One of his works has not only won admiration but, on further study, has fascinated, puzzled, and even repulsed Christian admirers of his work, because it seems to violate a central doctrine of the Catholic Faith. This essay will consider that work, “The Dead Christ in the Tomb” (click here for a full photo of the artwork), and attempt to interpret it in the light of Catholic doctrine. It will begin with a brief overview of the provenance of “The Dead Christ,” then an analysis of the anatomical details of “The Dead Christ,” and proceed to notable reactions to it throughout history.

Finally, I will propose a way of valuing this masterpiece that remains faithful to Church teaching. This will involve some speculation regarding what the painting meant to Holbein, what it might express in terms of Holbein’s own faith. We have no commentary by Holbein himself about the image, so I will move from what I judge to be least to most probable based on the little we do know about Holbein and the time in which he lived. Although completely unverifiable from beginning to end, this part does serve the purpose of helping us think about what this work could mean for us today. That concluding part will have two sections:

1. What “The Dead Christ” can never mean for Catholics (if modern anatomical analysis is correct), i.e. it can never be taken by Catholics as a faithful representation of the verum corpus, the physical body of Christ in its state from Good Friday evening through Holy Saturday until the Resurrection.
2. What “The Dead Christ” could profitably mean for Catholics—the decay and decomposition of the fullness of Christ in the world, the death of Christendom. This is a work of art which demands not only our appreciation but our prayerful meditation. But to give it that requires reframing it (no pun intended) in our minds and hearts, perhaps even departing from Holbein’s own intention.

Hans Holbein and “The Dead Christ” in Historical Context

Holbein lived from 1498-1543, when he died of the plague at the age of 45. He learned painting from his father, and in 1515, at the age of 17, he left his birthplace of Augsburg, Germany and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he lived for all but 2 of the next 17 years. Those two years, 1526-1528, were spent in England, where he joined the circle of St. Thomas More (with a letter of recommendation from Erasmus of Rotterdam, More’s close friend). In 1532 he would return to England where he would be officially appointed as the King’s Painter and paint his famous portraits of the Tudors, and where he would remain for the rest of his life.

“The Dead Christ” was a rather early work of Holbein during his time in Basel, and the only religious image that bears his signature. It was commissioned by his friend Bonifacius Amerbach, and bears the date 1521 in Roman numerals, resembling an inscription carved into the stone wall of the tomb above Christ’s feet (M D XXI / H H). During that year he was often in the company of Erasmus, of whom he painted many portraits and who lived in Basel for two periods of time overlapping Holbein’s time there. But Erasmus makes no mention of the painting, despite the fact that he frequently commented on art, books, and religious culture. No significant writings of Holbein survive, if he ever wrote anything, so we have no help from his own words.

Why did Holbein paint it, and for whom? There are two theories. One is that it was supposed to be used as a predella, or the base of an altar. But “The Dead Christ” has a low vantage point, which is not helpful in a predella and is more characteristic of a painting to be placed above eye level. The other theory is that it was painted to be an autonomous panel, perhaps for a family chapel in the Carthusian Charterhouse in Basel. Its width matches that of a stone memorial in a family chapel there, a memorial that Amerbach also commissioned, and its thin gold molding corresponds to a similar detail of the memorial molding. But the memorial was not installed until 1544, and Holbein’s painting was never installed in the chapel, adding to the mystery. It is currently in the Kunstmuseum in Basel.

“The Dead Christ”: Analysis, Commentary, and Speculation

Now let us consider the image. As is true of all Holbein’s paintings, it is very realistic, the image of a body that has been dead for at least 3 days. There should be no doubt that it is based on direct studies of corpses, and legend has it that the model for the image was the corpse of a dead Jewish man that had washed up in Basel and was then pulled out of the Rhine River. Notice that the head of Christ is missing both crowns—it is not adorned with a halo as it was always depicted in deposition scenes in Renaissance paintings, as we see in another famous deposition painting, Andrea Mantegna's “Lamentation over the Dead Christ,” to which I will return. Nor does it bear the marks of the crowning with thorns—in fact there are no wounds on the body except those in his side, his hands, and his feet.

The most important curiosity comes when we look at the one hand that is visible. Look closely at the nail mark, and a green pallor is evident, which could either be bruising or decay around the wound. In the only published medical analysis, anatomist Lovorka Grgurević confirms this pallor and other characteristics as a sign of body tissue decay.[1] One finger, the middle finger, is extended. You can see that it looks as if Christ has a long fingernail. Until the late nineteenth century it was assumed even by medical experts that the nails continue to grow on corpses (actually, the skin and cuticle recede, making the nail look much longer in death than it did in life). The body looks emaciated because the substance of the flesh has begun to shrink. In short, it is more probable than not that this is a body that is decomposing.

For this reason, even from the very beginning the painting provoked strong reactions, often of disgust, from its viewers. The very first record of the painting refuses to name it as The Dead Christ. Instead, it is catalogued as “Portrait of a Dead Man with the title ‘Jesus Christos Rex Judaeorum.’”[2] The most important commentator before the late nineteenth century was the Russian Freemason N.M. Karamzin who wrote, “Nothing divine can be seen in Christ taken down from the Cross; but as a dead man he is depicted very naturally.”[3] The Swiss writer Ulrich Hegner described the painting this way in 1823: “He lies on the board, stiffened, the color of corruption, dead as far as possible. This is probably how a crucified man might have looked, but no artist should have depicted the Savior so horribly disfigured.”[4]

But the greatest commentator was Fyodor Dostoevsky. In August 1867 Dostoevsky visited Basel and viewed the painting. In her memoirs, his wife Anna Grigorievna says that she left him before the painting, and returned fifteen to twenty minutes later to find him "riveted to the spot" before it. She wrote, "in his agitated face there was a kind of frightened expression, one which I had happened to notice more than once in the first minutes of an epileptic fit."[5] Afterwards Dostoevsky would declare to his wife that "one could lose one's faith from that picture." This cryptic comment is repeated by Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, where the character Ippolit comments on the painting:

The picture represented Christ just taken down from the cross. . . . In the painting his face is dreadfully disfigured by blows, swollen, covered with terrible swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes open, the pupils turned up, the large open whites of the eyes bright with a sort of deathly, glassy reflection. . . . As one looks at that painting, one conceives of nature in the form of some huge, implacable, dumb beast, or to be more exact, to be much more exact, though it may seem strange, in the form of some huge machine of the latest design which, deaf and unfeeling, has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up a great and priceless being, a being worth all of nature and its laws, all the earth, which was perhaps created solely for the advent of that being![6]

So—what was Holbein saying, or at least assuming, with this painting? What was he trying to say about Christ’s body in the state of death? Here we have a great dilemma. As we will see, there is no faithfully Catholic reception of the painting that can accept it as accurately depicting Christ in the tomb. But it is a masterpiece worth our respect. It is not something utterly disgusting and sacrilegious, like “Piss Christ” by Andres Serrano (1987), or “Elephant Dung Mary” by Chris Ofili (1986). As for Holbein’s meaning, I will give three possibilities, starting with the one I consider the least probable and ending with the one I consider the most probable:

1. The least probable: Holbein was ignorant of theology and simply wedded to his artistic realism, depicting Christ exactly the way any anatomist would tell him to describe a body that has been in the tomb for three days. He was certainly wedded to his realism; he is the greatest example of realism in painting of his day, and one of the greatest of all time. But he was also raised a Catholic and, thanks to his own father, had spent his childhood in religious and artistic instruction, which included visiting two masterpieces, Matthias Grunewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece,” painted only ten years before “The Dead Christ,” and Andrea Mantegna’s “Lamentation Over the Dead Christ,” completed just a generation before (circa 1483). From Grunewald he knew that to show a horribly wounded body was not in any way heterodox, and he also knew from Mantegna that to show the body at peace, bearing its wounds but still intact, not decaying, was the proper convention. He had to know that he was leaving both behind, and stating something that would not fit artistic convention or Catholic doctrine.
2. The more probable: Holbein was repudiating his faith in Christ. Remember—no halo, a body in decay, and that middle finger. Why the middle finger? From the time of ancient Greece until today, we know what the middle finger signifies. Could Holbein have been saying that Christ ended his life as a sinner, even an admirable one, and that this shows that he was not divine? Holbein could never have said any such thing in his day anywhere within the continent of Europe, nor in any Muslim Land, without risking arrest and execution.
3. The most probable: Holbein had become a Lutheran, and he depicted the Dead Christ according to Luther’s theology of salvation. Again, Holbein moved to Basel in 1516, and painted “The Dead Christ” in 1521. It was at the very same time that the Reformation had come to Basel, and especially through the circle around Erasmus. Erasmus remained a Catholic his entire life, but Protestant ideas were spreading rapidly through sermons, printing, and university circles. In February 1529 waves of iconoclasm had begun to spread through Switzerland, and many religious images and altars were destroyed. Holbein’s Dead Christ was held privately, so it escaped, but if it was known it could have been spared also because the absence of overt devotional spectacle in the painting may have made it somewhat less objectionable than traditional cult images.

Luther insisted that God does not appear in expected forms of strength or philosophical clarity. Instead, God hides himself in paradox: “God can be found only in suffering and the cross.” Any form of exaltation—say, a halo around the head of Christ—was considered by him to be a compromise of that principle. The painting removes every traditional sign of divinity and forces the viewer to confront Christ under the conditions Luther says reveal God most truthfully: suffering, death, and apparent abandonment. While the principle here is certainly Catholic—it is the suffering, wounded Christ that reveals God most truthfully—its extension to decay is certainly not, as shall be seen.

If he became a Lutheran, Holbein would never officially renounce his Catholic Faith. When he moved permanently to England in 1532, Henry VIII was still a Catholic, only declaring himself the head of the Church in England in 1534. We cannot be sure if my theory is correct. But consider this quote from Luther of which Holbein would certainly have heard echoes in Basel. It is from Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation in 1518: “He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore, he who does not understand the cross does not understand God.”[7]

Theological Evaluation and Retrieval

To evaluate “The Dead Christ” in the light of Catholic theology, we can begin with Acts of the Apostles and the Pentecost speech of St. Peter, applying Psalm 16 to Jesus:

For David says of him: “I saw the Lord ever before me, with him at my right hand I shall not be disturbed. Therefore my heart has been glad and my tongue has exulted; my flesh, too, will dwell in hope, because you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld, nor will you suffer your holy one to see corruption. You have made known to me the paths of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence.” My brothers, one can confidently say to you about the patriarch David that he died and was buried, and his tomb is in our midst to this day. But since he was a prophet and knew that God had sworn an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that neither was he abandoned to the netherworld nor did his flesh see corruption. God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses (Acts 2:25-32).

Bodily decay is explicitly denied by Peter based upon Old Testament prophecy. The body in the tomb remained Jesus’ body, not alive but also not subject to decomposition. A corpse is not really the body of a dead person. It remains superficially in the likeness of that person for a short time, but that quickly passes. But Christ’s body was miraculously preserved by the Holy Spirit in preparation for his Resurrection. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes St. Gregory of Nyssa:

God [the Son] did not impede death from separating his soul from his body according to the necessary order of nature, but has reunited them to one another in the Resurrection, so that he himself might be, in his person, the meeting point for death and life, by arresting in himself the decomposition of nature produced by death and so becoming the source of reunion for the separated parts.[8]

And then it offers this commentary:

Christ's death was a real death in that it put an end to his earthly human existence. But because of the union his body retained with the person of the Son, his was not a mortal corpse like others, for "divine power preserved Christ's body from corruption” (ST III.51.3) Both of these statements can be said of Christ: "He was cut off out of the land of the living" (Is 53:8), and "My flesh will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption” (Acts 2:26-27; cf. Ps 16:9-10). Jesus' Resurrection "on the third day" was the proof of this, for bodily decay was held to begin on the fourth day after death.[9]

There are no conciliar decrees regarding this doctrine, but that is because it has never been challenged in any significant way in the history of the Church. But the message is clear—Christ’s body in the tomb remains his body; lifeless, yes, but uncorrupted until it is glorified in the hidden moment of the Resurrection.

If one wonders whether or not this is tilting at windmills, consider: if the Dead Christ accurately depicts Christ in the tomb, then that means at some point after the Incarnation, Christ had no body on Earth. A decaying corpse is not a body, it is nothing more than human remains. If Christ was subject to decay, the response of God to Mary’s “Fiat” to the Incarnation would be more total than God’s own. The Word became flesh, not flesh for a time, then not flesh anymore, then flesh again. But a creature can never be more faithful than the Creator.

I propose that perhaps we may consider the Dead Christ beyond Holbein’s own intention. Perhaps the image there can be taken by the faithful believer not as an image of the verum corpus in the tomb, but Christ’s pleroma, his fullness in society, withering away. Without a doubt, by the time Holbein painted this image, that fullness of Christ that we call Christendom was, for all practical purposes, decaying.

By this I do not mean the Church, which is Christ’s mystical body. Of that body, St, Paul says she is “the fullness of him (Christ) who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). Like Christ, she can, in her deepest essence, never be subject to decay. But her emanation into culture, her informing of a society affecting all forms of human life, has no such guarantee. The society which from the 800s was called Christendom, a term which first appears in Anglo-Saxon writings and literally means “the realm of Christ,” began to decay at the Reformation and only its bones remain. Christendom is not the Church herself but the cultural and geopolitical flowering of the fullness of Christ from her into the world. Just as the Church is the image of Christ, the society that she once gave birth to also resembled him.

And now we look upon that society in Holbein’s painting, and we see what so many refuse to see, even centuries later. Despite how many embrace integralism and the Tridentine Mass, Christendom is dead and can never be recovered, at least not as it once was. In a speech Walker Percy gave during the 1983 commencement exercises of Saint Joseph Abbey and Seminary College in Covington, LA (the transcript of which is displayed prominently, still today, in the seminary library), he said:

The time may come when the Catholic Church and the Catholic people, priest and layman, will have become a remnant, a saving remnant, and that will be both good news and bad news. The bad news is that the familiar comfort of the parish in which the Church was taken to be more or less coextensive with society in which we lived is probably going or gone. The good news is that in becoming a minority in all countries, the Church also becomes a world church in the true sense, bound by no culture, not even the West of the old Christendom, by no means triumphant but rather a pilgrim church witnessing to a world in travail and yet a world to which it appears ever stranger and more outlandish. It, the Church, will be seen increasingly as what it was in the beginning, a saving remnant, a sign of contradiction, a stumbling block, a transcultural phenomenon, a pilgrim Church.

There is no more Christendom and it may be just as well.

There is no more Christendom. All our nostalgic longing for it is sentimentality and is worth nothing. It is like embracing a rotting body. Only when we turn from it and re-encounter the living Christ, risen and imperishable within his Church today, will we begin to forge a new way, which will begin in diminution but result in new societal forms.

As for “The Dead Christ,” I will leave the final word to my Notre Dame colleague Jennifer Newsome-Martin:

To witness Hans Holbein’s painting . . . is to experience at once its strangest feature: ostensibly it is a work of religious art, an icon of faith and thus a communication of some element of transcendence. And yet the starkness and brutality of the image is buffered by nothing, ameliorated by nothing that would or could dilute the insistent finality of the death that it records so forensically and without consolation. Holbein’s painting forestalls all pieties and beatific assurances, hopes of resurrection. . . . Holbein’s image belies no evidence of things not seen and expresses no faith beyond the devastating certainty that Christ is dead. What is seen is just a solitary corpse who could be anyone, any one of us who must also face the inevitability of our death alone. It simultaneously represents an aesthetic of both faith and doubt, one in which faith and doubt are themselves drawn into indistinction.[10]

EDITORIAL NOTE: This paper was originally presented at the Joie de Vivre Louisiana Arts & Culture Festival on May 16, 2026 and was published in the Summer 2026 issue of Joie de Vivre.

As Erika Bachiochi points out in her excellent book, The Rights of Women, “Until the mid-twentieth century, women’s rights advocates opposed infanticide and abortion, often speaking of the two together; most also disapproved of contraception” (202). Bachiochi explains that these early feminists viewed “contraceptive methods and abortion as technological incursions into women’s bodies and facilitators of male oppression of women” (115). For instance, nineteenth-centurty feminist and female suffrage advocate Mattie Brinkerhoff wrote: “When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society—so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that . . . she has been greatly wronged” (214). On the question of contraception, early feminists “feared that, by attempting to separate sex from childbearing, these [artificial birth control] methods would embolden men to engage in infidelity, prostitution, promiscuity, or even marital rape” (109). Although these feminists “sought freedom from excessive pregnancies and childbearing, [they] also sought respect and authority for motherhood and freedom from male sexual tyranny.” And they believed that “the solution to both . . . was abstinence and a single sexual moral standard restraining both women’s and men’s sexual impulses” (110, quoting historian Tracy Thomas).

So how did we move from this vision of women’s rights as inherently bound up with respect for the rights of preborn children and the disciplining of both male and female sexual desire, to our contemporary culture in which the very term “women’s rights” is taken to be synonymous with a right to abortion on demand and unlimited sex without procreative consequences? How can we unmask the falsity of this narrative to a culture that seems to take its truth for granted? And what do we need in order to restore the cultural recognition that true respect for women goes hand in hand with respect for preborn children?

In my remarks, I would like to consider each of these questions: how we got here, why this narrative pitting women against their preborn children (and indeed against their own reproductive capacities) is false, and what the solution is.

How We Got Here

So how did we get here? To simplify a complicated story—and here I draw on the excellent work of Carl Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—there was a three-part revolution in our understanding of the human person. First, there was a shift from a view of the person in which embodiment and social embeddedness are central to one’s personal identity, to what is often referred to as “expressive individualism,” a romantic view of the person as defined by inner psychological states, often in opposition to the societal demands of institutions such as family, church, or nation. This reduction of the self to psychological states goes hand in hand with materialism and the abandonment of a transcendent view of human nature. Second, this psychologized view of the self was sexualized, leading to what Helen Alvaré has called “sexual expressionism,” according to which one’s sexual feelings—and the freedom to express and act on those feelings—are at the core of personal identity and dignity. Finally, this sexualized self was politicized, as neo-Marxist and second-wave feminist thinkers identified political liberation with sexual liberation and the dismantling of traditional sexual norms.

The result of this tripartite revolution in our culture’s understanding of the human person was captured in the 1992 Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade’s claim that there is a constitutional right to abortion. Although both Roe and Casey have now been overturned, the understanding of the human person reflected in Casey nonetheless remains dominant in our culture. In one of the most notorious sentences in the history of American jurisprudence, the Casey opinion states: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." And central to that liberty to define oneself, according to the Casey court, is sexual expression. “For two decades,” says the Court, “people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”

Let us unpack in a bit more detail what this sexual expressionist view of the person—and the exaltation of sexual expression as the most fundamental of our political rights—implies. At the core of sexual expressionism is the assumption that the right to sexual expression requires the ability to express and act upon one’s sexual desires without any responsibility for the natural consequences of such activity—namely, children. Sexual expressionism attempts to sever not only the inherent connection between sex and procreation, but also the inherent connection between sex and marriage. On this view, sex could be a way of expressing love and commitment or of seeking to have a child, if that is what you happen to want, but it need not involve any of these things if you do not want it to. Philosopher Igor Primoratz exemplifies this view in his book Ethics and Sex, where he claims that there is no inherent meaning or purpose to sex beyond the attainment of sexual pleasure, and thus no special moral norms governing sexual activity. (As an aside, it is worth noting that Primoratz’s view—which is simply a systematic philosophical statement of the dominant cultural view of sex—cannot make sense of why the injustice of rape is different from or worse than non-sexual forms of assault and battery. This alone should reveal to us how deeply at odds sexual expressionism is with genuine respect for women.)

Of course, the pesky biological fact remains that sexual intercourse is a step in the process of human reproduction—that is what makes it sexual in the first place—and so the sexual expressionist culture must do everything it can to alter this biological reality and hide it from consciousness. Thus the “right” to “consequence-free” sex is made possible by hormonal birth control, with abortion available as a back-up when birth control fails—necessary since the only 100% effective method of birth control is abstinence. As the Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s research arm) reports, over 50% of women seeking abortions were using some form of birth control when they got pregnant. And we have already seen that the contraception-abortion connection was central to the Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v Casey decision—thankfully now overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson.

In other words, without the technological innovation of hormonal birth control and its widespread societal acceptance, it seems doubtful that the sexual expressionist view of the self would have ever achieved such cultural dominance. The implication is that a culture that sees sexual expression as the core of personal identity is necessarily also a culture that rejects women’s unique biological capacity for motherhood, both in theory and in practice. This rejection was clear in the work of second-wave feminists. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, argues in the Second Sex that “freedom from reproductive slavery” through effective contraception and abortion is essential to women’s liberation (139). For De Beauvoir, a key obstacle to women’s liberation is the female body itself, which—by contrast with the male body—is inherently in conflict with women’s transcendent “vocation as a human being” (723). As she says in an interview in the early 1970s, “women will not be liberated until they have been liberated from their children” (Simone de Beauvoir Today, 39). And in another interview she argues that it is not enough for women to hold positions of power in society, but that women’s equality will not really be attained until we “destroy the concept of motherhood.” Even more explicitly, Shulamith Firestone in the Dialectic of Sex argues that women’s social inequality is rooted in “the biological division of the sexes,” and thus that the only way to achieve women’s social equality is to eliminate “the sex distinction itself,” by replacing natural sexual reproduction with “artificial reproduction,” and in this way putting an end to “the tyranny of the biological family” (ch.1).

Thus we find ourselves in a situation in which women’s liberation is conceived of in a way that requires rejecting and manipulating women’s bodies to be able to have sex whenever we desire, while only taking on the responsibility of parenthood when (or if) we happen to want to. And even then, there is an attempt to eradicate biological sex differences in procreation through technology, thus rejecting women’s unique capacity to nourish a developing child within her body. This is how we have gotten to the place in which “women’s rights” have come to be synonymous with “reproductive rights,” which in turn is code for unfettered access to birth control and abortion, on the one hand, and—ironically—reproductive technologies on the other hand.

Unmasking the Falsity of the Sexual Expressionist View of Women’s Rights

But why is this a false vision of women’s rights? As with my answer to the question of how we got here, there is much more to say on this point than I can possibly cover here, but let me just highlight a few key points.

