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Four hundred ninety-two pages discussing the history of human levitations that are supposed to be impossible: they have been written by Carlos M. N. Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. A historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, Eire is also the winner of a National Book Award in Nonfiction for his memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana .
How could he find that much to say about miracles that, by his own admission, cannot be verified? And why is this relevant for psychoanalysts?
Eire makes clear at the beginning and end of this book that “the issue of whether so-and-so really flew cannot be addressed…. There is no way anyone today can prove that someone really hovered or flew or bilocated in the sixteenth or seventeenth century” (p. 20).
Yet that is what the book is about: hovering (levitation) and bilocation (being in two places at the same time), with occasional variations such as transvection (being transported to some other location) and teleportation (being transported to some other location instantaneously). So many of the saints whose names we know were also reputed to be levitators or bilocators: St. Teresa of Avila and St. Joseph of Cupertino, but also St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Catherine of Siena. Not to mention the fact that the devil was reputed to be able to cause levitations and bilocations, or at least the appearance of them. Eire gives a remarkably full account of not only the saintly but also the devilish side of such miracles. This book can fill so many pages only by giving us more than we expected. Every story of saints or sinners becomes a human interest story. We are urged forward because of our involvement in the intricacies of the particular life about which we are reading.
Eire's scholarship is unparalleled. His quotes from unimaginably obscure corners of history grace every page. His attention to detail is equally en