 Thank you for being here. This is the second major lecture of the semester in the program in Catholic Studies. My name is Paul Lakeland. I direct the Center for Catholic Studies and we're delighted you're here and we're delighted that Professor Eyre is here too. Now as you all know, I am sure yesterday was the 500th anniversary of the most famous event that probably never happened when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the wall of the church in the door of the church in Wittenberg. But this event, real or imaginary, has come to symbolize the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, a movement which changed the face of Christianity, which was certainly more than just the work of Luther and the Lutherans and which also precipitated dramatic changes in Catholicism itself. This event is Fairfield's official recognition and contribution to this 500-year commemoration and it's for this reason that we've invited Professor Carlos Eyre to Fairfield University from that distant Yale University in New Haven to deliver the 24th annual Christopher F. Mooney S.J. Lecture on Church Religion and Society. So just a word about Chris Mooney before I introduce our speaker. So this is an occasion to remember, well for those of us who remember him now, it's fewer people, to remember and honor our colleague and friend, Christopher Mooney of the Society of Jesus who was academic vice president here from 1980 to 1987 and then served as professor of religious studies until his death in 1993. He was an eminent theologian known for his studies of Thayada Chaudin, religion and law in American society and theology and science. So our lecture this evening in addition to commemorating the reformation, 500th anniversary, helps us to continue to promote Father Mooney's lifelong dedication to the intellectual life. Now Professor Eyre received his PhD from Yale in 1979 where he currently holds the T. Lawson Riggs Scholarship of History and Religious Studies. He specializes as many of you I'm sure know in the social, intellectual, religious and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe with a strong focus on both the Protestant and Catholic reformations. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, Professor Eyre taught at St. John's University in Minnesota and at the University of Virginia and he was a member of the Institute for a Bound Study in Princeton for two years. He's the author of many books, I'm not going to list them all, including War Against the Idols, The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus Calvin, From Madrid to Purgatory, The Art and Craft of Dying in 16th Century Spain and I haven't read this one but I think I'm going to a very brief history of eternity. He's probably best known to the general public as the author of The Memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana which he published in 2003 which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. There was a second volume of The Memoirs, Learning to Die in Miami which explored the experience of being a human exile. Now his latest book, Reformation, Notice the Plural, The Early Modern World, won the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities. Thanks to his skill as a writer and his engaging style, it is surely one of the very few 800-page books of any kind which can be accurately described as it was on the inside front cover as a fast-paced survey. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, Carlos Ares currently researching attitudes towards miracles in the 16th and 17th centuries and that's what he's going to talk about this evening. So please join me in welcoming Carlos at a Fairfield University to speak on writing the history of the impossible Catholic miracles in the age of the Reformation. Thank you, Paul. I'd like to thank you personally for the invitation to be here. It's a great privilege and an honor to be addressing you. Thank you for being here on the same night as the seventh game of the World Series. Thank you for choosing Reformation over World Series. So, let me work the title backwards, history of the impossible. What could that be? The miracles I focus on, that you just heard my next project is on miracles, the miracles I focus on are those that most of us in our culture would consider impossible. Healing miracles happen all the time and doctors have lots of stories about healings that they can't explain. Those are easy to explain, but I'm dealing with miracles in this specific age, 16th and 17th century, the age of the reformations because most Protestants in the 16th, 17th century, denied miracles to the world could happen. So, you have a kind of response to that from Catholics in which, because this is a common phenomenon in religion, including Christianity. It's an identity formation issue. You don't want to be like those people. So, the other defines you as much as you define yourself. So, this is what is going on with these, as you will see, somewhat outrageous miracles. And the image you see before you is one such outrageous miracle, but the thing is this is a 16th century painting of a 7th century event. This is Pope Gregory the Great, notice his papal tiara on the floor. Pope Gregory the Great was saying mass and the miracle of the Eucharist, the constant daily miracle of the Eucharist. Really comes alive for him. Christ appears bodily on the altar and not just Christ, but all the instruments of his passion and crucifixion. And this is one of the most frequently depicted miracles throughout the Middle Ages and also in the early modern period. This painting is from the Low Countries and it's dated somewhere between 1510 and 1550. I like to think, for my own sake, that maybe it's from 1516, just before Luther, or perhaps maybe it was finished on October 26th, 1517, just before Luther comes out with his 95 theses, because this embodies the essence of Catholic miracle, the central, ongoing miracle of the Eucharist, but that's only one of many. So without further ado, 500 years. Luther gets a lot of the credit and all the celebrating this year is focused on Luther because he was there first and much like Neil Armstrong's boot print on the moon, eclipsing all subsequent astronauts who walked on Luther gets all the attention or most of it, but he was not alone. And as a matter of fact, in his own day and age, it was known that he was not alone. This was a woodcut colored by hand from 1586. Luther has already been dead for 40 years when this is created. And you see Luther holding a Bible and the Pope is toppling, his throne is toppling