How should we interpret these stories of flying and bilocating, of demons and chapped nipples? Of the body and its impossible desires? Eire’s approach is idiosyncratic. Across his scholarship he has aimed to “re-enchant” history, in the words of Ronald Rittgers. Eire understands modern secularism as its own kind of methodology, with its own interpretive shortcomings. Atheism, as much as faith, shapes the questions we ask of our sources and limits the possibilities of interpretation.
[…]Faith—and especially lived faith, not abstract theology—can make history, too. “Belief is the immortal soul of the imagination,” Eire writes at the close of They Flew, and the power of belief to make history “can be limitless.”
As Eire and others have argued, secularism involves its own, often unacknowledged assumptions about historical interpretation.
Wings of Desire, Erin Maglaque, NYRB