First, this sexual expressionist vision of women’s liberation requires manipulating women’s bodies by altering them hormonally in ways that many—including many who have no moral objections to birth control or abortion—are now recognizing to be harmful to women’s physical and psychological health in both the short-term and long-term. Indeed, the burden of achieving supposedly “consequence-free” sex is one that falls almost entirely on women. While there have been and continue to be attempts to make a male birth control pill, so far the trials have always been stopped because of the side effects—side effects like acne, mood swings, and decreased libido that women on the pill have been putting up with for decades. By contrast, early versions of the female birth control pill had lethal side-effects for some women—one woman died in early clinical trials—but trials continued and more women died after the pill was made widely available. While newer versions of the pill are a bit safer, they still increase the risk of heart attack and stroke—in some cases doubling or even tripling the risk—and high-estrogen versions of the pill are labeled Group 1 carcinogens by the WHO. Although the absolute risk still remains relatively low, we are talking about a drug taken by millions of women throughout their reproductive years, so that increased risk translated into close to 2,000 contraceptive-caused strokes per year in the U.S. alone. But the medical establishment deems this risk acceptable because there is said to be a direct “health benefit” to the woman. As one article puts it: “Women taking some versions of the pill increase their risk of conditions such as blood clots, but this is balanced by the risk that pregnancy would present to their health.” Note that pregnancy—i.e. the healthy functioning of a woman’s body—is treated here as if it were a disease. By contrast, the article says that even relatively mild side-effects of male birth control have been deemed unacceptable because there is no direct health benefit to men. In other words, since only women can get pregnant, they are the ones who are burdened with the results of unprotected sex, and therefore they are the ones who should be burdened with the side effects of hormones to control their fertility.

So much for calling on men to bear their fair share of responsibility, despite the fact that it tends to be men more than women who desire to engage in uncommitted sexual encounters. As Leah Fessler points out in an insightful article on the hook-up culture at Middlebury College, for women the desire for sex is usually more about emotional connection than mere physical pleasure. Fessler found that sexual encounters outside of committed relationships are dehumanizing and often not even pleasant for women, who are much less likely than men to achieve sexual climax outside of a committed relationship. Writing about her own experiences and that of her friends, Fessler comments:

My girlfriends and I were top students, scientists, artists, and leaders. We could advocate for anything—except for our own bodies. We won accolades from our professors, but the men we were sleeping with wouldn’t even eat breakfast with us the next morning.

She and her friends, she says, “were desperate to know what it felt like to be wanted; desperate for a chance at intimacy.” The men with whom they were hooking up, however, seemed not to care. Months after Leah had stopped hooking up with a classmate named Ben, he told her: “I didn’t think of you as a human being while we were hooking up.” If that is not an indication of the way in which sex without commitment—and the sexual expressionist culture more broadly—dehumanizes women and objectifies their bodies, I am not sure what is.

This points to an important but often overlooked reality that Erika Bachiochi calls “sexual asymmetry.” In other words, the risks of uncommitted sex are asymmetrical—for women those risks are very high, whereas for men the risks are low. Conversely, while ultimately I believe that neither men nor women actually benefit from uncommitted sexual encounters—indeed, the research of Fessler and others indicates that neither men nor women are satisfied with the hook-up culture—the benefits from those encounters at least in terms of sexual pleasure are much higher for men on average than for women, and the risks to them physically and psychologically are much lower. Hormonal birth control and legalized abortion as a “back-up contraceptive” make women more sexually available to men—also depriving them of the excuses that they used to be able to give to say no when being pressured into sex by their boyfriends—and then make women bear the whole burden of that sexual availability. And because abortion is the woman’s choice, the man also feels more readily absolved of any responsibility to support the child if she chooses not to abort. She is the one who has to deal with the side-effects of birth control; she is the one who has to make the heart-wrenching decision of whether to abort if birth control fails; and she is the one who has to either deal with the physical and psychological consequences of abortion, or with the responsibilities of parenthood.

The asymmetry here is unavoidable, because it is based on unalterable biological differences between men and women. But instead of calling on men to take full responsibility for the consequences of their actions—and to control their sexual desires until they are ready to do so—society tries to mask this asymmetry through manipulation of women’s bodies. But technical manipulation of women’s bodies does not change the fact that women are simply more vulnerable to the effects of uncommitted sex, both physically and emotionally. Instead, technology just places new and even more onerous burdens on women to manipulate their bodies and eliminates the cultural pressures that, in the past, pushed men to be responsible.

In addition to manipulating women’s reproductive and sexual capacities so that it is possible (at least for men) to have uncommitted sex without bearing the associated burdens or risks, the culture of sexual expressionism also treats a woman’s fertility as something extrinsic to her overall personal reality, as if it were a machine that could be turned off when children are not wanted, and then turned on again to produce a child in short order whenever one is desired. The reality, however, is that a woman’s fertility is not a machine that can be turned off and on at will without consequences. Many women find that when they do finally want to become pregnant, being on the pill for years has masked or caused problems that make it difficult for them to conceive or sustain a pregnancy. And when this happens, rather than trying to understand and treat the underlying problems contributing to infertility, the standard medical approach generally settles for a relatively superficial investigation of the cause and then quickly recommends another technological work-around in which the woman's body is manipulated yet again (in ways that involve serious health risks for both woman and child) in order to conceive via IVF. (Before saying more about the problems with IVF, it is worth mentioning that I know from personal experience how devastating infertility can be. And in most cases couples pursuing IVF are simply following the recommendations of their doctor without awareness of the ethical issues or of alternative approaches—discussed below—that are more respectful of both women and children.)

IVF involves a number of health risks for women—including the risks of hyperstimulation of the ovaries to produce multiple eggs that are then harvested for fertilization outside the body—and it instrumentalizes the woman’s body for its reproductive capacity, performing interventions that do not actually aim to restore her health, but rather place her health at risk and manipulate her body (or another woman’s body, in the case when an egg donor is used) in order to get the raw materials necessary to produce a child.

The failure to respect the dignity of the child in IVF is even more stark than the failure to respect the dignity of the woman. Children conceived through IVF are subjected to the logic of manufacture and production, in which efficiency and customer satisfaction are the paramount values. For the sake of efficiency, IVF is usually done in a way that attempts to produce multiple embryos at once. Those embryos are then subjected to “quality control” screening, in which embryologists rank the embryos according to a grading system, selecting the healthiest for transfer to the woman’s uterus, discarding low quality embryos, and cryo-preserving any additional high-quality embryos. The fate of these frozen embryos—of which there are estimated to be roughly five million in the United States alone—is uncertain; most remain in cryo-storage indefinitely. The quality control element of the IVF process is intensified when genetic testing is done on the embryos, making it possible to select embryos based on the presence or absence of certain traits or diseases. While IVF could be done using only one or two eggs per cycle and transferring all embryos produced to the uterus—thus avoiding the problem of what to do with excess embryos and minimizing the eugenic, quality control aspect of the process, as well as lowering the risk to the woman—the logic of efficiency almost always trumps these considerations about respecting the value of embryonic human life and the dignity of the woman’s body.

IVF’s approach toward the child as a product manufactured to satisfy the desires of the would-be parent or parents is also seen in the practice of “selective reduction.” Sometimes when an unwanted multiple-fetus pregnancy occurs (often because more than one embryo was transferred to the uterus to increase the likelihood of success), one or more of the “excess” fetuses are aborted in order to avoid the risks and complications of a multiple pregnancy, or simply because the parent(s) do not want that many children. A 2011 New York Times article discussing this practice recounts the story of a woman named Jenny, who became pregnant with twins through IVF, and chose to abort one of them. Jenny’s reflections on her decision reveal how IVF rests on an attitude toward children as products of manufacture made to satisfy the desires of the adults who commissioned their creation. She says:

If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner—in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me—and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.

Let me reiterate that last line: “This became yet another thing we could control.” This line captures the core of the prevalent cultural attitudes surrounding human sexuality and procreation, which is the presumption that we can and should have complete control over our reproductive and sexual capacities by manipulating those capacities at will to suit our own preferences and desires. And this can only be done by treating the human body—particularly the bodies of women and of nascent human beings—as an object of technical manipulation, rather than as an essential aspect of the human person that deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. What we see, in other words, is that the failure to respect nascent human life actually goes hand in hand with a failure to respect women, because in pitting women against their babies, the sexual expressionist culture ends up pitting women—and society as a whole—against their own bodies, leading to a relationship culture that gives men all the power and reduces women to sexual objects, and to a medical culture that treats women’s bodies as objects of technical manipulation.

I should add here that the systemic effects of all this in the medical field have been terrible for women’s health, because standard medical training teaches doctors, on the one hand, to view women’s fertility as a disease to be “cured” with hormonal birth control or abortion, and on the other hand to see procreation as a consumer choice to be achieved through technical means when desired; but in neither case is women’s fertility understood as intrinsic to health. And the result is that most doctors—including ob-gyns—receive inadequate training about how a woman’s menstrual cycle relates to her overall health, or about how to identify and treat the underlying causes of women’s health problems, including infertility.

As an aside, let me also note that the treatment of human embryos in the IVF process is perhaps the greatest pro-life crisis of our time, involving the wholesale destruction of millions of human beings, and the indefinite freezing of millions more. It is estimated that fewer than 3% of embryos created through IVF result in a live birth. But sadly many who are otherwise committed to the culture of life fail to recognize this, so this is an area in which more public education is desperately needed, in order to at least create public support for regulations like those in Germany and Italy, limiting the number of embryos created through IVF to the number that the woman can immediately gestate. And while there is no simple solution to the plight of the millions of embryos already in cryostorage, I do think that embryo adoption is the response that best respects the dignity of these most vulnerable and forgotten children, and that if done in the right way, the practice of embryo adoption involves none of the injustices to women and children that are inherent in IVF.[1]

An Alternative Vision

Now that I have explained how our culture has come to accept the sexual expressionist ideology that pits women against their preborn children, and why that ideology is false and harmful to women, let me now offer an alternative vision. And since the false sexual expressionist approach rests on driving a wedge between marriage, sex, and babies—three things that most cultures throughout history have considered to be, at least ideally, inextricably interconnected—it is unsurprising that the solution I propose will be a reunification of this triad. In other words, we will not be able to recover a culture a life that respects both women and preborn children without correcting our culture’s distorted understanding of sex. What we need is an alternative approach to sexuality that respects the dignity of the body as an intrinsic aspect of the human person, an approach that contrasts with sexual expressionism’s claim that sex has no inherent meaning or purpose and need not involve anything beyond the consensual use of one’s own or another’s body to achieve sexual pleasure.

This alternative approach, based on natural law and in accord with the Judeo-Christian tradition, recognizes that sex does have an inherent meaning, and that meaning is marriage, a uniquely all-encompassing union of persons that is inherently oriented toward procreation and family life. The ability to literally become one flesh with another human being by joining the two halves of the human reproductive system in sexual intercourse is the biological foundation of the marital community, a community that is different in kind, not just in degree, from all other forms of human community, insofar as it involves a unity of persons not only at the level of mind and heart, but also at the level of the body. And because this bodily unity is possible only through the joining of the two halves of the reproductive system in an act that is part of the process of reproduction, marriage is also the only kind of community that is inherently oriented to procreation. Sexual intercourse is thus literally the embodiment of the marital community, the actualization and expression of the commitment a man and woman make to each other in their marriage vows. Engaging in sexual intercourse when there is no marital community to embody therefore fails to respect the inherent meaning of one’s bodily action and involves a kind of alienation from one’s bodily self in which one treats one’s body as a sub-personal object for the achievement of pleasure in isolation from any genuine human good. It also involves a failure to respect the child that might result from one’s sexual union, because it risks bringing a child into the world in the absence of a marital community that would enable the child to receive the united love and care of his or her parents within a stable family.

This alternative approach to sexuality is precisely the one proposed by Pope St. John Paul II. As he writes in Evangelium Vitae, “the trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have led to contempt for new life” (§97). And this trivialization of sex is also, at the very same time, a special threat to the dignity and equality of women, as noted in Mulieris Dignitatem (§10). John Paul II recognized and spoke about this inextricable connection between sexual integrity and respect for both women and children throughout his ministry. In an insightful retreat talk directed specifically to male students, he warns young men against the temptation to let their sexual desires get the better of them and to “take” from a woman, “fall[ing] into the role of a primitive profiteer or exploiter,” and then leaving the woman to “take on the whole burden of [the] life” created through his action.[2] He criticizes men for failing to assume responsibility and for saying things like: “Go and find a doctor. I’ll give you the money. Why on earth did you let this happen? There is such a thing as contraception.” John Paul II here clearly shows his awareness of the ways in which contraception and abortion facilitate male domination and objectification of women, rather than liberating them as the sexual expressionist culture would have us believe. By contrast, when speaking to the female students he encourages them to cultivate “interior independence” by developing their relationship with Christ, and tells them, “The man must come to understand that the woman is a person, that she can be a mother, and that motherhood is a wonderful thing and a profound experience—and one in which the man cannot simply assume the role of spectator. With her motherhood she communicates to him the inestimable value of fatherhood.”[3] Notice here the inherent connection in John Paul II’s words between respecting the woman as a person, and respecting her capacity for motherhood. This truth is precisely the inverse of the lie propagated by our sexual expressionist culture. And this truth is emphasized by John Paul II throughout his pontificate. In Mulieris Dignitatem, for instance, he writes: “It is . . . necessary that the man be fully aware that in their shared parenthood he owes a special debt to the woman. No program of ‘equal rights’ between women and men is valid unless it takes this fully into account” (§18). In that same document he laments that all too often—as with the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel—the price of sexual irresponsibility is one which the woman “alone pays and she pays all alone! How often,” he goes on to say, “is she abandoned with her pregnancy” and left on her own to care for the child, or pressured by the man to ‘get rid of’ the child and then left to suffer psychologically as a result” (§17). The solution, as John Paul II explains while commenting on Genesis in Mulieris Dignitatem, is to order our sexuality “to the mutual relationship of man and woman in marriage,” the only situation in which “the woman’s ‘sincere gift of self’ is responded to and matched by a corresponding ‘gift’ on the part of the husband,” and in which “both of them, and in particular the woman, ‘discover themselves’ as a true ‘unity of the two’ according to the dignity of the person.”

This alternative approach to sexuality goes hand in hand with an alternative approach to fertility, one which recognizes the inherent connection between sex and procreation, and which calls for regulation of fertility or healing of infertility in ways that fully respect the bodies of women and children precisely by respecting that inherent connection. There are fertility-awareness-based methods like NAPRO (natural procreative technologies)—or, more broadly, the field of restorative reproductive medicine—that can help couples either avoid or achieve pregnancy by understanding and working with the woman’s body rather than manipulating it. Such approaches are gaining popularity even among those who disagree with the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality, simply because they make it possible to regulate one’s fertility without shutting down one’s menstrual cycle or taking health-disrupting hormones; instead, one can avoid pregnancy by tracking one’s cycle, noting the presence of certain biomarkers that indicate the approach of ovulation, and avoiding sexual activity within one’s fertile window. Although this is not without challenges and requires discipline from both spouses, tracking one’s cycle in this way, paired with other minor tests (such as bloodwork to determine hormone levels throughout the cycle or ultrasounds to monitor follicular development), also provides crucial information to help identify the underlying causes of infertility in couples struggling to conceive or to sustain a pregnancy. Once these underlying causes are identified, most of them can be remedied.

This approach is at least as effective as IVF in enabling most couples to have a child. But unlike IVF, restorative reproductive medicine heals the underlying causes of infertility, enabling couples to conceive naturally, and it respects the woman’s body—actually promoting the woman’s overall health—rather than manipulating the body and risking health to achieve a desired outcome. This general method of paying attention to the woman’s cycle as a crucial indicator of overall health—rather than responding to women’s health complaints by using the pill to mask problems while sometimes actually creating or exacerbating them in the long run—is also starting to catch on outside the Catholic world at least among more holistic medical practitioners, with books that speak of a woman’s cycle as a “monthly report card” on her overall health,[4] or as a “fifth vital sign.” Yet unfortunately standard medical training is woefully inadequate in this regard, because the standard model views women’s fertility more as a quasi-disease to be manipulated and controlled, rather than as an important aspect of women’s health to be understood and respected.

Conclusion

In sum, the widespread use of hormonal birth control with abortion as a back-up in order to support the “right” to consequence-free sex, and the manipulation of women’s bodies and commodification of children through reproductive technologies in order to be able to have children on demand, are both causes and fruits of the problematic cultural presumption that respect for women is inherently in conflict with respect for preborn human life.

This cultural presumption is in stark contrast to what we might call a vocational vision of sexuality and of human life more broadly, a vision in which we are called to recognize that, although we should make reasonable efforts to plan our lives (including our childbearing) responsibly, we need to do so not with a view toward being absolute masters of our lives, but rather with a desire to be responsive and attentive to the unique calling that God has for each us. And such responsiveness necessarily includes respecting the moral law that God has made known to us through both reason and revelation—a law that protects the profound and intrinsic dignity of every human person understood as a unity of body and soul, and that guides us toward genuine fulfillment. This vocational vision, in line with natural law, Judeo-Christian revelation, and the teachings of John Paul II, calls us to respect our bodies and their procreative capacities, rather than treating them as sexual objects or reproductive machines. And it calls us to recognize that children are gifts to whom no one has a right, but rather who deserve our unconditional love and care, even when their arrival is unplanned. Ultimately it is this vocational approach to life that is the key to respect for the dignity of both women and children, and to a cultural vision that recognizes the inextricable connection between the protection of nascent human life, and the true flourishing of women, men, and society as a whole.

When St. Thomas Aquinas set out to prove God’s existence in his Summa Theologiae, he articulated two objections. The first was the problem of evil: How can there be an infinitely good God if there is evil in the world? He answers it by positing the principle of o felix culpa, O Happy Fault, demonstrated by salvation history; though God is all powerful, he permits evil in order to draw out of it a still greater good.

The second objection Thomas considers is the apparent completeness of nature: What need is there to posit God when the impersonal causes of science and the personal causes of human nature are able to explain everything there is to explain about the world? He answers this objection with the five proofs themselves, which demonstrate that the world and its secondary causes is not self-sufficient and self-explanatory but stands in need of God’s primary causality.

Were Thomas to pen his five ways today, he would no doubt add a third objection to God’s existence, that of the scandal of God’s hiddenness. If God is not evil but loving and God is not a limited natural cause but an all-powerful one, why does he not make himself readily known to all those who sincerely seek him? Yet there are today and in history at least some instances of sincere seekers who fail to find God, despite their best efforts. Is God not all loving? Is God not all powerful? Does he not wish to be known? Or is the reasonable conclusion that there is no such God?

In what follows, I will sketch the details of a reply to this new objection and in doing so introduce the principal themes of my new book, Divine Hiddenness: God the Creator and Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

The Modern Genesis of the Problem

In the Pensées, Blaise Pascal calls attention to God’s scriptural name, Deus Absconditus, the hidden God, and blames us, the seekers, and our occluded hearts, for our lack of finding. On this analysis, there is always some hidden resistance on the part of every seeker who fails to find God. (However true Pascal’s thesis of hidden resistance to the hidden God may be, it is not particularly satisfying to explain one hiddenness in terms of another.)

Friedrich Nietzsche, picking up the thread from Pascal, underscores the enigmatic character of the available divine signs. Even before proclaiming the death of God, he points to God’s enigmatic hiddenness, likening God’s efforts to make himself known to “a deaf-and-dumb man making all kinds of ambiguous signs when the most fearful danger is about to fall on his child or his dog.”[1] It is hard to imagine a more pointed version of the phenomenon of divine hiddenness that this single sentence from Nietzsche.

The person who has done more than Pascal or Nietzsche to make this third objection to God’s existence known is the contemporary philosopher, J.L. Schellenberg. He reasonably grants that it is no objection to God’s existence if some people do not find God, provided those who fail to find God are halfheartedly seeking or are otherwise puffed up with pride (or in his terminology, “resistant”). It seems compatible with God’s being loving that he does not accept every advance. Rather, Schellenberg zeroes in on those who sincerely seek and yet do not find God, those he calls “non-resistant.”

Schellenberg reasons that if God were all loving, God would ensure that he was found by those who with a sincere heart and sincere intention seek him, but we know that at least some people with sincere hearts and sincere intentions have not found him. Schellenberg concludes that God does not exist. No loving parent would withhold himself from his children when they called out; if God does so, he must not be God. Schellenberg’s is a powerful argument, perfectly in tune with the sympathies of the modern mind, and it has yet to be adequately answered.

A Contemporary Opportunity

While some wish to deny that God is truly hidden and instead focus on the moral failings of would be seekers, I am inclined to think, with Nietzsche and Schellenberg, that God really is hidden. But I argue that this is no defect of either the seeker or the one sought; it is rather due to the very nature of the God in question. God is naturally hidden, and we moderns, unlike our medieval predecessors, don’t know how to handle such hiddenness, making it the vexing topic that it is today.

Wittgenstein pointed out that hiddenness is correlated with manners of discovery: “The word ‘hidden’ has as many different meanings as there are methods of finding. When no method of finding has been laid down, there is no point in using the word ‘hidden.’” The hiddenness objection, unknown as such to the medieval mind, has become today a dominant concern. Why? The turn from the cosmos and its causes to consciousness, its ideas, and its models, renders God the creator of all opaque to human inquiry. We can then say that medieval thought had many methods of finding the divine and therefore many senses of divine hiddenness.

Phenomenology’s rediscovery of intentionality once again renders divine hiddenness navigable rather than intractable. In rehabilitating our experience of truth and the appreciation for the interplay of presence and absence, phenomenology gives us the means to manifest divine hiddenness as such. We are not imprisoned in our own consciousness, making guesses about what’s out there in the machinery of the world; we are together with others in the midst of things and therefore able to ask questions about the ultimate cause of the cosmos.

Supposing “God” Were the Creator

We search for God against the backdrop of the world, as though God were just like any other thing. But if God is the creator, he is the cause of the world and not part of it. Hence, to direct ourselves to this sort of God we have to suspend the natural horizon of all searching. The medieval philosophical tradition realized that such a suspension involves not only deploying the right arguments but also inducing the appropriate change of attitude, to shift from regarding the world as ultimate to regarding it as penultimate.