and he's being held up by all the Catholic clergy. But under Luther, you see all the other leaders of the Protestant Reformation. Lutherans knew they were not alone. Those who admired Luther knew that there were others too, and they are under him. You see many of the major leaders of the Protestant Reformation, including directly under the Pope. They even include an Anabaptist, mental assignments, which shows you team spirit, knowing which side you are on. And speaking of being on the sides, Catholics knew Luther was not alone. This is from 1570s and it's a Catholic image of the Protestant reformers, the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, trying to tear down the Catholic Church. And Martin Luther is all the way to the left. Calvin is over here to the right, a devil placing his hand on Calvin's shoulder. The reformer of Basel, Oculumpodius, has fallen to the ground because the chain he's using to pull down one of the towers on the Church has broken. And the four towers are the four great Fathers of the Church. Gregory, Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose. You see them clearly labeled. So what is this? Well, this is an equivalent of a tabloid newspaper from the 16th century, the Flyleaf, the Flugblatter in German, Flyleafs. And you see the text below. The text on the screen is just the title because they loved long titles in the 16th century. And it tells you everything you want to know about this Catholic take on the group attack, the mob attack on the Church. Mirror of the militant, true steadfast, age old Catholic Church of God against which many tyrants, heathens, Jews, heretics revolt, tear down, burn, break by storm, but which Church to this day remains steadfast against all storms, which until the end of the world by God's grace shall endure. And this is a response, a Catholic response to the attack because here you see the Reformers failing. But what was the most profound change brought about by the Protestant Reformation altogether? I mean, I'm going to be covering Luther and the other Reformers tonight. I'm not going to give Luther soul billing. So of course the Church is divided into pieces as a result. That's the most obvious change. But what was the most profound change? A hundred years ago, almost exactly in an article published in 1918, the grandfather of sociology, Max Weber, scary looking academic, said the most profound change brought about by the Protestant Reformation was the disenchantment of the world. That's the English translation. It's actually a poor translation of the German word employed by him. You see at the bottom, in Zauber. Zauber in German means magic. But Max Weber was saying was the Protestants had rid the world of magic. What? Well, here's a little fact about Weber. His mother was Protestant. Calvin is the Protestant. And he knew part of a long tradition that he belonged that from the very beginning, the Protestant Reformation attacked Catholic ritual and Catholic piety as magic and superstition. So that image you saw of Gregory at the altar, the figure of Christ, right? Protestants would say that's magic, superstition. Things like this just don't happen. The world is demystified, magic is taken out. I have a slightly different take on it from Weber, but I think he is onto something by listing this as the most significant change brought about by the Protestant Reformation. A change that we still live with and still affects us, all of us, whether you're religious or not. Yeah, magic. There are different kinds of magic. So what did Protestants mean when they said that Catholic ritual was magic? Well, there's stage magic. They had their David Copper Fields and so on. There's also black magic, which is associated with the devil. And here you have a representative of this kind of magic, Dr. Faustus, who makes a deal with the devil. And historians who like to use anthropology as an approach to the past often speak of Thaumaturgy rather than magic, but Thaumaturgy changes things. So, there's magic of the sort that we see on stage. Then there's magic that is sinister, but both kinds for Protestants are counter to the divine. One because it's totally fake, the other because it is totally demonic. And to begin at the very top of the list here with Luther. Here's what Martin Luther thought about miracles. And this is a quote from Luther. I don't have quotation marks at the beginning, but I do at the end. I just noticed those visible works are simply signs for the ignorant, unbelieving crowd. And for their sakes that are yet to be attracted. But as for us who know already all we do know and believe the gospel, what do we want them for those visible works of these miracles? Unnecessary. Wherefore it is no wonder that they have now ceased since the gospel has sounded abroad everywhere and has been preached to those who had not known of God before whom he had to attract with outward miracles just as we throw apples and pears to children. So we find here two arguments. One is miracles are no longer necessary because the gospel has already been spread. The other argument is that these things are infantile and then they're for stupid and childish people. So they're not necessary. Down south in Switzerland, the other reformer, major reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, had a much deeper distrust of any miracle claims. And this is a quote from him, those who trust in any created thing whatsoever are not truly pious. And I'll return to this in a few minutes. Zwingli was very, very, and I'll say it a third time, very focused on metaphysical issues in religion. Metaphysics is that part of philosophy that analyzes what really is, what reality is. And these two quotes are from him. Phenetum known as Kapak's infinity in Latin. The finite cannot contain the infinite. You could also read this as the finite cannot convey the infinite. In quantum sensuit ribueris tantum spiritu tetraxeris, the physical detracts from the spiritual. This matter, spirit, difference, dialectic, very important to Zwingli. This matter for him is not just incapable of bridging the gap between heaven and earth. It's actually an obstacle. It's an obstacle. Not please. He's not saying matter is evil, like some heretics. He's saying matter is actually an obstacle. Matter is good. It's fine, but it's inferior to spirit and therefore an obstacle to accessing the spiritual. The other major reformer, John Calvin also agreed that whatever holds down and confines the senses to the earth is contrary to the covenant of God in which inviting us to himself, he permits