What Caused Secularization? Yale Historian & Michael Horton on Radical Mystics and the Reformation

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Dr. Carlos Eire

   The project for They Flew was conceived in a very, very fuzzy and inchoate way in 1983. And the book was published in 2023. So I didn't continually write for 40 years on this book. I did a lot of other things. But it's a good thing I waited to do it until this point in my career because I touch on subjects that could have had me branded as unfit for teaching at an academic institution of higher learning.

2. 00:38

   Michael Horton

   Get tenure first and then—

3. 00:41

   Dr. Carlos Eire

   It's a good thing I had tenure. And not only tenure, but also, you know, I'm in my 70s now. They don't like to kick old men out of their offices prematurely. So I'm glad I waited.

4. 00:55

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

5. 01:19

   Caleb Wait

   Hello, my name is Caleb Wait. I'm the Director of Content at Sola Media, and today I have the pleasure of interviewing the usual host of this program, Michael Horton. Good to see you, Mike.

6. 01:32

   Michael Horton

   Good to see you, Caleb.

7. 01:33

   Caleb Wait

   But we're also joined by a very special guest. We're honored to welcome Dr. Carlos Eire, historian from Yale University. Dr. Eire, thanks so much for joining us today.

8. 01:46

   Dr. Carlos Eire

   Oh, thank you for the invitation. My pleasure.

9. 01:49

   Caleb Wait

   Yes, both of you have published important works in history around early modernity, Spirituality, mysticism, and the Reformation around that time period, which is the subject of our conversation today. Dr. Horton is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology at Westminster Seminary California. He's the founder of Sola Media, author of many books, and his new book is out now, volume 2 in his trilogy on the spiritual but not religious movement. The book is called Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of the Spiritual, Not Religious Phenomenon from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. And Dr. Ayer, you wrote a blurb for Dr. Horton's work.

10. 02:37

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes.

11. 02:37

    Caleb Wait

    You said, quote, this is a marvelously engaging and eye-opening reassessment of the Western world's transition to modernity. Later on you say, all in all, this is a stunning achievement. Dr. Carlos Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He specializes in the social, intellectual, and religious and cultural history of the late medieval and early modern Europe with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. He's the author of multiple books, including The War Against the Idols, The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin, Reformations: The Early Modern World, which won many prizes, including the R.R. Hawkins Prize for the best book of the year from the American Publishers Association and the award for the best book in the humanities. And we're going to speak with him about his book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible.

12. Caleb Wait

    He has also ventured into the 20th century, writing on the Cuban revolution in his memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in the United States in 2003. And his second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami, explores the exile experience of being in the United States. And notably, all of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has also been pronounced, I believe, an enemy of the state. Is that right?

13. 04:07

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes. Well, the legal term is enemy of the revolution. The state is not— never called the state or the government. It's called the Revolution.

14. 04:19

    Caleb Wait

    Very good.

15. 04:19

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    With a capital R.

16. 04:21

    Caleb Wait

    Dr. Ehrer, your work, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Dr. Horton, your work, Magician and Mechanic, they share many surprising stories that counter prevalent assumptions and narratives about modernity, namely the idea that there's been this kind of march of history through time and that humanity has gone from a primitive and superstitious culture in ancient and medieval eras to now a rationalistic and scientific era, free of religion and its dogmas, free of magic and that sort of thing. And the focus of your works, in my assessment, seem to run parallel in interesting ways. Some of your answers to what some might call the problem of modernity are different, and we'll get into some of that. But first off, what made both of you interested to research and write these projects? Dr. Ayer, you say you've spent over 40 years working on this, and Dr. Horton, nearly 30 years working on your trilogy. What has fascinated you about these themes?

17. 05:33

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Well, all of my work from my dissertation on, and my dissertation was my first book, War Against the Idols, all of my work, my academic work, has focused on the way in which the visible and invisible relate to one another in religion, especially in the history of Christianity and especially the history of the reformations of the early modern period, how individuals and societies have interpreted the relationship between the natural and supernatural. That's always been my fascination. So therefore, I, you know, I've gravitated towards the miraculous because that is one area that has not, I didn't think, had received sufficient attention. The project for They Flew was conceived In a very, very fuzzy and inchoate way in 1983. And the book was published in 2023. So I didn't continually write for 40 years on this book. I did a lot of other things, but it's a good thing I waited to do it until this point in my career because I touch on subjects that could have had me branded as unfit for teaching at an academic institution of higher learning.

18. 07:01

    Michael Horton

    Get tenure first and then—

19. 07:04

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    As one reviewer put it in the very first sentence about They Flew, this is a deeply unserious book. So it's a good thing I had tenure. And not only tenure, but also, you know, I'm in my 70s now. They don't like to kick old men out of their offices prematurely. So I'm glad I waited. These impossible miracles that I focus on, they're all 16th and 17th century, some 18th. But, you know, these are things that are not supposed to happen. And I was trained— to study religion as a functionalist, which means that you can only speak about the function that certain beliefs or events serve socially, culturally, politically. You can only talk about the function, but you never should ask the question, well, did this really happen? Even if you put quotation marks around “really.” Did such things get— can these things happen? Have they happened? But my overarching question in this book is historians should pause before they reject certain kinds of testimony as necessarily being false in some way, either false because they're lies or false because People are easily fooled or have different perceptions, faulty, faulty perceptions of reality.

