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In the third episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Carlos Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. Eire begins by recounting how reading Thomas Á Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ transformed his life. As a boy in Havana, Cuba, Eire and his brother were sent ahead of his parents to the United States. When they left, they could take a limited number of clothes and one book. The book which his parents gave him was The Imitation of Christ. At age fourteen, the message of dying unto oneself that Eire found in that book transformed how he came to understand himself and his relationship with the world around him. That process then became the basis for his two-volume memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana and Learning to Die in Miami. Eire then discusses how the role that transformation played in his discernment over a calling to history and, in particular to Reformation history. His first book was a study of Protestant iconoclasm but, most recently Eire focused on what became of the critically acclaimed They Flew. Drawing upon the wisdom accumulated over the decades he committed to the craft of history, Eire concludes by noting the virtues he finds most critical to cultivate as well as the vices he finds most critical to confront. While humility is the amongst the virtues Eire believes is most fundamental to pursuing truth, pride, not surprisingly, is a vice he cautions often plagues academe.
- Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press, 2024)
- Carlos Eire, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy (Free Press, 2010)
- Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press, 2003)
- Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Calvin to Erasmus (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Carlos Eire, T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. Thank you for joining us.
Carlos Eire: Thanks for inviting me to be on this program.
Todd Ream: In an essay you contributed to the volume entitled The Book that Shaped My Life, you wrote about Thomas à Kemp’s, the Imitation of Christ, and at one point you contended The Imitation of Christ introduced me to the art of introspection and taught me to look for God in the smallest of details.
Would you please begin by sharing what you find in the pages of Thomas à Kempis’s spiritual classic?
Carlos Eire: Well, it’s the book that it not only taught me about introspection, but also allowed me to deal with the chaos of my life at that time when I was a teenager, allowed me to let go of many things because that’s the chief advice I picked up from it at the time. It was not only introspection and, and the, the, need to have as constant connection to God as possible.
But my parents, I was born in Cuba, my parents sent me with my brother alone to the United States. They stayed behind because they couldn’t leave. They couldn’t get a visa. So we were allowed to take only two changes of clothing, one coat, one hat, and one book. And the book my parents chose for me and my brother, we each got our own copy, was The Imitation of Christ.
So I quickly outgrew my clothes. I was 11 when I left, so I quickly outgrew every physical connection I had to my parents except for the book. And they had told me that whenever I had trouble in life of any sort, and I needed some guidance, I should just open the book at random and I would find some answer.
But that didn’t happen. That book is tough for an 11, 12, 13 year-old to take in. I mean, take up your cross, give up the world, to give up all worldly ambition. Oh my God, and, and suffering is so good for you. It scared me. The book scared me.
But then as I have matured into a teenager, I realized it was the world that was scary and that the world’s values were really, really scary. So little by little, I started to open it and it spoke to me. And then finally, when I was about 14, I read it cover to cover for the first time. And it changed my life, finding the divine in, in small things and trying to be in touch with God as much as possible, silently in my head, in my heart. I thank God for it. I thank my parents. It took root.
But I still find it scary and that’s the odd thing. It counsels you to let go of everything, which then when I went on to read more mystical texts, that’s what they all say. It’s the path, and there is a single path. It has many variations. People take that path differently, but that book was loaded with what I considered divine advice. It brought me closer to God.
It marked a difference between, sadly, between me and my brother who could not let go of everything we had lost. He just could not for the entire rest of his life, may he rest in peace, he, he never let go of what we had lost and of the time that we spent without our parents. To me that was the best advice anyone had given me is let go. Don’t focus on these material things.
Todd Ream: If I may ask you more about your childhood and the decision that your parents made for you and your brother to leave Cuba, you wrote two very poignant memoirs Waiting for Snow in Havana, and then Learning to Die in Miami. In what ways was the process of writing those memoirs linked to the wisdom that you found in The Imitation of Christ, and instrumental in terms of how you’ve come to understand your life and your vocation?
