LEIBNIZ AND THE FLYING MONK

I have 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