us to think of nothing but what is spiritual. Very strong contrast between matter and spirit. And what our mirror, the miracles claimed by the Catholic Church, of course, is an infusion of the divine into nature of the spiritual into the material reordering the material. But here we get to another part of the Protestant argument. Calvin says, we may also fitly remember that Satan has his miracles, which though they are deceitful tricks rather than true powers are such a sort as to mislead the simple minded and untutored. Notice the condescension again, right? It's the simple minded and the untutored who are tricked easily by the devil. Idolatry has been nourished by wonderful miracles, yet these are not sufficient to sanction the superstition either of magicians or idolaters. There you go. Lumping all of Catholicism and idolatry, magic, superstition. At this point, I need to add one more observation. Why bring Satan into the miraculous? This is why. From day one, when the Protestant Reformation begins to take hold, first with Luther then with Swingley, Catholics who oppose them say, where are your miracles? Our church has miracles. Our church is full of miracles. And they prove that we are the true church. Your church has no miracles. Therefore, that proves that you are the false church because the true church of Christ, true church of God, must have miracles. Just read the Bible. Protestants counter this argument by saying, all those so-called miracles you claim, you Catholics, they're not real miracles like the ones in the Bible. They're demonic either because Satan can easily fool people into thinking they see something or experience something or because the devil can manipulate nature. More about this in a few minutes. Protestants continued to believe that God could send signs through nature. And especially Lutherans in Germany believed in Wunder or Wonders. That is messages sent by God. And again, here you have these early tabloids, Siamese twins, a pig born with one head and two bodies. These are signs. The text there tells you in German or whatever language the little tabloid happens to be in. It's usually a message that there's something wrong in that community where this happened. And it's usually some bad behavior that needs to be corrected. This is a sign of divine displeasure. And I chose these two. I could have chosen many, many others. For instance, one of the strangest things anyone could ever see, which we now know does happen when it rains fish. We now know that tornadoes actually sometimes pick up fish from lakes and rivers and drop them elsewhere. Well, in the 16th century, you can imagine it's raining fish. This must be a sign from God. So, Protestants are willing to grant God this much, right? He's not really performing miracles. He's sending signs, wonders that make you think. And as another footnote or parenthesis or caution, yes, miracles do return into the Protestant tradition, especially in the 19th and 20th century and especially in the United States. They do return. And those of us in this room who are old enough to remember Oral Roberts on television, healing people, he's very, he's not Catholic, he's Protestant, but this returns, especially in the United States, healing miracles, very common. And especially today among Pentecostals, miracles are expected. But I'm not talking about the 19th and 20th century. I'm talking about at the very beginning when the church breaks apart, 16th and 17th century. Catholic miracles can be extreme. This is a photograph that depicts a saint, Eusepidesa, Joseph of Cupertino, 1603 to 1663. I present him as an answer to Protestantism, because yes, you can read of saints levitating way before the 17th century. Middle age is full of lives of the saints where people do this. But in the 17th century, all of a sudden, and I've done a little bit of quantifying, hagiographies that mention flying saints, the 17th century is the peak period for flying, or flying saints. Let me put it that way. It's the peak period. And Joseph Cupertino is a contemporary of all of the early great scientists, the men that we now credit with getting the ball rolling, modern science. He's also a contemporary of skeptics, like the philosopher Descartes, who said, everything ought to be doubted, the omnibus dubitandum, right? This is happening at the same time. View it as a response. Joseph of Cupertino is a Franciscan who went into ecstasy frequently. And every time he went into ecstasy, up he would go. As a Franciscan, he was very much taken by nature, and many of his ecstasies had to do with nature. Seeing a nice flock of sheep could send them into ecstasy. Or my favorite, someone sliced open a pomegranate, something he had never seen before, sees the inside of the pomegranate and whoop, up he goes. And I'm not being disrespectful when I, whoop, because all of the accounts of St. Joseph's life tell us that that's what he did as he went up. Whoop. Here, he has been taken to northern Italy near the Holy House of Loretto, another miracle. The Holy House of Loretto, off there in the distance, is the house Jesus grew up in Nazareth, which had miraculously been brought from the Holy Land to northern Italy, sometime in the Middle Ages. And what you see there is the outer shell, they built a church over the house, which is in the inside. Anyway, Joseph is taken there, he sees the Holy House of Loretto, off in the distance and whoop, up he goes. Joseph, and the religious image will cause him to rise, saying mass constantly, up in the air, Joseph. One of the worst films ever made, the Reluctant Saint, tells the story of Joseph of Cupertino. If you're glutton for punishment, check it out. But among other great events in the life of Joseph of Cupertino is that when he's introduced to the pope, he hovers over the pope. And the pope supposedly says, if this man dies before I do, I will be sure to have him canonized because this man must really be a saint. So why do I mention this? I mention it because we have hundreds, literally, hundreds of testimonies of people who claim they saw him fly or levitate, including the pope, and including peasants, but including all other sorts of people, including a Lutheran Saxon prince who was visiting Assisi and saw Joseph fly from one end of the nave of the Basilica of St. Francis to the other, and uttered something like, oh, now I know my whole life, I've been wrong, and converts the Catholicism. So goes the story. So I'll pause for a second. How can a historian be taken seriously dealing with phenomena like this? It's a real problem. What