Plough’s Susannah Black Roberts sat down with Carlos Eire, whose book They Flew: A History of the Impossible was published by Yale University Press in 2023. Dr. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.

Plough: What led you to write They Flew?

Carlos Eire: The topic of the book is my obsession, which is the relation between the natural and the supernatural, or the material and spiritual. All my scholarly work has been focused on this subject. I began with iconoclasm, then I moved on to attitudes toward death and the afterlife, and then eternity. And then – Saint Teresa of Ávila! Mysticism has always been one of my deepest interests. And then I wrote this book on miracles, and especially impossible miracles: levitation and bilocation.

I was trained as a functionalist – taught that you can only approach religion as a functionalist. You study beliefs, and then you figure out what purpose or function beliefs serve. Because you can’t ask the question: Is there a supernatural realm? You just don’t do that. You can’t do that. You can’t ask whether these miracle accounts that you find – not just in Christianity, but in every religion – are facts. You can’t treat them as facts. If I had published something like They Flew early in my career, my career would’ve ended. So I waited till I was this age [74]!

But I got the idea for the project in the summer of 1983, while visiting Saint Teresa’s convent at Ávila. The tour guide showed me the spot where she and John of the Cross had levitated together for the first time. The tour guide, a very young woman, spoke of it in a matter-of-fact way. She had just been showing us this and that; here’s the staircase, here’s the kitchen, here’s the spot where levitation took place. Some area of my brain was awakened. But I was juggling other projects, and it wasn’t really until the 2020s that I started moving on this, at great speed.

Now, I think the functionalist approach is marvelous. The more you know about beliefs and the context in which belief takes place – that’s wonderful, and very necessary. But I no longer think that it’s the only way to approach the subject of impossible miracles like levitation or bilocation.

One hostile reviewer compared me to Erasmus of Rotterdam, of wanting to have my cake and eat it too, of critiquing but backing away from critiquing fully, and being in-between. A quote from Luther came to mind when I was reading the review: Luther called Erasmus “as slippery as an eel.” I took that as a great compliment!

Putting myself into the mind of that reviewer, it must have been frustrating to not find you credulous, because if you were credulous, that would make it easier.

That’s right. And this very same reviewer thought it was appropriate to bring up my place of birth [Cuba] and the culture in which I had grown up: how could I help but be affected by “magical realism”? I am after all a simple-minded man, as are apparently all Hispanics born in Latin America.

Well, that’s astonishing. You’ve written about the necessity of written testimony: this is what history is dependent on, for the most part. We used to hear New Atheist types say something like: If Jesus wanted people to believe in him, why didn’t he come in a time when there was photography? But in an age of AI-generated photos and videos, it becomes clear that testimony from a person of good character is actually much stronger than photographic proof.

Well, you know, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in by photos of fairies! Testimony is the most important thing I didn’t enlarge on in the book. What I don’t say explicitly in the book is that most of the testimony I have comes from canonization and beatification inquests, not from hagiographies. What makes that special? For all medieval levitators, all we have about their levitations are their hagiographies. Hagiographies, from a historian’s point of view, are questionable materials, because the author wants to convince you that this person was very special.

The same is true of beatification and canonization inquests, but the difference is that after the Council of Trent, Catholics instituted a very rigorous process of investigating all claims to sainthood, because of the Protestant doctrine of cessation of miracles, the idea that God does not do these things now. Questionnaires were created for every case. The specific questions differ from saint to saint, but there’s always a section on miracles, and those who are testifying have to swear that they are telling the truth. But unlike a civil court of law where perjury only gets you a fine or jail time, in this inquest the penalty for lying is hell. Or, because there’s forgiveness for every sin, even the most serious ones, a long time in purgatory. And all of these folks who are testifying tend to be religious. They believe in hell and purgatory. So are they going to fabricate all these stories? And are the testimonies from place A, place B, and place C going to be so similar? No. That increases their credibility.

There’s also the position of the devil’s advocate, the person who’s attempting to prove that this person is not worthy of beatification.

That’s right. And actually in the case of the three who figure prominently in They Flew, Teresa of Ávila, Joseph of Cupertino, and María of Ágreda, they all had to face the Inquisition. They were all afraid of the Inquisition, because they knew that, in the Catholic Church, these phenomena can also be attributed to the devil. So Teresa was not only embarrassed, she was afraid of what charges might be leveled against her. Because of her visions of Christ, she went through a terrible time where her confessors were saying, “That’s not Christ you’re seeing, that’s the devil.” And at one point, this confessor says, “Next time ‘Jesus’ shows up, give him the fig.” Because that’s what you do to the devil. But Jesus shows up and she gives him the fig sign. She writes about this. And Jesus says, “Thank you for obeying your confessor. But now go tell him I am not the devil.”

