On a cool Thursday evening, February 19, 2026, a diverse group of minds gathered in Niebuhr Hall at Yale Divinity School. The occasion was the latest installment of the “Wine, Cheese & Dessert” mixer, a collaborative series between the Medical and Divinity Schools. The room buzzed not just with the promise of fine wine and artisanal cheese, but with the anticipation of a rare intellectual experiment: a conversation about the impossible.
The event, “Between Heaven and Brain: The Neuroscience and History of Extraordinary Bodily Experiences,” brought together two distinguished Yale scholars. Professor Carlos Eire, a historian of late medieval and early modern Christian Europe, and Dr. Christopher Pittenger, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, sat down to grapple with phenomena that seem to defy explanation—levitation, bilocation, and the ecstatic states of saints.
What followed was not a debate to be won, but a profound exploration of reality, truth, and the limits of our respective disciplines. This is the story of that evening.
Setting the Stage: A Circle of Inquiry
After a warm welcome from Dr. Anna Yusim, and a brief introduction by Professor Bruce Gordon, the floor was given to the speakers. The room was filled not just with academics, but with individuals whose personal and professional lives orbit the same questions: MD/PhD students, chaplains, theologians, medical students, and those who have felt the pull of the spiritual in their own lives. It was, as intended, a true community of inquiry.
The Historian’s Gamble: Carlos Eire on the Reality of “They Flew”
Professor Carlos Eire began by framing his entire career as a pursuit of the intersection between the physical world and the spiritual dimension. He confessed a personal obsession with this boundary, tracing it from his early work on Protestant iconoclasm to the history of death and, ultimately, to the physical phenomena of mystical ecstasy.
The spark for his latest book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, was an anecdote from a tour guide in the convent of St. Teresa of Ávila. The guide nonchalantly pointed out a spot where the saint had levitated. For Professor Eire, this was not a quaint legend, but a historical and epistemological gauntlet.
The Historian’s Dilemma: How to Study the Impossible?
Professor Eire laid out the central challenge posed by archival testimony of levitation. As a historian, he is trained to analyze texts, context, and credibility. Yet, the very nature of the events he was studying—saints floating in the air—seems to place them outside the bounds of verifiable history. Traditional historians, he noted, have two primary ways of dismissing such accounts:
- The Scientific Lens: They assume that if modern measuring tools had been present, they would have proven the event did not happen according to the laws of physics.
- The Psychological Lens: They dismiss the accounts as shared delusions, mass hysteria, or the result of psychological mechanisms that trick people into believing they saw something impossible.
Professor Eire’s project is a radical attempt to carve out a third space, one where both the historical testimony and the physical laws can be held in tension without one negating the other. He proposed that perhaps Teresa of Ávila was levitating—in her own experience and in the experience of the nuns who tried and failed to pull her down—in a way that is not remotely trivializing. To call it “just a delusion,” he argued, is to miss the point entirely. The experience was real to them, and its truth lies beyond the realm of what scientific instruments are designed to probe.
To ground this abstract idea, Professor Eire shared a deeply personal story. After a traumatic brain injury, he lost his sense of smell. His doctor, pointing to the non-redundant design of the olfactory nerves, offered what he called a “theological explanation”: poor design. For a year following the injury, he suffered from phantosmia, a constant, morphing hospital smell that was as real to him as any “true” smell. This experience revolutionized his understanding of hallucinations. He realized that a hallucination is not a falsehood; it is a genuine, undeniable experience generated by the brain. It is real to the person having it, which forced him to rethink the nature of the testimony he was reading from centuries-old convents.
The Scientist’s Humility: Chris Pittenger MD PhD on the Models We Build
Dr. Chris Pittenger began by aligning himself with the spirit of Professor Eire’s inquiry. As a scientist, he explained, his job is to build a coherent model of the world—a synthesis of reality from fundamentally inadequate information. This model, whether we call it subjective experience or mind, is, in a sense, prior to our understanding of the physical world. Our scientific theories about the brain are secondary to the primary reality of our own experience.
Two Ways of Hearing “Impossible Facts”
Dr. Pittenger echoed Professor Eire’s dichotomy, framing it in scientific terms. When we hear that St. Teresa levitated, we can interpret it in one of two ways:
- The Physical Event: It happened in a way that could, in theory, have been measured and verified by objective instruments.
- The Dismissive Interpretation: It was a hallucination, a shared delusion that can be explained away by psychological mechanisms.
Dr. Pittenger then proposed his own “third space,” one that resonates with Professor Eire’s. He suggested it’s possible that physical devices might not have recorded a violation of physics, and yet Teresa was genuinely levitating in her own experience and that of her community. This is not a lesser truth; it’s a different kind of truth, one that exists beyond the shared, consensual model that science builds.
Dr. Pittenger anchored this idea in the neuroscience of perception. He explained that our expectations, both individual and societal, constantly condition what we experience. He gave the simple example of seeing a flash out of the corner of his eye and, expecting to see his black cat, “seeing” his cat even if it was a shadow. This individual bias scales up to the societal level. He offered the provocative example of how a society might condition its members to trust—or fear—people in uniform. These preconceptions shape our perceptions until overwhelming evidence forces a revision.
He linked this to the changing face of psychiatric illness itself. “Hysteria,” a common diagnosis in the late 19th century, is now rare. The phenomenology has changed, he argued, not because the underlying human psyche has changed, but because the societal expectations for how internal conflict is expressed have evolved. This is a powerful example of the constant interplay between social expectation and personal experience.