20. 08:43

    Caleb Wait

    Hey, Mike, and what, what caused you to start research and writing on your project?

21. 08:49

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, well, I was working on a completely different project for my dissertation, and while I was doing that work in Oxford, I went to a series of lectures by a professor who filled the largest public classroom. And what he was doing was drawing a Venn diagram with various circles of the four great religions and trying to show that it was the heterodox, more mystical wings of those religions, the more occult, if you will, versions of those religions that meet at the center. And so here I was thinking, isn't this interesting? A number of us went out afterwards and middle-aged white upper-class professor in the West telling all of us what our real religions were. And it was very exclusive. He was very critical of traditional religion. And so I started to—I think that was the trigger for me where I started to lose interest in my dissertation and started going to every lecture I could around this subject. And from then on, as Carlos says, it's not like I was working on it exclusively. I was doing a lot of other things, but I kept going back to that and using up my sabbaticals for it. And so that's how that happened.

22. 10:18

    Caleb Wait

    Excellent. Dr. Eyre, you focus on, in your work, well-attested miracles, and you specifically focus on eyewitness and public reports of levitation and bilocation. Notably, accounts of these miracles seem to reach their height after the Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. Could you share a few examples of these involving figures such as Saint Teresa of Ávila, and then maybe explain what you think these testimonies reveal about this particular period in history.

23. 10:58

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Right. Levitation is hovering above the ground at various distances. And basically you are escaping the law of gravity in some way. That's an ancient phenomenon. And it's a very common phenomenon in world religions. As a matter of fact, when I would tell colleagues, experts on Asian religions, that I was working on this project, their response was usually, yeah, so what? Yeah, of course. Yes, this is normal. And in Christianity, levitation begins to appear in the early Middle Ages.

24. Dr. Carlos Eire

    It's a side effect of mystical ecstasy, always. In every Christian account, it is a side— it's a physical side effect of spiritual ecstasy. But there tend to be more reports of levitation in the later Middle Ages, and then they begin to spike in the 16th century after the Protestant Reformation emerges, and the evidence changes. But before I get to that, bilocation is being in two places simultaneously. Or being seen in two places simultaneously, which is also an ancient phenomenon, world religions. But in the case of Christian history, that too is a physical or transphysical phenomenon linked to ecstasy. And all of these individuals who levitate or bilocate that I've studied, you know, they are people who have trained pretty much like athletes in the realm of prayer. They've devoted their life to almost nonstop, or in some cases nonstop praying, and also self-discipline, including fasting and cutting back on sleep and all such things.

25. Dr. Carlos Eire

    So these are highly trained individuals. It just doesn't happen to quote-unquote average or normal individuals. But back to the testimonies. What happens in the 16th century, and I can get back to this, you know, Protestants, when they emerge, they deny that these things could be caused by God and insist that if any such thing happens, it's from the devil. Or they argue that in most cases, these are just lies. These things don't happen. So of course, the phenomenon has a polemical edge both ways. For Protestants, it's a way of proving that Catholic Church is the false church because the devil is doing all this stuff. For Catholics, proving that they are the true church, of course. The argument is, no, no, this can be from God.

26. Dr. Carlos Eire

    Not in all cases, but it can be. So we have more accounts, but the evidence that we have is different in the 16th and 17th century than the evidence we have from the Middle Ages. Because in the Middle Ages, where do we read about these things? We read about them in the lives of the saints, right? Hagiographies. So these are texts in which the author is trying to convince you that this person was special—had a special relationship with God. Modern historical standards, you know, this is biased literature. What changes in the 16th century is that the Catholic Church revamps the process for canonization and beatification, the two steps. You become a blessed first and then you become a saint. And not only it revamps the whole process, but the most important part for a historian, is that very, very detailed questionnaires are prepared and circulated to all the people who might have known this person who's up for sainthood. There's a section always on miracles. Did you see this person perform any miracles? People have to swear on their souls, on their eternal destiny, that they're telling the truth. So my approach is to ask the question, very rational question. How likely is it that 100% of these testimonies, most of which come from deeply religious people who believe in hell, how likely is it that 100% of them are lying?

27. Dr. Carlos Eire

    Or how likely is it that they're all deluded? I mean, this is very difficult to explain. It's what William James called a wild fact, right? It's like a square peg that won't go into a round hole. How do you account for mass hallucinations? Or, you know, mass hysteria is another very commonly used term. But what I focus on is not the mass hysteria or hallucination, but the question of truth-telling. You can end up in hell. And in the Catholic mindset, right, God forbid, you know, you walk out the door and you get hit by lightning without having gone to confession just after you lied to the canonization inquest. You can go straight to hell. And everybody knows this.

