’s excellent book might help those whose minds are restricted by a atheistic materialism to admit the reality that the world is stranger than they had imagined—that weird things happen, and that the inexplicable is more interesting than the dull and dogmatic systems offered by materialists.
The other thing They Flew opened up for me was a continuation of my connections among saints, stories, and Sacred Scripture. Doesn’t the child in all of us delight in heroes who can fly? Whether it is superman or Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, or Spiderman, we are pleased when our heroes go up, up, and away. When a saint levitates we remember Elijah being taken up in the fiery chariot, the Ascension of Our Lord, and the Assumption of Mary.
“So what?”, the earth bound cynic will spout. “What does it prove and why does it matter?” Eire asks the question in his book and doesn’t really offer a substantial answer except to say, “Here is something we cannot explain and this fact, in itself, is something that matters.” Must we draw a Catholic conclusion? Do the miracles of Joseph of Cupertino, Teresa of Avila, and a host of others prove the Catholic claims? The Church herself refutes this conclusion. Mystical phenomena, on their own, do not prove anything—least of all the sanctity of the person in question—and neither do marvelous phenomena necessarily prove the authenticity of the Catholic religion. They may certainly augment the Catholic claims and encourage the believer, but they are not watertight proofs of the religion because similar phenomena are known to exist within the mystical traditions of other religions.
We are left then scratching our heads and dropping our jaws in wonder, and perhaps G.K.Chesterton’s quip from Orthodoxy is worth remembering: “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” Perhaps levitation is a gift to humanity to puncture our pride—to remind us that we don’t have all the answers, and that our approach to all the things we take with such gravity ought to be spiced with a touch of levity. Maybe all we’re supposed to do is laugh with wonder and delight when we hear about saints who are so lighthearted that, like Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins, they float up to the ceiling.
If we could take this approach, then the stories of flying saints would surely be as uplifting as they should be, while also helping us, in our own lives, to remain down to earth.
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The featured image is “S. Giuseppe da Copertino si eleva in volo alla vista della Basilica di Loreto” (1767), Ludovico Mazzanti, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.