Carlos Eire: Well, that’s an excellent question. But yes, I wrote those two memoirs that was unplanned. Both of them were unplanned. I had no plans to do that, but it just so happened. There’s a long story behind writing the first one, but it had a lot to do with, well, it was a painful moment in time. This little Cuban boy who was named Elián González, his mother and many other people had died when their raft sank on the way to Florida. And he was taken in by his family, his uncle or an aunt. I can’t remember who took him in, but it was a relative in Miami.
And then the Cuban government started asking for him to be sent back to his father, a father he had never known because his parents split up before he was born. So he had never known this man, but the Cuban government’s argument was, oh, every boy needs to be with his father. And I thought, oh my God, what hypocrisy, what hypocrisy. But then the worst part of it was that the American news media took the Cuban dictatorship side in the story.
It was not only I who was separated from my father. I mean, after I left Cuba, I never saw him again because he was not given permission to leave by the government until he developed heart disease and by then it was too late. So he died before he could leave. So I wrote to every major publication that I could think of, newspapers, magazines, news stations, on my fancy Yale stationary, which I thought someone might find halfway impressive.
And I didn’t get a single acknowledgement for any of my letters in which I said, you know, this, this boy is not being sent back to his father. He’s being sent back to be a pet, a trophy of the dictatorship. So I wrote a book about my childhood, because what people didn’t seem to realize is how weird that place is and how weird it became. What it was before, and what it became after, what got atheistic, communist totalitarian regime. Most Americans have zero clue what that is like in the details.
So I wrote this. And the subtitle is Confessions of a Cuban Boy because many newscasters on TV wouldn’t even use his name. They just put the label Cuban boy under his photograph. So I just opened a door and a flood came out. And the book is deeply religious and only very few readers catch that. At least when I get, I’ve received thousands of emails mostly, letters, and very few, comment on the religious dimension of the book.
But the book is, is all about the first one, Waiting for Snow in Havana, is all about how I struggled as a child with the world, and the, the, the, the central metaphor in, in the book is lizards, reptiles. Questioning the goodness of creation was a constant preoccupation of mine. You know, once I turned to God, didn’t go away completely, because the world is still troublesome. But it cured me of this. I think it was not just fear, anger. I hated lizards. And I hate to say it, any lizard I saw, I killed. I was so scared of them.
My nemesis in the book, throughout the book, is Immanuel Kant, and many readers say, what’s going on here? And if they’re well educated, and they’ve read Kant, some of them say, how you be so down on Kant? And of course in the book, he’s a metaphor too for the loss of the spiritual realm, the death of metaphysics, which he caused in some traditions, even in some churches. So lizards versus Kant, they’re both, both my enemies in this book.
And then “Learning to Die in Miami,” the title is from a realization I had. And again, back to Imitation of Christ. We need to die repeatedly in our lives, whether we want to or not. Our life changes dramatically, and we have to adapt. So, you know, you die, you die repeatedly, and you have to become a new person, while maintaining some continuity with your past.
When I did public speaking on this book, I would say, because people had a question, you know, whoa, wow. Why learning to die? It sounds so depressing. I would say, because, you know, just what I just, what I said, our life forces us to die repeatedly. Like I said, for instance, the moment you have children, you die. You become a parent and your life is totally different. Minute you get married, your life changes. And one man in the audience one time raised his hand right at that point, so when you get married, you die. He said, yes, I’ve done it three times.
So in both of them, Jesus plays a central role, and especially in the first one. Actually, my original title for the first one, which the publisher would not allow me to use, was Kiss the Lizard, Jesus. And Jesus was asked to kiss the lizard. And that’s what we’re all asked to do. It’s a metaphor for, you know, embracing your cross, kissing, embracing something that you just loathe. And we have to do that so many times.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we move on, I want to just ask for you to potentially confirm, one detail that I’ve heard is that not only your memoirs but all your books are banned in Cuba.
Carlos Eire: Yes they are. And I received a message from the State Department—this would’ve been about 2003, I had been declared an enemy of the revolution, because that’s what the government calls itself, even 66 years after taking over, they’re still the revolution. They said, don’t you dare go there. Not that I would want to ever.
