LEIBNIZ AND THE FLYING MONK
Did one of the major thinkers of the Enlightenment really meet the celebrated levitating monk St Joseph of Cupertino? BOB RICKARD looks at the evidence and asks ‘What If?’
Leibniz’s patron visited Assisi in 1650 and did meet St Joseph
Did one of the major thinkers of the Enlightenment really meet the celebrated levitating monk St Joseph of Copertino? And did his witnessing of Joseph’s miraculous flights cause Leibniz to convert to Catholicism? BOB RICKARD looks at the evidence and asks ‘What If?’
Ihave always enjoyed the alternative time-line genre of ‘What if?’. Factual and fictional speculation on such crucial issues as ‘what if’ Kennedy had lived beyond 1963? What if Socrates died at the Battle of Potidaea in 432 BC? What if Charlemagne had failed to destroy the Saxon Irminsul at Eresburg in 772? Or the Apostles had failed to establish Christianity? And so on.
Some time ago I came across a curious allegation that at around the time Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was researching gravitation, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) – Newton’s closest rival – had travelled to Italy to see for himself a levitation by St Joseph of Cupertino. 1 Simon Young joked with me that this seems to be a happy bit of wishful dreaming: “One of the heroes of the Enlightenment coming face to face with the representative of, let’s say, another world order.”
Search online and you can find a few scattered allusions to this idea, and many sites appear to repeat this sentence (with small variations): “Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick, a Lutheran and patron to philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was so impressed by the sight that he converted to Catholicism.” 2
This is substantially correct; but it is perfectly feasible to suppose that a careless reading might give the impression that it was both men, or Leibniz alone, who “converted to Catholicism”. Either way, the idea was out there long before it appeared on the Internet. 3
THE IDEA
I first came across a more explicit version of this notion in a short science fiction story of dark humour by the late John Sladek (1937-2000), first published in 1982. In it, a rather unstable character rants: “I learned that levitating persons were common enough in the past, before Newton. The last authenticated case was the celebrated ‘flying monk’, Joseph Copertino, who flew in front of hundreds of witnesses. Leibniz travelled to Apulia to see him fly. Copertino went on flying all his life, and even made a last, feeble levitation from his death-bed, on 18th September, 1663. That was the exact day when Newton, at Cambridge, commenced his infamous calculations… Man would fly no more, declared Newton. Man would see no more. His optical laws were to put out our eyes, as his gravity nailed us to the ground.” 4
Sladek was a satirist, so we cannot rely on his deadpan prose as factual. However, a more serious statement of the idea had appeared in Marcello Truzzi’s pioneering sceptical journal Zetetic Scholar four years earlier, in 1978. In a book review, Laurent Beauregard, a teacher of philosophy and physics at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, wrote: “It was at about the time that Isaac Newton first conceived of the universal law of gravitation that the flying monk was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church because of his saintliness and his levitations. And Leibniz – who is said to have witnessed one of the monk’s flights – actually thought that there was something profoundly ‘occult’ – that was the word that was used – about the Newtonian concept of gravitation, a concept which involved instantaneous action-at-adistance.” 5
That same year, Geoffrey Ashe – a historian of Arthurian and Marian legends – refers to it more precisely in his book Miracles. Among the many hundreds of witnesses to St Joseph’s elevations, he writes, “was the future mathematician and philosopher Leibniz. 6 There was no clue as to where Ashe’s information came from.
Dr Robert Labanti (responding to my request for help) reminded me that there was a brief allusion to Leibniz in the Encyclopedia of the Unexplained: Magic, Occultism and Parapsychology, edited by historian Richard Cavendish and published in 1975. Here – around five years before Sladek’s usage and three before Beauregard’s – is the assertion that St Joseph’s “levitations were witnessed by a
host of eminent persons, kings, prelates, and professors, including the philosopher Leibniz.”
(My emphasis.) The article had been written by Benjamin Walker a diplomat and wellknown authority on Hinduism; but like Ashe, he provided no reference.
In the same year as Beauregard’s reference, 1978, The People’s Almanac, edited by Wallace and Wallechinsky, referred to Cavendish’s Encyclopedia of the Unexplained,
apparently excited by this factoid about Leibniz.
Here, the trail peters out. It is conceivable that Sladek (who was certainly well-read in fiction and anomalous phenomena) and Beauregard (as a well-read sceptic) could have come across the idea in Cavendish’s Encyclopedia, because that sold well and widely; but I have not been able to track it any nearer to its origin.
IS IT TRUE?
