Review: Michael Robbins on a History of the Impossible
I was ready to get behind Carlos Eire’s “history of the impossible”—actually just a history of some “documented” instances of levitation, bilocation, and a little witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—after reading a wildly condescending review in a prominent journal. Alas, despite the reviewer’s snide dismissal of religious belief, I must concur with the spirit of his objection: They Flew compiles interesting historical accounts of certain religious phenomena considered “impossible” by any rational scientific measure, but Eire offers only a half-baked challenge to the threadbare narrative of “the triumph of rationality over primitive credulity and superstition.”
“You’ll believe a man can fly,” promised the posters for Richard Donner’s Superman (1978). In fact, as a comics-obsessed kid, I was always bothered by the mechanics of Kal-El’s flight. He would stop in midair, then zoom off again, or change direction on a dime. I was familiar with Newton’s laws of motion. No such objections arise in Eire’s “case studies”—Teresa of Avila, Joseph of Cupertino, María de Jesús de Ágreda, “and three disgraced nuns”—since they flew through the agency of God, for whom Newton’s laws are sands upon the Red Sea shore.
All these folks flew or were present in more than one location simultaneously (or both, which seems a bit showboaty). Their levitations and bilocations were witnessed and documented. Which means bubkis, for of course they neither flew nor bilocated. We all know that; that is, we all “know” it.
And I’m not saying we’re wrong. But one thing I really do believe is that the reason it’s impossible for me to believe in miraculous human flight is not that miraculous human flight is impossible. It probably is! Almost certainly! But as Charles Taylor describes the matter in A Secular Age, beliefs are held within the scope of what is “taken-for-granted,” which is usually “tacit”—unacknowledged by the believer, because never formulated. This philosophical concept of the “background” is derived from Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and related to Marx’s understanding of “ideology” as a shaping force behind belief. Taylor lays out in persuasive detail the force with which constraints on what it is possible to think in a given period impose themselves, even when we are aware that they exist. To believe in levitation in 1500 is simply not the same kind of belief that it would be today.
Taylor gives the sixteenth-century example of “beating the bounds” of the parish on rogation days. The whole community would turn out in procession to march around the boundaries, carrying the Host and other relics, to ward off evil spirits for another season. The social deployment of magic or spiritual power entails that “society itself is seen, is experienced as a locus of this power”:
How can you be fully ‘into’ a collective rite like beating the bounds, and yet skeptical of the power of God and the Sacrament? It would be like fixing the socket today while doubting the existence of electricity.
This is the crucial point: just as it doesn’t occur to us to doubt the existence of electricity, it wouldn’t have occurred to earlier societies to doubt the existence of miracles. What makes it harder for us to believe that a nun can fly is not that we know more about the laws of physics, although we do, but that we do not live in the kind of society in which nuns fly.
Thus Taylor argues against a reductive “subtraction story which sees the development of unbelief as coming simply from the progress of science and rational inquiry.” Eire seems to want to make a similar case, but he cites Taylor only once, though their arguments are closely related. Each turns on Max Weber’s identification of the “disenchantment” sparked historically by the Protestant Reformation. The changing conditions of belief in Eire’s levitators exemplify the transition from an age of enchantment—in which “the material world we access with our senses and our intellect is only a minute sliver of a much larger and complex reality beyond our ken”—to Taylor’s secular age.
But Taylor offers a dense, complex philosophical account of this transition, while Eire asks:
Why do we have high-speed magnetic levitation trains but feel the need to bracket all reports about hovering saints or witches? How can millions of us humans be in multiple locations simultaneously via the internet, day after day, but still feel the need to scoff at bilocation? Why is the only fact that we can accept about human levitation the fact that others, long ago, thought it was possible?
These are not good questions. You might as well ask why I believe that I can communicate with you by email but not by telepathy.
One might expect Eire to make a more sophisticated case for religious thought, yet here too he traffics in caricatures, writing, for instance:
Ever since the inception of their religion, Christians had accepted a binary understanding of the cosmos: God was spirit, and He had created a material world, ontologically related to Him but metaphysically different and inferior. Humans were the pinnacle of this creation, part matter and part spirit, composed of a mortal body and an immortal soul.
This is an essentially modern, Cartesian account of Christian thought. It is in some ways the opposite of what Aquinas taught in the high medieval period. As Denys Turner shows in his Thomas Aquinas, on whose back cover both Eire and I are quoted, Aquinas rejected the notions that matter was “inferior” and that body and soul were “parts” of a whole. Indeed, this aspect of his theology struck some of his contemporaries as “unspiritual.” But Eire’s account is also very far from the understanding of early Christians (see for instance David Bentley Hart, “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients”).
Then there are Eire’s blessedly infrequent forays into art history and literature. This is a book that contains the sentence “Aye, there’s the rub, as Hamlet might say.” He claims at one point that Goya’s paintings of witches belie his reputation as a harbinger of modernity, apparently unaware that Goya—famous for the phrase “the sleep of reason produces monsters”—intended these images as a satirical denunciation of superstitious belief.
Eire’s book works best as a history of some instances of early modern supernatural or mystical phenomena. I especially enjoyed the account of Saint Teresa of Avila, who had to defend her ecstasies and bouts of flight against the Spanish Inquisition’s suspicions that she was “inventing the sacred,” a wonderful phrase with sinister implications. Far from reveling in her God-given freedom from the constraints of gravity, she resisted what she called her “favors,” urging “the other nuns to pull on her habit and bring her back down.” Once, she began to levitate after receiving communion; witnesses reported that she “clung to a grille in the church, ‘greatly distressed,’ and begged God, out loud” to restore her to the earth.
If Eire had resisted the temptation to wade into philosophical waters that rise above his head, his work might have been useful as an intellectual history of miraculous events. But he aims for something much less niche, and misses. When I reached the final paragraph of They Flew, which perfunctorily addresses the “revered orthodoxies” of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, I wanted to throw the book against the wall. Revered orthodoxies are not that hard to come by: one need look no further than the New York Times’ coverage of the ongoing destruction of Gaza or the average economics textbook. “Every age and culture,” as Eire himself argues in the preceding pages, “has its own unquestionable beliefs.”
Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. He has written for Book Post on Nancy, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Muldoon, Rilke, Proust and the Grateful Dead, apocaplypse by fire, the destruction of animals, and cheesy reading.
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