Todd Ream: I suspect that being declared such an enemy was perfectly acceptable, if not only potentially a badge of honor.
Carlos Eire: Oh, it’s the highest honor I have ever received, honestly.
Todd Ream: Yeah, I suspected so.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And I’ve had a few encounters with Cubans who have arrived recently, all of them on the young side, twenties, thirties, maybe even early forties. They’ve never known anything else but what they lived in. That’s totalitarian hellhole. So they’ve stumbled onto my book and they have just marveled, not at my personal history, but at the history of Cuba, they never knew.
So it’s been a wonderful experience for me to get that feedback because I actually wrote the book for non-Cubans. I was so angry about the Elián González Cuban boy thing. I had non-Cubans in mind, but it had a profound effect on just about 99% of the Cubans who have written to me, say thank you. And they say something very odd. And very revealing. They say, thank you for telling my story. Or in the case of the younger folks, they say, thank you for telling me a story of my parents, which they would never share with me, because it was too painful.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I want to ask a couple of biographical details now in relation to your academic career as you’ve experienced. You earned a bachelor’s from Loyola University in Chicago, and then two masters and a PhD from Yale University.
At what point did you decide the study of history and theology would prove to be critical dimensions of how you understood your vocation? And at what point did you decide on Reformation history and not, say, medieval history?
Carlos Eire: I’m an oddball. I decided that teaching would be my profession and history would be my subject. I decided this when I was a sophomore in high school, public high school in Chicago, Senn High School, which was one of the schools that pioneered the Advanced Placement program. I was lucky enough, one of my history teachers was one of the creators of the Advanced Placement Program, Henrietta Miller. She was great.
But I fell in love with history. I fell in love with Christian history and I knew I wanted to put them together somehow. And actually at the early stage when I was, you know 15, 16, 17, I thought I’d be a high school teacher because that’s all I knew. But once I got to college, I said, oh, no, no, no, no. This is, this, this is the, the gig. So I only applied to one college. I couldn’t go away to school because my mom was there, my mom had left her entire family to be with my brother and me. I could not go away. So I only applied to one school.
Loyola Chicago was six blocks from our apartment, and the elevated train had a stop at Loyola, and it was on my way to work. That was my choice of college. Plus it was run by Jesuits, it was Catholic. I double majored in theology and history. And I was so happy. I thanked God every day. I also got very generous financial aid. I didn’t have to pay for college. Loyola gave me a full ride all four years. When I was a freshman, I decided this is what I want to do.
And actually apropos your question, why didn’t I choose medieval? My initial aim was to deal with early Christian history, but I was chased away by all the languages I would have to learn. I, throughout college, worked between 25 to 30 hours a week. There was no way I could, so I learned German instead because I was advised if you want to study theology, you must have German. Oh, okay, fine. I loved learning German. But everyone squinted at me when I said, when I told them I was learning German. Why are you doing that?
By the time I finished college, I thought I would do medieval history because I would only need German and Latin, perhaps French too. So as I arrived here at Yale for my doctoral studies, I thought I was gonna do medieval history, and I thought I was going to work on conciliarism. The movement known as conciliarism places the Pope a few notches lower and promotes the idea that councils should be called often, and councils should have as much a say as Popes. And that’s the way they solved the great schism anyway. They were three men claiming to be pope, the Council of Constance unseated all three and elected a new one. So I thought, this is marvelous. I’m a conciliarist. I wanna do conciliarism.
But then I got here to Yale and you know, I knew that Jaroslav Pelikan was here, and I thought I would work with him. But he was not too interested in taking on a graduate student. Throughout his entire career, this prolific author, only had like five or six PhD students in over 30 years. He liked to write. Basic issue was he didn’t want to be distracted by, you know, mentoring graduate students.
But not only that I met, he was then very, very young, Steven Ozment, a student of Heiko Oberman who was here teaching Reformation. And I had always been interested in Reformation, even in high school. I was drawn to it because I was puzzled, continually puzzled by the divisions among Christians. And I’ll relate this back to some, you know, scratch any historian and won’t take long for you to find that the interest the historian has in a peculiar subject or time period stems from personal reasons, something in their life story.