28. Dr. Carlos Eire

    Or, you know, if you confess and you're forgiven, you might spend extra time in purgatory for lying about something like this. So I think the possibility of lying is lessened. So using these inquests as evidence, I think the question then reverts back on those who say that all such accounts are false. The question reverts to them. Would you dismiss evidence on these grounds for any other kind of phenomenon from this many people? Should they be dismissed offhand, all of them, 100% as false?

29. 17:33

    Caleb Wait

    Understood. And just so our audience could have more, a couple concrete pictures, could you share some of the examples from St. Teresa of Ávila and St. Joseph of Cupertino? Sure.

30. 17:47

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Sure. Well, my favorite for Saint Teresa. She is the Mother Superior in her convent. She has been experiencing these flights, as she calls them, or gifts, metaseles. And she orders the sisters in her convent, next time you see me going up, try to hold me down. Or if I go up, pull me down. And there are repeated testimonies in the canonization and beatification inquest, these nuns testifying to the fact that she did go up, but they couldn't restrain her and they could not pull her down. But one of these events involves Teresa being in the kitchen cooking with a frying pan, and she goes into ecstasy with this frying pan on her hand. But the frying pan contains the last little bit of olive oil the convent had. And they were worried the oil might spill. And all of this, these details are in the testimony, which to me adds a level of believability to it. It's a detail that why would you invent something like this? Plus, we have Teresa's own testimony. She's one of the very few people who have levitated, who has written about what it feels like for this to happen.

31. Dr. Carlos Eire

    And she actually begged God to stop it because it was bringing too much attention to her. And maybe we can come back to this. There's always, as Protestant charged, there's always the possibility the devil might be behind it. So this was placing her in a very peculiar position. where she might, you know, and she was being watched by the Inquisition. So Joseph Cupertino, even more extreme levitating. No one that I have read about has ever risen as high or actually flown from point A to point B backwards and forwards more. No one's done so more than Joseph Cupertino. Hundreds and hundreds. Actually, they stopped counting after a while how many times this happened to him. But my favorite Joseph of Cupertino account of levitation is—and it's a strange one. There is a Lutheran prince visiting Assisi. Where he has been placed. Joseph. What's this Lutheran? Actually, Duke of Saxony. And not just because there were two Saxonies, not just any Saxony, but the very same Saxony that Luther emerged from.

32. Dr. Carlos Eire

    What's he doing in Italy? Well, he's there. He has heard about Joseph. So he's definitely there to see him, see this. And lo and behold, he does get to see it. And Joseph flies over his head, and he converts to Catholicism, convinced that this is not demonic, right? And very little has been written about John Frederick of Saxony and his conversion. You know, I'm hoping that at some point in the near future, someone will start doing the digging.

33. 21:24

    Michael Horton

    The experience, especially of Teresa of Ávila, is so parallel to the experience I have read of Sarah Pierrepont Edwards, Jonathan Edwards' wife.

34. 21:38

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes.

35. 21:39

    Michael Horton

    And she was worried. She would be not even worried. She said, I don't care if I run out with pitchforks, because there was a kind of a controversy that was aroused by her visions and her agitations, as she called them.

36. 21:56

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes.

37. 21:57

    Michael Horton

    She said things like this: infinite beauty and amiableness of Christ's person and the heavenly sweetness of his transcendent love, so that the soul remained a kind of heavenly Elysium and did, as it were, swim in the rays of God's love like a mote swimming in the beams of the sun or beams of his light that come in at window and the heart was swallowed up in a kind of glow. And she talks about having these experiences since she was six years old. An example, seeing many people moved after a Wednesday afternoon sermon, she was, quote, overcome by a vision of heaven that I lost all bodily strength. And yet for three hours, she exhorted everyone in the church, both men and women, which was not usually done. And she said, I repeatedly flew out of my chair, leaping, speaking in a loud voice, bodily agitation and convulsions. It seemed to me I must naturally and necessarily ascend thither. I could not keep in my chair any otherwise, that as they held me down— I was constantly endeavoring to leap or fly, feeling I had left behind my body as an empty shell. And should, as it were, drop into the divine being and be swallowed up in him.

38. 23:17

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I actually have a less dramatic quote from Sarah in They Flew. It's more referring to what it feels like inside her for this to happen. But yeah, I love this one with the leaping and flying. Absolutely. You know.

39. 23:39

    Caleb Wait

    Dr. Horton, in your work, the history you are tracing is when the hunt for spiritual ecstasy leads people into strange pursuits, as it were, leading people into all kinds of practices. So in volume 2 of your work, Mike, you go—

40. Caleb Wait

    From volume 1, Alexandria, Egypt, the birthplace of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism and other philosophies, and you're going to the Renaissance in Florence. So what was the cultural and intellectual scene in Florence at this time? Who was Marsilio Ficino? Why was there such a widespread interest in astrology? alchemy?, hermeticism? Why were people hunting for spiritual ecstasy through these things in Florence at this time?