do you do as a historian? How do you tell the history of the impossible? Well, one approach is to overlook one question, whereas we historians like to say, to bracket that question. So we bring these big, heavy brackets and we say, well, we're not going to try to determine whether this actually happened or not, whether Joseph actually went off the ground. All we can deal with is the eyewitness testimony and the fact that people believed it. What does that belief tell us? That's where I'm stuck at the moment. That's where I've been stuck for a number of years with my big, heavy brackets. Because as the student once pointed out to me, Mr. Herr, Professor Herr, you're not doing the history of the impossible. You're doing the history of the ridiculous. And in the 17th century, you begin to see a lot of religious art that depicts medieval saints levitating and other saints levitating, such as this painting of St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost objects, who is often depicted with the child Jesus in his arms. But in this painting, Jesus is mediating in some way there between the Virgin Mary and St. Anthony, floating in the air. But notice the shadow if you can see under St. Anthony. He is off the ground. And of course, the celestial ensemble there has the latest and finest and most modern up-to-date musical instruments. But what's going on in this picture? Ecstasy leads to levitation. And this is painted in 1631, St. Anthony of Padua's 13th century saint. St. Painter, an Italian who moved to Spain to work with the Spanish court, Vicente Carducho. This is the only painting I know that depicts St. Francis receiving the stigmata in mid-air. Typically, he is represented on the ground. Here, he is up in the air. Murillo, Spanish painter, 17th century. This painting hangs in the Louvre Museum. And it depicts a friar. Art historians, experts have not identified this individual. We don't know who this depicts. But there are eyewitnesses noticed. And the rest of the story is another miracle that a Catholic would believe in. The friar has been ordered to do kitchen duty, but he goes into ecstasy and is therefore unable to fulfill the order to work in the kitchen. So angels from heaven come and do all the work for him. Something that all of us would like, perhaps every day, right? It would be a wonderful thing. St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order. This university is Jesuit. Well, this is 17th century Flemish engraving of St. Ignatius at prayer. And notice the eyewitnesses. This is an important part of all the 17th century religious art that depicts people levitating is that you've got the eyewitness as part of the depiction. Or another type of miracle. Paul asked me before the lecture, are we going to see any lactations? Well, here you have one. A lactation of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, painted by Alonso Cano, 1650. This takes you to another realm of the miraculous. This is a medieval story I add. St. Bernard did not write about this. This is not from St. Bernard's works himself. This is a legend that arises later in Mallorca. But then it becomes a theme in art. The story goes like this. St. Bernard was praying before an image of the Virgin Mary. And it's unclear exactly what happens, but the image comes alive and feeds Bernard milk. Milk from Mary's breast. And there you see it. Can you see the Ark? Very clearly. Bernard is an ecstasy. In this painting, the image of Mary is not exactly life size, but almost. Making it even more unclear whether this is the actual Virgin Mary showing up or the image coming to life. It doesn't matter. It's the miracle. And notice the eyewitness, too. This painting, perhaps utterly ridiculous. But if you're ever in the Prado Museum in Madrid and you want to have a good time, stand by this image for at least a half hour and listen to what people say who encounter this image for the very first time. You'll be surprised at the things you hear. I had an encounter once an American college student says to her friend with her, this is religion? And I answered, yes. And boy, they were more scared by me than by the painting itself. I was saying, yes, this is what religion is all about. This is what Catholicism emphasizes in the 17th century. The miraculous. And perhaps the best known work of art depicting any kind of mystical ecstasy, Bernini's sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila, the ecstasy known as the Transverboration where an angel shows up and pierces her heart with a little spear. In this case, Bernini chose to turn the angel into a cupid-like figure with an arrow very gently held in his hand. But in fact, in the description, the Spanish word she uses is dardo, or dart, which is a small spear. But notice, too, Bernini chose to depict Teresa off the ground. Her foot is dangling off that cloud that she is floating on. I could have taken a quiz and just asked, Catholic or Protestant? And of course, you would have known immediately what the answer to the question was. This is part of Catholic identity. So so much for levitating and lactating and transverberating. How's this for another impossible miracle? Maria de Jesus de Agreda. Known in the Southwestern United States in folklore as the Lady in Blue, who, without ever leaving her town of Agreda, actually without ever leaving the house she was born in, in Agreda, appears in the area around eastern New Mexico and western Texas and evangelizes the Humano people before actual missionaries get there. And this is my crude attempt to make a graphic of her many by locations, being in two places at the same time. Because she appeared to the Humano people over 500 times, supposedly, which adds up to 2,640,000 frequent flyer miles. But of course, she's not flying because here's the fine distinction in mystical ecstasy. There is a distinction made between by location, which is being in two places at the same time. Because the nuns at Agreda, what they would see, they would see Maria, Sor Maria, going to ecstasy. And she would be unresponsive. And supposedly at that very same time, the Humano people were seeing her in America. That's different from mystical transport, which is just like Star Trek. You leave place A and suddenly show up and place B. That's another miracle I haven't even begun to investigate. But that's not all that Maria de Agreda manages to do. She takes dictation from the Virgin Mary who appears to her and tells her right down my life story. And she tells her her entire life story. And not only that, narrates the story of her