The image of the great mathematician Leibniz bunking off to see St Joseph’s soarings for himself is certainly a provocative notion of the ‘what if?’ type; but is it true? Unfortunately for fans of ‘alternative history’, it can be quickly discredited.
Leibniz’s only opportunity to visit Assisi would have been between 1687 and 1690, when he toured Germany and Austria before ending up in Italy. But by then, St Joseph had been dead for 27 years. On the other hand, it is well-recorded that Leibniz’s patron – Prince John-Frederick of Brunswick – visited Assisi in 1650 and did indeed meet St Joseph over a few days and witnessed several elevations by the saint, which converted him to Catholicism. The Duke’s visit took place when Leibniz was barely four years old, and 19 years before he joined the Duke’s employ.
What about Sladek’s assertion that St Joseph made a last, “feeble” levitation on his death-bed? In the closest account of his death – as recorded by direct testimony of the doctors and companions that surrounded St Joseph in the hours leading to that final moment – there was no mention of levitation; only ecstasy and a radiance in his face. And, as for Beauregard’s ‘factoid’ that St Joseph was canonised “about the time” Newton was working on his gravitation theory, he was wide of the mark. The saint’s canonisation took place in 1753, some 26 years after Newton’s death.
THE DUKE’S CONVERSION
It remains to describe the scene at the heart of this discussion. Accounts of the Duke’s conversion in his biographies are singularly discreet. The most verbose one I have found – in a life of Sophia, who became Electress when she married the Duke’s brother Ernest, and who, herself, was the sole heir to the vacant English throne – simply mentions that “in February, 1651, Duke John Frederick was… at Assisi received into the Catholic Church” with no mention of the remarkable events that provoked it.
The writer makes no mention at all of the Duke’s impulse to see St Joseph’s ‘miracles’ for himself the previous year; but this is not surprising. The entire drama takes place against the religious and political fallout from the forced conversion of Catholics by Europe’s ruling German Protestant (Lutheran) regimes. It simply would not ‘look good’ if one of their own had defected so dramatically.
Nor was the Duke’s conversion improbable. Those who knew him say that he “had a natural interest in religious matters”. Ward’s dynastic history fills in a few of the blanks. Duke Frederick was occasionally “possessed by an ardent ambition… to think out his own salvation”.
While he was in Rome in 1650, the Duke took an interest in the conversion of the Imperial Count Christopher von Rantzau (1625-1696). It had been induced by the German philologist Lucas Holstenius, himself an “eminent convert and convertmaker”, who headed theVatican Library at that time.
Up to this point, the conversion was known only to his family and entourage; but the silence following the Duke’s encounter with St Joseph in 1650 was not without drama. This idyll ended when Frederick’s elder brothers sent commissioners to Rome “to dissuade [him] from” going public. The Duke frustrated them by choosing that moment to out himself.
WHAT THE DUKE SAW
Where biographic details are sparse about the Duke’s conversion, the hagiographic discussion about St Joseph’s part in it is comparatively voluminous. My summary (below) is mainly from Sir William Crookes 10 who derived it directly from the Latin of the Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum. 11
In 1650 [ 12], St Joseph was at the monastery of his Franciscan order’s founder, in Assisi; and Prince JohannFriedrich (John-Frederick) of Brunswick was on a European tour, accompanied by two Counts (one a Catholic and the other Lutheran Protestant). At the age of 25, Frederick (1625-1679) was the heir to either of the Protestant states of Brunswick or Hanover, whichever might first fall vacant, and he afterward succeeded to both. When he reached Rome, he heard tales of the “the wonderful monk”, and he seized the opportunity to make the four-hour journey north to Assisi. According to Crookes, who was fascinated by the story, the Duke arrived there “on a Saturday, begging one interview with Friar Joseph, and intending to depart the same day”.
Crookes notes that, despite the great distrust between Catholics and Lutherans at that time, the Duke was, nevertheless, quickly and diplomatically accommodated by Franciscans. The company was prevented any sight of St Joseph at first, but the Prince was resolved to stay until he could see a miracle. On the second day (Sunday): “The superior… introduced [them] by a secret door into the chapel where [St Joseph], uninformed that any stranger was present, had to perform Mass. As had been expected, an impressive part of the service overcame the speaker, he became unconscious, and, as frequently happened in these trances, rose and floated some time in the air.”