41. 24:41

    Michael Horton

    Lots of reasons, but one example is the fear of death. And I think that's what united the cultures of ancient Alexandria, the late Middle Ages with the Black Death, And subsequent periods when there's a kind of convulsion of social unrest. You know, a lot of revolutionary movements arose before the Reformation. What we could say are precursors to sort of communalistic revolutionary impulses arose before the Reformation. And in fact, the magisterial Reformation reacted against that as much as the Church of Rome. But the Black Death stole away whole populations, including in Florence. Florence was decimated so much that the banking system collapsed. And so that's when a lot of groups, even returning to Gnosticism so much as they understood it, various extreme heterodox groups arose in that milieu. And you had people like Savonarola, who claimed to have visions in which the Virgin Mary gave him basically the keys to the kingdom of Florence. And eventually, he was burned at the stake because his prophecies didn't come true. But I think— That's one of the reasons why Ficino, you know, how to gain life from the heavens. His dad was a doctor, doctor to the father of the fatherland, Medici, and Cosimo de' Medici. And Cosimo was young Ficino's patron. So he really didn't see any difference between his being a priest—a doctor of the soul—and using natural magic as a way of healing the body and the soul and society and so forth. So he returned actually to the ancient texts of Alexandria.

42. Michael Horton

    He claimed to perform— not only believe Orphic doctrines and translate Orphic literature, especially the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of Hermetic works, but to practice what he called Orphic rituals. And of course, that's where the church said you're crossing the line. Who are you praying to? Who are you singing to? Who are you praising? Is it Dionysus and Orpheus, or is it Christ and the saints?

43. Michael Horton

    And so in a sense, it was, as Anthony Grafton has argued this really well, there was a sense that the magicians were competing with the church for magic. At least that's how even before the Reformation, many people saw it. And at the time of the Reformation, that was the critique. As Carlos points out so well, that it was—they had crossed the line. The church had been very vigilant in trying to keep that line from being crossed, but even popes like Alexander brought Hermeticism and neo-paganism right into the heart of the church. That line was crossed again and again. And so the Counter-Reformation was in some ways, as much of a reaction against superstition as the Reformation was. I don't know if Carlos would agree with that, but there was a real pushback, probably because, as Carlos points out, in the 16th and 17th century, you have a spike in supernatural claims, miraculous claims, and the church has to be wary. Of just being gullible and accepting any and every testimony.

44. 29:08

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yeah. And you know, the skepticism about miracles in general, or visions and apparitions on the Catholic side, predates the Protestant Reformation. And a case in point is what happened in Spain in the early 16th century. Which is that anyone who claimed to have had a vision, especially if they were laypeople, and especially if they were peasants, which was very common throughout the medieval period. You know, some peasant would say, “oh, the Virgin Mary visited me. She had this to say.” They all start being processed by the Inquisition and questioned about details. And actually, the Inquisition decides that most of these cases that they're handling are fraudulent. And as a result, there's a beautiful book by William Christian Jr. on this, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. And reports of visions by the mid-16th century have dwindled.

45. Dr. Carlos Eire

    Because everyone knows if they go running to their parish priest, tell them that an apparition has occurred, the Inquisition will come and grill them. So yeah, they cut back on this. But, you know, magic itself, magic of all sorts, white magic, black magic, all this, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's throughout all of Europe.

46. 30:43

    Caleb Wait

    Yeah.

47. 30:44

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Which is one of the reasons that French historian Jean Delumeau argued in the '70s, 1970s. Beginning of the 16th century when the Protestant Reformation began, Europe had yet to be fully Christianized.

48. 31:02

    Caleb Wait

    Wow.

49. 31:02

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Scratch anyone and under the skin you will find many, many superstitions, pagan holdovers, and even some dark stuff.

50. 31:12

    Michael Horton

    Caleb mentioned the march of history Whiggish interpretation that no matter how critical social historians are of that, they still bleed the Whiggish narrative. There's this presupposition that a lot of historians have that people were gullible until science came along.

51. Michael Horton

    And the fact is people in earlier ages may have been open—more open to supernatural activity, to miracles, but they weren't less superstitious than our own time. And furthermore, they weren't any more gullible than we are about purported miracles. In fact, you know, when the miracle of miracles, Jesus' resurrection, the disciples didn't believe when the women came and brought the testimony that Jesus had been raised. And Thomas had to put his hand in Jesus' side. So, it's not as if suddenly Einstein comes along and we have a rational world that doesn't take miracle claims at face value.

52. 32:27

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    I agree. It's, well, it's a bit of prejudice and also anachronistic in a way for anyone here in the 21st century or even back in the 20th century to project their own materialist interpretation of how people saw the world, which includes, of course, all of these people being either liars or very, very easily fooled. Yeah, I like what you brought up, Mike, about Thomas having to stick his hand in Jesus's side, especially. Feeling the holes in the fingers is one thing, but he wanted to stick his hand in Jesus's side, his hand. That's such one of these details that just jump out at you, like the frying pan in Teresa's hand. They're added as a bonus.