parents, St. Joachim and St. Anne. And goes all the way from St. Joachim and St. Anne to the Assumption of Mary. In between, the details are amazing. Entitled the Mystica Ciudad de Dios or the Mystical City of God, this work is a million words long. And she not only wrote it once, she wrote it twice, because the first version she was ordered to burn. And of course, being obedient, she did. And what's in here? Well, you find things you find in the Gospels, of course. You also find things that you find in some books like the Apocryphon of James. But you also find things that you don't find anywhere, which are being revealed to Sor Maria by the Virgin Mary. What kinds of things? Well, guess who ran the church after Jesus ascended to heaven? Virgin Mary. Virgin Mary is kind of omniscient. She knows everything. Virgin Mary also is constantly being taken from place to place by angels, mystical transport. They take her everywhere. Not surprisingly, the Virgin Mary is co-redemptrix of the human race. Because first point, this autobiography defends the doctrine of the immaculate conception, which was not yet a doctrine in the 16th or 17th century. Mary is conceived without original sin. Mary has constant mystical experiences, even as a little girl. She knows exactly what's going to happen to her. She knows exactly what's going to happen to Jesus. And during Jesus' passion and crucifixion, she begs her son to beg the Father to allow her to feel all the pain felt by Jesus in his tortures and his crucifixion. And in the narrative, this is what happens. And here's a little text from the mystical city of God. Knowing the high value which the Lord sets upon the labors, the passion and death of my son, and upon those who were to imitate and follow Jesus in the way of the cross, I not only offered to deliver my son over to passion and death, but I asked him to make me his companion and partaker of all his sorrows, his offerings and torments, which the Father granted. So everything felt by Jesus was felt by Mary, which doesn't quite exactly match this image of the seven sorrows of Mary, which are emotional sorrows. This is bodily pain we're talking about. And again, to the issue of who's telling us these things and how are these things being received? The king of Spain, Philip IV, hears about her by locations and travels to Ágreda and goes to see her especially. And then they establish a correspondence and they write over 300 letters to each other. And he confesses to her his deepest darkest sins, even though he knows that she can't grant him absolution. She becomes a confessor to the king. So we're talking once again to somebody at the very top of the hierarchy here. The king believes this. And what about her text? She's processed by the Inquisition, and I've read that document, but she's not processed for the book. She's processed for the by locations and the Inquisition refuses to pass judgment on whether that actually happened or not, just like a historian with brackets. But they say she's fine. The text, very interesting. The text is published. It is accepted by many Catholic universities. And not just in Spain. Of course, all the Spanish universities accept it. The University of Louvain, which is an area of the Low Countries run by Spain, also accepts it. But there are French universities and Italian universities that also accept it as a genuine revelation, including the University of Toulouse. Only one university condemns the mystical city of God and that's the University of Paris, the theological faculty. And the reason they condemn it is not because they think the revelation is false or preposterous. It's because it contains indecent details about the sex life of Joachim and Anne. You can buy the mystical city of God from Tan Publishers English translation and open the first page and you will see the Imprimator and Nihil Obstad. And it comes from none other than the cardinal who used to be Secretary of State for Pope Benedict XVI. Forget his name. Having a senior moment. Forget his name. Anyway, not to mix my metaphors and adjectives. This is perfectly kosher for Catholics, right? So we're not talking about, again, it's in the case of Joseph Cupertino, who is the patron saint of anyone who flies, of all fliers. And for you students in the room, he's the patron saint of exam takers. Because when he was being examined for ordination, the only question he was asked was about the only passage in the entire Bible that he knew. So the prayer to St. Joseph goes something like, Oh, St. Joseph, help me to be examined only on those things I know. These are legitimate still. These are outliers in a way. Maria de Agirda and Joseph Cupertino. But they're not fully outliers, no. Maria de Agirda has never been canonized, but she is the venerable. So Maria de Agirda. She never made it to canonization. And guess who used this book? That horrific scourging scene in this film, which I have never been able to watch, I've been told about. But I've read it. I've read all the details. They're in the mystical city of God. I don't have to see the movie. It's just absolutely horrific. And this is total aside. It has nothing to do with the lecture, but with the image. Jim Cavizel, the actor, when he was playing Jesus on the cross, was actually struck by lightning and survived. Talk about something it has nothing to do with. But now I told you I'd come back to the devil. Here's the deal. Maria de Agirda has to be processed by the Inquisition. Catholics believe the devil does do these things, that the devil does trick people. So just about every great saint from the 16th and 17th century is processed by the Inquisition in Spain or in Italy, including Ignatius Loyola, who actually has to flee from Spain because the Inquisition is on his heels. Here's the flip side for the Protestants. And it's a very interesting thing. Protestants borrow medieval Catholic demonology 100%. Right? They change the theology, but they do not change the demonology. Very odd. I've been telling some graduate student to do this for a dissertation. No one takes it. I wonder why. Here's Luther. And this is medieval demonology. His devil was the 1000-kunstler, the 1000-fold artist who could fool people in all sorts of ways because the devil doesn't have supernatural powers. That's medieval demonology. The devil is a creature. Therefore, he is not supernatural. His powers are preternatural. It's fine distinction, but an important one. What the devil does not miracles, it's trickery. He fools people. And especially as a shapeshifter, Luther had a story there at the bottom. He