In Isaiah, the original proclamation of divine hiddenness is put in the mouth of a pagan who has just discovered the vanity of every idol for capturing the reality of God. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isa 45:15). In the Gospel of Mark, the centurion who witnesses the death of the Savior discovers that he was no idol. “Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (Mark 15:39). Unlike the idol that is ever present before us, a familiar sight to pagan eyes, the God of faith is hidden, and reveals himself as such precisely in his eluding that very gaze.

Whenever we seek something we naturally do so against the backdrop of the whole world. We can see this implicit assumption very clearly in the presocratic philosophers and the first scientists who went out and sought the first and ultimate principles of things; it also continues to our own day in the impressive scientific progress and research of our top biologists, psychologists, and cosmologists, who look for what is ultimate within the horizon of the whole, the cosmic whole. Thales said it was water that was ultimate and so divine; Stephen Hawking points instead to gravity governing empty fields of force. To paraphrase Bertrand Russel, the cosmos just is: explanation starts from there.

But however natural this horizon or limit or presupposed term or context might be, it’s nonetheless the case that it is not self-evident, and that it can be challenged, and that reason can appreciate the challenge and even justify it with good reasons once it has already been proposed.

What I, following Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, call the “natural theological attitude” is the approach to the divine according to which we regard God as whatever is highest and best in the whole, and this is simply the default mode of human cognition. Against this, Christianity proposes that God is not one being among other beings but rather the cause of being, the source of all being. In Christianity, the natural theological attitude is upended in a way that reason can appreciate, once it is proposed.

By default, we think of God as whatever is highest and best in the cosmos. But to think of God the creator is to think of something that would be better than whatever is highest and best in the cosmos. Therefore, a kind of Copernican shift is necessary in which the cosmos moves from its implicit status as that which is first to an explicit status as that which is second to God the creator.

The medieval tradition experimented with novel literary and linguistic forms to pull of this transformation. Augustine’s Confessions involves a curious eavesdropping structure, which Anselm and Aquinas adapt and transfigure in the Proslogion and the Summa Contra Gentiles. These books are innovative, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of their form. To think of God the creator is not to think of there being new content to the world but instead to think of the form of the world in a new way.

Ostending Such a God

Suppose I visited the University of Notre Dame for the first time. You showed me the library, the stadium, the grotto, and classroom buildings (it was a thorough tour!). At the end, I said, “You’ve shown me the library, the stadium, the grotto, the classroom buildings and so on, but where is Notre Dame itself?”

A university and a universe, as their etymology suggests, are uni-versus, turned toward one. Both are constituted out of a variety of things so as to comprise a unity. Yet both only achieve that unity by being referred beyond their individual parts. In the first case, a university is a university only to the extent to which it is constituted by an alliance of those defined by the activity of uncovering truth. The joint pursuit of truth makes a university a one rather than many. In the second case, a universe is a universe only to the extent to which it is turned toward some unifying principle. Just as the library and the grotto point to the search for ultimate truth, so each and everything that is points to an ultimate cause. We need to avail ourselves of the right category to unlock the reference.

Of course, Notre Dame’s iconic Golden Dome might be seen to be a privileged part of the university that unifies the whole internally, just as Aristotle thought of the divine as the privileged part of the cosmos, that around which all things turn, but if God is the creator, to think such would be to fall prey to what Gilbert Ryle calls a category mistake. Aquinas expresses this primacy as follows: “God is not a part of, but above, the whole universe, possessing within himself the whole perfection of the universe in a more eminent way.”[2]

Respondeo

Divine Hiddenness argues that God is hidden in virtue of being the creator, and it outlines a three-stage strategy for pointing him out.

First, because he is hidden to our experience in virtue of being the creator, God cannot be defined or described. All definition and description presuppose direct access to the terms of the definition or description. All is not lost, however, since God can be pointed out, not, to be sure, via a direct ostension that refers to something present but by what Quine calls a “deferred ostension” that points to something present in order to refer to something absent. We might refer to the person who wrote this screenplay, or the person that wrote this book. Similarly, we can point to the present things about us and refer to their ultimate cause.

So, on this analysis, the phrase, “God the creator” is a deferred ostension that refers to God as that which is the ultimate cause of these present things. A virtue of this approach is that it can use present things to refer to the hidden God in his hiddenness. Another virtue is that, unlike other appeals to a causal chain, to refer to God as creator is to fix a reference that anyone at anytime can renew for themselves. There is no worry of a semantic drift as in the standard account of reference fixing via causal chain, where one has to ensure that the reference is faithfully transmitted. Does Santa Claus still refer to Saint Nicholas? Kripke has his doubts, as do I. God the creator, however, is up for grabs right now rather than being buried in history.

Second, how can we make sense of such a deferred ostension, one that points us beyond the created whole? Divine Hiddenness takes a page from Plantinga’s classic God and Other Minds but shifts from the epistemological problem of other minds (how can I know whether my neighbor isn’t a metaphysical zombie?) to the phenomenological elucidation of other minds (how does my neighbor there appear as other and as yet similar to me here?). To make sense of the deferred ostension of God the creator is to make sense of an absent cause that is present in its effects, which parallels the attempt to make sense of an author in terms of the author’s works. A great writer writes carefully; a great writer writes on various levels to meet different kinds of readers. Creation, too, calls for the highest hermeneutic art to fathom. It’s less like a textbook and more like the work of Nietzsche, requiring careful skill in the art of reading to mine all that is there to be mined.

Third, a classic objection to ostension of any sort is that it is inherently ambiguous. If I point to a cat, do I point to its being-on-the-mat, its being a cat, felineness as such, the color black, something soft and cuddly, or what? Introducing “God the creator” as a deferred ostension, rooted in the things that are, and referring to that which is ultimate, leaves unaddressed this problem of ambiguity, even if the mundane parallel with absent authors and artists provide some light. Here the Augustinian idea of an inner criterion, a sort of second factor of authentication, helps ensure that the deferred ostension functions properly. Augustine, who in De Magistro showed himself to be an expert at minding the ambiguity of ostension, solves the problem in this case with his famous insight at the start of the Confessions: “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If I praise “God the creator” and find my heart unexpectedly leap in doing so, that is an indication that I have adequately directed my care toward God the creator, who is not only the origin of the universe but also the origin of me and my inclinations.

Alethic Theism or Aletheism

Divine Hiddenness: God the Creator and Phenomenology is an invitation to take the third objection to God’s existence seriously, and, in doing so, to work out a much more compelling and nuanced understanding of what it means, experientially, for God to be the creator. The method for finding such a God is going to have to be adjusted accordingly.

Replies to the hiddenness argument have up to the present come up short, because they have not availed themselves of the resources of the contemporary method of phenomenology, which is a method built from the ground up for coping with the interplay of hiddenness and manifestation. Moreover, attentiveness to phenomenology allows us to see that not only Aquinas but also Augustine and Anselm thematize divine hiddenness in central ways in their thinking.

Because God is the creator, divine hiddenness is real, a feature of the perennial phenomenology of the divine. But divine hiddenness is not an obstacle to affirming that God exists, as the contemporary mind imagines. Phenomenology and medieval authors surface strategies for referring to and seeking God in a productive manner, beyond the presumed ultimacy of both consciousness and the world of scientific objectivities.

The peculiar alliance of contemporary phenomenology and medieval philosophy I term “alethic theism” or “aletheism” for short, drawing from the Greek word for truth, a-letheia, which, as Heidegger ever reminded us, means un-hiddenness. God cannot be approached without countenancing how he must look just in order to be God the creator.

God is no conspicuous feature of the world to be affirmed or denied. Aletheism names the approach to God that keeps this constraint in mind and thereby undercuts the impasse between theism and atheism on this topic. If my book accomplishes nothing else, I hope it gives readers confidence that the contemporary conversation between theists and atheists is sorely in need of the mediating role of phenomenology and medieval thinking.

God is hidden. But the hiddenness can be navigated. First in virtue of a unique deferred ostension, which refers to the ultimate cause by means of pointing to the things caused, the creator through the creature. Second, by employing analogous strategies when we try to divine an author’s mind through the story he has written; to seek God is not akin to seeking another character but instead seeking the author beyond the horizon of the story. Third, by suspending the natural horizon of the world in terms of gratitude to God the creator for the existence of all, ourselves included.

Some have called for a Social Contract for AI, where signatories promise to abide by certain principles that might be able to manage the creation and usage of AI for good in the world. It has been suggested that the ethics of medicine might serve as a model for the ethics of AI (Hanna et al. 2024). Some have even suggested that something akin to an oath, not unlike that of the Hippocratic Oath, might be helpful in establishing an ethical ground for the usage of novel AI technology. In fact, several oaths or declarations have been created as a means to ensure confidence in data science and developer communities. Most recently, theologians, philosophers, users, and developers of Artificial Intelligence through the facilitation of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion gathered to create the Oxford Oath for AI Professionals. One might even imagine that by swearing allegiance to adhere to some ethical code, professionals might be able to hold themselves accountable for their AI creations.[2]

Taking inspiration from Magnifica Humanitas, I will explore the spiritual impulses that animate these calls for public displays of ethical piety. In fact, a spiritual impulse animated the traditions of medicine that resulted in the practice of oath-making, like the Oath of Hippocrates. Medicine has always been a spiritual endeavor, even if in its contemporary guise it imagines itself a merely naturalistic and technical field. The tools of AI, however, seem different than the tools of medicine. Are there spiritual longings in rapidly writing a letter for application to a job, or other of the menial tasks to which we put AI? It seems odd to think so. I shall argue that medicine—a technoscientific endeavor—has always been tied to human spiritual yearning.

By paying attention to the spiritual dimension of medicine, we can find something nourishing for our journey with AI. Human death, disease, disability, and frailty require medicine to think in a spiritual valence. Yet, the impulses to use AI seem more frivolous: a student using AI to complete an assignment, an employee using an LLM to write a memo, a scientist using AI to figure out how a protein folds; all of these uses seem far more mundane than sacred. Yet, AI tools do in fact mimic the human—human memory, reason, and agency—in ways that call us to think foundationally about ourselves. In fact, a spiritual valence has always been tied to human tool use; AI is no different in that regard.

The Crisis

The Hippocratic Oath is often imagined to have been a longstanding tradition in medicine throughout the Western world, but in fact it was not used very frequently (Ferngren 2014). In fact, it was only resurrected as a live option in various parts of Europe, usually only when there was a crisis of faith in medicine or medical doctors (Amundsen and Ferngren 1983). Many people feel threatened by AI’s powers, even if many others feel enthralled by its possibilities. Those that feel threatened have suggested that AI has the potential to marginalize or alienate us from our work, to make our work obsolete; others are concerned that AI and the rapid expansion of Data Centers might escalate the ecological crisis (Chen et al. 2025; Duvenaud 2025). Still others worry that AI might escape human control as depicted in many popular, dystopian science fiction-like movies, like The Terminator.

The optimists see all the same potentials but remain enthusiastic about AI’s usage to solve many problems. They remain confident in the human ability to master and control AI. What could be better for society than to free humans from risky or mundane work, opening the possibility that we can pursue more properly human goals? What could be better than to use AI to cure cancers, heal illnesses, overcome human frailties, and expand human cognitive capacities? The optimists imagine that when unsavory things fall out from AI, with transparency we will be in a position to tweak the system, to get the machines of society back on some “ethical” track.

Of course, both the pessimists and the optimists are wrong and right at the same time. AI will not inevitably usher in a new Ben Salem, nor is it inevitable that it will usher in a Terminator-like world. Even with humans in the loop, we must not assume that we will bring the hoped-for good effects without any detrimental effects. As in medicine, a therapy or a preventative not only ushers in the desired effects, but side-effects inevitably fall out from usage of the medication. In fact, it is best not to refer to the undesired effects as “side-effects.” After all, the consequences of the use of any medication or technology do not bifurcate into good and bad effects; to think in this way is too simplistic.

Thus, one cannot simply create social policies that seemingly set technology off on the right trajectory, assuming that all will be well. The morality of AI, then, cannot simply be a social contract, for what is at stake is much deeper.

Liminality and Birth of Medicine

Historically in the West, there have been many healing systems and they were for the most part linked to various metaphysical-moral systems. For instance, there was Pythagorean medicine—not as well-known as Apollonian medicine—which applied numeric and harmonic theorems to medical practice, including cultic practices like singing and dancing aimed at healing (Pesic 2022). Apollonian medicine found its apogee in Asclepian medicine, which often included liturgical practices around drinking substances and engaging in prayers and activities that might induce hypnotic states (Limneos et al. 2020). Cultic practices were continuous with medical practices; no hard and fast line of distinction between them existed.

There were also cultic practices associated with healing outside of the West as well. Mayan and Aztec cultures practiced ceremonial bloodletting believed to enact social goods, not just individual medical goods (Joyce et al. 1991). Ancient Egyptian medicine had practices that today we might call energy healing (Metwaly et al. 2021). Ayurvedic medicine also held to a kind of holism between body and mind and between the natural and the divine. However, it should be noted that in all these traditions, there was a thinner veil between the physical and the spiritual. The natural and the supernatural were flip sides of the same fabric (Harrison 2024).

Put differently, for many of these systems of healing, a conceptual distinction between what we might call the spiritual or supernatural and the physical or natural is already the result of early modern Western philosophical thought influencing how we in the late modern West interpret these ancient healing systems.

In fact, early modern thinkers seized upon Hippocrates because in his work, and in the later works on medicine from Galen, one can see a line that looks very much like the line between the supernatural and the natural, a distinction that is very important for Western thought since the rise of early modern philosophy.

Further, thinkers like Sydenhem and Locke pointed to Hippocrates as an ancient source of naturalism in medicine and thus placed Hippocrates on a pedestal. In fact, “father of Western medicine” is a label placed on Hippocrates in the early modern period. Oddly enough, the Hippocratic Oath itself appeals to the gods and goddesses, including Apollo (god of music, healing, foresight, and reason), Asclepius (son of Apollo and god of medicine and healing), Hygieia (goddess of heath and cleanliness), and Panacea (goddess of healing and universal remedy). Thus, the hard and fast distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural” is not quite as tidy as early modern physicians might have led us to believe.

Moreover, the Hippocratic Oath has a similar structure to other oath-making rituals from ancient mystery cults. The cultic gods and goddesses are invoked because the practices themselves brought their users closer to the gods and goddesses, thus they were dangerous. Illness itself was dangerous, and no one could master the work of gods and goddesses. Moreover, the use of the cultic practices might bring one closer to the gods and goddesses, but might also place one in a precarious position of dependence upon the often-fickle gods and goddesses.

Thus, those having been trained in the arts of medicine made an oath as part of their initiation into the mysterious knowledge of the cult. Making an oath binds one to a future way of acting and also binds one to take responsibility for what comes along. The oaths themselves call down judgement upon the oath-maker in the case that the initiand stray far from the path articulated in the oath. One binds oneself to a guild, with reverence for the master-teacher, because it was only those initiated into the mysterious knowledge of healing that could judge the activities of the initiand.

Whether it was the cult of Pythagoras, or the cult of Asclepius, and then the cult of Hippocrates, one bound oneself to the mysteries of the healing arts. The Oath of Hippocrates emerged from this milieu and has been passed down through the ages to us because disease, disorder, death—human frailty—place one in a liminal space. In fact, whenever there have been crises of trust or moral confidence in medicine, there has been a concomitant call for a new commitment to some moral core, often in the form of the Hippocratic oath (Ferngen 2014). The vulnerability of the human animal is the spiritual impetus for the practice of oath-making.

When one falls ill, one finds oneself at several mysterious liminal junctions: 1) between health and disease; 2) between community and isolation; and 3) between life and death. Those who suffer are in an asymmetric relationship between what they desire—health—and their ability to return or stay healthy.

Disability, disease, and disordered function often leave people alienated from their own bodies. Numerous phenomenological descriptions of persons suffering disease describe this uncanny form of alienation. S. Kay Toombs describes the uncanny loss of the ability to move a limb as a paradigmatic example of alienation from one’s own body (1992). Havi Carel describes the way that she loses her community when she is unable carry out the simplest of tasks (2018). Thus, disease, disability, and disordered function highlight the in-between state of illness. A person who desires to move her body but cannot due to paralysis experiences something odd—a disruption between the desire/idea/spirit to move and a body that cannot move. A person who is ill cannot fully participate in community, sometimes due to the limitations of their body and sometimes because the community ostracizes them, at times unintentionally and at other times intentionally. The spiritual feeling of belonging is disrupted. Thus, there is a kind of “in-betweenness” experience of health and disease and experience of belonging to a community and isolation. Each is a harbinger of death and loss. The suffering person finds herself in a situation suspended between the living and the dead.

It is into this space that doctors, nurses, and other health care providers step, placing them in a space outside the normal and mundane space. Practitioners of medicine step into these liminal spaces, with a kind of power that places them above those suffering. Those with power to heal must step into the breach to aid those who are powerless before their own human frailty.

In fact, the appeal to something like the Oath of Hippocrates requires the submission of those in power to the practices of the community. In binding oneself to the traditions of healing (the past), one also binds oneself to a future that the practitioner herself has only a modicum of power over. Thus, the act of professing an oath—of making the oath—is an act of acknowledging one’s place not as master of the liminal spaces, but as someone who has tools to navigate these liminal spaces with vulnerable patients.

There is a fourth liminal junction that the practitioners of medicine enact. Medical interventions are always both remedy and poison. Thus, practitioners of medicine and health care often find themselves as intermediaries in the liminal spaces—between life and death, community and isolation, and health and disease—deploying tools that become both remedies and poisons. Disease, disorder, and disability are echoes of death; and even our remedies are poisons. It is no wonder that ancient medicine committed itself to cultic practices, including the practice of oath-making.

Comparing Modern Medicine and Modern AI Technologies

There are some similarities between modern medicine and modern AI technologies. The complexity of modern medicine and its need for ethical research and practice guidelines resulted in a new form of ethics ushered into the West in the late 1970s. This new approach to ethics was called principlism. In fact, the Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence (cited above) doubles down on principles—formalized rules of thumb that should guide action. The idea behind principlism is that without commitment to a universal moral theory or to specific metaphysical moral traditions, medicine can, by appeal to four ethical principles—respect for autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence—adjudicate any ethical issue (Beauchamp and Childress 2019). These mid-level principles—midway between high-level theory and particular, low-level practical content—are in need of specific content. Filling in the content is referred to as a process of specification. Likewise, one must adjudicate between the different principles, a process referred to as balancing.

Thinkers like Raanan Gillon suggested that these four principles should be the guiding principles for all social ethics of technologically advanced countries (2003). Thinkers Luciano Floridi and Josh Cowls have suggested that Beauchamp and Childress’s four principles provide a strong foundation for the ethical guidance of ethical AI in society, adding a fifth principle of explicability (2019). By explicability, Floridi and Cowls mean something like epistemic and ethical transparency, such that AI can be evaluated openly and with an eye to modification. Still other thinkers, like Brent Mittelstadt, note that medicine is a very different sort of enterprise than is AI, and thus the principles governing medicine are not translatable across other domains (2019). Mittelstadt notes that medicine has historically derived professional norms that are highly particular to its domain of knowledge and practice (2019). It also has practical methods to specify and balance the principles relevant for particular kinds of situations (Mittelstadt 2019). There are also long established legal norms and mechanisms of professional accountability, unlike AI (Mittelstadt 2019).

Mittelstadt’s point is that the social place of AI is very different from that of medicine and thus, he suggests, a bottom-up approach is necessary because AI is typically aimed at very specific problems, the ethical dimensions of which are highly specific and particular. Attention must also be given to the social and political spaces within which AI develops. This bottom-up approach will require the private sector to acknowledge its role in the creation of ethical AI and require it to take on responsibility for the problems that inevitably will arise. The problem is, of course, one cannot see clearly into the future and taking responsibility for unforeseen problems is not something that business developers like to do.

While I find Mittelstadt to be correct, his interventions ignore a very prominent feature of AI, namely that any technology, however simple it may be, inevitably results in novel problems that fall-out from the usage of the technology itself. These unexpected consequences were often not even imagined and thus could not have been prevented. This problem of the uncontrolled fall-out of any technology is described in the very earliest writings we have about technology.

Take the Phaedrus as an example; Socrates points to the fact that the technē of writing is a pharmakon. Plato’s Phaedrus engages the novel technology of writing, which is both a memory aid and at the same time destructive of the human’s ability to memorize. Thus, as Jacques Derrida noted, a pharmakon is a tool that is both remedy—and it is desired as a remedy—and a poison—and it is undesired for this reason (1981). The point is that technology cannot be controlled completely. Once unleashed, it becomes an actor in the world, even if it has no agency of its own. It can still result in many unknown, undesired, and nefarious effects, the problems of which arrive too late to forestall them. Thus, a technology as powerful as AI creates liminal spaces: the space between the good foreseen and imagined, and the ill effects unforeseen and unbidden. And, as I noted above, oath-making binds one to an unknown and unknowable future set of commitments.

Covenant and the Spiritual Dimension of AI

Thus far I have shown that medical interventions arise from the alienation one feels in disease, disability, and disordered function, and a deep desire to return to flourishing. These liminal states—the in-betweenness one feels when faced with life-altering disease—prompt one to seek wholeness. This desire to once again flourish prompts medicine and healers to step into that marginal space with those that suffer. Medical practitioners and the technologies and tools that they create mediate between community and isolation, disease and health, and even life and death. These medical practitioners held certain beliefs about the nature and meaning of bodies, their moral duty to care for those suffering in these liminal states, and the mysterious knowledge they needed to mediate between life and death for the sake of the sufferers.

Thus, medicine has always been a discipline that sits and mediates between the sacred (set apartness) and the profane (everydayness). I have also suggested that the very use of the knowledges and tools of medical practitioners and the spiritual practices that guided the use of this knowledge and these tools is not fully mastered. Our knowledges and tools have a myriad of effects over which we have only a modicum of foreknowledge and control.

When we deploy the tools of AI, we typically are not doing so because we are trying to alleviate the existential angst that accompanies the liminal states between health and disease, in-group (health) and outgroup (disease) dynamics, and life and death. While AI devices are not always deployed into a liminal, sacred space in the way that medicine often is, there is something deeply spiritual about it.

