They Flew, Carlos Eire

A reading meditation on belief, evidence, and the modern mind’s discomfort with the supernatural. Eire is an historian of early modern Christianity who investigates reports of levitation among Catholic saints…. such as Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Cupertino. It’s not to prove or debunk their flights, but to interrogate why modernity feels compelled to do either. The book becomes a philosophical inquiry: What counts as credible testimony? When did Western culture begin to assume that extraordinary claims must be illusions, hysteria, or fraud? Eire invites readers to recognize that for centuries, levitation was not automatically dismissed; it existed within a coherent worldview where heaven, hell, angels, and demons were real. Eire suggests instead that disbelief is not the default, but a culturally conditioned stance shaped by Enlightenment skepticism and modern materialism. Eire exposes how fragile our own certainties may be. He asks readers to confront a possibility that perhaps the boundary between the plausible and the impossible tells us more about our philosophical commitments than about the events themselves.