found a dog on his bed he had never seen before, a black dog, when he was at the Bartburg Castle translating the New Testament into German. He walks in, sees the dog, and does what any reasonable person would do in 1522. He threw the dog out the window because he was convinced the dog was the devil. And then he ran all the way down about 300 feet to look for the dead dog, and of course there was no dead dog to be found, which proved to him this was indeed the devil. He told the story at dinner to his students. This is a wonderful resource for Luther, the table talk. He would have dinner with his students and with every beer his talk would get more and more outrageous. And the note taken by the students would get even more frantic. But he tells the story with a straight face, of course. Yes, of course this happened. The Catholics and Protestants both believe in witches and persecute witches in the 17th century especially. With a vengeance. Witches fly, how about that? They levitate, and Protestants believe that witches do fly. As a matter of fact we have thousands of testimonies and trials, witch trials, of eyewitnesses accusing their neighbor of being a witch and the testimony is so-and-so is a witch I saw her fly. My former colleague David Underdown explained to me that in England the beginning of the end of witchcraft trials you can date it to a specific trial that said a precedent where a witness said so-and-so is a witch I saw her fly and the judge's decision was there is no law against flying. And there you have a map showing you places where witches were persecuted by atrocity by Protestants and Catholics. So I've now taken you to a weird territory, right? Not the map itself, but the fact that Catholics and Protestants do share this fear of the devil and of the devil's power. But they do not share the same attitude towards the power of God to intervene in nature. So you have a lot of witch burning. This is a Lutheran one. A Protestant one, too. And then, let's forget the devil, not completely. There are miracles in the body in mystical ecstasy. And here we're back to that image of Teresa of Avila in her transverberation in complete total ecstasy. How did she explain this? Well, there's a long text and I'm not going to read it all to you. But it's about going into ecstasy. With a very sweet great delight the soul feels it's fainting away almost completely in a kind of swoon and loses its breath. It can't even wiggle the hands without great pain. Your eyes close involuntarily and if they remain open you can hardly see anything. If you try to read, you can't read. If you hear something, you can't really hear it. You can't understand what you hear. Speaking is impossible. You can't bring yourself to form a single word and even if you can, you don't have strength to pronounce it. For all external strength vanishes while the strength of the soul increases so that it may better enjoy its bliss because this is ecstasy. However, the transverberation is a paradoxical ecstasy that is the ultimate pain and the ultimate joy together. And the life of St. Teresa is full of miracles. And here we have a graphic hagiography. It's a life of Teresa told with images. And we have her espousal to Christ which is nothing new. St. Catherine of Siena had a spiritual espousal with Christ and so did St. Catherine of Alexandria back in ancient times. This is nothing new but now it's being represented this way. This woman, her body crosses over into the divine realm. And levitates of course always without witnesses. Or sees the trinity. St. Teresa's autobiography is full of disclaimers such as, oh, I don't have a college degree so I have trouble explaining this or I'm a woman I have trouble explaining this and then she sneaks up on you. Oh, by the way, I experienced the trinity. And here you have it. It's an outrageous claim but this is and as depicted here, she is bodily in heaven experiencing Father, Son and Holy Spirit. She's also great at handling demons especially with holy water and the crucifix. And as a matter of fact in all of her hagiographies that's the life of her as a saint her death is interpreted as the ultimate ecstasy. Here's what St. Teresa had to say about levitations and ecstasies. With the levitations a great force she said would come up under you push you up that you couldn't resist and afterwards your whole body would hurt. She explained it this way that when the soul is pulled up towards heaven in an ecstasy the body has to follow. So her death is interpreted as the ultimate ecstasy where her soul came out of her body very fast and so violently that she began to hemorrhage and that's how she died she died of an internal hemorrhage. She also says very graphically during these ecstasies the soul is shot out of the body with the same speed as a bullet from a gun as her image not protestant. Her body also refused to decompose that's another outrageous but there you have it. Her heart is in Alba where she died her arm is in Avila consolation prize the nuns at Alba got to keep the whole body. And finally this point of contrast the aesthetics caused by this difference in world view two different cultures created by this difference in attitude towards matter and spirit natural and supernatural. Here you have the main Jesuit church in Rome the church of the jesu 1584 that decoration this is to overwhelm the senses it's very material and there's the ceiling of the church of the jesu heaven opens up for you up there and you have a mixture of dimensional figures and painted figures matter is no obstacle to spirit none whatsoever as a matter of fact it's a window to spirit it's a window to the celestial and heavenly the other Jesuit church in Rome St. Ignatius shows the ceiling shows St. Ignatius being taken up to heaven you want to give people in church in the church and in contrast a Calvinist church in the low countries another Calvinist church from the low countries and when Zwingli the reformer of Zurich first mounted the pulpit after all the churches in Zurich had been cleansed of images and organs and stained glass windows what he said was from the pulpit finally we have a beautiful church in which to preach the word without those obstacles and here you have a French reformed Huguenot Calvinist church in France notice the pulpit is center this church did not survive but it's circular and it's not about celebrating the Eucharist it's about preaching the word finally the world 16th 17th century is split into many churches each church claiming to be the true church here you have the Lutheran version