Our tools are the linkages between our desires and the objects we imagine will sate those desires in the future. At their most basic level, our tools are relational devices. While they are sometimes mere afterthoughts, tools bind our desires to the objects of those desires. They are part of our commerce and conversation with the world around us. While our attention is mostly on the subject or the object of the subject-object relation, the tools themselves are the hyphen in the relation. Thus, they are never merely tools, and never merely means to achieve some goal. They participate in our subjectivity in that our tools sometimes shape our desires. They participate in the objectivity of the object of our desire because in the use of the tool, we gain something that is outside ourselves that may or may not sate the desires.
Tools are the means by which one reaches beyond oneself to that which one needs or wants. But the pharmacological effect—the poisonous effect that one does not hope for, or that one does not foresee—still flows from the use of the tool. It is the stuff of tragedy. Our tools are never merely neutral, nor are they merely dormant. They are active in the way that a baseball (or cricket) bat stirs in one the desire to play the game, or the way that a letter (a primitive tool of communication today) from a loved one is revisited with anticipation and joy. The tool mediates relation.

Thus, there is something altogether spiritual about tools. AI in particular mimics so much that is human. It mimics memory and it mimics anticipation; it mimics reason and it mimics our logic. It both is and is not human. Thus, AI sits in and even creates that which crosses over a liminal space. While most of our tools are part of the everydayness of our lives, AI has the potential to be the most expansive of our tools in that it is imagined that AI can intervene in every problem of human existence. It promises to sate not only every human desire for wholeness, but also every human desire to know or master the world. Moreover, something of the will of the makers of technology linger in the tools that they create. The hammer carries the memory of its creators and users in the very shape of its head and in the shape of its claw. Thus, something of the memory and will of human users linger in even our dumb devices.

AI is a memory device, as well as a processing device (even if not itself thinking), and it is a device that presents future solutions to problems. It carries the past, the present, and a possible future in its machinations. And just as writing, a memory device, both enables memory, it also disembodies memory and makes it possible for the human to forget.

Thus, we can say with both Socrates and with Derrida, that the most obvious feature of AI is that like all technologies, it is pharmakon (1981). It is remedy and it is poison. And as with all pharmakons, we should not valorize its pretension to remedy all the ails humankind, nor should we demonize it for the potential poisonous effects on society.

What I think this means is that the social contract model of thinking about AI and the deployment of principles that imagine that we can keep the guardrails up, is itself part of the valorization of the remedies that it promises. We desire the promised future so much that we think we can maintain our mastery over it, such that we can minimize the detrimental effects that inevitably fall from its use.

In the 1990s, the conversation around medicine had focused on the contract model of medicine, where the goods and services needed by suffering patients are exchanged for money (Veatch 1972). Money is imagined to be the bond, the glue of the social contract. It was imagined that market values would be able to make the partners in the contract equals. Patients who are suffering can trade money for health. (In this model, money is a kind of technology.)

William F. May stepped into this space with his book, The Physician’s Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics (1983). May argued that the social contract metaphor of the doctor-patient relation is not apt to what medicine is really about, or to what medicine is actually doing. May returned to thinking about medicine in more covenantal language—where the bond between the patient and the doctor (and other health care providers) is a bond of unequals—suggesting it was more apt to the asymmetry of the relationship. Drawing on the language of covenant, May argues that the relationship between God and the Hebrew people is not a quid-pro-quo contract. It is a covenant between non-equals, where one party has more to offer the other party than can be bought. The relationship is not transactional, but gratuitous.

The same holds for the relational dimension of patient and physician. It is a relationship of unequals. The physician has a kind of power that exceeds the patient’s capacity to enact, and in extending the tools of her trade to those who sit in liminal spaces—those that desire to once again be whole—the relationship is asymmetrical. But even the power of the physician’s tools is not one of absolute control or mastery over the patient’s illness or life, or even one of absolute power over her tools. For all technologies are pharmakons. They are both remedies and poisons, at one and the same time. At best what medicine has to offer is a gift, but it is a gift that can turn dark very quickly.

The tool of AI is no different. We ought to think of it in spiritual terms for several reasons. First, the all-too-human creators of these powerful tools only have a modicum of control over them. AI devices are powerful in satisfying many of our desires, but when ordered to desires for power and mastery, they can enact poisons in society, even while promising every possible remedy. The power to fulfill human desires means that it has a spiritual dimension. Second, while we imagine that we can keep the poisonous outcomes at bay, we also know that even the remedy can become poisonous, just as a cancer medication can cure the cancer, but leave the patient diminished. AI unleashes more effects than we can forecast, let alone control. More will fall from it than we imagine, even if some of what falls from it will be good and desired. Third, because AI devices mimic so much that is human (memory, reasoning, anticipation), we sometimes imagine that these devices can solve every problem that will arise. But AI, like medicine, elides its limitations. We remain somewhat ignorant in relation to it.

It is for these reasons that we must think of AI in spiritual terms, and all things spiritual remain somewhat ineffable to us. In the medicine of ancient mystery cults, there was a clear acknowledgement of the dangers that lurk both in the human condition and in our attempts to intervene on the human condition. It is not clear to me that in our contemporary world there is any real acknowledgement culturally (and cultically) that we are in need of humility and grace as we move through our world. Our public liturgies today are mostly celebrations of the power and mastery that we have over the world, and not the liturgies that call us to wait on the power, to pause before it, to marvel at the fact of our lack of control (Grimes 1982; Grimes 2013).[3]

We sit in an asymmetrical relationship between the whole of reality and the small amount of knowledge that we have about that reality. Our sciences and technologies carry traces of our beliefs about ourselves and our world in their structures and functions. We believe wrongly that the power of thought is adequate to the totality of all that there is in the world, and that it is adequate to master all that there is (Adorno 1931).[4] Our hubris is on full display perhaps most with AI mimicry of human memory, understanding, and willing.

The activity of oath-making in the ancient world was a public liturgy that enacts a humility before the actions are ever taken by the partitioner of the arts of healing. It bound the practitioner more tightly to the community; the practitioner vowed to take responsibility for a future over which there is no absolute dominion. It seems to me that the hubris sometimes entangled with our best intentions could stand to pause before the mystery and the frailty of our own being, the being of the whole, and that which exceeds our capacity to master. The Hippocratic Oath then is not about principles; nor is it just something to be affirmed as if affirming a social contract. It is more like a covenant. That is to say, the practices of oath-making were the public acts that pause before we even begin to act. It is an act of bowing the head, before lifting up the eyes to intervene. I am not sure that such public practices are enacted into today’s technocultures; but a public bowing of the head seems apropos.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. 1931. “The Actuality of Philosophy” Telos 1977: 120-133.

AI World Society. 2020. “Social Contract for the AI Age.” Accessed July 9, 2025. https://aiws.net/social-contract-for-the-ai-age/.

Amundsen, Darrell W., and Gary B. Ferngren, 1983. "Evolution of the Physician-Patient Relationship, Antiquity through the Renaissance," The Clinical Encounter: The Moral Fabric of the Patient-Physician Relationship, ed. Earl Shelp (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company), 26–29.

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2019. Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8^th edition. Oxford University Press.

Burgess, K. 2026. “Could a Hippocratic oath for AI workers help rein in the robots?” The Times, accessed August 17, 2026. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/ai-hippocratic-oath-university-oxford-368j2ndf2.

Carel. Havi. 2018. Illness: The Cry of the Flesh, 3^rd ed. Routlege. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315197999.

Chen, Qiong, Jinghui Wang, and Jialun Lin. 2025. “Generative AI Exacerbates the Climate Crisis.” Science 387(6734): 587. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt5536.

Derrida, Jacques, trans. 1981. Plato’s Pharmacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Duvenaud, David. 2025. “Better at Everything: How AI Could Make Human Beings Irrelevant.” The Guardian, last modified May 4, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/04/the-big-idea-can-we-stop-ai-making-humans-obsolete.

Ferngren, Gary. 2009. Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Floridi, Luciano, and Josh Cowls. 2019. “A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society.” Harvard Data Science Review, Issue 1.1. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.8cd550d1.

Gillon, R. 2003. “Ethics needs principles – Four can encompass the rest – And respect for autonomy should ‘be first among equals.’” Journal of Medical Ethics, 29(5): 307-12. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.5.307.

Grines, Ronald L. 1982. Beginnings of Ritual Studies. Lanham, Marlyand: University Press of America.

Grines, Ronald. 2013. The Craft of Ritual Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hanna, Matthew G., Liron Pantanowitz, Brian Jackson, Octavia Palmer, Shyam Visweswaran, Joshua Pantanowitz, Mustafa Deebajah, and Hooman H. Rashidi. 2024. Ethical and Bias Considerations in Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning. Modern Pathology 38(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.modpat.2024.100686.

Harrison, Peter. 2024. Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009477215.

Joyce, Rosemary A., Richard Edging, Karl Lorenz, and Susan D. Gillespie. 1991. “Olmec Bloodletting: An Iconographic Study.” In Sixth Palenque Roundtable, ed. V. M. Fields, 1-12. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Limneos, Pantelis, Andreas Kostroglou, Spyridon Sioutis, Konstantinos Markatos, Theodosis Saranteas, and Andreas F. Mavrogenis. 2020. “The Asclepian art of medicine and surgery.” International Orthopaedics (SICOT) 44: 2177–2183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-020-04640-8.

May, William F. 1983. The Physician’s Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics. Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press.

Metwaly, Ahmed M., Mohammed M. Ghoneim, Ibrahim H. Eissa, Islam A. Elsehemy, Ahmad E. Mostafa, Mostafa M. Hegazy, Wael M. Afifi, and Deqiang Dou. 2021. “Traditional ancient Egyptian medicine: A review.” Saudi J Biol Sci 28(10):5823-5832. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sjbs.2021.06.044

Mittelstadt, Brent. 2019. “Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI.” Nature Machine Intelligence 1: 501-7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0114-4.

Pesic, Peter. 2022. Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.15-28.

Pope Leo XIV. Magnifica Humanitas. Encyclical Letter. May 15, 2026.

Suskind. Dana. 2025. “AI Engineers Need Their Own Hippocratic Oath. Here’s What It Should Say.” TIME. https://time.com/7312350/ai-engineers-need-hippocratic-oath/.

Toombs, S. Kay. 1992. The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient. Springer Dordecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2630-4.

Veatch, R. M. 1972. “Models for ethical medicine in a revolutionary age. What physician-patient roles foster the most ethical relationship?” Hastings Center Report 2(3):5-7. https://doi.org/10.2307/3560825.

Augustine argues that some causes of sadness, a frequent response to grief, may be inappropriate for a griever who believes in the hope of the resurrection. This evolves away from his early beliefs, which were informed by Manichaeism (a heresy that promoted the view that the spiritual world was good and locked in a battle with the physical world, which was evil). Augustine left Manichaeism and wrote extensively on the relationship between the soul (spiritual) and the body (physical) as parts of one human person, which will be reunited at the resurrection of the dead.

His hope for this reunification leads him to conclude that some sadnesses may be an inappropriate response. Augustine’s grief journey through the losses of his friend, mother, and son leads us to consider how that belief ought to shape experiences of sadness.

Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Friend

Before Augustine’s conversion, a dear friend of his falls ill and is baptized, for which Augustine mocks him. The friend responds harshly, “[he] warned me that if I wished to be his friend I had better stop saying such things to him” (IV.8). Augustine plans to try to talk to him again a few days later about this reaction, but the friend worsens and dies while Augustine is gone. Some of the characteristics of Augustine’s grief for his friend include:

• Restlessness: “Within me I was carrying a tattered, bleeding soul that did not want me to carry it, yet I could find no place to lay it down” (IV.12).
• Overwhelming: “Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death. My native land was a torment to me and my father’s house unbelievable misery. Everything I had shared with my friend turned into hideous anguish without him” (IV.9).
• A loss of interest in hobbies or passions: “My eyes sought him everywhere, but he was missing; I hated all things because they held him not, and could no more say to me, ‘Look, here he comes!’ as they had been wont to do in his lifetime when he had been away” (ibid.).
• Identity Confusion: “I had become a great enigma to myself, and I questioned my soul, demanding why it was sorrowful and why it so disquieted me, but it had no answer” (ibid.).
• Personal Belief Confusion: “If I bade [my soul], ‘Trust in God,’ it rightly disobeyed me, for the man it had held so dear and lost was more real and more lovable than the fantasy in which it was bidden to trust” (ibid.).
• Disbelief over the world continuing: “I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I had loved as though he would never die” (IV.11).

Overall, Augustine’s response to his friend’s death is a grief of intense hopelessness and fear marked by instability.

In grief, what Augustine had come to expect is no longer sure to him. What he knows about himself (such as what he is passionate about, or why he feels the way he feels) has become unclear; what he knows about his community (where his friend is, and how he feels about reminders of his friend) has shifted; what he wonders about God (whether God is real or not) is emphasized; and what he fears about eternity (that it will not involve the reunification of body and soul) feels evidenced by the intensity of his emotional reaction.

What Augustine knows with certainty is that this death has impacted him severely. He speaks of how “as the dying lose their life, life becomes no better than death for those who live on” (IV.4). He not only loses his zeal for life; he also grows in fear of his own death (IV.11). Augustine retrospectively frames this reaction as due to his lack of hope in resurrection: “I was miserable, and miserable too is everyone whose mind is chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart by their loss” (IV.11). In reminiscing later, he refers to the “uncleanness of such affections” (ibid.). In other words, he attributes the severity of his emotional reaction to his belief at the time that death truly was the end, either for his friend’s body or for his friend entirely. His first sadness is for the death of his friend; his second sadness is for his belief that this death is a permanent end.

Given that Augustine had no hope of resurrection and experienced grief so intensely, one might well wonder how he coped with the potentially permanent loss of so dear a friend. He outlines three coping mechanisms that played an important role in this grief.

Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Like many people, Augustine found that crying helped him process his grief: “Weeping alone brought me solace, and took my friend’s place as the only comfort of my soul” (IV.9). He writes extensively about why he wept, wondering if his tears were comforting because of his hope God would hear him, but he names that more as prayer than as grief (IV.10). He also notes that the tears were not a plea for his friend’s immediate resurrection in this world (ibid.). Instead, he asks whether humans enjoy or feel a need to weep to “match the weariness we feel over what we once enjoyed” (IV.10). In contemporary grief terms, Augustine views his tears for his friend not as bargaining or as spiritual communication but as emotional release, and he finds solace in them.

Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine also benefits from social support after the death of his friend: “But what revived and refreshed me especially was the consolations of other friends” (IV.13). These consolations included doing the typical activities he and his friends had done before, even those activities that were not particularly godly—such as joking around and “trifling together” (ibid.). He explains that doing these activities with these friends, “emanating from the hearts of those who loved and were beloved in return . . . were so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of many to make but one” (ibid.). We see mirrored here a similar intensity in his desire for intimacy with his surviving friends as he had experienced with his friend who died. However, at this point he believes such intimacy can only exist in this life.

Coping Mechanism #3: Time. Augustine writes that, “my hurt has been assuaged with time” (IV.10), which he says “disseminated in my mind other ideas and other remembrances, and little by little patched me up again with the former kind of delights, unto which that sorrow of mine yielded” (IV.13). In contemporary grief terms, time gave Augustine opportunities to reintegrate his own identity and practice restoration-oriented coping.

Overall, through the death of his friend, Augustine realizes his despair of resurrection and experiences great uncertainty and intensity in his grief. He copes with crying, social support, and time, but he does not have hope for his friend and has developed a greater fear of death himself.

Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Mother

The second major death that shapes Augustine’s grief story is that of his mother, St. Monica, who dies of illness in old age. Augustine had converted shortly before she died, which was something she had long hoped and prayed for. Augustine’s grief response to her death demonstrates a shift in his thinking on the reunification of body and soul and in how he practices his grief in an embodied way as a result.

Some of the characteristics of Augustine’s grief for his mother include:

• Silence: “I was silent, holding back my tears” (IX.27).
• Hiddenness: “With this salve of truth I soothed the agony that was known only to you; [my friends] were unaware of it, and though they listened attentively to my words, they believed that I felt no pain” (IX. 31).
• Sharp and painful: “What was it, then, that gave me such sharp inward pain?” (IX.30).
• A physically close loss: “She and I had grown accustomed to living together; an exceedingly gentle and dear custom it was, and its sudden disruption was like a newly-inflicted wound” (ibid.).
• Heaviness: “All day long I was secretly weighed down by sorrow” (IX.32).
• Desperation: “In my mental turmoil I begged you as best I could to heal my hurt” (IX.32).

Compared to Augustine’s grief response when his friend died, these characteristics of grief are more embodied and rely on more physical metaphors. Perhaps this is because Augustine is present at Monica’s physical death while absent for the death of his friend. Monica’s death may have been a more embodied experience for him, which could thus have been reflected in his grief. And, perhaps this is because Augustine had recently converted. His shift toward honoring the bodily and incarnate rather than villainizing them may have borne out in his telling of this story.

As with the loss of his friend, the loss of Augustine’s mother provides us with more insight into how intimately he experienced his relationships. He describes her loss in vivid terms: “Being now bereft of her comfort, so great a comfort, my soul was wounded; it was as though my life was rent apart, for there had been but one life, woven out of mine and hers” (IX.30). Once again, Augustine stresses his intimacy and the importance of relationship in his life, seeing separation in these intimate relationships as the result of death.

But, Augustine grapples strongly with other concepts in his thinking which have changed since the death of his friend. While we still see a sense of the Manichean emphasis on the soul as the good counterpart to the less-than-good body (“that religious and godly soul was set free from her body” (IX.28), we also see Augustine enter into deep questioning regarding how he lives out his beliefs about eternity in his grieving practices, and how his grieving practices reflect or do not reflect his beliefs about eternity.

Contrary to his thinking during the death of his friend, Augustine holds hope of the resurrection after the death of his mother. He and those around him even change their typical grieving practices in order to better align with this hope: “We judged it unfitting to mark this death by plaintive protests and laments, since these are customarily employed to mourn the misery of the dying, or death as complete extinction. But she neither died in misery nor died altogether. The evidence of her virtues and her sincere faith gave us good reason to hold this as certain” (IX.29). However, despite this decision about grieving practices, Augustine still struggles with whether his emotional reaction to his mother’s death belies a hypocrisy in his own thinking about eternity. He explains just a few paragraphs later,

I chided myself with weakness for feeling as I did, and dammed up the flood of grief, so that for a little space it receded from me; but then a fresh wave swept over me, and though it was not enough to bring on an outburst of tears or even a change of expression, I knew myself what I was suppressing in my heart. And since I was gravely displeased to find how powerfully I could be affected by these human experiences, which in the due order of things and as a consequence of our natural condition are bound to occur, the woe I felt over my woe was yet another woe, and I was distressed by this double sadness (IX.31).

In other words, Augustine’s sadness over his mother’s death prompts a second sadness over how sad he is, because he worries that his first sadness means he does not truly believe in the hope of the resurrection.

Augustine’s recognition and theorization of his double sadness complicates some of his coping mechanisms while simultaneously providing a new opportunity.

Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Augustine identifies crying as closely connected to his double sadness, but he also again finds comfort in his tears—just as he had with his friend’s death. He does, however, carefully caveat what causes for tears he thinks are acceptable.

Upon Monica’s death, Augustine says, “the tears welled up, but in response to a ferocious command from my mind my eyes held the fount in check until it dried up, though the struggle was intensely painful for me” (IX.29). He suppresses his immediate response of sadness, presumably because he does not know if it comes from a justifiable cause, he believes it is unjustifiable, or he does not wish to give the impression to others that he does not believe in the resurrection of the dead.

Augustine’s prohibition of public crying extends beyond himself. When Monica dies, Augustine’s son Adeodatus bursts out in tears. Augustine recounts, “he was restrained by all of us and grew quiet. By this means something boyish in myself, which was sliding toward tears, was also restrained by the man’s voice of my heart, and it too grew quiet” (IX.29). This phrase may strike modern readers, especially those accustomed to a Western Anglo-Saxton Protestant view of grief, as harsh. It is key to remember that whichever reason holds for Augustine’s concern of public tears (whether he is unsure if they are justified, he believes they are not justified, or he does not wish to lead others to doubt his belief in the resurrection), the same holds true for his son. In this grief-stricken moment, Augustine is trying to parent Adeodatus well by guiding toward what he believes to be the true belief through adjusting his bodily actions and grief practices. At the same time, he relates to the response Adeodatus has and has to parent himself toward hope, too.

Public and private weeping differ, though. Soon after withholding his tears publicly and reprimanding his son for failing to do so, Augustine weeps privately. He attributes this to his mother’s piety:

Little by little I recovered my earlier thoughts about your handmaid, remembering how devout had been her attitude toward you, and how full of holy kindness, how willing to make allowances, she had been in our regard; and now that I was suddenly bereft of this I found comfort in weeping before you about her and for her, about myself and for myself (IX.33).

This weeping brings him solace, much as his weeping did after the loss of his friend.

Augustine recognizes that his weeping, though effective as comfort, is considered socially unacceptable, noting that he cried freely because only the Lord’s ears heard him and no one else could “judge my weeping by the norms of his own pride” (IX.33). But, in the next breath, he becomes almost defensive in his analysis of his tears over his mother’s goodness: “Let anyone read it who will, and judge it as he will, and if he finds it sinful that I wept over my mother for a brief part of a single hour—the mother who for a little space was to my sight dead, and who had wept long years for me that in your sight I might live—then let such a reader not mock, but rather, if his charity is wide enough, himself weep for my sins to you” (ibid.). The key differentiation here is between Augustine’s potential pride (that is, not wanting to be seen acting in a socially unacceptable way) and potential sinfulness (that is, indicating through his tears a lack of hope in the resurrection). Augustine is arguing that some tears, though socially unacceptable, can be not sinful; other tears may be sinful, but he does not believe his sobbing over the loss of his mother’s piety qualifies as such.

Augustine later clarifies that he thinks he may have been “guilty of some carnal affection” in weeping for his mother, but that he also weeps because she may have sinned and there is a possibility that her eternity may not be spent in heaven (IX.34). He ends this passage with a reminder of God’s mercy, pointing once again to his growing hope of the resurrection (ibid.).

Overall, crying as a coping mechanism becomes much more fraught for Augustine after his conversion because of its implications as a bodily practice that potentially reflects (or even publicly promotes) certain theological beliefs. His double sadness complicates this grief practice that brought him solace and indeed brings him comfort again, as he navigates which causes for tears he finds acceptable and which reflect a lack of hope.

Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine has conversations with friends “who felt I should not be left alone” and listen to him attentively (IX.31), but he hides his tears from them for the reasons we have outlined. He does, however, find some solace in thinking about his mother and the responses she had when he performed acts of service for her (IX.30). In contemporary grief terms, he is receiving continuing social support from reflecting on his relationship with Monica.

Coping Mechanism #3: Time. As after the death of his friend, Augustine finds that time helps him process his grief over the death of his mother. But, now, he ties the passage of time specifically into his ability to remember her piety rather than simply to engage in activities with other friends: “Little by little I recovered my earlier thoughts about your handmaid, remembering how devout had been her attitude toward you” (IX.33). In contemporary grief work terms, he is using time for loss-oriented coping purposes rather than restoration-oriented coping purposes.

Coping Mechanism #4: Sleep. Augustine notes that after his mother died, he tried to take a bath (which did not change his affect; see sidebar) and then slept “and on awakening felt a good deal better” (IX.32).

Coping Mechanism #5: Hope. Augustine returns repeatedly to hope of the resurrection as a way to process his grief from his mother’s death, writing to God, “we trustingly hope for a place in your house” (IX.34). He also prays for his mother in an act of hope and asks all of us, reading his confessions, to do the same (IX.37).

Overall, after Augustine’s conversion, he takes hope in the resurrection of the dead. But, his old beliefs about bodies and souls, along with his former coping mechanisms, give him pause, as he contemplates his double sadness.

Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Son

Augustine’s son, Adeodatus, died around the age of sixteen. Augustine does not speak at length of his death in The Confessions. Indeed, only one full sentence is dedicated to the event of Adeodatus dying (for context, in the previous section, Augustine actually spends more words describing the characteristics of his reaction to a severe toothache than he does here on the death of his son). But, both the fact that the passage is included at all, and the fact that the passage is presented in the story of Augustine’s own baptism, provides powerful insight on his conversion.

This section begins with the news of Augustine’s coming baptism alongside Adeodatus, after which Augustine speaks highly of Adeodatus for his God-given gifts, insisting that the gifts did not come from Augustine. Addressing God, Augustine praises, “It was you, and you alone, who had inspired us to instruct him in your truth as he grew up, and so it is your own gifts that I acknowledge to you. . . . The brilliance he evinced filled me with awe, for who else but you could be the artificer of such prodigies?” (IX.14).

Augustine continues, “Very soon you took him away from this life on earth, but I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (ibid.).

While Augustine had demonstrated varied characteristics of grief in response to other losses, he describes his grief over Adeodatus’s death as more uniform. This grief is:

• Imbued with gratitude: “Very fair had you fashioned him . . . surpassed many educated men of weighty learning” (ibid.).
• Peaceful and confident: “I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (ibid.).

In his writing about his grief over the deaths of his friend and his mother—in both of which his grief has many characteristics he describes in detail—Augustine notes much less variety in his reaction to this grief, identifying only a very tranquil response written about through a lens of gratitude. Further, this instance of grief does not seem to attend separately to mind and body, as his descriptions of grief had in the past. This contrast is particularly stark in comparing his description of his grief over his mother’s death, which is very embodied, to this short passage about Adeodatus’s death.

The framing of this passage sets the stage for Augustine’s main coping mechanism: hope. By including Adeodatus’s death in the midst of the story of their baptism, Augustine contextualizes his grief, and his primary coping mechanism of hope, around his surety of Adeodatus’s salvation.

Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Augustine addresses crying in the sentences after he notes the death of Adeodatus, but the tears are not related to his son’s death. Rather, he describes his crying as caused by the beauty of God’s salvation:

And so we were baptized, and all our dread about our earlier lives dropped away from us. During the days that followed I could not get enough of the wonderful sweetness that filled me as I meditated upon your deep design for the salvation of the human race. How copiously I wept at your hymns and canticles, how intensely was I moved by the lovely harmonies of your singing Church! Those voices flooded my ears, and the truth was distilled into my heart until it overflowed in loving devotion; my tears ran down, and I was the better for them (IX.14).

Rather than naming crying as a source of relief in grief, as he had done previously, Augustine names tears as a piece of his hope of salvation even outside the context of grief. However, his description of this reaction here, immediately after addressing his son’s death, highlights how his hope allows his grief over Adeodatus to take the form it does. Crying here is also not simply a communication of his weariness or some lack of trust in salvation. Rather, the act itself, situated within hope, betters him.

Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine emphasizes in his praise of God’s design for salvation the importance of the voices of the singing Church in orienting him toward the source of hope. It is not on his own, as an isolated island, that his meditations bear fruit. Rather, his Church community provides him the opportunity and orientation to reflect further on hope.

Coping Mechanisms #3 and 4: Time and Sleep. Although the passage of time and getting sleep are both compulsory (and indeed often foster greater senses of hope), Augustine does not indicate that they may have contributed to his coping after his son’s death. They seem less impactful in this case of grief than they had been in former instances.

Coping Mechanism #5: Hope Itself. Through his emphasis on lack of fear because of his son’s baptism, Augustine demonstrates hope as his primary coping mechanism after his son’s death. At this point in his life, Augustine has internalized Christian teaching on salvation. Because Adeodatus dies soon after he and Augustine are both baptized, which opens a known path for their salvation, Augustine has no fear for Adeodatus’s salvation. This is both his main coping mechanism and the defining characteristic of his grief. In contemporary grief terminology, Augustine demonstrates here a sense of reorganization or reconciliation to the reality of his son’s death and eternal life.

By the time Adeodatus dies, Augustine has found surety. While his grief journey after the death of his friend started with a trademark of uncertainty, now he has confidence. His fear has been replaced by peace. We see in his grief response to the death of his mother how the hope of the resurrection began to change him; by the time Adeodatus dies, this change is complete. His primary coping mechanism is a sure hope. Body and soul will be reunited one day for all eternity.

Augustine’s son, Adeodatus, died quickly around the age of sixteen. Augustine does not speak at length of his death in The Confessions, but what he does say provides powerful insight on Augustine’s hope.

Adeodatus dies soon after he and Augustine are both baptized (which opens a known path for their salvation). Augustine writes, “I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (IX.14). There are few other details about Adeodatus’s death or Augustine’s grief response. The primary characteristics of this grief response are that it is peaceful and confident.

By the death of Adeodatus, Augustine has found surety. While his grief journey after the death of his friend started with a trademark of uncertainty, now he has confidence. His fear has been replaced with simple cherished memories. We see in his grief response to the death of his mother how the hope of the resurrection began to change him; by the time Adeodatus dies, this change is complete. His primary and sole-mentioned coping mechanism is a sure hope. Body and soul will be reunited one day for all eternity.

Overall, in his response to Adeodatus’s death, Augustine believes the realities he had grappled with during the death of his mother, as we see in his confidence in Adeodatus’s salvation. He does not experience double sadness but rather only comfort from the Lord in the form of hope for the resurrection.

Conclusion

Augustine describes to us how his relationship with the idea of death changes over time and what that means for his grief responses. After experiencing a very intense sadness over his friend with little hope, he converts and then experiences a similarly intense sadness over his mother. But his growing hope makes him reflect on the role of sadness in his grief response, to the effect that he determines only some kinds of sadness are appropriate or justified. When Adeodatus dies, Augustine shares with us only his new and most important coping mechanism: his sure hope of the resurrection.

What do the changing characteristics and coping mechanisms of Augustine’s grief teach us, centuries later?

Augustine grappled with the physical and embodied nature of humanity and of grief. For those of us who live in our minds and tend to ignore our bodies, we may find in Augustine an example of what grappling with being incarnate means, for our own deaths and for how we mourn the deaths of others. And for those of us who have been taught that tears are inappropriate—whether as a response to grief or to devotion—we may find in Augustine a companion in discerning the worthiness of tears.

Augustine was deeply concerned with how others perceived him early on in his conversion. For those of us who work to be perceived by those around us as holy or well-theologized, Augustine demonstrates that increasing our sure hope can go hand in hand with paying less attention to what others think of the sincerity of our hope.

And finally, Augustine found that losses prompted reflection. When his friend died, he wondered if life was worth living. When his mother died, he questioned whether his mourning for her was congruous with his belief in God. Although some might say that including so short a note about his son’s death indicates a lack of reflection on this loss, the fact that he includes his son’s death in the story of his own baptism demonstrates for us the importance of this moment in his own conversion and the importance of baptism to his assurance of his son’s salvation. Grief demands contemplation, even when we approach deaths with sure hope.

So, what can mothers learn from Monica’s story today? Much, I think, especially those who share her anxious tendencies. Indeed, the first time I read Confessions as a mother, her character sprung off the pages in a radically new way: here, I thought, was a woman I could identify with. She was not in any sense a chill or sanguine mother. Instead, she was fiercely protective and flooded with worries for her son. Overcome with maternal instinct, there were things she had to learn the hard way. At the start of my own maternal journey, I desired to take her wisdom into my heart. I knew I would need it. Carrying it with me, what I would like to offer today is the good news I have taken from Monica’s story. In short, I have found, it illumines a path to sanctity that both enfolds and purifies our love for our children. More than this, it reminds us that we are but co-operators with a Heavenly Father who loves them far more and far better than we do. This is the best news any mother can hear, and to dwell with it is a gift.

To read the Confessions as a mother, I have found, is to strain to hear Monica’s voice within it. So, while my students often come away from book one with complaints about Augustine’s cynical view of babies, I always come away in gratitude that I have heard his mother’s voice. Indeed, when Augustine says he knows he was welcomed into life with tender mercy, it is her word which serves as proof. Other hints of Monica hover in the background. Here is where I hear them most clearly. Listen:

My mother and my nurses did not fill their own breasts; rather you gave me an infant's nourishment through them in accordance with your plan, from the riches deeply hidden in creation. You . . . inspired in those who nurtured me the will to give me what you were giving them, for their love for me was patterned on your law, and so they wanted to pass on to me the overflowing gift they received from you. It was a bounty for them, and a bounty for me from them; or, rather, not from them but only through them, for in truth all good things are from you, O God (1.6.7).

This whole passage is full of Monica’s words, received by Augustine in trust and love. Put differently, her confessions shape his. When Augustine tells us of God’s plan, hidden deep within creation, it is Monica who taught him to notice it. It is she who discovered within herself the overwhelming desire to give to her child. And, it is she who found God within in that desire. Disclosing these discoveries to her son in loving conversation, Monica revealed that dawn of the love which defines their whole story. Coming upon her as an in-breaking, this love revealed the fatherly heart of God to her in a way that deepens her bond him and with her son. The overflowing gift of God’s love, poured as it is into Monica’s heart, serves as the anchor that preserves mother and son on their stormy journey to sanctity.

Signs of this storm appear early. At the same time that Augustine highlights Monica’s deep love for him, he also points to a rift between them because of his incapacity to receive this love in trust. Indeed, Augustine the infant is fallen Adam: we all were. Surrounded by bounty and love, he is already deeply distrustful. We see this reflected both in the jealousy of the nursling who “glared with . . . fury” at a fellow babe at the breast, and in the frustrations of the child who cried, fearing his needs would not be met (1.7.11). Monica, like many mothers, probably felt despondent in such moments, exclaiming, “I am trying to help you, trust me!” The trust so often associated with childhood is not, for Augustine, unwounded.

The feelings of maternal helplessness hinted at in these passages of course only come to a head when Augustine enters adolescence. Taking a break from boarding school due to his father’s lack of funds, Augustine loiters around his hometown with nothing to do—this, at precisely the age when inactivity is liable to get him into trouble. Falling in with a group of boys who embody what he wants to be—confident, comfortable with their themselves at a highly uncomfortable age—Augustine becomes unreachable. Monica knows he has great potential. For this reason, she has looked the other way as his teachers imposed harsh punishments on him, reasoning that they might be what it takes for Augustine to learn. She has felt confirmed as his teachers reported his remarkable talent. She has imagined his future. She has hoped in it.

Now, all that seems on the line. She hates watching her son, used to the discipline of the schoolroom, roam wild about town. She hates that he panders to foolish friends. She hates who he is with them. Word has gotten back to her what they do together, what they say together. She sees it in how he is at home with her. Of course, we get all this from Augustine’s perspective. Going through puberty, “the thornbushes of [his] lust shot higher than [his] head,” so that he was drawn to friends who bragged about their sexual antics (2.1.6). He longed to imitate them. Monica, we hear, did everything she could to talk sense into him. Describing “the intense earnestness with which she cautioned [him] against” unchastity, he recalls that “she urged [him] to keep clear of fornication, and especially not to commit adultery with any man's wife.” Augustine admits that he dismissed these warnings as “mere woman's talk” which he “would have blushed to heed” (2.1.7). I cannot imagine how intolerable this must have been for Monica. She must have lain awake at night fearing he was on the brink of making choices he had no idea were actually of consequence. His need for guidance and utter unwillingness to accept this guidance must have been infuriating. is

So, Monica had a heart bursting with the desire to help Augustine get things right, and a growing sense that she was out of her depth in trying to make that happen. And so, she watched from the sidelines as he first became sexually promiscuous and then joined a cult. It was then she really panicked. Overhearing Augustine torment less educated Catholics “with finicky . . . questions,” she must have thought all this cultivation of his intellect was for naught. She must have regretted not having had him baptized. We know she prayed for someone to show him the emptiness of his so-called truth. Encountering a bishop with the rhetorical chops to do it, she cornered him: “would [he] be so kind as to talk to [Augustine] . . . to . . . disabuse [him] of [his] harmful persuasions and teach [him] good ones?” (3.12.21). The bishop refused. The youth was still “too puffed up with the novelty of [his] heresy.” He was, as yet, “unteachable.”

It was, then, a dark period. Indeed, Augustine says that during it, Monica regarded him as dead (3.11.19). I think we see where he got his flare for the dramatic. But, in all seriousness, for those of us who look at our children and wonder how the kinks will iron out, this moment of grief—and Monica’s response to it—offer a real lesson. Monica could have succumbed to her sense of powerlessness. She could have kept trying to control the situation. She could have burned the bridge. She did none of these things. She stayed close to Augustine and handed him over to God.

Now, this is not something that happens perfectly all at once. Indeed, one of the reasons that I cherish Monica’s story is that it reveals what it is for an imperfect mother to become a saint. We all know she could be a little bit smothering. We also know she had expectations for Augustine that she needed to let go of. But, what matters—and why it is such a gift for us to have Monica as a role-model—is that God offers her and her son a path to salvation—and she takes it. Because she does that, Monica’s profound maternal instinct and her deep love for Augustine are caught up in the love of God in a way that ultimately gives her back her maternal agency. God provides a home for her love, and offers her a way to channel it so that nothing of it is lost.

So, how does this happen? Well, it starts with Monica’s tears. Augustine assigns remarkable power to these tears. Explaining why God had mercy on him, he exclaims: “You, [Lord], stretched out your hand from on high and pulled my soul out of these murky depths because my mother, who was faithful to you, was weeping for me more bitterly than ever mothers wept for the bodily death of their children” (3.11.19). Like the persistent widow, Monica moves God to mercy. Unlike the judge worn down by the persistent widow, God makes space for her to move him to mercy. He moves her to move him. Celebrating that God has built Monica’s tears into the economy of salvation, Augustine writes: “Thanks to your hidden providence, O my God, your hands did not let go of my soul. Through my mother's tears, the sacrifice of her heart’s blood was being offered to you day after day, night after night, for my welfare; and you dealt with me in wondrous ways” (5.7.13). God’s paternal love and Monica’s maternal love work together.

One remarkable instance of this dynamic can be seen when Monica’s prayers miraculously save Augustine from death without her knowing. Here is the story on Augustine’s telling: having just abandoned Monica on the shores of Africa, Augustine falls gravely ill in Rome. She, for good reason, is furious at his sneaking off, but soon resumes praying for him. Though she knows nothing of his illness—a mercy I think—God allows these prayers to be the reason he has mercy on Augustine: “you heard her in that land where she was, and took pity on me where I was.” Reflecting that, had he died, he would have died in his sin, Augustine remarks: “If a blow like that had struck my mother's heart, she would never have recovered.” Going on to describe how diligent she was in making her daily offering at God’s altar, Augustine again portrays Monica’s fidelity as his lifeline:

Would you, O God of all mercy, spurn the broken, humbled heart of a chaste and temperate widow who was untiring in her acts of charity, attentive to the needs of your saints and faithful in serving them? . . . Could you . . . whose grace had made her what she was, disdain those tears and rebuff her plea for your aid, when what she tearfully begged from you . . . was the salvation of her son? (5.9.17).

God cannot but hear Monica’s prayers and enfold them into his loving plan for her son. Her fidelity is caught up into the fidelity of a merciful God.

Here, I think, Monica’s story offers us great hope. Since God is the same yesterday and today, our prayers for our children go into his safekeeping, just as Monica’s did. Through Monica, God is calling us to entrust more, to entreat more. Yet, this is not the only gift Monica’s story offers us. It also liberates us from an ersatz idea of what it means to entrust our children to God. It is tempting to imagine that if we did this properly, we would not experience anxiety. But in Monica’s case, this is simply not true. As Augustine writes, “I can find no words to express how intensely she loved me: with far more anxious solicitude did she give birth to me in the spirit than ever she had in the flesh” (5.9.16). Or, again, “She who had given me life according to the flesh was very anxious, because in her pure heart, through her faith in you and with a love still more tender, she was bringing my eternal salvation to birth” (1.11.17). This idea that as mothers, we are given the privilege of birthing our children, not only in the flesh, but also in the spirit, is remarkable, but we have to admit that birthing is an anxious process. Monica teaches us to make peace with that anxiety. More than this, she shows us that we need not pretend to be different (or indifferent) mothers to become holy. We can be passionately intense, passionately ourselves, so long as we offer all the loves in our heart to God—and let God do the work of purifying them.

For this reason, I am tempted to say that Monica’s story is God’s pledge of fidelity to all anxious mothers. While our maternal instinct, like Monica’s, will need to be purified, the ongoing activity of placing our children—and our anxiety for our children—in God’s hands is that path to purification. Dwelling with Monica’s story reveals this. She too has a set of hopes for her son that prove to be wrongheaded. We have seen how she corners a bishop, expecting him to be the one to help Augustine see the light. She also expects academic success and a good marriage to be a catalyst in his conversion. Each of these hopes is dashed. And yet, they prefigure the better things within God’s plan. Ambrose eventually comes along, Augustine’s success leads to a self-reckoning, and celibacy provides the liberation from lust that Augustine needs. Thinking about this can inspire us to be more openhanded with our wishes for our own children; Monica’s story reminds us that God’s ways are not our own.

And yet, it is not a given that the disappointment of our hopes will purify our maternal loves. It is the fact that Monica never stops taking God’s promise of fidelity seriously that allows hers to be purified. It is also what allows her to receive that first bishop’s advice to leave Augustine alone and simply pray for him—and to take from that her maternal mission: as this bishop famously tells her, “it is inconceivable that a son of tears like yours should perish” (3.12.21). Augustine tells us that Monica “often recalled” how “she had taken these words to be an oracle from heaven.” Monica, in other words, teaches us to look for the ways God is trying to strengthen us as he purifies our desires, and to receive these consolations as gift. Indeed, when we read that Monica received prophetic dreams, we need to realize that Monica has become good at opening herself up to God’s nudges; she looks for them and so is able to draw strength from them. They are what allow her to do the difficult work of accompanying Augustine along the way.

Paradoxically, this habit of looking out for divine consolation is also what allows her to get better at distinguishing her own wishes from God’s will. We see this in her attitude as she goes about arranging a marriage for Augustine. For context, Monica had long desired to see Augustine married; as a catechumen, he began to desire it himself. And so, the mature Augustine writes:

In the light of my request and her own desire she besought you daily, with powerful, heartfelt cry, to show her in a vision something of my future marriage; but you never consented. She did have some illusory, fantastic dreams, brought on by the activity of her own human spirit as she busied herself about this matter, and these she related to me, but without the confidence she usually showed when you revealed something to her: to these dreams she attached little importance. She claimed that by something akin to the sense of taste, a faculty she could not explain in words, she was able to distinguish between your revelations to her and the fantasies of her own dreaming soul (6.13.23).

Monica, then, still has desires for Augustine that she hopes are part of God’s plan. This is human. And yet, her habit of attending to the ways God speaks to her loosens her grip on them. She still passionately offers them to God, but now with a confidence in the superiority of God’s plan.

How is such a confidence forged? In Monica’s story, one moment seems especially illuminative. This is when Augustine the Manichee has been offered a job in Rome, and Monica really does not want him to go, or if he goes, she wants to come with him. Augustine does not want this. With difficulty, he writes, “I persuaded her to spend the night in a place very near our ship, a memorial chapel to Blessed Cyprian. That same night I left by stealth; she did not, but remained behind praying and weeping. And what was she begging of you, my God, with such abundant tears? Surely, that you would not allow me to sail away. But in your deep wisdom you acted in her truest interests: you listened to the real nub of her longing and took no heed of what she was asking at this particular moment, for you meant to make me into what she was asking for all the time” (5.8.14). Writing that God was both using his lusts “to put an end to them” and chastising Monica for holding onto him too tight, Augustine reads the story as the act of divine mercy she soon discovered it to be—for, by the time she braved the stormy sea to follow him, Augustine had become a Catholic catechumen. Because Monica chooses to entrust Augustine to God every time that all seems lost, she gains personal knowledge of God’s fidelity that transforms her anxiety from the root. She discovers a deeper kind of confidence: one that is not feigned but graced.

Indeed, Augustine remarks how striking it was that when she heard the news of his becoming a catechumen, “there was no wild excitement or agitation in her heartfelt joy” (6.1.1). This could not but remind him of her reaction when he, as a Manichee, had attempted to reinterpret her prophetic dream—it was not he who would stand where she was, but she who would stand where he was—even then, Monica was eerily certain of what God had disclosed to her. He describes being disturbed by her confidence. When, now that he had abandoned Manicheism, “she told [him] very tranquilly and with full confidence that in Christ she would see [him] a faithful Catholic before she departed from this life,” he was again struck (6.1.1). She was, he reflects, certain that the God, “who had promised her everything, would grant what was still lacking.” And he did. Monica’s confidence stands as a divine sign for Augustine amidst his wanderings.