So in my case, it was the fact that when I came without my parents, my first set of foster parents were Jewish and they forced me to go to church, which at that time in my life, it’s the last thing I wanted to do. And then when we eventually were able to join our Uncle Amato in Bloomington, Illinois, because that’s where he had been sent by the refugee center. They found a job for him. He’s an architect, and they found a job for him in an architectural firm.
The people who helped us the most were all Protestants. The Methodists and the Presbyterians, my God, such generosity. I had never known anyone to be so generous, including this very nice lady, who drove us to the grocery store every week in her VW wagon. The bus, the little bus. And all the furniture we had came from the Methodists and there was a Presbyterian pastor, last name, Nordquist, and how a Scandinavian ended up as a Presbyterian, I never asked later but he was wonderful. Very, very wonderful.
All these divisions puzzled me, but then I decided, yes, now I’ll work with Steven Ozment on Reformation and I’m very glad I did, very, very glad I did. But of course, this would’ve been around 1974 that I made that decision. Back then, every college, if they had a large enough history department, would have a Reformation course. It was considered crucial to the curriculum, and sadly, what happened is that throughout my professional life, I’ve watched this subject virtually disappear from college. It’s an odd thing, very odd. This collective decision that seems to have been made simultaneously in academia is not an important subject.
So as I was searching for a dissertation topic, again, personal history, when I was a child, nothing scared me more than the religious images in Havana’s churches. Those Spanish, life-size images, statues, especially images of Jesus with real human hair and glass eyes. I found them terrifying, especially because most of the time it was bloody Jesus, Jesus of the Passion. Different aspects of the Passion, all displayed constantly in different churches in different ways. I was so scared of those images. Again, I later found out it wasn’t the images that were scary. It was the world that was scary. And what had happened to Jesus was the thing.
And, and actually, because Spanish Catholicism focuses so much on the Passion and so little on the resurrection. That’s something else that I learned from Protestants and how much more significant Easter was to American than the Spanish or Hispanic Catholics.
And then, I also discovered gradually that American Catholics were more similar in many ways to American Protestants than they to Spanish Catholics. So I’m very interested in ecumenism, and studying the Reformation seemed the most logical thing on Earth to me at the time. And I did my dissertation on Protestant iconoclasm. It just came to me so naturally.
I went to hear a lecture by historian, Peter Brown, author of the best biography ever written of St. Augustine. It wasn’t the entire lecture, but anyway, while he was making mention of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth century, how suddenly the, the Orthodox Church soured on images and started destroying them, I made the realization that Protestants had done the same thing, and I had never read anything about it than just the mere fact.
So I actually ran, after his lecture, I ran across the street to the library and back then there were card catalogs, right? No online catalog. So I went, spent a long time going through the card catalog under every conceivable label for the subject of iconoclast, of Protestant Iconoclast. There was nothing. It was ignored.
So boom. Perfect situation for any dissertation.
Todd Ream: Which then became your first book too.
Carlos Eire: Yep, War Against the Idols. And I had trouble getting that book published because iconoclasm, Protestant iconoclasm, at that time in the early eighties was still a non subject, only gradually acquired. Well, now all of Reformation is declining. But anyway, the responses I would get to the proposal, the book proposal was, well, this is not an important subject.
And actually the archivist of the city of Basel in Switzerland, whom I met at the Newberry Library in Chicago as I was trying to publish the book, I told him what, what the subject was. And he said, basically, that’s not a subject. One day there were images in Basel and the next day there weren’t. What is there to say about it? And that was the moment I realized that it was not an important subject because most Reformation history, Protestant Reformation history, had been written by Protestants, and it was not a subject. I mean, they’re gone. We don’t have to worry about it anymore. We got rid of them and good riddance.