At this point in the Mass – as recorded in the biography by Domenico Bernini, son of the famous sculptor 13 – a startling detail: “Giuseppe [Joseph] began to wail, gave a great scream, and then flew into the air backward in a kneeling position. [My emphasis.] St Joseph then returned to the altar where he remained in ecstasy for some time.” 14
“Questioned afterwards by the superior, but still unaware that strangers were listening, he could only tell that he had fainted; that before the swoon he had been trying in vain to break the holy wafer; that afterwards he broke it, but with difficulty. 15
On the third day (Monday): “Joseph, while elevating the host, again swooned, and was seen to rise following it, and remained suspended with his knees and feet one palm (or by another account a foot) from the floor; while the clear face of the wafer, visible throughout so small a chapel, became marked with a cross of jet-black… The friar, in an insensible state, yet holding up the monstrance over his head, hung immovable in the air an eighth part of an hour.”
There and then, the Duke solemnly promised to believe “all that the Catholic Church believes”. About a year later, when the affairs of state allowed him, Frederick revisited Assisi, and fell to his knees “before two cardinals and Friar Joseph”.
After this, the friar successively relocated to increasingly secluded mountain convents, to avoid the increasing crowds of worshippers. Before long, he was forbidden to perform Masses publicly. One of the most significant features of the story of St Joseph is that, unlike so many other cases in Christian hagiography, important documentation was made soon after his death by people who knew and lived with him and written within living memory. Pastrovicchi’s biography (see also note 13) included a statement from the Duke’s widow vouching for the facts. 16
“He flew into the air backward and in a kneeling position”
A ‘WHAT IF?’ MOMENT
Crookes was intrigued by the political implications of the Duke’s conversion. Could the powers-that-be have miscalculated in backing Frederick? Crookes suggested that the Catholic Church might have been better served if Frederick’s younger brother, Prince Ernest (1692-1698), had been converted instead. “Whatever power or intelligence superintended those miracles, [it] showed great ignorance of the future. No conversion could seem more important to the interests of Catholicism than that of [Frederick’s]…
It appeared that any other ruler would have had more permanent influence, [because] all the Prince’s pious dispositions absolutely ended with his life [and] all his states passed, for want of a son, to his Protestant brother, Ernest Augustus, father of George I,” which had historical consequences across the continent. 17
Like his older brother Frederick, Prince Ernest was also on his travels around Europe “and of similar education and disposition”. “Plainly,” mused Crookes, “if the power directing the Assisi miracles could have looked forward but a few years, not [to the] heirapparent, but [to] his younger brother, [Ernest’s] conversion, though not then looking so important, would, in all present probability, have recovered to Rome a great part of Germany.”
Referring to the English monarchy, Crookes wrote: “What dynasty England might have chosen is of course impossible to guess 18 but his posterity would not, by being Catholic, have been excluded from any of the continental thrones they have actually filled.”
While Leibniz’s contribution to science, mathematics and philosophy is widely recognised, his Duke’s conversion stirred something within him. He was certainly a rationalist, once saying: “I prefer a Leeuwenhoek who tells me what he sees, to a Cartesian who tells me what he thinks.” It is a matter of record that almost as soon as he took up his employment, in 1676, as librarian and archivist to the House of Brunswick, Leibniz began work, inventing the chocolate biscuit19 and bringing about a reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants 20 … as well as hatching an even more ambitious plan to convert the Chinese by using some sort of binary rhetoric based upon the Yi Jing... 21
Thanks to Robert Labanti and SimonYoung for their helpful comments; and especially to Michael Grosso who kindly supplied me with a digitised copy of Pastrovicchi. An early version of this was a discussion on Academia.edu, 22 April 2020.
NOTES
1 Giuseppe da Copertino was born Giuseppe Desa in 1603. His aerial flights – and frequent ecstasies, to which he had been subject from the age of eight – continued, the former to his last year, and the latter to his last day, in 1663, at the Osima monastery. Olivier Leroy, Levitation (1928) ch6, pp89-102. I will refer to ‘St Joseph’ throughout, even though the events under discussion happened before he was canonised. For discussion of the primary sources of St Joseph’s life, see the ‘Appendix’ to Michael Grosso, The Man who could Fly (2016); and ‘Appendix: Chapter 1’ of Eric Dingwall, Some Human Oddities… (1962), pp162-171, especially p167.
2 The repetition of this sentence on many different
sites could indicate that it is was lazily copied from an encyclopaedia entry of some sort. I have not yet identified its original source. 3 There have been many references to St Joseph’s levitations in fiction, including depictions in at least two films. While The Reluctant Saint (1962), starring Maximillian Schell, made gentle fun of the saint’s clumsiness and childlike innocence, its scene of levitation is quite sombre and minimal. In stark contrast, the depiction of the saint hovering happily in mid-air above excited onlookers near the beginning of More than a Miracle (1967), starring Omar Sharif and Sophia Loren, is one of the more impressive portrayals of the surreality of levitation.