53. 33:34

    Caleb Wait

    I think, yeah, thank you, Mike. That's exactly where I was heading to. And so one more question. I know you both are writing works of history, but I'd be interested to see if you speculate with me on some of the sociology of this just for a moment before we dive back into the books. I think there’s a lot of modern folks today who are wrestling with this interesting tension. I think you both note, and one is like, they're comfortable with the challenge to a dogmatic materialism. They're comfortable saying, you know, maybe, yeah, there's something else out there, whatever it is. Mike and I being in California, right, people are definitely interested in the impossible here, but the kind of things that maybe is more trendy is, you know, tarot cards.

54. Caleb Wait

    Astrology is alive and well. It's definitely in vogue. You have people, you know, when they think about enchantment in the world, they like that, but what they're thinking of here is, you know, crystals, Wicca. Mike, you're kind of tracing the idea that modern people are still superstitious. Dr. Ayer, in your work, you've said, you know, yeah, we're modern, but we have also these this superstitious side, and we're postmodern, so we don't maybe care so much about saint miracles, but we're definitely interested when witches fly because they're the minority oppressed group.

55. 35:11

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Of course.

56. 35:12

    Caleb Wait

    So both of you elaborate on kind of that tension we feel today when we're kind of drawn to an enchanted spiritual life, but that That drawing for modern people today doesn't really push them towards religion, the Bible, or the church. It pushes them maybe towards crystals and tarot cards and that kind of thing.

57. 35:33

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yeah. Well, what Mike has as a subtitle, the spiritual, or “I'm spiritual, I'm not religious.” Right. Yes, that is definitely out there. But what I have found in speaking about my book and public appearances, is that the younger the audience, the more receptive it seems to be. And I think, Mike, you're nodding, so you've had the same experience. There is a generational difference that I note. And it's a very sharp difference.

58. Dr. Carlos Eire

    And, well, I attribute it to two things. Like you say, we're all superstitious. Human beings are superstitious, or they have—they're drawn this way. Calvin said the same thing. Begins his Institutes with basically, I call him an armchair ethnographer or anthropologist, you know, diagnosing why it is that human beings are inherently religious. I agree with that. And it's not—I don't agree with it because Calvin says it. I think it's a common sense observation—that religion is a human phenomenon. And I have often argued in public and in private that our species is called homo sapiens. Might as well also call it homo religiosus.

59. Dr. Carlos Eire

    Because what's one of the things that distinguishes us from the rest of creation, of creatures? It’s religion. Yes. And even in the caves of Altamira and those that are even older than Altamira, anthropologists have discovered religion. It's a natural human instinct. But I see something else happening. And I see it happening in various media, but even in books published by distinguished academic presses. Which is the fuzziness of reality that is being discovered by science at the astrophysical level, at the subatomic level, and in many other instances, calling into question dogmatic materialism in all of its forms. That in fact, the human mind, the scientific mind, has now come up on so many instances where it seems, and some scientists seriously debate, whether we're living in a hologram.

60. 38:12

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

61. 38:12

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Basically the film The Matrix, which is a retelling of Plato's allegory of the cave, that this is what is happening. And there are so many books and articles now on consciousness and mind being the actual ground of all reality. So there is a scientific as well as a kind of instinctive pull towards religion. There is this scientific discovery of—that leads to puzzlement and to questioning of dogmatic materialism.

62. 38:49

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, I've seen the same thing. It's ironic because it's like they may still say they're materialists, but they're actually idealists. It turns out that they're panpsychists, you know.

63. 39:00

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Right.

64. 39:01

    Michael Horton

    There is one mind that is real, that all reality is a part of. And what I find is the— you either have supernaturalism, which is Christianity. There is a God who created the world ex nihilo. He transcends the world absolutely. And created the world, governs the world, redeems the world, and so forth. And so, within that, of course, there are miracles. And then there's natural supernaturalism, which is basically, there is no God outside the world, quote unquote, outside the world, who creates and provides and performs miracles and so forth. Rather, nature itself is miraculous. And then you have materialism, you have naturalism. What I see is the naturalists and the natural supernaturalists now combining against traditional theism. Jan Assmann calls it the mosaic distinction.

65. Michael Horton

    “I am Yahweh, there is no other God.” Of course, the Gnostics said that that was the bad creator God who said that, jealous God. There is no other religion. There is, you know, only Yahweh worship is the true religion. Whereas, you know, all the other religions, they said, yeah, there are parallels of our religion in every culture. Here, it's only in Israel is God known. And from there on, Christianity just carries that forward. And what I see is a reaction against both materialism on one hand and supernaturalism on the other, and the triumph of a kind of—not just among New Age people and so forth, but wide swaths of intellectual and popular culture for natural supernaturalism. Do you see that too, Carlos?