So I think now historians took more of an anthropological turn and it began to puzzle over the same thing I puzzled over, which was the power that symbols have in religion. The symbolic dimension reaches every religion, not just Christianity. Symbols reach us at a very, very, very deep, illogical level. And they convey information in a way that no theology book can or any kind of liturgy or worship.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You began your academic career then in a place where you did not need to wait for snow for very long at St. John’s College in Minnesota. You were there for two years, then you were at the University of Virginia for 15 years, and then you returned to Yale where you had spent a number of years as a graduate student.
For junior scholars trying to discern the commitments of their vocation today, what advice would you offer?
Carlos Eire: There are various things that one has to keep focused on in order to just stay in the game or to fulfill one’s vocation. If in fact you view it as a vocation, you have no choice. You will probably have to end up living somewhere you never expected you would be because you have to go where the jobs are. I think it’s the most wonderful profession on earth for me personally, but that has been the hardest thing for me, is not being able to find a job in Chicago near my mom and my brother. It caused me great pain. I ended up in really good places, but they were far from Chicago. Even Collegeville, Minnesota was too far.
So realizing that it’s a vocation and of course if it’s a vocation with a religious dimension to it, accepting God’s will, where one gets sent. And actually this is where Calvin helped me immensely. He hated being in Geneva. He hated it. He loathed being there, but that’s where he was called. And that’s where he stayed and that’s where he did what he did. World shaking from that tiny little city. So you never know where God is going to send you if you have a vocation. So accept that. Make the most of it.
The other is when things have changed in the scholarly profession to such an extent because of computers and the internet and so on. That’s one aspect of change. Depending on what one’s field is as a scholar, you may or may not need to travel abroad as much anymore because so many things are available online. So I think what I’ve seen is that in the past decade or so, publishing has become very fragmented. So it’s an added challenge for young scholars. Academic publishers have been cutting back on publications, so it’s become more of a challenge.
My advice is persist, persist, persist. I have a very thick file folder of rejection letters for that first book. And for a while, everything I submitted to journals was rejected. Again, because iconoclasm was not important.
And as a matter of fact, I’m the only Reformation historian in the US who won the Carl Meyer Prize. This was awarded by the Society for Reformation Research, for the young scholar best paper at the conference. And part of the prize, you know, the prize was only like, I don’t know, very small amount of money. The better part of the prize was that you were guaranteed publication in The Sixteenth Century Journal. I’m the only one who won the prize and had the article rejected by The Sixteenth Century Journal.
Todd Ream: So much for the guarantee.
Carlos Eire: Yes. And then later I found out that the person vehemently opposed to publishing my article was the same person who had rejected my articles in two other journals. And he would come up to me in conferences and say, hey, I’m the one who rejected your article. What do you think?
Todd Ream: So much for blind peer review also.
Carlos Eire: Yes. So persistence is key. Never losing sight of why it is that you’re doing what you’re doing. And times can, can be tough. Rejections are awful. Persisting and finding a way of making whatever it is that you have a passion for.
Also trying to get others to be as passionate about it and putting up with—every profession has its negatives. Academics has its own set of negatives, but, you know, putting up with what really is a lot of nonsense in academics, right. I’m sure you understand, you know.
Todd Ream: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Carlos Eire: No, no. Well, I’ll, you know, be patient with that too because, you know, I’ll give you an example that since you don’t know what I’m talking about, we were interviewing a candidate for a position here at Yale this past year. And those candidates are nervous. You give a job talk, my God. This candidate gives the talk and then it’s a question and a professor in the room, a colleague, asked a question that was about seven minutes long. And at the end when he finally launched some questions, it was a four-part question.
So not only had this man hogged 80% of the Q and A time, but he hadn’t really asked a question. He had just given a disquisition on how much he knew about this subject. And I thought, this is just intolerable. But then I realized, I’ve witnessed this. It was an extreme case, but I have witnessed things like this for the past 50 years, and that’s the nonsense that one must be patient with.
Todd Ream: I’ve often thought that one of the greatest gifts that we could afford our students is being more interested in their voices and the cultivation of their voices than hearing our own voices. And hopefully we get that out of our system when we go to academic conferences where there will be any number of exercises such as what you witnessed, or occasionally maybe at a faculty meeting too. But we don’t bring that with our students. It’s one of the greatest gifts I think that we can give them.
