Hi @swamidass, @John_Harshman, @Rumraket, @structureoftruth, @Guy_Coe and @dga471,
I have a much better-attested miracle than the Mormon plates, and it provides an excellent illustration of why the “Minimal Facts” case for the Resurrection is inadequate. I’m referring to the levitations of St. Joseph of Cupertino, in the 17th century. I’m talking about no less than 150 sworn depositions from eminent people of unimpeachable veracity, some of them given as early as two years after St. Joseph of Cupertino’s death in 1663. What’s more, there were literally thousands of occasions on which the saint was seen to have levitated. I myself was firmly convinced of the authenticity of St. Joseph’s levitations until a few months ago, when I chanced upon some crucial evidence which pointed the other way.
So how strong is the evidence for St. Joseph of Cupertino’s levitations? It turns out that the levitations were witnessed by thousands of people, on thousands of occasions, over a period of 35 years. Allow me to quote from a blog article, Why Levitation? by Michael Grosso (October 8, 2013), who has done extensive research on the saint:
By chance, on a trip to Italy some years ago I acquired a 1722 biography of St. Joseph of Copertino.
I had read accounts of St. Joseph’s levitations in a scholarly essay by Eric Dingwall and also in Herbert Thurston’s book, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism . Eventually I began to read Domenico Bernini’s biography of Joseph, which Dingwall had cited as being rich in sworn eyewitness testimonies of the saint’s phenomena , which included more than levitation. I delved into the critical literature and assembled my own thoughts on the subject in a forthcoming book, The Strange Case of St. Joseph of Copertino: Ecstasy and the Mind-Body Problem (Oxford University Press). Joseph’s performances were never dubious sightings; they were show-stoppers , and his reputation as miracle mystic man spread all over Italy and then Europe….
The records show at least 150 sworn depositions of witnesses of high credentials: cardinals, bishops, surgeons, craftsmen, princes and princesses who personally lived by his word, popes, inquisitors, and countless variety of ordinary citizens and pilgrims. There are letters, diaries and biographies written by his superiors while living with him. Arcangelo di Rosmi recorded 70 incidents of levitation; and then decided it was enough. Streams of inexplicable events surrounded the black-bearded friar. Driven by malicious curiosity, even Joseph’s inquisitors observed him in ecstatic levitation during Mass. Their objection to him was not the fact that he levitated; they were concerned with where the power was coming from, God or the Devil?
It is impossible to suppose that all the stories about levitation were part of a Church plot to use miracles to control the mind of the masses. It wasn’t like that at all. The only way to make sense of the Church’s treatment of Joseph is to assume that he possessed these strange abilities in such abundance that there was talk of a new messiah arising. Joseph’s response to his Inquisitor’s was humble and honest. He had to explain that he enjoyed these “consolations” but that he was not proud or pleased with himself for having them. Nevertheless, the Church progressively tried to make him retreat to the most obscure corners of the Adriatic coast, ending finally under virtual house arrest in a small monastic community at Osimo. There was no decline effect in Joseph’s strange aerial behaviors; during his last six years in Osimo he was left alone to plunge into his interior life; the records are unanimous in saying that the ratti (raptures) were in abundance right up until his dying days. The cleric in charge of the community swore that he witnessed Joseph levitate to the ceiling of his cell thousands of times. The surgeon Pierpaolo was cauterizing Joseph’s leg shortly before his death when he realized the friar was insensible and floating in the air. He and his assistant both deposed that they bent down and looked beneath Joseph’s horizontal body, to be sure they weren’t dreaming.
To repudiate the evidence for Joseph’s levitations would be to repudiate thirty-five years of history because the records of his life are quite detailed and entangled with other lives and documented historical events. We would have to assume colossal mendacity and unbelievable stupidity on the part of thousands of people, if we chose to reject this evidence. We would be forced to believe that when the duchess of Parma wrote in a letter that Joseph was the “prodigy of the century”, she was romancing or totally deluded.
Perhaps readers are wondering where one can find the documentation for all of the miracles associated with St. Joseph of Cupertino. I’ve located a short pamphlet entitled, The Life of Saint Joseph of Cupertino by Fr. Christopher Shorrock O.F.M. Conv. (1985) which has this to say on the subject:
A number of biographies of St Joseph of Cupertino have been prepared in the past and give us extensive details of the extraordinary life of the saint. Of paramount importance are the thirteen volumes of the Process of Canonization preserved in the Vatican Archives. In this great literary work we find recounted the numerous testimonies of witnesses (including princes, cardinals, bishops and doctors) who knew St Joseph personally and in many cases were eyewitnesses to the wonderful events of his life. These episodes clearly reveal a man completely open to the transforming grace of God.
