Leap of faith: the miraculous phenomenon of levitating saints

The ‘ordinary academic mind’, William James wrote, struggles to recognise things which ‘present themselves as wild facts with no stall or pigeonhole’. The Yale professor Carlos Eire has a passion for them. His erudite, wilfully eccentric study of baroque Catholicism glories in the supernatural powers of holy persons. He showcases two kinds of miracles they performed: levitation and bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once. Through him, we meet St Joseph of Cupertino, who liked to nest in the tops of trees, and Sister María de Ágreda, a Spanish nun who made 500 trips to missionise the New World without once leaving her convent. Although their feats were facts – widely attested and discussed at the time – we now know them to be impossible. Eire invites us to be sceptical about our doubts and to ask what it would mean to accept them as real.

Miracles like these were no vestiges of primeval times. They gained ground with literacy, print and religious reform. Levitation is mentioned in the New Testament – Simon Magus, the rival of Christ’s apostles, flew – but was not a mark of sainthood until the later Middle Ages, when hagiographies became popular. The invention of printing boosted the circulation of miracle stories, while the hostility of Protestant reformers to celibate holy people motivated Catholics to seek arresting evidence of their saintliness. This inflation of the supernatural made levitation a prolific and theatrical phenomenon. It had been amazing enough when St Thomas Aquinas rose three feet into the air. But St Joseph drifted into the rafters of churches like a lost birthday balloon. He hurled a sheep skywards, then flew up to catch it. He even floated over Pope Urban VIII.