66. 41:09

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Oh yes, very much so. Very much so. But what I see is that, you know, unlike the aggressive atheists of the late 20th century and early 21st century, these folk are much less aggressive in their dismissal of the Mosaic distinction. Yeah, they're much less aggressive in taking down or criticizing that. As a matter of fact, I know several personally who are really indifferent to that. Fine, if you want to see it that way, that doesn't contradict my own thinking on these matters. Maybe there is, because there's some of them who I know, people I know personally who think this way. Let's put it this way.

67. Dr. Carlos Eire

    There's an open-mindedness in these people. About three people I know who are like this, who think like this. there's an open-mindedness that you tend not to find in aggressive atheists. We don't see it as much anywhere. I think it was, was it Dawkins who very recently said that he considers himself a—

68. 42:23

    Caleb Wait

    Cultural Christian.

69. 42:23

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Cultural Christian. Was it him? Yeah.

70. 42:26

    Caleb Wait

    Yes.

71. 42:26

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes. Yeah. But he's saying that in response to the overt privilege being given to Muslims in England. as he sees it. Yeah, they're getting too many concessions. They're trying to turn UK into an Islamic culture. That's why he reverts back to saying, yeah, I'm a cultural Christian. And he actually, if I remember correctly, bemoans the loss of the Christian cultural and intellectual heritage. So he used to be nothing but aggressive.

72. 42:57

    Caleb Wait

    Yeah, yeah. He's still condescending towards the actual doctrines per se, but you're right. If there's a good thing about Christianity, it's more of an ethos rather than a dogma. Now, back into the history for a bit before we close our time. Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation and that period both had high views of external authorities, the church, of the scriptures, the sacraments, and the people we're talking about today who see religion and these kind of mystical autonomous spiritualities, they don't really see a difference, but they're more attracted to whatever is maybe more autonomous, right? They're not interested in the— into those external authorities that both Catholics and Protestants held dear. Who were some of the radical figures in this time? Because normally the story is told where it's only Catholics versus Protestants at this time in history, but really there were radical and fringe figures in and around Catholic and Protestant circles. Who were some of these radicals? What were the briculars, their teachings? What were some things that they picked up on to support their views of being away and distinct from those external institutions.

73. 44:29

    Michael Horton

    Well, one of the subtexts in my project is that the traditional histories that carve up the eras into periods led by traditional figures, let's say, have left out the people they thought were weirdos. And I think actually modernity is more the product of the so-called weirdos.

74. 45:00

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Weirdos.

75. 45:01

    Michael Horton

    For instance, the radical Anabaptists.

76. 45:04

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes.

77. 45:05

    Michael Horton

    If you read Marx and Engels, I was in East Germany before the wall came down, they had statues to those guys.

78. 45:12

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes.

79. 45:13

    Michael Horton

    Thomas Müntzer, you know, a great example. I actually think, and it was the Anabaptists who wrote the first Bible criticism volumes, trying to show the errors in the Bible so that they could shift authority from an external source, whether the church or the scriptures, to the inner light, the inner divine self.

80. 45:40

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Right.

81. 45:40

    Michael Horton

    And all of that, All of that, the utopianism, everything, all of that had more of an impact, I think, on modernity than either the magisterial Reformation or the Counter-Reformation.

82. 45:55

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Wow. Yeah. Well, you know, they're usually labeled as being, quote unquote, “ahead of their time”, these weirdos, right?

83. 46:02

    Michael Horton

    Yes.

84. 46:03

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    And for good reason.

85. 46:05

    Michael Horton

    Right.

86. 46:05

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    You know, Thomas Müntzer, if you were there in East Germany, you might have seen The 5-mark note? The paper bill?

87. 46:12

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, I did. Yeah, I had it.

88. 46:13

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    It had Müntzer on it.

89. 46:15

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, I had it. I've lost it, but I had it.

90. 46:16

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Oh, what a shame. And on the reverse side, it had a thresher, which is an overt reference to one of his sermons in which he says, the harvest is at hand. And what he means by that is he's calling on the peasants to go and kill all the landlords. So it's very appropriate for the DDR to put him on the 5. He should have been on the 100-mark note, but then that means you're self-enriching. So that would have been a problem. But yeah, I think of Sebastian Frank especially.

91. 46:48

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Michael Horton) — Yeah.

92. 46:49

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Utter, utter edge of the Radical Reformation. Who called the Bible the paper pope and actually comes out and says, you know, even a Turk can be a better Christian than a Christian or something like that. I'm paraphrasing.

93. 47:07

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

94. 47:07

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Right? I'm paraphrasing. And he doesn't want a church. Caspar Schwenkfeld, ironically, didn't think that the church should be established given all the religious divisions of the age. But his followers established the Schwenkfelder Church. Again, that impulse, right? But only recently I started to read into, and also some of the texts of Emanuel Swedenborg, who's later. Boy, he is the prophet of the New Age. And then I found all the websites on him and his work. Swedenborg.

95. 47:50

    Michael Horton

    Well, think of how popular the Swedenborgian Church was in Boston.