And how about this excerpt from an article by Thomas Craughwell in the Arlington Catholic Herald (13 September 2007)?
When the Father General of the Franciscans took Joseph to a private audience with Pope Urban VIII, Joseph levitated in the presence of the Holy Father. An astonished Pope Urban said if he outlived Joseph, he would promote Joseph’s cause for canonization and personally attest to this miracle. On another occasion when Joseph was living in Assisi, Spain’s ambassador to the Papal Court brought his wife and a large retinue to see Joseph. As he entered the church to meet his visitors Joseph saw a statue of the Immaculate Conception. He floated off the floor and flew over the heads of the ambassador and his party to the statue where he remained suspended in the air. Then he floated back to the church door, and made a gentle landing. The Inquisition heard about Joseph and commanded him to appear before their tribunal. On Oct. 21, 1638, as the inquisitors questioned him, Joseph levitated.
And here’s an excerpt (courtesy of Eternal Word Television Network) from the entry for St. Joseph of Cupertino (whose feast day is September 18) in The Saints: A Concise Biographical Dictionary (ed. John Coulson, Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1960):
What strikes us immediately is that his miracles kept drawing such crowds that not only was he up before the Inquisition, but his desperate Superiors sent him from convent to convent. Once the Inquisition removed him to a Capuchin friary, where he was kept in strict enclosure and forbidden even to write or receive letters — to his own bewilderment: ‘Must I go to prison, then?’ he said. Yet, at Assisi, the duke of Brunswick and Hanover, after visiting him, abjured Lutheranism and became a Catholic; Urban VIII, having seen him in ecstasy, said that should Joseph die first, he himself would give evidence of what he had seen. Most important, Prosper Lambertini did his best, as Promotor Fidei (‘Devil’s Advocate’), to discredit him , yet afterwards (as Benedict XIV) published the decree of Joseph’s beatification in 1753 and, in his classical work on Beatification, alluded to the ‘eye-witnesses of unchallengeable integrity’ who witnessed to Joseph’s ‘upliftings from the ground and prolonged flights’. It is difficult to see how, if we reject this evidence, we shall ever find any historical evidence acceptable.
The sheer number of witnessed flights would seem to put the reality of the levitations beyond all doubt. The evidence for St. Joseph’s flights is handily summarized in an article, The flying saint ( The Messenger of Saint Anthony , January 2003), by Renzo Allegri.
The earthly existence of Friar Joseph of Cupertino was rich in charismatic gifts. However, the phenomenon which attracted the most attention occurred during his disconcerting ecstasies. Chronicles recount, as we have already said, that he need only hear the name of Jesus, of the Virgin Mary, or of a saint before going into an ecstasy. He used to let out a wail and float in the air, remaining suspended between heaven and earth for hours. An inadmissible phenomenon for our modern mentality.
“To doubt is understandable,” Fr. Giulio Berettoni, rector of the Shrine of St. Joseph of Cupertino in Osimo tells me “but it isn’t justifiable. If we take a serious look at the saint’s life from a historical point of view, then we see that we cannot question his ecstasies. There are numerous witness accounts. They began to be documented in 1628, and this continued until Joseph’s death in 1663, i.e. for 35 years. In certain periods, the phenomenon is recorded to have taken place more than once a day. It has been calculated that Joseph’s ‘ecstatic flights’ took place at least 1,000 to 1,500 times in his lifetime, perhaps even more, and that they were witnessed by thousands of people. They were the phenomenon of the century. They were so sensational and so public that they attracted attention from curious people from all walks of life, Italians and foreigners, believers and unbelievers, simple folk, but also scholars, scientists, priests, bishops and cardinals. They continued to occur in every situation, in whatever church in which the saint prayed or celebrated Mass. It is impossible to doubt such a sensational and public phenomenon which repeated itself over time. It is also worth noting that these events occurred in the seventeenth century, the time of the Inquisition. Amazing events, miracles and healings were labelled magic and the protagonists ended up undergoing a trial by the civil and religious Inquisition. In fact, St. Joseph of Cupertino underwent this very fate because of his ecstasies. But he was subjected to various trials without ever being condemned; final proof that these are sensational events, but also real, extraordinary and concrete facts.”
Sounds pretty airtight, doesn’t it? Let’s face it: the testimony for these miracles is about as good as you could possibly get. So what changed my mind?