Carlos Eire: You’re absolutely right. Young people should be encouraged rather discouraged. And I think academics actually has become kinder than it used to be.
I was once at a conference where someone had given a paper, and I remember the subject was the Theology of Philip Melanchthon. And the first question was not a question. It was someone very well-known scholar who made a comment and what he said, I remember verbatim, is people like you who give intellectual history a bad name. And he sat down. I thought, this is horrific. This should be illegal.
Todd Ream: In some professions it certainly would be a liability but yeah, something that we need to work to exercise in ours.
Carlos Eire: So be patient and, and keep your eyes on the prize basically. And count all the negatives. I actually, now that I think about it, you know, you mentioned about teaching and, and hearing students’ voices. That’s another piece of advice I would give the younger scholars is learn from the negative things and strive not to replicate this behavior, not to replicate the behavior of people who have swelled heads and love to hear themselves talk.
Todd Ream: Absolutely. Thank you.
In addition to your dissertation which did fortunately become a book and start setting the trend for a new dimension of Reformation studies and your two memoirs, you’re the author of six other books, and I want to ask you in particular now about your most recent one, They Flew: A History of the Impossible. You noted in the opening pages that you thought about such a project and considered pursuing it for decades.
Would you describe the thought process that finally compelled you to commit to this project? And what do you hope audience members encounter through the stories that you tell?
Carlos Eire: Again, this actually follows very nicely on the, the previous question about younger scholars. I got the idea for this project in 1983. I knew I had to work on this. I had to, but I couldn’t because I didn’t have tenure and writing on the subject. I’ll get to that in a minute or two. It’s a controversial subject. So as a young scholar, one should shy away from not just controversial subjects, but from questioning certain assumptions that are nearly universal. And that’s what my book does. So I couldn’t do that in 1983.
And what happened was I was in Spain. I went to Ávila to say hello to Teresa of Ávila. Actually, she’s buried in Alba, so she’s not there. But I went, I was taking a tour of her first convent. And the guide is showing us around, young girl, she wasn’t a nun. Oh, you know, here’s the kitchen where Teresa saw God among the pots and pans. Here’s the staircase where St. Teresa fell and broke her arm. And then we get to the spot. And here’s the spot where Theresa and St. John of the Cross levitated together for the first time. They went up, up in the air.
And I thought that this is being treated like a fact. That shocked me because of my training. We historians are not supposed to ask the question, did this really happen? And, and that goes back to the New Testament too. Miracles are a problem for historians. Did Jesus really feed 5,000 people? Did Jesus really walk on water? All the miracles.
So I decided to work on levitation and bilocation also because of my interest in mysticism. And, you know, levitation and bilocation, by the way, those are two terms invented by 19th century spiritualists. If one is looking for those terms in the distant past, nobody uses those terms, but floating in the air while in mystical ecstasy, and it’s a side effect of mystical ecstasy. So I worked on this slowly, very slowly.
But the final push came. I was already in my late sixties. I didn’t have to fear being cast out of the historical profession for treating these very, very strange phenomena as facts. And not saying, look, I can prove to you that this happened. No, I can’t do that. But at least questioning the assumption that miracles have ceased and that God can’t do strange things to people who dedicate their lives to prayer, which is the key.
I mean, this is what many people don’t understand about levitation is that it’s, it’s not something that these individuals can bring on. No, it just happens to them. It happens during mystical ecstasy, and it happens to very few people, relatively speaking.
But I took it seriously and as a historian, I focused on this, okay, how can this be treated as a fact? Not as something that played some role because that’s what functionalism does, that’s what I was trained to do as a historian of religion, if you don’t ask, did this happen? You ask, what does the fact that people believe in this tell you? The only fact is that some people believe.
So anyway, I have put the book out there. Two scathing reviews have appeared. One the Times Literary Supplement (UK) and the other in the New York Review of Books. In the Times Literary Supplement, I’m accused of being a liar, because I deal with the testimony of liars and I know that they’re lying and I try to pretend that I don’t know that they’re lying. It’s really bizarre logic at play.