96. 47:56

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Right. Yes.

97. 47:57

    Michael Horton

    Right up to the time of, you know, Henry James Sr.

98. 48:00

    Dr. Carlos Eire

    Yes.

99. 48:01

    Michael Horton

    Ralph Waldo Emerson.

100. 48:01

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Yes.

101. 48:03

     Michael Horton

     Henry David Thoreau. They were all in some ways— William James, in some ways.

102. 48:08

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     William James too, yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And not only that, I actually did a little bit, tiny bit of research, took me about a half hour, the turn to Unitarianism at Harvard. There was a long string of presidents from mid-19th century until like the 1930s. Every president of Harvard was Unitarian. At least very overtly or less overtly, but they all were Unitarian. And then the classic example that comes up also is the character, the main character in this book, Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg.

103. Dr. Carlos Eire

     Simple miller in northern Italy in the Friuli region who gets hauled in by the Inquisition because he goes around saying crazy things to people. Weird things, crazy things about how the world came about that all contradict the Genesis narrative. And the Inquisition comes after him for making these statements, but the poor man, he can't control himself. He never shuts up, and he keeps coming back to face the Inquisition. But the title of the book is a reference to the cosmology that this Menocchio had, which is that the world is eternal, and the world that we know now just emerged naturally from some primordial goop. He says, much like worms come out of cheese if you wait long enough. And the thing is, the Inquisitors keep asking him, Where did you get these ideas? Like thinking there has to be some intellectual who comes up with these things. And he keeps telling them, from my own head. I came up with these ideas. And we're talking about late 1500s, early 1600s. A very simple miller somewhere is talking just like Sebastian Frank.

104. 50:16

     Michael Horton

     Or Jakob Böhme.

105. 50:17

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Or Jacob Böhme also, yes. Yeah. Or much later, Thomas Paine. My own mind is my church.

106. 50:24

     Caleb Wait

     Wow.

107. 50:25

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Direct quote from Tom Paine.

108. 50:27

     Caleb Wait

     Wow. And that really explains it. And I'm going to try in our last few minutes, try my hand at an ecumenical olive branch, as it were, between Catholics and Protestants here, because we hear narratives sometimes from Roman Catholics to say they seem to pick up on a version of Max Weber saying the Reformation is the reason for a disenchanted materialistic culture. Secularization is the Reformation's fault. And likewise, the Reformation was very skeptical of the spiritual miracles purported by many Catholics, as you have dutifully noted, Dr. Ayer. However, it seems like the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, neither of them won. It seemed like the radicals and those on the fringes won and defined the modern mind. Why? Can we agree that neither the Catholics or Protestants are to quote unquote “blame” for modernity? And why did the radicals win, as it were?

109. 51:45

     Caleb Wait

     Michael Horton) — Well, I think first of all, the whole idea— I argue in my third volume, which won't be out for a while, that I go right straight at—it's assumed throughout the others, but go straight at the Weberian thesis of disenchantment. It's actually the demagification of the world in German. And so if you look at the history of how it evolved, it didn't start with Max Weber, it started with the Romantics. Schiller, Schlegel, and other philosophers. When they said disenchantment, they meant that Christianity had disenchanted the world. We need to come up with new myths. And in doing so, they went back to old myths, Greek, Roman, Orphic, you know, another Renaissance, sort of like Ficino. Another evival of this underground phenomenon. And Weber is an heir, I think, to that. So, when you hear disenchantment, really what it is, is the effect of the Jewish and Christian God driving away the gods of the ancient paganism just seething beneath the crust of Christendom.

110. Caleb Wait

     And we need to go back to that kind of, you know, what we would today call, I guess, New Age, you know, kind of spirituality. That was Weber's own spirituality. I have a whole chapter on how so many liberal theologians, scientists, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and Weber himself were involved in a Gnostic summer camp in Altona, Switzerland, that included Freud and Carl Jung. Carl Jung, of course, was at the heart of it.

111. 53:49

     Carlos Eire

     I love this.

112. 53:50

     Michael Horton

     So, this idea that we're disenchanted is crazy. And if you look at the statistics today, people who move from traditional Christianity to spiritual but not religious become more superstitious. Not less. They believe more in astrology, more in nature being divine, and so on and so forth. So I don't think the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant Reformation—I mean, forget modern Protestants. I don't think that the medieval church and the Reformers had a different metaphysics.

113. Michael Horton

     I don't believe that they had a different epistemology. I think for them, the debate was, number one, what were the biblical miracles? Those don't match the ones that a lot of people are claiming today, like levitating or bilocation and so forth. They all pointed to the credibility of Jesus and his mission. And the apostles performed miracles to certify that gospel. And the charismata, the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, are all for the building up of the body, not for identifying super saints and their heroic virtue. And so the emphasis on grace, I think, was a big part of that. And then secondly, if Christ has come, the canon is closed, then we don't need those miracles, even the ones that you do find in the Book of Acts. They might happen, not closed off to it, but we don't need them.