from the 1540s contrasting Luther's true church to the Catholic church and as you can see on the Catholic side God the Father is very angry shooting out fire and brimstone but you have to make a choice now for the Lutherans that church over there full of fat monks and superstition and magic and the constant exchange of money and selling indulgences of course that's the false church Luther's church he's preaching straight from the Bible and he's connected to the Holy Spirit the Lamb of God, Christ and the man Jesus and the Father and the only two sacraments are being celebrated baptism and the Eucharist reduced from 7 last image okay what happens when you have these two conflicting world of views and you have multiple churches and especially when you have many of these churches Protestant churches that claim that there's a separation between matter and spirit and that the miraculous is not to be expected no more miracles since the last apostle died among Protestants you have this what I call desacralization of the material world Protestants don't do away with a sacred altogether and don't get me wrong they're not doing away with a sacred but they're ratcheting down or shrinking the sacred to an invisible realm an interior realm after 150 years of constant struggle and fighting, religious wars, persecutions massacres there's a certain exhaustion that sets in and in those areas where Protestants and Catholics live in close proximity and especially areas where they live in close proximity and there has been a lot of religious violence you begin to see actual toleration grudgingly Protestants and Catholics admit let's meet in this desacralized space this desacralized space serves a purpose which is that people can meet and interact without killing each other and I think that this we we're the lucky beneficiaries of these very first steps taken towards toleration but this image from exactly 100 years after the 95 theses this is 1617 this is a what do you have after 100 years on the left you see Calvin, Luther arguing with each other in front of the pope and the pope is putting his fingers in his ears Luther is actually pulling Calvin's beard the German says spiritual squabble and they're inside a church on the right hand side what do you see? you see a simple shepherd girl with her sheep out in the country the church in the background the word of the Lord endures forever above the images and under the shepherd girl the Lord is my shepherd I lack nothing Psalm 23 what's the real religion according to whoever crafted this image of course it's the shepherd girl that's where you find religion it's interior, it's personal it's personal and forget about expecting miracles forget about expecting the material supernatural to interact this is what being a true Christian is that's the world we now inhabit where we can each have our own private religion we can even invent our own religion if we want how did we get there? we got there with this first few cracks made in the view of the world and that first crack opening up this desacralized space so thank you for your attention thank you so thank you professor air we have some time for comments and questions and I'm happy to get it started if no one raises their hands eagerly so let me go back to your about Joseph of Cupertino being the patron saint of exam takers and you had mentioned the Holy House of Loretto earlier and the Holy House of Loretto I believe is the patron saint of pilots yes airmen, pilots of course the only patron saint is not actually a human being but anyway so I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking there's a certain frivolity at work in the Vatican as they assign these patrons but there's also today in the attitude of the Vatican enormous skepticism about miracles anyone who claims to have had a vision or been part of a miracle they are given the most intense scrutiny so what change did we become more Protestant or what? several things going on at once yes there's a way in which the skepticism of the culture in general seeps in but there's something else going on which is that skepticism was always there and all of these miracle claims they're not investigated with the same rigor but they were all investigated and actually the Spanish inquisition there's a special category of case named inventing the sacred where people were constantly constantly being processed by the inquisition for making these claims and then they were investigated and for instance I know a case of one nun brought in for inventing the sacred she was quote unquote levitating by sticking a broom under her habit and standing apparently her habit was long enough that she could stand on the broom and people would think she was off the ground so the skepticism was there all along now the skepticism is stronger but still there is that one man at the Vatican forget what his title is he's the one who's in charge of processing all the miracle accounts for canonization he was interviewed by CVS news about 12 years ago or so and he said our perfect witness the person we look for in a healing case is an atheist doctor who will say I have no way of explaining this or modern science has no way of explaining this so I'm not sure what the mix is modern skepticism seeping in and the skepticism always being there it's never been taken away it's also true by the way that in Lors in France the team of doctors who adjudicate supposed miracles they're not allowed to be Catholics same principle so a question a comment thanks that was just great I was intrigued that at the end if I heard you correctly you came back to Weber in spite of talking about all these miracles and the power of the devil so how was the world disenchanted then well this is it the problem with the terminology that's why I prefer desacralization and I have a twin term for what happens in Catholicism is you have a hyper sacralization as a response but no there are historians who have argued that Weber is all wrong because all religious ritual is a form of enchantment so if you're performing rituals of any kind you still have an enchanted world and this is where I think Weber with his disenchantment he's dealing only with the divine he's completely overlooking all this demonic stuff that still makes the world very enchanted in his sense in his meaning but there's one historian Robert Scribner who's sort of put forward the strongest argument for saying look Luther and the Protestants didn't disenchant the world at all their world was enchanted so he points to things like those wonders those natural wonders