The other review in the New York Review Books begins with this sentence, “This is a deeply unserious book.” And goes from there to just, you know, I’m, I’m also a liar, a creep of sorts, right? A cretin and a creep, without using those terms. That’s what anybody reading the review would come away with. And also an idiot.
And one of the reviews actually, the reviewers saw fit to bring up my nationality and my ethnicity as a reason for me being such a bad historian. Of course because, you know, I hail from Latin America. I believe in magical realism. In other words, I’m not smart enough. And that’s what I feared in 1983 would happen. But now I don’t care.
And actually the book has been very, very well received. And even won a prize from the American Academy of Religion, which I just find, and now I’ve been nominated for another, another book prize, on books that deal with religion and science.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Some of my friends who found the book most interesting and most compelling are actually those who are in the natural sciences, in part because the topic and the history is compelling, but the manner in which you are asking us to ask questions about the ways we ascribe veracity has been, I think, perhaps the most powerful dimension to them.
Carlos Eire: I’m so glad to hear that. I am so glad to hear that, because, you know, after these two negative reviews came out, I thought of something I should have put into the book that I just assumed people would figure out for themselves. And it’s the way that I present the evidence. I needed to add a little more detail about my sources, my sources, canonization inquests.
And as a historian I mean in a court of law, how is testimony handled? People have to swear, I’m telling the truth. In the canonization inquest it’s the same thing, except what’s on the line is not a fine from the judge for contempt of court or whatever, for perjury. The penalty for lying in a canonization inquest is hell.
Todd Ream: Higher bar.
Carlos Eire: And all these people, most of them anyway, who are testifying, are religious people who believe in hell. So doesn’t that make the odds of lying much lower than other?
And if I had been working on a medieval levitator, for instance, there’s no canonization inquest of the sort that was created specifically in the 16th century because of Protestants. The Catholic Church said, hey, it’s time to catch up with the Renaissance, catch up with modernity and investigate as scientifically as possible, empirically as possible, the miracles of these people were saying were special.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. It’ll be interesting to see what the long tail, as publishers often talk about with books, what the long tail of this book will be, how it will shift thinking, and the books that also will come in its wake in the years to come.
Carlos Eire: Yeah. And actually there are, I mean, pretty much the same thing that happened with War against Idols, is that it came out at a time when other people had discovered the subject. And there’s a spate of books. I have some of them here with me. I’ll show one. Wonderful book by Peter Harrison, Some New World. Beautiful book.
And I had a very nice chat with Peter Harrison too on another podcast. He’s not alone. There are others questioning the functionalism in the history of religion. I love functionalism. Yes, it’s great to know what role something plays in people’s lives. It’s a great thing to know, to figure it out.
But dogmatic materialism is one of the terms employed for people who are challenging the status quo. And I was so glad to hear you say that scientists have liked my book, because the discoveries being made by science now at both ends of the material spectrum, the subatomic level and the astrophysical level, call into question everything that you and I were taught as children and young adults. I just watched a YouTube scientist describe what those images from the web telescope are revealing about the structure of the universe. It’s just mind blowing.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation, if I may, I want to ask you, what qualities or characteristics would you say define your understanding of the academic vocation, and in what ways perhaps have those commitments changed or even evolved over the years, over the course of your career?
Carlos Eire: The academic profession has become very politicized, especially in the past 20 years and even more so in the past 10 years. I mean, everyone knows this, a huge percentage of college faculty in the United States, and even more so in Europe, lean left politically. And this, this used to have a much less acute impact when I began my career in the early eighties.
It’s the cause of Reformation disappearing from college catalogs. Why is the Reformation not important? Well, because historians have somehow, collectively, because of their political leanings, decided the focus on what is evil about not just European history, but Christianity itself. It’s not only not important, it’s something that needs to be done away with because of the New World that some people are trying to create, in which Western values and Christian values are discarded.