114. Michael Horton

     Someone asked Calvin, well, where are your miracles to certify your message? And he said, turning water into wine at the marriage in Cana, the resurrection of Jesus, healing of the blind man, and so forth. We don't have a new Gospel. This is the same Gospel that was certified in the past. So, it was a debate, I believe, over exegesis and theological commitments, theological presuppositions. But metaphysically, Christians, Protestant and Roman Catholic, were open to supernatural interventions and intrusions, the freedom of God to do whatever he wants, miraculous healings and so forth continue.

115. 56:30

     Caleb Wait

     Dr. Ayer, how would you nuance some of that?

116. 56:33

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Well, I would nuance it a little differently because I think that there is a metaphysical component to the Protestant critique of Catholic piety. Right. And I agree. I mean, I've had exchanges with several scholars since my book came out about this point, which is that, yes, the cessation of miracles is a tenet, particularly of Reformed Protestantism. Yes. And you can trace the line back to Zwingli, all the way through Calvin to Zwingli, that miracles were not necessary after the death of the apostles. And I agree with Mike that, you know, deep down, yes, there's a metaphysical affinity between Catholics and Protestants with this difference, which has two parts to it. Number one, while Protestants rejected much of Catholic theology, they simultaneously accepted Catholic medieval demonology, almost 100%.

117. Dr. Carlos Eire

     So miracles, quote unquote, these are works of the devil. That's part of the cessation of miracles argument, right? But the other is that the Reformed tradition feels uncomfortable about connecting matter and spirit or the divine and creation. And Zwingli actually had a formula. Whatever you invest in the material, you detract from the spiritual. But of course, this is part of his campaign or crusade to straighten out piety. Medieval piety is just too materialistic, way too materialistic. And that's what he wants to clear out. So he does engage in a little bit of metaphysics, including the principle of finitum, Non est capax infiniti.

118. Dr. Carlos Eire

     The finite cannot ever contain the infinite. A point raised regarding the Eucharist, whether Christ can be present or not. But yes, and I agree with Mike 100%, and I started laughing when he told me about all of these characters from the late 19th, early 20th century practicing occult religion. Yes. Zauber is the German word here. Zauber, it's magic. But yeah, you know, I'd never thought about this, but the Romantics, yeah, they give a special spin to Zauber, which it, and actually it was Weber himself who translated Entzauberung, or disenchantment, as disenchantment. That's his English, his choice of English words.

119. Dr. Carlos Eire

     And now I know why it was intentional. Because it's demagification. But then it calls to mind Schiller's poem, which is the text of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, the final choral section, the 4th movement. Joy, freude. Schöner Götterfunken, beautiful spark of the divine. And then the other line. Deiner Zauber binden wieder. Your magic binds us together. Schiller uses Zauber, magic, that way. Joy has an enchantment power, right? So thanks, Mike. You have added so much depth. You have added so much depth to the context of where this playing around with Zauber by someone who's a native German speaker, right? Picking the wrong English word. Because it's not the wrong word. This is precisely what he means, right? So, absolutely. Yeah.

120. 1:00:31

     Michael Horton

     Thank you for that. And your comment on Zwingli, I totally agree with. I think, you know, Calvin and the Eucharistic controversy brought this to a head. Calvin said, who with a right mind wouldn't agree with Luther over Zwingli. He really wasn't influenced by Zwingli and was deeply troubled by his metaphysical dualism.

121. 1:00:54

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Right.

122. 1:00:54

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     ] (Michael Horton) — And so, had a very different— there are 2 sort of Reformed traditions, a Zwinglian one and a Calvinist one. But yeah, I agree. Zwingli was a mess.

123. 1:00:08

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Well, Zwingli, you know, like everyone who gets their foot through the door first or second, they have to think on their feet as things erupt around them. Same thing for Luther too.

124. 1:01:24

     Michael Horton

     Yeah. And he was indebted to late medieval Neoplatonism.

125. 1:01:28

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Zwingli, yes, through Erasmus.

126. 1:01:30

     Michael Horton

     Through Erasmus, yeah.

127. 1:01:32

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Yeah, definitely. But yeah, they didn't have sabbaticals. These guys, during which they could formulate their theology. No, they had to do it on the fly.

128. 1:01:44

     Michael Horton

     On the fly, so to speak.

129. 1:01:45

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Yes.

130. 1:01:46

     Caleb Wait

     Indeed. Well, thank you both so much. Dr. Ayer, thank you so much for joining us. This is very helpful, and both of your works I commend to our audience, pick them up. They Flew: A History of the Impossible and Magician and Mechanic, from Dr. Horton. As our enchanted age continues sprawling on and people continue to hunt for a spiritual ecstasy through their own esoteric pursuits, your research and work helps us make sense of some of it all. So thank you both. Until next time.

131. 1:02:27

     Dr. Carlos Eire

     Thank you.

132. 1:02:28

     Michael Horton

     Thank you.