All told then, Monica’s trust in God is the golden thread that leads them both to salvation. It deepens, expands, and purifies her maternal love, so that when she does receive the converted Augustine in from the garden, her first reaction is to marvel that God has the power to do more than we ask or understand. Converting her grief “into a joy far more abundant than she had desired,” God had, Monica reflects, granted “much more than she had been wont to beg of [him] in her wretched, tearful groaning” (8.12.30). Dwelling with this good news, we are invited to draw strength from Monica as from one who has gone on ahead. Entrusting our children to God alongside her, we endure the anxiety of motherhood in hope, remembering that our tears and prayers are ways of bringing our children to spiritual birth. Embracing this labor in love, we can travel the path of graced confidence to joy that is open to even the most anxious of mothers.

In his enormously rich monograph, Les conversions de s. Augustin (1950), J.-M. Le Blond observed that Augustine saw the incarnation as a révélation de méthode spirituelle. Augustine’s deepest and most significant “conversion,” he suggested, is that from Gottesmystik to Christusmystik, meaning not that the incarnate Christ somehow replaces the transcendent divine nature for Augustine as an object of contemplation, but that the sense of Christ as the path to and the form of transfiguring and participatory knowledge of the transcendent God becomes ever more pervasive, more obviously an organizing principle. In what follows, I hope to trace some of the ways in which this theme works as such an organizing principle in Augustine’s theology.

By the second decade of the fifth century—essentially by the time of the completion of the De Trinitate (Trin.) and De civitate Dei (Civ.)— it is possible to see in Augustine a notably coherent christological scheme. The definitive studies of T. van Bavel and, more recently, of H. R. Drobner have established some of the important shifts in Augustine’s christological vocabulary; Drobner, in particular, has also made plain the roots of so much of that vocabulary in the conventions of rhetorical analysis. Among the questions raised by this is why Augustine’s Christology fits so comfortably with the theology of Cyril of Alexandria in its resonant affirmations of the unity of the incarnate Word, when those in the Eastern Christian world who employed comparable methods from rhetoric ended up with a much more dualist reading of Christ’s person. I want to suggest that when we have grasped with Le Blond the logic of seeing Christ as the form of the spiritual path, with all that this involves, we may understand why the “Cyrilline” structure imposes itself.

Briefly, my argument is simply that the unifying principle of Augustine’s mature Christology is the understanding of Christ as sapientia. Wisdom, as defined in De doctrina christiana (Doctr. chr.), in Trin., and elsewhere, is the contemplation of the eternal, God’s delight in God; as such, it is what we hope to receive by grace, so that we acquire a share in that reflexive contemplative love which is God’s very life. But that divine love as bestowing itself on creation is (as may be seen from a close reading of the later books of Trin.) identical with that divine action which seeks the “justice” of another’s good or joy, and is therefore bound up with the divine identification with us in the incarnation. Sapienta is oriented to incarnation, and thus to the rhetorical paradoxes which involve the divine Word speaking not only human words, but also words of spiritual distress or apparent doubt—the constant theme of so many of the Enarrationes in Psalmos (Enarrat. Ps.). And the upshot in practical terms is, as Le Blond asserts, that “incarnation” becomes the path we must follow, la soumission de l’espirit aux symbols temporels. The embrace of our creatureliness, and resistance to all that draws us away from the recognition of the centrality of time in our learning of holiness—these are the actual consequences of the act of incarnation, making sense of both the individual path of sanctity and the Church’s corporate life and discipline.

Some Illustrative Texts

These themes are announced very straightforwardly in Confessions (Conf.) book 7, where Augustine offers an already very nuanced account of what it is to become wise with the sapientia of the divine Word, a wisdom which is not available through the speculations of the Platonists; this world’s “wisdom” is overtaken by the humility of the incarnation. While the wisdom of the world seeks truth by escape from the body, by techniques designed to free us from the distortions imposed by fleshly life, God’s wisdom takes root in us only as we accept our bodily limitation and our spiritual frailty as things we cannot cure from within. Wisdom must become milk for infants if it is to enter our minds; it must be encountered in the flesh. The incarnation both requires and makes possible the conditions of its understanding: “non enim tenebam Dominum meum Iesum humilis humilem.” Grace humbles us so that we may accept the way of humility as the way to truth; only prosternere allows us to rise to the heights of God’s wisdom. God’s love brings the eternal Word into the human world, and that same love allows us to face our creatureliness and our sin in honesty, knowing that God’s will is for our good. In so doing, we reflect God’s caritas and know God’s light, the lux supra mentem which is accessible only to love. The displacement of our desire to rise by our own strength delivers us from the idolatry of the self which impedes love. Absent this process—as in the Platonic books—and growth becomes impossible. When I know that I am presently imperfect, I know I must grow in order to feed more fully on Christ who is the Truth (cresce et manducabis); and nothing can be built except on the foundation of humility which is Christ.

Here, as in Doctr. chr., the underlying point is that the abandonment required for us to receive the true knowledge of God is not, so to speak, the “spatial” abandonment of the world of material things in order to rise to a higher realm, but the abandonment of attachment to the projects and desires of the unregenerate will. The refusal to identify God with any res in the world, the recognition of creation itself as signum, with the cross of Christ as the central proof of this, is another means of saying that conversion is the willingness to keep moving in time, putting behind those desires that look for satisfaction within time (as though desire could be brought to an end, and time thus reduced to space). Growing into knowledge of the incarnate Christ means the reconstruction of desire into hope for God, the exspectatio which Le Blond sees as the climax of the argument of the Confessions. By the incarnation, God both binds us to the temporal world as always and inescapably our starting point and dispossesses us of the illusion that there is a point within that temporal world where we can settle. Every point in the temporal order becomes a point of departure, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. The leaving behind of our limited material condition is a temporal and not a spatial matter, in that it involves the journey of growth and learning in time. The peregrinatio, which is the basic form of discipleship, is the willingness to see every present moment as the place which a desire for God obliges me to leave, yet also as the necessary prompt or stimulus to the journey of desire, not as something simply to be negated. This is Platonism still, we may well say, but given a distinctive turn by the intensification of the particular promptings of history, focused on the crucified Christ.

To imitate the humility of the incarnate Christ is to come to occupy his position vis-à-vis God, so that his humility is indeed the doorway to knowledge of the eternal. This is the force of the language about divine humilitas that we find early in the De Trinitate (and, note, not too far distant in time from the Confessions). In Trin. 4.2.4, in the course of one of Augustine’s most extended treatments of the person and work of Christ, this is spelled out very explicitly. We are unfit for the contemplation of God because of our sin. Wicked and proud as we are, we can be made capable of participating in the divine Word, being illuminated, only by means of sanguis iusti et humilitas dei. God stoops to become a righteous human being so that, as human but not sinful, he may intercede for us so that, created though we are, we may still contemplate God. God is what we are not by nature; but by the Word’s participation in humanity, we may share the Word’s divinity in being enlightened with his light (and thus, by implication, sharing his contemplative relation to the Father). In an image which Augustine goes on to develop at length, the incarnate Word “adds” to our humanity in congruentia or convenientia, concinentia or consonantia, “what the Greeks call harmonia,” an element which in its “simplicity” overcomes the discords or fractures of our “double” humanity. The merciful will of God forms a human identity in which mortal body and damnable soul are united with the single purpose of divine love so that they are made capable of seeing God and being resurrected. Of this resurrection, Christ’s own is given in sacramento et exemplo.

The incarnation here is seen as the act of divine self-offering which, so to speak, gathers up the elements of broken humanity and constitutes thereby a new humanity, integrated in virtue of the divine act which takes and holds the twofold life of human beings, body and soul, bringing them into harmony. Augustine spends a good deal of time in book 4 elaborating the mathematical appropriateness of adding a simplum to a duplum; but the theological heart of the argument is in effect an anticipation of the scholastic notion that the humanity of Christ is distinct not because of an extra element alongside the human soul and body (as if the incarnate Word were part of a threefold complex of equipollent elements) but because the soul-body compound is in this case concretely animated and individuated by a single divine agency. That is a more involved issue than can be discussed here, but, as we shall see later, it illuminates the most distinctive feature of Augustine’s deployment of rhetorical idiom in this context.

It also relates to the theme opened up a little later in Trin. book 4 and very prominent in Augustine’s preaching. In Trin. 4.9.12 Augustine reflects upon the prayer of Jesus in John 17, that the disciples will become one as the Father and the Son are one. Jesus, says Augustine, does not simply speak of a unity of nature (unum) between himself and his disciples, although the Church may say that it is unus with Christ, one subject, in the sense that there is one head of the Body and one Body. The focus is on the total unity between Son and Father, which is to be reflected among the disciples: this is to be not merely the natural unity between members of the human species but a harmonious will, a tending toward one and the same blissful heavenly end. The unum of the Father and the Son is a unity of substance and will; so for the Church the unity prayed for is dilectionis societas. This societas is attainable only in Christ, who binds us together in such a way that we are no longer divided by wanting radically different things. The common life becomes an image of the single focus of the trinitarian life upon its own intrinsic joy; as we are corporately directed toward this bliss, we share in God’s self-relatedness. Here the major themes of the closing books of De Trinitate are already sketched, but they are related very directly to the understanding of the Body of Christ as the form of our renewed life under grace.

But one of the most interesting aspects of this passage is the reference to the sense in which the Church and Christ are unus. The argument of the passage is thereby connected to the theology of Christ as Head of the Body which pervades the Enarrationes in Psalmos, where it is used precisely as a tool of rhetorical criticism. Who speaks in the Psalms? Christ as Head; and as Head, he makes his own words that would otherwise shock or puzzle, words of guilt or suffering. Just as his death (as we are told at Trin. 4.2.4) is meritoriously effective because it is voluntarily endured, not received as punishment, so the entire range of what we might call death-directed experience in humanity is voluntarily embraced by the incarnate Word. Augustine’s de agone offers a classical exposition of the aproslepton atherapeuton argument (i.e., “that which is not assumed is not healed”), and much of the Enarrationes can be read as an elaboration of this. In an utterance like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:35; Ps 22:1), we can identify the speaker not simply as a guilty and suffering human subject, but as the one who freely undertakes to make all human guilt and suffering his own. By incarnation, death, and resurrection, the Word creates a relation between himself and the human race that brings all human experience within the scope of healing and restoration. The Word animates the particular soul and body that is Jesus, and in so embracing this human nature becomes the animating principle of any and every human identity associated with him by baptismal incorporation and the gift of the Spirit. The speaker in the Psalms is the Christ who tells Saul in Acts 9:4 that he is persecuting him (the Acts text is referred to fourteen times in the Enarrat. Ps. as a hermeneutical principle). Enarrat. Ps. 88.30 adds a further dimension, connecting the Head and Body theme with the earlier one of divine humility: “[Christ’s] love did not allow the Head to separate himself from union with the Body” even in the exalted state following the Ascension. Thus there is no context in which Christ speaks simply as human or simply as God; he speaks as the one who by taking on humanity through his divine will and power has become Head of the Body, speaking uniquely as representative of humanity in virtue of his divinity. The “right” of the exalted Christ to speak for humanity rests upon the divine decision to take flesh—and not only to take the specific flesh of Jesus of Nazareth but to create by that flesh the historical Body that is the company of believers, so that their variegated and flawed human experience may be offered by the eternal Word and touched with his transforming presence.

It is possible, then, to say, as does Augustine in Enarrat. Ps. 21, that Christ speaks in our persona. The expression personam sustinere is used here, as in other places, to mean something like representing, acting in the role of someone. It is more or less the same in sense as another of Augustine’s locutions, agere personam, and both are used by him in the works of the 390s to express aspects of the incarnation. For a related locution that does not have to do with Christology, but that also suggests a deeper level of significance, we may turn to Trin. 12.12.18: Adam and Eve both deserve punishment for sin, as each personam suam portabat. The fact, though, that Adam and Eve also represent different dimensions of human subjectivity and decision making should not lead us astray into thinking that somehow different bits of our selfhood are judged independently (as Eve would have been judged even if Adam had not sinned). Each of us is una persona . . . unus homo considered as an agent, a subject of desire, thought, and projection; each of us is judged as a single agent. The persona here is the terminus of responsibility, what finally speaks for or answers for our thoughts and desires, for the way we are. Persona operates on the frontier between legal, rhetorical, and what we should call psychological reference.

But we need to be alert to the complexities of this. The Word of God may be said to speak or act in our persona in virtue of his assumption of humanity (and there are of course several issues about how that “assumption” is best characterized, to say nothing of the varied vocabulary for it). Agere hominem appears in several early works (De ordine and Div. quaest. LXXXIII) as a way of describing the Word’s action. But this does not mean that the persona of fallen humanity, the homo activated by the Word and for which he speaks, is some kind of independent subject associated with the Word of God. The Word’s ability to sustain this persona is, as we have seen, grounded in the Word’s eternal act and determination, the act that assumes or includes humanity in its life. Hence, prior to anything that can be said about the Word speaking our “person,” is the belief that the entire earthly life of the incarnate Son is a speaking or acting in the person of divine Wisdom: agere personam sapientiae dei. The core theological conviction emerging more and more strongly in the 390s and early 400s is that the incarnate Word constitutes a unitas personae in taking human nature. Trin. 4.20.30 speaks of the homo who is joined or even “mixed” with the Word so as to form such a unitas, and there are very many examples of this definition of the incarnate persona as being the Word in union with the soul and the body (which latter two normally constitute a persona of themselves).

It becomes clear that Augustine’s persona is a flexible, or, better, an analogically complex term. Its basic meaning is fairly plain: identifying a persona is identifying who is speaking, whose role is in question in a complex of interchanges, verbal and otherwise. On that basis, persona questions about Christ can be answered at several different levels. The words of straightforward human suffering or fear in the Gospels are spoken in the persona of a fully vulnerable member of the human race; the words that must be attributed to Christ as the Word speaking in Scripture, especially in the Psalms, are spoken in the persona of what we might call the human condition in general, the condition of sinful people cut off from God. But the entire phenomenon that is the Word incarnate invariably speaks for the persona of divine Wisdom, since it is the action of divine Wisdom that creates the divine-human grammatical subject we hear speaking in Christ. Agere hominem in this sense depends upon agere sapientiam, since the utterance of human grief or pain is the result of Christ’s being freely engaged, as Wisdom’s embodiment, in the world of historical suffering and struggle. Thus the persona of Wisdom is the foundational identity with which we have to do; it is present and active in the form of the concrete historical persona that is a soul and body united with the divine Word; and as that historical persona incorporates human experience beyond its own individual limits, by setting up the relation of Head and Body in the reality of the Church, the person of divine Wisdom is free to take the role of lost humanity, agere hominem in the widest sense.

To engage with Augustine’s use of persona, then, is to encounter a concept providing a fluid and many-faceted connection between exegesis, soteriology, and Christology in the stricter sense. We may say that the answer to “Who is speaking?” where Christ is concerned is always sapientia; yet this does not entail a divine speaker who can be identified alongside a human one. Sapientia is indeed and ultimately the contemplation of God by God, but it is also that which prompts and makes possible the presence of God in what is not God, in the order of creation and in the human mind. Van Bavel rightly observes that from the first, Augustine sees the incarnation as the revelation of divine reason so that our human reason may be awakened; but as his understanding of sapientia develops, rather more than reason comes to be involved. Wisdom is identical with caritas, and so it is oriented always to the other’s good. The persona of Wisdom cannot therefore be isolated from its action as caritas; to say that Christ constantly acts in Wisdom’s person is not to assert that he always speaks or acts as divine Word simpliciter, as though the humanity were both separate and insignificant. The persona is Wisdom-in-action, Wisdom engaging with what is not by nature God (cf. Trin. 4.2.4 again) so as to incorporate it into the divine life and make it capable of seeing what Wisdom sees, knowing what it knows, contemplating the absolute otherness of the creator as if it were located where eternal Wisdom is located, in the heart of the divine self-knowledge and self-love.

Hence the truth of Le Blond’s observation with which this essay began: Augustine’s Christology is about spiritual method. In the first instance, it is the “method” of God’s own life, the method of sapientia. In contemplating the divine life with joy and delight, Wisdom realizes itself as love, the radically disinterested love that seeks the fruition of others in the same joy it knows; all that Augustine wrote about creation itself and in Doctr. chr. about the character of divine and created love must be understood in the background here. The humility of identification with the created other is the fitting expression of this, and the fitting means by which created life may become capable of divine contemplation, since it involves the “inclusion” of human experience in the life of the divine Word, by incorporation into the Body of Christ. Since our prideful self-assertion is the root of our separation from God, and the multiplicity of selfish goals and private definitions of human delight is the root of our separation from each other, only our humility opens the way to belief in the saving power of Christ and to reconciliation with God and each other.

One Christ

It is possible, then, to see why the use of rhetorical categories leads Augustine to a conclusion very different from those of the Antiochenes who (as Drobner demonstrates) have what are in some ways comparable concerns. The familiar debate in the Eastern christological controversy over whether the sayings of the incarnate Word could be divided according to whether they are spoken by the Word or the human individual Jesus is circumvented by Augustine—not because he has a straightforwardly “Cyrilline” account of union kath’ hupostasin (this is not Augustine’s mental world), but because of a more carefully integrated sense of the absolute dependence of the human speech of the incarnate one upon the single act of divine Wisdom. The stress in Trin. book 4 on the simplum that is the Word’s presence and activity is significant. As we have seen, it brings to the duplum of unredeemed humanity not simply a third element to contribute to a sum total, but an integrating unity which transforms both parts of humanity. The phraseology of Trin. 4.3.6 is instructive: here Augustine speaks of how the single death and single resurrection of Christ serve to overcome the twofold death to which we are condemned. The simplum of the Word’s agency is the principle through which our natural elements are transformed, not a sort of extra subject.

Consequently, the typical Antiochene anxiety about distributing the dicta of Jesus cannot really arise. What substantiates or gives active presence to this particular duplum of soul and body is the action of the Word, without which no human word can be spoken by this individual, Jesus of Nazareth. He exists because the Word has elected to be incarnate, and thus what he says is said because of the eternal Word. The Word is therefore never “alongside” the human speaker. It is neatly put in Trin. 13.18.23: in the saints, God “reigned,” regebat, while in Christ he “acted,” gerebat—a very characteristic Augustinian word chime. The act that defines the speaker is always the act of sapientia, not a divine act engaging with the act of another subject. There is, one could say, no “drama,” no dialogue of resistance and engagement and submission, between Jesus and the Word, as between the Word and other human beings. That is reserved for the relation between the single reality of the Word incarnate and God the Father. Here the natural and eternal self-surrender of the Son is enacted in the circumstances of weak flesh, both displaying and creating the possibility of obedience to the Father in all circumstances; human pride is overturned by divine humility. The divine act of humility in the incarnation itself, as portrayed in Conf. book 7, becomes the unifying theme of the human life of Jesus. And utterances of the incarnate Word which sound inappropriate to God are thus shown to be entirely fitting to divinity since they are the product of that loving sapientia which is the wellspring of the incarnation.

So Augustine avoids the pitfalls of Antiochene exegesis on this question by refusing to consider the human voice of Jesus in abstraction from the divine self-determination which is the coming of the Word in the flesh. How exactly he comes to this position is far from clear, but I suspect that we should read it as very closely connected with his developing concern with exegesis in the 390s, and the resultant nuancing of his understanding of sapientia. Increasingly, the pattern of Christ as “reason” incarnate opens out, as the “unreasonable” in Scripture has to be systematically interpreted. There has to be a theological way of making sense of the claim that God speaks in the oddities and contingencies, the fragmented and not always edifying words of the Christian Bible; and in Doctr. chr. and Conf. a twofold hermeneutical strategy is developed, which has the consequences for Christology that we have already sketched. Scripture is a sign, that is, a communication drawing us beyond itself, requiring change and growth, the acceptance of deferred desire (including deferred comprehension); and the embrace of this unfinished and unfinishable discourse has to be recognized as what is appropriate to temporal subjects who cannot of their own efforts lift themselves out of the contingent world to eternal verities.

Reading the Bible correctly and understanding the character of God’s work in the incarnation are clearly inseparable in the major works of the 390s; our humble acceptance of God’s accommodation to our condition correlates with the understanding of divine humility as the unifying foundation for all God’s revealing work. To paraphrase Conf. book 7 once again, if we cannot see that God takes our fleshly and temporal condition seriously enough to use it as his medium for communicating, we shall not take it seriously; and vice versa. Trin. book 4 echoes both Conf. 7 and considerable tracts of Civ. in defining the essence of religious error as the attempt to achieve reconciliation with God by means of strategies, whether ritual or meditative, to engineer a way out of the human condition; in Trin. 4.12.15, the Three Magi are presented as models of those who abandoned magic and human wisdom to adore humilitatem domini and learned to return to their patria “by another way,” the way of humility taught by Christ. With a curious passing allusion to the imagery of the Phaedrus, by this time a trope in philosophical writing, Augustine warns against supposing that the wings of virtue can be nourished by ritual and magic; instead we are weighed down more than ever by our efforts to rise.

So Augustine’s concern with humility develops during the 390s toward the mature polemic in Trin. and Civ. against pagan theurgy as well as pagan speculative metaphysics; and the incarnation has a focal place in this argument. But there is a further dimension, harder to trace with precision, that has to do with the evolving sense of what sapientia means. As the concept becomes more and more evidently connected with absence and dispossession in its human exercise (Doctr. chr. is significant in this), so when it is applied to God, its divine exercise becomes more and more linked with caritas and justitia. To enact the person of Wisdom is inevitably bound more closely with the fundamental act of self-humiliation or self-dispossession in the Word’s becoming flesh. So to represent Wisdom is precisely to represent an agency that is displaced for the sake of another. The dual idiom of the Word made flesh, the agere of homo and sapientia inseparably, makes complete sense as a resolution of the exegetical issue.