Last year, I came across an article by Joe Nickell in The Skeptical Inquirer (Volume 42.4, July / August 2018), titled, Secrets of ‘The Flying Friar’: Did St. Joseph of Copertino Really Levitate?, a critical review of Michael Grosso’s book, The Man Who Could Fly (2016). It was quite an eye-opener for me.
What made me very suspicious, on reading the article, was that St. Joseph was never actually observed to hover in mid-air, holding onto nothing. Instead, he always held on to something while remaining in the air, sometimes for hours, and he had to bound through the air in order to reach high objects. Finally, he was not able to descend without assistance. To quote Nickell:
Let us start with an incident in which Joseph “flew” to the feet of a statue that stood more than a man’s height above the ground; there he adored it while “floating midair” (Grosso 2016, 81–82). In fact, all the time he “embraced” (i.e., held onto the feet of) the statue! Perhaps with muscular ability he extended his body horizontally to add to the effect.
A more significant example is a story told in the first biography of the friar (Bernini 1722, 150). A priest walking with “Padre Giuseppe” (Father Joseph) had mentioned the beautiful sky when, suddenly:
“These words seemed like an invitation for Padre Giuseppe to fly up into the sky, and so he did, letting out a loud cry and bounding from the ground to fly up to the top of an olive tree when he landed on his knees on a branch that kept shaking … as though a bird were perched on the branch. Padre Giuseppe stayed up there about a half hour …”
Note the use of the word bounding plus the fact that olive trees are typically of low height (described as “short” and “squat” [“Olive” 2017]). Remember too that Joseph was practiced in kneeling for long hours. Besides, bounding upward was one thing, but after coming out of his supposed rapture he had to have help getting down! So the other priest fetched a ladder for the catlike friar…
Commenting on another alleged miracle, Nickell writes:
It is apparent from his movements that he bounded, in increments, onto the altar where he “rested between the candles”—that is, on the support that held them . And there, for the several minutes duration, he was “embracing”—in other words, holding onto—the tabernacle (which contained the Eucharist). He was never simply floating in air, as sources may seem to imply.
In his conclusion, Nickell points to a number of highly suspicious facts about St. Joseph’s levitations, which, taken together, are highly damning:
Not only do the accounts indicate Joseph’s most dramatic aerial traverses were launched by a leap—not by a simple slow rising while merely standing or kneeling (Smith 1965, 49)—but, moreover, I find that they appear to have continued as just the sudden arcing trajectories that would be expected from bounding. They were never circuitous or spiraling flights like a bird’s. Invariably, Joseph’s propulsions began with a shout or scream, suggesting that he was not caused to leap by some force but chose to. Analogous to martial artists who yell when executing some technique (like breaking a board with their hand), his cry may have been to help him focus and commit to the act and so dispel fear. It might also have served to turn all eyes on him. He might have found that if he yelled not when he first started moving but only the instant before he left the ground people would be more likely to think they saw him simply rise up.
Grosso (2016, 80) gushes that the duration of Joseph’s levitations—from only seconds to fifteen or thirty minutes or more of “sustained floating”—“seem to point to the reality of an unrecognized force of nature.” Certainly, he insists, they were “enough to render implausible the claim that they were tricks of perception.” Yet our analysis revealed that Joseph did not hover in the air but, after rapidly ascending, he then rested on some support such as a tree limb or held onto some fixed object such as a statue. In other accounts, such details may have been left out because the narrator was simply relying on his impressions.
Nickell points to one more distorting factor:
There is also the “gross exaggeration” of biographies that were published more than half a century after Joseph’s death. Also, as a practical matter, the original records that led to his canonization are no longer available for study (Smith 1965, 48–49). [He adds in a footnote that Grosso’s most-used source for the levitations is Bernini, whose 1722 text appeared nearly six decades after St. Joseph’s death.]
The miracle I have described above is about the best-documented Catholic miracle in existence. By contrast, we are unable to interview the original twelve apostles. We don’t know how many of them saw and/or heard and/or touched the risen Jesus, in their apparitions.We don’t even know when the risen Jesus appeared, where he appeared, or to whom he appeared, because the Gospel accounts are so divergent.
If the evidence for the various for the veracity of St. Joseph of Cupertino’s miracles turns out to be full of holes, what shall we say about the evidence for the Resurrection? No sworn testimonies. Multiple internal contradictions. Far fewer witnesses and far fewer names.
Now do you see why we need to be cautious about Resurrection apologetics?