The only thing Joseph of Cupertino heard in his trances was the voice of his monastic superior. That’s really distinctive. However much these miracles challenge some aspects of society, they are not challenging the order of obedience and the hierarchy itself.

That’s right. And as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said, when asked, “What is the highest virtue?” Humility. Humility. Humility. And all the frauds that I deal with in this book as a sort of control experiment, who get caught faking it, they’re not into humility at all. It’s just the opposite. They’re self-promoting narcissists. So we have these sworn testimonies, and the penalty is something that these people would normally fear. I think if the circumstances were the same in a civil court of law, where let’s say there was the death penalty for lying, would historians discard the testimony? Would the judge discard the testimony? The probability is much lower. Most historians would not dismiss testimony that has this level of seriousness and credibility. Why discard it? That’s my question.

What has been the most surprising response you’ve had?

The first surprising email I received was from a scientist in the United Kingdom who was very happy to see a certain detail brought up regarding Joseph’s levitation. He went into cataleptic rapture, or to use a medical term, cataleptic seizure, where whatever position he was in when he entered the ecstasy, that was fixed until he was brought out of the ecstasy. The detail is that it was not only his body, but his clothing that remained rigid. And this scientist said, “this proves my theory that mystical ecstasies are outside of space-time.” He lost me because I couldn’t follow the science.

Another email came from a former CIA agent who had worked in the Stargate Project, which was about remote viewing. For two decades both the United States and the Soviet Union employed psychics to see what was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. They scored many hits, and therefore the program kept going for twenty years. Of course, there are people who say it was not for real. Anyway, he was also very happy to see one detail in my book, something he had experienced. When María of Ágreda bilocated to Texas, she could speak to the natives. She didn’t know their language, and they didn’t know her language, but they understood each other. This former CIA agent said to me in an email, “Sometimes when I was remote viewing, I would break through to the other side [i.e., Russia] and I could talk to people on the other side. They could talk to me, and we understood each other perfectly, and I can put you in touch with more people who have had this experience.”

You focus on levitation and bilocation – what are your thoughts on healing miracles?

They’re very common, and of course answer a practical human need. I know somebody who was healed at Lourdes. He was an atheist, and he refused to accept it as a miracle. He was a Marine in the Vietnam War and was injured by a grenade. He had leg problems from his wounds, and they kept getting worse and worse. He was traveling in Europe with a friend who insisted on going to Lourdes, and he reluctantly agreed. When he was at Lourdes, going into the Grotto, his leg gave out on him. So he steadied himself on the wall of the Grotto with his hand and was cured. We had this two-hour-long phone conversation about this; he kept explaining to me why it was not a miracle and going through scientific theories of what might have happened, that it was just a coincidence.

You, and the church, place great emphasis on holiness as the primary miracle. C. S. Lewis talks about how in the Renaissance and early Enlightenment, there was an uptick in both magic and science. Lewis sees these as two sides of the same coin because they’re both about controlling the world through technique. At first glance, it seems like the miracle stories of that time would go onto the magic side. But actually they’re doing something that is in opposition to both magic and science. So you’ve got magic and science on one side, and the power of holiness on the other. A lot of these miracles seem to be almost afterthoughts to the miracle of holiness.

Well, they were a byproduct of holiness. Many of the levitating and bilocating saints also placed a focus on mystical ecstasy. For me, there has to be a connection to human physiology. This is not the historian speaking, this is getting to be, you know, theological and metaphysical and pseudoscientific. But there has to be a physiological link between the material human body and the divine. And as a matter of fact, neurologists have discovered in which regions of the brain religious experiences take place. So if there is a supernatural realm, well, our brain is the point of contact. All humans have brains. And it’s that training – What happens if you pray all day for all your adult life? You spend your whole day praying; that part of your brain is activated! This was Teresa’s sixteenth-century take on levitation: in ecstasy, the soul is pulled toward heaven so strongly, so quickly, so irresistibly, that the body must follow.

Dogmatic materialists’ take on the brain is that it produces all of this stuff. It’s the origin. But those who say that it’s the receiver–… but this is another rabbit hole. And then there are near-death experiences! Oh, if I were twenty-three again, I would go into this. Ironically, the Center for Near-Death Studies is at the University of Virginia. Has been for decades. And I was there for fifteen years, across the street from it, and I didn’t know it was there. They publish the Journal of Near-Death Studies, which is a serious scientific journal. At UVA, Mr. Jefferson’s university! He’s spinning in his grave at Monticello like a lathe. The man who took all the miracles out of the New Testament. Ha!

This interview was conducted on June 24, 2025, and has been edited for length and clarity.