It would be tempting but misleading to say that Augustine provides a rhetorical version of what is for the Cyrilline tradition a more obviously metaphysical schema for understanding Christology. Cyrilline theology is not simply the attempt to isolate and define an undergirding “something” in Jesus that can be described as divine; it is, no less than Augustine’s language, concerned with finding what agency it is that gives unity to the components of Jesus’s humanity, and displaying that unity as the act of the second person of the Trinity. Equally, Augustine is not in any sense replacing an account of metaphysical subsistents with a “functional” union between the Word and human individual (as if this were a transcription of the stale debate in New Testament criticism two generations ago about whether the New Testament ascribed ontological or functional divinity to Jesus). Sapientia is for Augustine a real, substantive agent—both the “locus” from which the Father can be contemplated and the specific, eternal act of loving contemplation, the person of the Word of God.

But it would be fair to say that, to the extent that all Augustine’s reflection on the nature of being a subject is deeply involved with reflection on language—representation, relation of word and external reality, memory as self presence, verbal images as both prompting and expressing the complex re-routings of desire—it is not surprising that his theology of the incarnation should be, in effect, an account of how God speaks within the nexus of human relations, and that human salvation or transfiguration should be linked so often with the idea of the Word’s speech taking up and taking over the varieties of confused or rebellious human speech, anchoring the tumultuous instability of what we feel and express in a solid and unbroken self-communication, the Word’s self-giving to the Father. Most significantly of all, though, and most challengingly, this pattern of christological exposition insists that there can be no accurate discussion of the incarnation that is not itself incarnationally modeled—humble in its awareness of the inescapable context of material history, alert to the question of how justitia is realized, open to the dangerous and potentially humiliating solidarity of fallible and sinful human agents, and refusing prideful isolation. Agere personam sapientiae is for all believers the task of learning a new speech apt for the city of God, a méthode spirituelle that is both political, in the widest sense, and prayerful, continuous with the unbroken, transfiguring enactment of Wisdom that is Jesus Christ.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from In the Shadow of the Incarnation: Essays on Jesus Christ in the Early Church in Honor of Brian Daley, S.J. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.

I am not the only one who observes that Nolan turned Matt Damon’s Odysseus into a tortured Catholic male of the twenty-first-century sort, one who doubts the gods are worth a damn but still lives in a Zeus haunted world, in dire need to repent for the slaughterous sins he committed in the name of a king not worth following. His desire is to confess, to be heard, to be known as the one who broke the law of God and brought down the ties of civilization around him, and in being known, being forgiven. Odysseus wants to go home, but he cannot. Not yet. The Odyssey and its cousin The Iliad stand on their own. They are not the tellings of a Christian imagination.

The ancient world is not the Catholic world. I am still learning a lot about Catholicism; I was welcomed home to the Church this past Easter. Every convert’s story is similar, and most are rather boring. Mine is not exceptional. What it involved was a change of worldview, a shift in priority, an acknowledgement of true desire. It required a painful opening of my eyes to see myself anew. Restless was my heart, though I thought myself ensconced in Protestant tradition. I had to be broken to be made whole, I had to be wounded to begin to heal. What does it mean for a person formed by one vision of reality to encounter another?

My conversion was long. I grew up a weekly Sunday First Baptist Church attendee. I memorized my Scripture, the Youth Group was my social life, a path towards being a pastor seemed set in stone from an early age. I became Presbyterian, because I was told that Presbyterian pastors make more money. College led to years of travel, which led to seminary, which led to more wandering. Ordination arrived, and I thought I was at journey’s end. I was not.

I failed. My ministry ended in failure. The story of my failure is not that interesting; the reality of my failure is. I failed professionally and personally as a pastor. It was not my calling; my vocation was not to be a Protestant pastor, though I fought for it to be so. Denial is a helluva drug, and I inhaled deeply.

Allow what may appear to be a digression: what difference does Christ make? The life of St Augustine made Christ’s difference real to me, and it is thanks to Peter Brown. I came to Peter Brown almost by accident. I had read Augustine, of course, but Augustine had been a name on the shelf, another Father of the Church, another theologian whose importance I understood without quite understanding him. He was an influence on Calvin, and I had been taught that Calvin was Augustine on steroids. Brown changed that. Brown insisted, as he wrote in a 2013 New York Review of Books article entitled “Rome: Sex and Freedom,” “Antiquity is always stranger than we think.”[2]

Brown made the ancient world strange to me. I had spent years thinking about the ancient world as the world into which Christianity came, the pagan world waiting, however imperfectly, for Christ. Yet this is a comfortable story we tell ourselves, and modern-day bards such as Christopher Nolan echo it. Antiquity is multiple worlds, with multiple understandings of desire, the body, death, freedom, virtue, and what constituted a good life. And yet, at the end of those worlds, at the end of the Roman world, was Augustine.

Brown’s magisterial Augustine of Hippo paints a man who in the first part of his life does not realize the ground he stands upon, but thinks he does.[3] Augustine was formed in the womb of North Africa—he was a Roman of the Romans, yet never felt at home in Rome (when in Italy, he quickly left the Eternal City for better job opportunities up in Milan.) He loved his Virgil, and Cicero was his North Star. Monica his mother was no Dido weeping on a shore as Aeneas sailed away; she hounded him with her love and her tears, following his restless steps across the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome to Milan to Ostia.

Brown pulled Augustine out of modern Protestant abstractions and put him back in the complicated Roman world he actually inhabited. Augustine does not stand outside the ancient world looking backward at it. He belongs to it. He had been educated by it, seduced by it, formed by its literature and philosophy. He wants the things that a successful Roman intellectual might want. He wants recognition. He wants a career. He wants love. He desires to know and be seen. You know the rest of the story.

Without Peter Brown, I doubt I would have met the saint in quite the same way. Augustine became more than a theologian I ought to know. He became a man who had lived through the very thing I was beginning to understand: the challenge of a worldview that failed. Of the necessity of leaving one world without knowing where you would wind up, where your home would be. I did not read Augustine and suddenly decide to become Catholic. At first he simply offered permission to distrust the story I had been telling myself about myself.

Augustine had a restless heart. What he gave me was not an answer so much as a way of seeing the cause of the restlessness itself. Augustine understood that our desires can be real and still be disordered, that we can spend years pursuing something we think will make us whole and discover that it has only carried us farther from home. “My weight is my love,” he wrote. “Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”[4] I spent much of my life thinking I knew what I loved. I was beginning to wonder whether I did. It pains me to write all this. For most of my adult life I desired to be a Protestant pastor; this was a mistake. It was a failure of not only judgment, but imagination. Augustine, by the grace of God, made me wonder whether failure might also be a form of revelation.

Brown ends his memoir, Journeys in the Mind: A Life in History, by quoting Symmachus: Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum. (“Not by one avenue alone can we make our way to so vast a mystery.”[5]) I read these words while sitting in a coffee house outside of Chicago in September, 2023. I had quit ministry two years prior. My wife and kids had moved to Portland, Oregon two months before, while I remained in Illinois to sell our home. I had just seen a production of Hamlet the night before, and the words, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” echoed in my conscience, an eerie echo of the last great pagan of Rome. I was unmoored. I did not know which way was up or down, who I was or whose I was. Lost in my desires and despair, the knowledge of my failure. If I was not a pastor, who the hell was I? That moment crystallized for me that my life as a Protestant could not continue. Christ was calling my restless heart towards himself, towards his Church. But I did not have ears to hear.

This was not a Damascene-like conversion moment: it was an acknowledgement of the truth of my failure. My identity had been constructed around being a pastor—when my ministry ended, I lost my sense of self. Holding my chai latte, I started to cry. This was a moment when something I had been resisting became intellectually and existentially undeniable. This was the quiet acknowledgment that my life as a Protestant could not continue. I was not a pastor. I was not a Protestant. I was not even sure I was a Christian.

The irony was that I was actively adjunct teaching Introduction to Christian Theology at Loyola Chicago. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I stood before eighteen-year-olds lecturing on the Confessions and nature of the Trinity, using academic detachment to mask the fact that my own floor was caving in. I was asking teenagers to analyze a fifth-century bishop’s total undoing before God, all while trying to keep my own undoing hidden. I had spent years wandering, my entire life up to that point. But what Augustine did for me, and still does if I am honest, is help me recognize the road I am actually on, me, a poor wayfaring stranger traveling through this world of woe.

What interested me was not simply that Augustine converted. Plenty of people convert. What interested me was that his conversion did not mean that his previous life suddenly became meaningless. The things he had loved were still there, at least in his memory, but he had to learn how to love them differently. The problem was not that Augustine had desired too much. He had desired badly.

I had spent years thinking my problem was that I had failed to become the person I was supposed to be. Augustine made me wonder whether the deeper problem was that I had spent years desiring to become the wrong person.

The difference Christ makes which Augustine through his life, works, and continual presence in that great cloud of witnesses makes clear to me, was driven home to me in my post-Nolan Odyssey-driven mania. I decided I was going to read the Iliad. Emily Wilson’s translation is a true achievement; published in 2023, it is her greatest work so far. She makes the poem alive, even in the midst of so much killing, rape, and dying. She concludes her introduction to her translation with these words, which I quote in full:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem [The Iliad] will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.[6]

Wilson drives the point home—the ancient, Homeric world is our world in its mortality. The gods may intervene, but they cannot give mortals what they most desire: escape from death.

When I failed Protestantism, I died. I am speaking metaphorically, yes, but also damn near well physically. My identity, or so I told myself, up to that point disappeared as completely as tears in rain. Yet, Christ does not make our brokenness or mortality disappear; he enters our wounds and transforms them. By his stripes we are healed and made known as children of God. This is my desire. This is my reality. But could I be brave and die to self and live for God? Or would I continue to let the memory of the bitter herb of failure rule my world?

As if a cosmic joke, I wound up at a Dominican priory parish in Portland. But not immediately. I moved to the Pacific Northwest around Thanksgiving, 2023. I did not attend worship for nearly a year, because what was the point? I read more Augustine though, or works about him, and started forming stronger opinions on the more recent biographies on him (read deep from Augustine the African by Conybeare, appreciate the Lancel as the update to Brown’s biography, and embrace Robin Lane Fox’s for what it is.) I realized that God, if there was a God, was working through Augustine to speak to me here and now. And it was through the Confessions, but not in a way one typically understands the Confessions.

The Confessions are a prayer of a restless heart finding its rest in God. It is also a narrative of loss, and what comes from loss. In Book 4, we hear recounted the loss of Augustine’s close friend, but what struck me was that Augustine never names that friend. He holds the friend in his memory, but his name is lost, known only unto God. To pursue his career, he abandons his again unnamed concubine and leaves his home in Carthage, losing both his love and his homeland. In Book 8, at the moment of his realization that he needs to come home to the Church, he struggles at first to take up and read because of the fear of loss that such a conversion will bring about—the process of turning his disordered soul around, to begin to desire God in God’s fullness, will lead him to give up his life that he had created so far in Italy.

And the failures, the losses, continue after his repentant conversion. Cassiciacum ends in failure. Monnica dies just as he is to return to North Africa. He tells us also in Book 9 of his beloved son Adeodatus, baptized alongside him, whose death Augustine mentions almost in passing. As you read the Confessions it becomes clear how much Augustine loves his mother, but the mention of his lost son is striking in how brief it is. One imagines that Augustine grieved in his heart the loss of his boy, and even all those years later he does not have the words. The wound remains fresh.

The losses continue after the story that the Confessions tell ends. Augustine’s desire to retire in Thagaste and start a monastery comes to naught. Seized and forced to become a priest in 391 in Hippo, made a co-bishop in 395 (a task he felt totally unprepared and ill-suited for), Augustine continually loses himself to the providence of God. Yet, God is capable of doing profound and beautiful things through this loss.

Bishop Erik Varden, in his remarks at the Papal Lenten Retreat this year, related to Pope Leo, he who upon his papal election declared himself “a son of St Augustine,” insights he had gained from the book of Job. “God can enable a new world after he has pulled down walls we thought were the world, walls within which we actually suffocated. Job breathes again. Aware of the transience of things, he sees that God is greater. He acknowledges that God does not promise security but virtue for trials, also face to face with death. Job bows down and worships.”

Job does not get his old world back. Like Christ, although he experiences a kind of resurrection, he continues to carry his wounds. So, what difference does Christ make? What does the Christian say to Homer? What does Christ do with a dead man? “He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.” The ancient world is not the Christian world, and thank God for that!

So how did I end up with the Dominicans in Portland? Well, the boring but true answer is that it was the closest parish to my home. By coincidence it had also been suggested by some Chicago friends, friends who had dragged my depressed and lonely self to Mass over the summer of ‘23 as I was separated from my family. For a year and a half, I attended Mass at Holy Rosary in Portland and began to be formed in and by the liturgy. I could not take communion, as desperate as I found myself to be for the Eucharist. I found myself going forward, my arms crossed over my chest, to receive a blessing, my prayer being “if I can but touch the hem of his garment I will be healed.” Did I believe? I do not know. I frankly do not think it mattered, because God was calling me home whether I knew it or not.

I began OCIA, I attended a biweekly course on Christology. I got to know my priests, took them out for coffee, they took me out for lunch. I was still a mess, a walking contradiction, but I began to feel as my frame of reference was shifting—the desires of my heart were becoming more grounded. Easter Vigil approached, I went to my first confession and forty years of mortal sin came pouring out. Holy Saturday came. I am standing outside in my suit, surrounded by other catechumens and confirmands. A fire blazes, and it is quite hot and I am worried that Father Joseph might accidentally catch on fire. We process into the Church.

Smells and bells, holy water sprinkled, I kneel and am called by my new name—Augustine. The priests lay hands upon me, and it is at this moment, in the glare of the candlelight, in the aroma of the incense, that I begin to have an experience I cannot fully describe. I feel as though I see myself from above, and my heart is smiling. I am at rest. I am home.

In Book 9 of the Confessions, Augustine relates a mystical experience he shared with his mother that he cannot fully describe. Augustine and Monnica are alone at a window overlooking a garden. They have been talking about the eternal life of the saints, quoting Paul: “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man.” Augustine says they were “forgetting the past and reaching forward to what lies ahead.”

Then their conversation becomes an ascent. Augustine describes them moving beyond created things and then they turn inward: “We entered into our own minds and passed beyond them . . . .” And finally, they reach toward God himself, “that region of never-failing plenty.” Augustine says: “We touched it slightly by the whole force of our heart.”

If this experience were to be prolonged, and other visions of a far inferior kind were removed, and this single vision were to take total possession of its beholder, and ravish and absorb and plunge him into interior joy, so that eternal life were to be like that one moment of understanding for which we sighed—would not this be what is meant by “Enter into the joy of your Lord”?[7]

And here we are. I attend Mass every week, not because I have to, but because I need to. I need to be where Jesus is. And so I receive him, he who is the source and summit of our faith. Late have I loved Thee!

A coda: I can do theology alongside Augustine, under his tutelage. I am not there yet with the Angelic Doctor, but I have a copy of his Theological Compendium bedside, and God willing I will get there. This fall I will begin teaching an Adult Catholic Education class on the Life and Works of St. Augustine. Please keep me in your prayers.

The Good Samaritan is an ideal model for our incarnational recovery of digital evangelization because he is an icon of Christ’s love poured out for a broken world. His story reveals both whom and how to serve. The passage begins when a lawyer presses Jesus on the boundaries of the second great commandment. But God’s love knows no bounds, and neither should ours. Jesus responds with the famous parable at the center of today’s reflection. Turning the reductive assumptions on their head, he offers a Christian definition of neighbor that is unsettlingly inclusive. In contrast to the selfish temptation of the religious and intellectual elites—those who sought to minimize the number of neighbors and those who ignored the stranger in the ditch—we must expand the category to include all whom we may encounter on the digital continent.

Moving from whom to how, the Good Samaritan’s story teaches us that love of neighbor extends beyond sentiment to concrete, oftentimes costly, action. It means caring for people wherever we meet them, wherever they lie. To love the “stranger on the road,” as Pope Francis has described them, is not only to look for those in need online, but to strive to see them as Christ sees us—and then respond accordingly. That is how we escape the snare of avoidance in our digital interactions. The internet tempts us to engage only on our own terms, luring us into echo chambers that reinforce what we already hold true. To echo Pope Francis instead, our prayer is that the light we offer others, “not be the result of cosmetics or special effects, but rather of our being loving and merciful ‘neighbors’ to those wounded and left on the side of the road.”[1] It is easier than ever to remain in communities that are curated and comfortable. Christian love, however, cannot be self-centered, and comfort is not guaranteed.

Our mission demands that we retrain ourselves to see the forgotten and the overlooked as fellow humans, hidden though they are in the ditches that line our digital roads. We should tend to their wounds as if they were our own. Will we, like the Good Samaritan, become “little Christs,” embodying our reason for hope to the strangers we meet? Or will we follow the example of those who are too busy, too sterile, too suspicious, too self-absorbed? While the missionary’s road may look different today, make no mistake: digital ditches abound, and they are full of suffering. It is easy to avoid turning into the robbers that prey upon the Good Samaritan. It is much harder to avoid becoming the priest or the Levite.

Serving as Good Samaritans online starts by remembering that so-called “users” are first and foremost people worthy of love. The language itself is telling: “internetspeak” tends toward the inhuman. “Users,” with their ambiguous avatars and fictitious usernames, are easy to ridicule, to neglect, to leave in the ditch. Humans made in the image of God? Much less so. Regardless of profile appearance, party affiliation, or preferred hashtags, the Church’s category of neighbor contains whomever you are engaging with online. Focusing on our shared humanity paves the way for an incarnational strategy. For our work “is not simply a matter of generating content, but of creating an encounter of hearts,” as Pope Leo XIV reminded the Catholic influencers and digital missionaries gathered for the July 2025 Jubilee for Digital Missionaries and Catholic Influencers. “This will entail seeking out those who suffer, those who need to know the Lord, so that they may heal their wounds, get back on their feet and find meaning in their lives.” Their wounds may be hidden by digital makeup, but their need for healing is just as real as the stranger’s.

Recognizing Christ in the other does not stop with intellectual assent. God’s law commands us to love in action, which in turn compels us to give up something of ourselves. An outsider in a hostile land, the Good Samaritan forsakes his position of relative comfort because he recognizes the other’s dignity. He lets himself be interrupted and inconvenienced. He chooses to spread hope through healing, even at great personal cost. Perhaps most impressively, the Samaritan returns to ensure the stranger has recovered. He remains in relationship with the man, adopting a profound spirit of accompaniment. He carries the other’s cross all the way to Calvary.

The Samaritan’s example is timeless because it mirrors the accompaniment of Christ, whose own gift of self sustains the very hope we aim to spread. His goal is not to achieve credibility per se, but that is also why he is so effective: true credibility cannot be gained by seeking personal comfort or external validation, two of the internet’s chief virtues, but by demonstrating radical gifts of self. Just as the early Christians bore witness through physical martyrdom, today’s missionaries need to embrace a new form of digital martyrdom. This call is answered by intentionally sacrificing the self—whether it be measured in terms of monetization or reach or other personal gain—to incarnate Christ’s message in the digital continent. Like the Samaritan, we must be willing to diminish so that others may grow and heal.

This harmony of old and new requires us to view the digital continent through neither a utopian nor dystopian lens, reframing the entire conversation in incarnational and relational terms. Properly understood, digital evangelization rejects transactional engagement, treating online interactions as opportunities for personal accompaniment. Just as the Good Samaritan poured out oil and wine to heal the wounded, the way to evangelize effectively is to shape our exchanges into “a balm which relieves pain and a fine wine which gladdens hearts,” as Pope Francis described it in his 2014 World Communications Day message.[2] Regardless of where we meet, people are not primarily an audience to be reached, but humans to be loved. By thus reshaping our content in the form of the Cross, we become the “agents of communion, capable of breaking down the logic of division and polarization, of individualism and egocentrism” that Pope Leo encouraged digital missionaries and influencers at the 2025 Jubilee—and all of us—to be.

Throughout history, the Church has navigated technology-fueled revolutions by keeping her eyes fixed on Christ, the origin and end of all communication. Our content should not merely contain Christ’s message; Christ’s message has to shape our content. As Marshall McLuhan explained in a conversation to his wife, the Incarnation is the supreme example of communication because “Christ came to demonstrate God’s love for man and to call all men to Him through himself as Mediator, as Medium. And in so doing he became the proclamation of his Church, the message of God to man. God’s medium became God’s message.”[3] To be sure, the evangelistic environment has changed, and with it the media we use, but the incarnational foundation of our message remains the same: the Word made flesh. That is why we must not only proclaim but embody Christ’s message of hope. Moving beyond abstract connectivity, the modern world desperately needs “networks of relationships, of love, . . . where we can mend what has been broken, heal from loneliness, not focus on the number of followers”[4] as Pope Leo implored once again in his 2025 Jubilee message. Understood in this light, today’s missionaries are true bridges to Christ, offering digital invitations to “experience the greatness of infinite Love in every encounter.”

The subversive task of building a digital culture defined by martyrdom—as foreshadowed by the Good Samaritan and modeled by the early Church—is also how we bridge the credibility divide. Martyrdom fueled Christianity’s spread because martyrdom is the perfect testament to faith. It is the ultimate gift of self: hope in Christ embodied. Our current plight beckons us to return to these familiar roots. Becoming digital Good Samaritans means grounding content in the Incarnation and orienting it toward communion, so that “every story of shared goodness will be a knot in a single, immense network: the network of networks, the network of God,”[5] as Pope Leo describes it once again in the 2025 Jubilee. Digital martyrdom is not an example of performative suffering, but cruciform witness. It is the intentional sacrifice of influence and reach in service of compassion. It asks Catholics to prioritize integrity over virality, impact over engagement, and communion over celebrity culture. Once more from Pope Leo’s Jubilee message, it requires us to “look for the ‘suffering flesh of Christ’ in every brother and sister [we] encounter online.”[6]

The digital continent might be our mission field, but it is not our home. Like the Samaritan, we find ourselves in a state of journeying. That is why the Church needs digital missionaries who not only build but become bridges between this world and the next. Those who take up their cross and carry it into the digital continent. Those who see the other lying in a ditch first and foremost as a human being in need of Christ’s love. Those who refuse to rest until the forsaken have been healed. Becoming digital Good Samaritans is not only how we restore credibility in our disenchanted, disbelieving world—it is how we communicate our reason for hope online.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was first published at the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. Reprinted with permission.

What causes these cycles of revival and rejection? There is certainly no single answer, but sometimes at least it seems to have been the case that moral and political Aristotelianism has been self-subverting, that it has been its protagonists who brought about its downfall. And perhaps this was how it was with some Renaissance Aristotelians.