4 John Sladek, ‘An Explanation for the Disappearance of the Moon’, in the anthology The Lunatics of Terra (Gollancz, 1984, pp146-147).
5 Laurent Beauregard, ‘Review of ‘Dark Side of
Knowledge’ by A Shadowitz & P Walsh (1976), in Zetetic Scholar (1978) vol.1, no.2, pp127-131.
6 Geoffrey Ashe, Miracles (RKP, 1978), p68.
7 Benjamin Walker, ‘Physical Powers’, in The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained: Magic, Occultism and Parapsychology (1975) p195.
8 St Joseph’s last levitation was on 17 September 1663, “one day before his death”. (Leroy, op. cit., p101, citing Pastrovicchi.)
9 Adolphus William Ward, The Electress Sophia and the Hanoverian Succession (Longmans Green, London, 1909) p154f.
10 See the Vita of St Joseph in the Acta Sanctorum, vol. 5 of September, p1002, A-F; p1024, 43-44. For extracts see extensive passages in Thurston and Leroy, and also in Alban Butler, ‘St Joseph of Cupertino’, in Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints (1883) pp480-482.
11 ‘Human Levitation: Illustrating Certain Historical Miracles.’, Being Item 3 in The Quarterly Journal of Science, and Annals of Mining, Metallurgy, Engineering, Industrial Arts, Manufactures, and Technology. Vol. V. (New Series), January 1875, pp31-61. Although the article was anonymous, it was by the QJS’s editor Sir William Crookes, FRS.
12 One of the saint’s biographers, Pastrovicchi, gives 1649; but historical and critical evidence confirms the date as 1650. As Leroy notes ( op. cit., p170), the Acta Sanctorum Vita is largely drawn from Robert Nuti’s account. Nuti knew Joseph personally and began in the year of the saint’s death collecting testimonials from other living witnesses, where Pastrovicchi’s account was published 90 years after Joseph’s death and is more an anthology of official documents.
13 Michael Grosso, Wings of Ecstasy: Domenico Bernini’s Vita of St. Joseph of Copertino (1722) pp119125. Privately printed 2017. This is a fresh translation by Cynthia Clough, edited by and with a commentary by Michael Grosso. See also Michael Grosso, The Man who could Fly (2016), pp82-84.
14 This backward flight is unprecedented in the annals of Christian levitation. Although elevations while kneeling are rare in Christian hagiography, this backward flight adds additional significance to the account of the Duke’s conversion. Grosso, Wings of Ecstasy, p.83.
15 The Duke, startled by Joseph’s “great scream”, asked for an explanation. Joseph tried to explain his struggle with the wafer and sudden faint. He told of having such feelings before, when he felt the presence nearby of “some hard-hearted heretic”. Unknown to him, among the witnesses was the Lutheran Count who had complained to the Duke’s company that: “It was a cursed day that I came into Italy. At home I always enjoyed a quiet mind; but in this country, puzzles about faith and conscience keep pursuing me.” This doubter was Henry Julius Blume, who barely three years later, was himself converted to Catholicism. Andreas Raess, Die Convertiten seit der Reformation, vol.6 (Herder, Freiburg, 1868) pp450-452, 558-571.
16 In 1668, Johann Friedrich married Benedicte Henriette (1652-1730) of the Palatinate, a Bavarian princess. In his introduction, Pastrovicchi wrote: “Her most Serene Highness of Brunswick is still alive while we are writing this book… Frederico her Husband, did nothing but speak of the servant of God, Father Fra Giuseppe da Copertino, to whom he kept a very tender devotion, and he had an Effigy.” This is my translation from the Italian cited by Crookes (p60), but he doesn’t state which edition of Pastrovicchi’s Compendio della vita… del B. Giuseppe di Cupertino he consulted – Rome, 1753, or Osimo, 1804.
17 Crookes, op. cit., pp.60-61.
18 The Duke’s younger brother Ernest was the father of George I, the first British monarch of the House of Hanover (which rebranded as the House of Windsor just after WWI due to anti-German sentiment).
19 I’m only half jesting: see https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Leibniz-Keks.
20 See a discussion of this at https://www.newadvent. org/cathen/09134b.htm.
21 See Frank J Swetz, ‘Leibniz, the Yijing, and the Religious Conversion of the Chinese’, in Mathematics Magazine, vol.76, no.4 (Oct, 2003), pp276-291.
✒ BOB RICKARD started Fortean Times in 1973 and was its co-editor for 30 years. He is the author of numerous books and articles on forteana and strange phenomena.