Scribner has a wonderful article entitled The Incombustible Luther which is about something that actually really did happen Lutherans believed that images of Luther would never burn they actually believed this is that a miracle or not well I would classify that as a miracle but there's also a lot of slippage too I mean you've got official teachings and you've got people who are being told what they can and should believe or what they shouldn't believe saying that you should believe this or not believe that is not the same thing as getting people to actually believe it or not believe it so there was a lot of slippage and we know for instance from Geneva they had a court for trying people who were trying trying to return to Catholicism they found a man who was coming through Geneva with a suitcase full of religious images that he would show people so they could venerate in the privacy of their homes they catch people doing this and punish them and people from Geneva who go 10 kilometers to the south to attend Mass and they get punished too so there's that slippage too I think Baber was so late 19th century so early 20th century with this view of the progress of science and reason dating at all at the Reformation was very convenient the beginning dating the beginning of this disenchantment the Reformation was very convenient Thanks a lot I guess I had a question about if we focus on the desacralization part sort of and put miracles to aside for a second it seems to me that a sort of simple dichotomy between Protestants and Catholics particularly on the desacralization becomes a little problematic I guess your argument works best if we talk about the Calvinists and particularly low lung Calvinists but it becomes more complicated when we start talking about southern Germany or Scandinavian Lutherans and you sort of start complicating the picture by the different types of cyclization that existed within the Protestant groups so do you find sometimes that this sort of strict dichotomy between Catholics and Protestants is problematic but then also within Catholicism I would imagine you would experience some geographical diversity on this southern Italy is going to be different from other regions could you say something a bit about how historically you sort of get some traction there because I find the sort of Catholic Protestant thing I would want to problematize that quite a bit well I problematize it I just didn't have time I had a whole section I had to take out for time limits on the debate between Luther and the Swiss about the Eucharist Luther continues to believe in the real presence and the Swiss don't know I just didn't have time to go into that Luther is part way he sacralizes the world part way insofar as he does away with divine miracles but he's on a different register different part of the spectrum absolutely than the reformed to the south and among Catholics at this time period you do have real skepticism for instance in the case of Teresa of Avila she's not just processed by the Inquisition there are clergy who remain convinced that her experiences are demonic and even after her works are published in 1588 the Inquisition keeps receiving denunciations of Teresa especially Dominican priests right so among Catholics there's this skepticism about anyone back to your question Paul skepticism about anyone who claims any of this so yeah there's a lot of it's a spectrum but I feel comfortable drawing this line between Protestant and Catholic for several reasons but mainly because of the rejection of post biblical miracles which I think it makes a huge difference whether you're Lutheran or reformed or even Anabaptist those miracles are no longer necessary and you're not going to have anything such as the experiences depicted in those images among Protestants I once said to write a senior essay I said hey how about this for a topic because he was searching for a topic so I said why don't you study Anabaptist martyrs and see if in the martyrdom accounts there's any the least bit of miracle at the execution couldn't find any so then he wrote a brilliant senior essay on why Anabaptists didn't have martyrdom miracles because the fact is they didn't it goes across the spectrum but it doesn't go away right it comes back does that no more no more right way at the back there good man thank you so much it was a very interesting lecture so I was just wondering from your perspective so it would be Catholicism generally considered to be a very idealistic religion they totally believe in the idea of the supernatural you've seen of the demonstration of the miracles but the Protestants seem to be a lot more cynical in nature the denunciation of the idea of the devil's supernatural taking on a clear physical definitive form as you've explained a couple of times the fact that these miracles they deny the idea of these mystical miracles so would you generally consider that the Protestant Reformation was a lot more cynical compared to Catholicism and a sign of religious modernity well I wouldn't use the term cynical skeptical I think it's kind of cleaner because cynicism has a nasty edge to it skeptical and yes there are many historians who have tried to especially of late try to pinpoint the beginning of modernity and have assigned this period the distinction of being the beginning of modernity for various reasons and one of them is precisely this and especially those who agree with Weber about this enchantment this is definitely beginning of modernity but there are other markers of modernity that have nothing to do with religion of the nation-state scientific revolution so on so forth but yeah I think to some extent you can say that this religious division is part of a collection of changes that bring on what we now consider modern well before I thank professor forgive me I want to slip in one commercial two weeks from today at this time in this place professor Dayton Haskin from Boston College Department of English will talk about an almost equally fascinating topic Paradise Lost Frankenstein and the origin of fake news that's enticing isn't it to thank a professor I want to come back to the man in whose honor this lecture series was first established I was thinking Father Chris Mooney who is only known to very few of us in this room but we have never forgotten him and there was one word his favorite word when something really pleased him would have been so appropriate as a one word thank you for this event the word he used was marvellous so this was a marvelous event thank you professor thank you all for being here