Engaging the Historical Testimony
When Professor Eire pressed him on the testimony of 20 nuns who all swore they tried to pull a levitating Teresa down, Dr. Pittenger remained the open-minded skeptic. He didn’t call them liars. Instead, he pointed to the well-documented fallibility of memory, especially over time and especially when people have discussed an event. Their stories could have converged through social reinforcement, not conscious deceit. This is not the same as lying; it’s the nature of human memory as a reconstruction, not a video recording. To be truly compelling, he noted, one would need independent, isolated testimonies, free from the chance of “subconscious collusion.”
This is where the two scholars found their most productive friction. Professor Eire, leaning on his own phantosmia, argued for the enduring, “immovable” reality of the experience, even with the passage of time and social interaction. He couldn’t conceive of a group of devout nuns unconsciously arriving at the same false memory. For him, the vivid, consistent details—the frying pan, the failed attempts to pull her down—point to a shared reality that transcends our modern categories of truth and falsehood.
The Dialogue: Audience Questions and a Meeting of Minds
The formal presentations flowed seamlessly into a moderated discussion, where the audience eagerly joined the fray. The questions were as profound as the topic demanded.
The Perils of Explanation
A medical student raised a crucial point: If we use scientific explanations (like mass hallucination) to undermine historical accounts, don’t we also undermine the observations upon which science itself is built? If 20 nuns can be mistaken, why not 20 scientists about the reality of an atom?
Dr. Pittenger embraced this challenge, arguing that this is precisely why science is a process, not a list of facts. The entire apparatus of science—replication, statistics, antagonistic peer review—is designed to combat the very human tendency to see what we expect to see. The proof that this process works, he argued, is in its fruits: airplanes and electricity. The key is humility about the extent of science’s domain, not arrogance about its supremacy.
The Possibility of “Spooky” Connection
Another audience member offered a more radical hypothesis. Drawing on accounts of CIA remote viewing and a psychoanalytic anecdote about a patient inducing drowsiness in her analyst, she wondered if the nuns’ collective vision could be explained by “energies we all emit.” Could Teresa’s ecstasy have been so powerful that she projected her experience onto those around her?
Professor Eire admitted this was “too much” for him to conceive of, stumbling as he was on the “chronological dimension” of memory reconstruction. Dr. Pittenger, however, found a plausible, non-supernatural explanation within the realm of social neuroscience. He suggested that “extraordinarily subtle social cues”—the kind we are not consciously aware of but that charismatic individuals master—can create a shared experience. A figure of spiritual authority can condition the perceptions of those around them through complex manipulations of the social field. This is not magic, he argued, but a testament to the fact that our channels of communication are far more subtle and multidimensional than we typically acknowledge.
Consciousness, Reality, and Truth
The conversation then turned to the biggest questions of all. When asked about consciousness, Professor Eire offered a historian’s view: it is our awareness of ourselves in an environment we must constantly decipher. He linked it to the human inability to conceive of our own non-existence, a problem he explored in his work on eternity.
Dr. Pittenger made a crucial distinction. For him, the “easy” problem of consciousness—self-monitoring, building a model of oneself—is complex but philosophically straightforward. The “hard” problem is qualia: the subjective, “what-it-is-like” feeling of being oneself. This, he admitted, is a mystery. He has no idea how a scientific explanation for it would even look, but he refused to declare it forever inaccessible.
The final question of the evening elegantly tied the threads together: “Can one distinguish between something that is real and something that is true?”
Pittenger’s response was a fitting capstone to the dialogue. He suggested that “real” and “true” are not fixed, universal concepts. They are words whose meaning is contingent on a particular frame of explanation. To dismiss something as “not real” or “not true” only works if there is only one possible definition of those terms. Since that is not the case, these words should not be used to shut down conversation, but to open it.
Broader Questions for Reflection
As the formal discussion ended and attendees drifted back to the wine and dessert table, the questions lingered in the air, refusing to be resolved. They are the kind of questions that defy a simple answer and instead invite a lifetime of reflection.
- The Nature of Evidence: What constitutes valid evidence for a phenomenon? Is the collective, consistent testimony of dozens of witnesses over centuries inherently less valid than data produced by a machine? On what grounds do we make that hierarchy?
- The Authority of Experience: How do we honor the profound, life-altering subjective experiences of individuals—from medieval nuns to modern patients—without being forced to accept a literal, physical interpretation of those events? Can an experience be “real” without being “factual”?
- The Discomfort of Mystery: Why is the “third space” between literal truth and outright dismissal so uncomfortable for both the historian and the scientist? What is it in our modern, post-Enlightenment mindset that demands that every mystery be solved and categorized?
- The Power of Expectation: If our expectations and social context so powerfully shape our perceptions, what does that mean for our own claims to objectivity? How much of what we “see” is actually a reflection of what our culture, our discipline, and our personal history have conditioned us to expect?
- The Future of Interdisciplinary Dialogue: How can conversations like this one move beyond polite intellectual curiosity to fundamentally reshape the questions we ask in our own fields? What would it mean for a historian to truly incorporate the insights of neuroscience, or for a neuroscientist to take the deep archive of human testimony as seriously as the data from an fMRI?
The evening at Niebuhr Hall did not answer these questions. But it did something perhaps more important: it created a sacred space where they could be asked without fear, where the impossible was not dismissed, but held, examined, and wondered at. It was a reminder that some of the most important truths are not found in the answers, but in the quality of the questions we dare to ask together.