So in history in particular, which is the field I know best, but this also happens in literature, it happens in just about every humanities subject. Much harder to do with the sciences, but it does have effects on the sciences too as it creates in history this leftist mindset, which has a very, very solid Marxist foundation, a focus on identities as the main issue in history.
So, race, class, gender, race, class, gender, I call it the unholy trinity. It’s or I guess you could call it the, I would even go as far as to say it’s a demonic triad. That’s not all there is to history, but basically that’s what the historical profession has gravitated towards is this obsession with race, class, gender, imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, elites subalterns, very Marxist terms.
You know, we award prizes here at Yale, senior essays and the prize money comes from donors and for some reason, American history has more prizes than any other kind of history in our department. I think there’s some, I won’t even count how many. It’s a huge number of American history prizes.
I just looked at the list of prize winners in American history. Most of them, race, class, gender. In European history, there are only four prizes. Three of them went to race, class, gender topics. So kids are coming out of college with this as the set of lenses through which they view reality. So, you know, for any young person starting now, they have to know, they need to know that politics has taken over in many respects.
For instance, I was on the publications committee for Yale University Press for many years, so I got to read all the book proposals the editors were putting forward. And over the years, I noticed with any book that was somewhat political in nature or dealt with politics of one kind or another that didn’t lean left, tended to get scathing reviews from the readers that the press sent. And these are only the ones that made it through the entire process to land at the committee meeting.
But yeah, oh Lord there was one book in particular, which, thank God, fortunately, Yale Press did publish. It’s, it’s a, a, a book about one of the most horrific things that happened in the 20th century, Children of the Gulag. And the research was based on the then newly opened archives, because the Soviet Union no longer existed. And this book discovered that it was hard to read. I can’t read it. It’s that horrible a story. I can’t read about Holocaust stuff either. But the children of the men, men and women sent to the gulag sometimes suffered worse fate than their parents.
Both readers’ reports, very negative, that the book was just flawed in every possible way. And not only that, it was old fashioned Commie-bashing. The book almost did not get published. But I raised my voice and I used an impolite term to describe the two readers’ reports. I said they were BS. I yelled it out, actually. I yelled out BS. So I’m the only, probably the only Yale faculty member, recorded in the minutes ever to have yelled BS in a publications committee meeting. But I just have. And that’s only one of many, many such stories I could tell about the publishing process.
Todd Ream: For our last question then, and perhaps as a way of addressing some of the ways that our vocation has become held captive by politics, what virtues, intellectual or moral, do you believe are most important to cultivate? And then what theological virtues perhaps do you believe are most important to receive?
Carlos Eire: Oh, wow. I would say that the virtues that could be called Christian virtues are not solely for Christians. There’s something to the classical virtues of faith, hope, love being the Christian virtues. Yes, those are important, but the faith part, if one is not Christian, well, it’s hard to tell anyone who’s not Christian, you need to have faith in my religion. No that, but believing in transcendence, I would say of some sort, that the material world is not all there is. As a virtue, hope, yes. Love of neighbor, loves help, the Golden Rule. My arch enemy, Kant, even had to admit that the categorical imperative was that the golden rule applies to all humans, not just Christians.
But I would, I would add also, courage to speak one’s mind when one disagrees. I mean, that’s what scholarship should be. We should be disagreeing with each other a lot more than we do. Questioning and challenging as a virtue, yelling out BS when it’s on the table.
And you know, in connection to what I said before about people who ask seven minute questions in a 10 minute Q and A, humility is one virtue that, well, scholars are not known for. Scholars in general should warm up more to humility. Bernard of Clairvaux, he was asked, what, what is the chief virtue? He said, humility, humility, humility. Just like real estate, people say, you know, location, location, location. Give, give others a chance to have their say, students or others too, and open up to their voices.
I can’t think of anything more important in scholarship than a passion for the truth. Is passion a virtue? Well, the Stoics didn’t think so. You have to have passion for the truth, and kindness and humility.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Carlos Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Carlos Eire: Thank you for inviting me to be on this program. Thank you.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
