CWL Annual Lecture – Avatars of the Impossible ft. Dr. Carlos Eire

Whether reality extends beyond science shapes how we write history and navigate the shift to the AI age.

Leaders of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason, such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Bacon, Boyle, Descartes. and Leibniz, lived alongside mystics who levitated, bilocated, and performed all sorts of miracles that defied the laws of nature. This same time period was also the setting for massive witch hunts and spectacular cases of demonic possessions and exorcisms. The history of the world’s transition to modernity was not as neat and simple as many people assume, and neither is our own transition to postmodernity. In his History of the Impossible, award-winning historian Carlos Eire mines the firsthand accounts and archival evidence of the miraculous and demonic. How did an increasingly skeptical and scientific culture account for events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals? What do these anomalous phenomena reveal about the transition to modernity? Focusing primarly on St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and the Venerable María de Agrades, Eire challenges us to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and of the relationship between the natural and supernatural realms. The main question addressed in this lecture — whether there is more to reality than meets the eye or can be observed by science—has deep implications not only for the writing of history, but also for our own transition from postmodernity to the Age of Artificial Intelligence.