I

In Philip Sidney's An Apologie for Poetrie the claims of the poet to be the preeminent teacher of the virtues are challenged by the moral philosophers and the historians. In this encounter the historians fare worst, but the moral philosophers turn out to be no better than the poets in telling us how we should live, while being a good deal their inferior at motivating us. So Sidney concludes of the poet that "therein, (namely in morrall doctrine, the chief of all knowledges,) hee dooth not merely farre passe the Historian, but for instructing, is well nigh comparable to the Philosopher; and for moving, leaves him behind him . . . . " What philosophers did Sidney have in mind?

At the very beginning of the Apologie Sidney provides a mocking portrait of those who compete with the poets for preeminence,

among whom as principall challengers step forth the morrall Philosophers, whom me thinketh, I see comming towards me with a sullen gravity, as though they could not abide vice by day light, rudely clothed for to witnes outwardly their contempt of outward things, with bookes in their hands agaynst glory, whereto they sette theyre names, sophistically speaking against subtility, and angry with any man in whom they see the soule fault of anger: these men casting larges as they goe, of Definitions, Divisions, and Distinctions, with a scornefull interogative, doe soberly aske, whether it bee possible to finde any path, so ready to leade a man to vertue, as that which teacheth what vertue is?

Sidney probably wrote these words in late 1581, nine years after he had left Oxford. But he would not have had much, if any, occasion to encounter philosophers during his travels abroad or his time at court, so that it seems reasonable to suppose that it is the teachers of moral philosophy at Oxford whom he still has in mind. And the most notable of these was John Case.

Case was some thirteen years older than Sidney. It was in the same year (1568) that Sidney had entered Christ Church that Case had become a Fellow of St. Johns. Charles B. Schmitt in his splendid account of Case's life and work laid great emphasis both on the knowledge of Sidney's writings exhibited in Case's later work and on Case's acquaintance with some of Sidney's friends and with Sidney's sister. But while Sidney was an undergraduate at Oxford, Case's reputation as a moral philosopher had yet to be made. It was finally made by the publication in 1585, a year before Sidney's death, of his Speculum quaestionum moralium, in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis, a detailed exposition of and philosophical commentary upon the Nicomachean Ethics, printed by Joseph Barnes on the press recently given to Oxford University by its Chancellor, Robert Devereux Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Sidney's uncle. (So began the long and marvelous history of the Oxford University Press.) And it is to the Earl of Leicester that Case's book is dedicated.

In the same year Sidney published his Discourse in Defence of the Earl of Leicester and it seems unlikely that he did not have some knowledge of the publication of Case's book. If he had read it, he might well have felt that its definitions, divisions, and distinctions provided confirmation for his stinging portrait of the moral philosopher. But Case's book is in an important way a reply to Sidney. I do not mean by this to imply that Case had read the Apologie, let alone that he had it in mind when writing the Speculum. The Apologie was not published until 1595 and, even if we entertain the remote possibility that Case had been shown the Apologie in manuscript, it is very unlikely that he could have seen it before a large part of the Speculum had already been written. What then do I mean when I say that Case's Speculum is nonetheless a reply to Sidney's Apologie? Just this, that Case's Speculum articulates more adequately than any other book (the claim was not peculiar to Case, but is found elsewhere among Renaissance Aristotelians) the thesis that the teaching of moral philosophy, rightly understood, is the teaching of the moral virtues, that the moral philosopher is preeminent, not only in affording instruction about the theory of the moral virtues, but in making those whom he instructs virtuous. If Case's arguments are sound, then Sidney's arguments for the preeminence of the poets fail.

The claims made by Case were endorsed in some of the twenty-seven congratulatory Latin poems by his Oxford colleagues which precede the text. "The book," declares the Vice-Chancellor of the university, "teaches all the several virtues by philosophizing." And in the dedicatory epistle Case addresses the students of both English universities as one anxious to instruct them to practical effect. He is not merely engaged in expounding the text of the Nicomachean Ethics and in responding to a variety of objections to Aristotle's theses and arguments, but is doing so in order to make his readers, if they are seriously attentive, better human beings in a way that only the teaching of moral philosophy can achieve. So Case's Speculum asserts precisely what Sidney's Apologie denies. But in so doing Case encounters an obvious initial difficulty.

At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle had argued that the young are not yet capable of learning what the moral philosopher has to teach. Their experience is too limited and they are guided by their as yet disordered passions (1095a 2-6). What they need is the discipline of practical habituation, not theoretical instruction. To act not only in accordance with what virtue requires, but virtuously is first to know what one is doing—that one's action is what justice or courage or generosity requires, secondly to do what one does for its own sake, to do it just because it is the just or courageous or generous thing to do, and thirdly to give expression in so doing to a stable disposition to perform just or courageous or generous actions, when ever they are required. But Aristotle emphasizes that it is not the knowledge that moves us to action (1105a 30-1105b 3). So that it is not only that the young are not the moral philosopher's appropriate audience. It is also that, on Aristotle's view, the kind of moral training that produces virtuous character is a type of practical habituation and not theoretical instruction in moral philosophy.

II

It must seem then that Case would only have been able to answer Sidney if he had been willing to repudiate Aristotle. But this is not at all how Case proceeds. Instead he radically reinterprets Aristotle, without recognizing that he is doing so. Aristotle had remarked that one can grow older without becoming mature and that there are therefore older people who remain in the condition of the young. Case seizes on this as a first step in arguing that "young" is to be understood as referring not so much to age as to mores. "Wherefore it is not by being few or many in years, but by inconstancy and levity of mores that I define 'young' in these passages" (lib. I, cap. 3). The student, that is to say, must have the habits of a good student, but this habituation is preliminary to the moral education afforded by instruction in the Ethics. When we remember the age of the undergraduates whom Case was teaching at Oxford and whom he addressed in his dedicatory epistle, the difference between Case and Aristotle becomes even clearer. (Sidney who, after four years at Shrewsbury School, had become an undergraduate at the age of thirteen was younger than most, but there were many not much older.) The adolescent student whose preliminary education has implanted a desire to excel and a willingness to learn from his teachers is treated by Case as someone who already has all the prior habituation that he needs in order to be moved to the acquisition and exercise of the virtues by philosophical instruction.

Both the scope and the power thus ascribed by Case to moral philosophy make it necessary for him also to revise Aristotle's conception of the virtue of prudence, phronesis, although once again Case was plainly unaware that he was engaged in such a revision. For Case in a preface addressed to the students of both universities had ascribed to the study of philosophical ethics great power: "It is the norm of mores, the mistress of the virtues, the gnomon (the measure on a sundial) of life, the rule of actions." So much so that when he comes to the discussion of prudence, he confronts the problem of distinguishing between moral philosophy and prudence. The problem arises because on his account it seems to be the case that "Moral philosophy is the habit of acting with true reasoning concerning human goods: therefore it is prudence." Case's reply is that "Moral philosophy treats these goods in terms of genus, prudence in terms of species" (lib. VI, cap. 5). The philosopher supplies a set of moral generalizations; the prudent agent applies them to particular types of circumstance. Prudence is, so to speak, applied moral philosophy and without moral philosophy the agent would not have the requisite stock of generalizations.

How then does Case deal with Aristotle's assertion that knowledge (scientia in Case's translation) plays little or no part in virtuous action (Nicomachean Ethics l 105b 2-3)? He does so by quoting the passage in question and replying that the knowledge thus referred to is theoretical, contemplative knowledge. The knowledge that is required for virtuous action is what he calls a knowledge of circumstances, by which he means, so it presently becomes clear, the knowledge of what kind of virtuous action is required in whatever circumstances (lib. II, cap. 4). But to this further objections have to be raised. That the scientia circumstantiarum that is needed is prudence seems evident from Case's definition of virtue, yet one can be learned without being prudent, so that the knowledge of circumstances—which presumably the learned possess—is not sufficient. Moreover the ignorant and uncultured often possess virtue, but, on this view of prudence, they cannot be prudent.

To this Case's response is that two kinds of prudence must be distinguished. There is on the one hand particular prudence, which is the limited knowledge of how to act virtuously in some range of particular circumstances and this knowledge can be in the less experienced and the less learned. But there is on the other hand "heroic and general" prudence, "which is the knowledge of living well and of acting in accordance with all the virtues in every circumstance, and this is not necessary for everyone." So the ignorant and uncultured can after all be prudent on this or that occasion, but only with an inferior form of prudence. And one can be learned without having the knowledge necessary for heroic and general prudence, a knowledge which is to be provided generally, even if not necessarily always, by moral philosophy. There remains one further objection.

"To obey the precepts of virtue is an act of virtue, but a boy can obey the precepts without prudence: therefore there can be an act of virtue without prudence" (lib. VI, cap. 13). What is noteworthy here is that Case does not reply, as Aristotle presumably would have done, by drawing a distinction between acts that conform to what the virtues require and acts that issue from the settled dispositions of a virtuous human being. Instead Case answers that ''As the act of virtue is in the boy inchoately, so is prudence . . . . "

Moral development then is from the inchoate moral virtue and prudence of the very young to the development of virtuous habits over a certain limited range of cases to the heroic virtue, requiring heroic and general prudence, for which an education into the substance of Aristotle's ethics is required. The notion that what Aristotle had provided was primarily a set of general moral precepts which can be taught to the well brought up young, so that they can then learn to apply these to their own particular circumstances, is not of course original to Case. It was this conception of Aristotle's ethics that had led Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke named the Governour (1531) to include the Nicomachean Ethics along with Cicero's De Officiis in the books of which tutors of young gentlemen were to make use. And when John Wilkinson published the first English translation of the Nicomachean Ethics in 1547 (not from the Greek, but from Brunetto Latini's Italian), his title page read: "The Ethiques of Aristotle, that is to saye, precepts of good behavoure and perfighte honestie, now newly translated into English."

Case however brings to the task of expounding Aristotle a kind of learning that is found in none of his English predecessors, but that matches the best of his European contemporaries. He draws upon both scholastic and humanistic sources and methods, making use of a wide range of older and newer commentators, including Aquinas, Buridan, and Burleigh. But his use of commentators is always subordinated to those educational purposes which provide his enterprise with its justification.

His methods of exposition were eclectic. He was, as an Aristotelian, opposed to Ramus's positions and influence and he contributed to the debates between Aristotelian and Ramist dialectic. But he made use of Ramist schemes of division and of Ramist diagrams in setting out his Aristotelian subject-matter, putting these devices to the service of a type of commentary modeled on the scholastic treatment of Quaestiones Disputatae, where exposition proceeds through the posing and answering of successive objections, something that I have already illustrated in Case's treatment of prudence.

Not every reader has been charmed by Case's modes of exposition. Nancy S. Struever has called them "technocracy run wild" and "reductive and baroque," concluding that "the message is virtually submerged under the weight of the organizational modes." And her criticism involves content as well as form, for she takes Case's aim to be "to put forward as many familiar and comfortable moralisms as possible with the least expense of effort of reconciliation." Struever's criticisms however miss the point in two different ways.

First they ignore the excellence of most of Case's expositions of Aristotle. Generally his use of techniques of division clarifies effectively what would otherwise be obscure to the student and his distinctions are just those that the beginning Elizabethan student needs. This is a book that reflects the experience of teaching undergraduates and that speaks to the teaching needs of Case's colleagues as well as to the needs of his and their pupils. The questions put to Aristotle may not be quite the same as either the questions put by their medieval predecessors or their modern successors, but Case's book is well-designed to move the attentive reader from being a naive questioner of Aristotle to someone who has begun to learn from the text how to question Aristotle in Aristotle's own terms.

Secondly, what Struever says may suggest that Case merely asserts what she calls "moralisms." But it is of the first importance that these moralisms are presented by Case as the conclusions of philosophical arguments. And it is on the philosophy that everything turns. It is perhaps because of their recognition of this that the verdict of Copenhaver and Schmitt on Case is very different from Struever's: "More effectively than any other Englishman, he combined traditions of scholastic and humanist Aristotelianism that had been separate in the previous century . . . . It was Case who brought the new humanist-scholastic Aristotle to Renaissance Oxford, reviving interest in standard philosophical questions." The morality emerges from the philosophy and is so presented that the Aristotelian moral philosopher emerges as a moral teacher. What then is the content of that argumentative teaching?

III

It is of course for the most part a content that would be recognizable to Aristotelians of any time and place. But as well as those topics on which Case does no more than expound Aristotle, there are topics where he puts to Aristotle questions that are not precisely Aristotle's and topics about which he gives answers that are very certainly not Aristotle's. Let me give an example of each.

On courage Case follows Aristotle closely. And he also affirms Aristotle's view that the good human being is directed towards the achievement of that human being's own good. When therefore it turns out that the supreme exemplification of the exercise of courage is, if necessary, to give up one's life for the sake of the defense of one's city, the question arises of how to act thus can be to act for the sake of one's own good. Surely to act thus is to sacrifice one's own good for the sake of the good of others. The good of one's country and one's own good no longer coincide. Case's response to the objection is both terse and Aristotelian: "He gives his life to his country, as the philosopher teaches, but he preserves his virtue (which is the greatest good) for himself" (lib. IX, cap. 8).

On lying Case is closer to Aquinas than he is to Aristotle. It is not that his conclusions are at variance with Aristotle's. Neither were Aquinas's. But his idiom is Thomistic rather than or as well as Aristotelian. Yet his account is not entirely the same as Aquinas's. Aristotle tells us simply that a lie is in itself bad and culpable (1127a 28-9). Someone with the virtue of truthfulness tells the truth both when nothing else is at stake and, even more scrupulously, when something further is at stake (1127b 3-5). Aquinas sets out the grounds for this condemnation of lying (Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae, 110) as Aristotle does not, and in what Case says about lies as perversions of the order of speech and as directing the intellect away from its proper object, truth, he remains close to Aquinas. But where Aquinas had insisted that the essential property of a lie is that it is the intentional utterance of a false statement, Case (lib. IV, cap. 7) makes an intention to deceive, either by word or deed, central to the definition of a lie.

Aquinas treats the intention to deceive as an additional evil of almost all lies (110, 1). Case treats the wrong done to whomsoever is deceived by a lie as an essential part of the wrongness of lying. Yet Case is at one with Aquinas, not only in his assertion that the prohibition of lying is unqualified and unconditional, but also in his acknowledgment that this prohibition applies even in just wars. Ruses and stratagems by which an enemy may be deceived are permitted. But nothing that involves a violation of good faith is permitted (lib. III, cap. 11).

Consider by contrast an issue in which Case departs from Aristotle's text in such a way as to put himself at odds both with Aristotle and Aquinas and one that is all the more striking because of Aquinas's evident influence on Case's discussion of the relationship between natural law and positive law (lib. V, cap. 7). Both Aristotle and Aquinas had condemned tyranny, but on resistance to tyranny Aquinas seems to have twice changed his mind. In De Regimine Principum he had emphasized the dangers involved in attempts to overthrow a tyrant. In the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae (42, 2), written about half a dozen years later, however, Aquinas, having argued that sedition is always a mortal sin, says bluntly that the overthrow of a tyrannical government is not an act of sedition, except when the disorder that it produces is a greater evil than the tyrant's rule. It is rather the tyrant who is guilty of sedition in harming the community. Since the text makes it clear that violence may be involved in such acts, Aquinas seems finally to have returned to his earliest position on these matters, when he had followed Cicero in holding that on occasion it is praiseworthy to kill a tyrant in order to liberate one's country (Commentary on the Sentences II, D. 44, 2, ad 5).

Case's position could not be more sharply opposed. In his discussion of justice he concludes that arms are not to be taken up against any prince, whether good or bad. To do so is madness (furor). It is to fail to uphold the dignity of the state (lib. V, cap. 3). In one way this purported version of Aristotelianism that involves a condemnation of all rebellion against any political authority is very strange, but in another not surprising at all. Pius V's condemnation of Elizabeth in 1570 had legitimized rebellion by her Catholic subjects, and in the two years before the publication of the Speculum a variety of conspiracies to overthrow Elizabeth's government had been exposed. Case needed to show that an Aristotelianism such as his, influenced as it was in its interpretation by Aquinas's commentary, nonetheless enjoined unconditional loyalty to the Elizabethan settlement.

IV

Case was in fact not merely a loyal, but an enthusiastic subject of Elizabeth (the seventeenth-century rumor transmitted by Antony à Wood that he was "popishly affected" seems to have no foundation in fact; academic gossip then as now was unreliable). His book on politics, the Sphaera Civitatis, published in 1588, the year of the Armada, like the Speculum, contains nothing that would have been unacceptable to Elizabeth's government. The Aristotle whom he presents in both books is an Aristotle from whom Elizabeth's regime has nothing to fear. This was in itself a controversial stance, for not all Case's English contemporaries took this view of Aristotle. After Essex's rebellion in 1601 had failed, a plea for clemency was advanced on behalf of one of the rebels, the young Earl of Southampton, on the grounds that he had been corrupted by being made to read Aristotle's Politics by his tutor while abroad. And perhaps there is more to be said for this view of Aristotle than for Case's.

Case's enthusiasm for Elizabeth's rule becomes explicit in his unpublished Apologia academiarum. Elizabeth is here saluted as the protector of universities, and universities are praised as institutions whose flourishing is necessary for the well-being of both church and state: "Without universities and men educated in letters great empires are nothing other than dens of wolves and tyrants" (quoted by Binns, p. 251). What is the function discharged by universities which might have afforded Case grounds for this extraordinary claim?

It surely can be nothing other than their function as institutions of moral and political education. The responsibility for carrying through the tasks necessary to discharge this function certainly falls in part on the tutors who oversee the living conditions, the studies, the recreations and the discipline of their students—in the Apologia Case praises the English universities for their superiority in these respects to their European counterparts—but an essential role has to be that of the teacher of moral philosophy, that is, of Aristotelian moral philosophy and this just because education in moral philosophy is the capstone of moral education. Case's view of the importance of universities becomes fully intelligible only when we remind ourselves of his conception of the moral philosopher as the teacher and inculcator of virtues in those who are going to serve the high purposes of the Elizabethan state.

In making this claim Case had put himself further at odds with Aristotle. I noticed earlier how far he had departed from Aristotle in his view of how the virtues are acquired, at least at the level of heroic and general virtue, and more generally of how philosophical theorizing is related to practice. Now we have to take note of Case's unargued assumption that the Elizabethan state is an Aristotelian polity or, at least, that the Elizabethan state satisfies Aristotelian requirements for an acceptable polity, so that by assimilating his Aristotelianism his students will be well fitted for political and other advancement. And the problem here is not just one of anachronism, of the differences between any fourth-century polis and any sixteenth-century kingdom.

Elizabethans were apt to understand the relationship between membership in the nobility, virtue, and the qualities of the upwardly mobile in complex and not wholly coherent ways. Elyot had "identified wisdom, virtue and nobility," supposing that nobility had first originated in a grant of possessions and dignity by the people "to him at whose virtue they marvelled." But now, Elyot declared, the nobility in order to achieve the virtues need an education informed by Cicero and Aristotle. Noble birth is by itself insufficient for virtue. And later on it became possible to assert that noble birth is not always necessary. Sir John Ferne as a herald in his Blazon of Gentrie praised most highly the "mixed noblenes" that combines virtue and noble blood, but also declared, even if contentiously, that he who had achieved the status of gentle man "by industrie of his virtues" was to be preferred before those with ancient lineage, but without virtue.

Elyot, Ferne—and indeed Case—write at different stages in an ongoing Tudor debate about the relationship between nobility of birth, the virtues, and the achievement, by whatever means, of wealth, status, and power. The setting for that debate is an intensely competitive social order, one in which the possibility of upward mobility at the expense of others or downward mobility as a result of the rise of others are such that pleonexia in the form of ambition and acquisitiveness is a dominant quality. It was only three and a half years after Case's death in 1599 that the fourteen-year-old Thomas Hobbes became an Oxford undergraduate, and his later remark that there is "a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power" (Leviathan I, 11) is perhaps more apt as an observation of the later Elizabethan and Jacobean society in which he had grown up than as the generalization about human nature as such which he intended.

V

What I am suggesting then is that Case had set himself and his colleagues the Quixotic task of teaching Aristotle's ethics to a generation of students whose aspirations and ambitions were directed towards success in an increasingly Hobbesian social world and that it should therefore be no surprise that the effect of such teaching, insofar as it had any effect, was often, as with Hobbes himself, to turn the student against Aristotle. The moral and political Aristotelianism of John Case therefore failed in two ways. Its pretension to teach the virtues was bound in the longer run to discredit it, since the inculcation of the virtues into the young cannot be achieved by the teaching of moral philosophy, something that Case should have learned from Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics is not meant for undergraduates. But in addition Case failed to recognize that the social and political world shared by him and his pupils was one to which Aristotle's ethics and politics were to a significant and increasing degree alien and antagonistic.

The widespread rejection of Aristotle's moral philosophy from the early seventeenth century onwards has been explained by historians of thought in a variety of ways. Teleological modes of explanation were taken to have been discredited by the new science. There were influential theological movements in both the Protestant and Catholic worlds from whose standpoint Aristotle appeared as a pagan antagonist. The types of social, civil, and religious conflict by which seventeenth-century societies found themselves afflicted had rendered Aristotelianism irrelevant. Or so it has been claimed. And perhaps each of these types of explanation has something to be said for it. But reflection on John Case's writings suggests that perhaps something more and other also needs to be said.

For it may be that, even if the scientific, theological, and social climate of Western Europe of the early seventeenth century had not been in these ways inhospitable to Aristotle's moral philosophy, that moral philosophy would still have fallen into disfavor and deservedly so. Why? Because it would have been discredited by the unfounded claims made for it by some of its sixteenth-century teachers. They had advanced large claims for their teaching as a form of practical moral education that it was impossible to sustain. Before they were defeated by others, they had therefore perhaps themselves made their own defeat inevitable. But note that they had done so precisely because they had not learned enough from their reading of Aristotle. Their conception of moral education was inadequate in just those respects in which it rested on a gross misinterpretation of Aristotle's views. And so also did their failure to recognize the extent to which a genuine allegiance to Aristotle's morals and politics would have put them at odds with the political culture of their own society.

To this it may be said that we are not entitled to generalize from one or even from a few examples, that Aristotelian moral philosophy had a number of very different protagonists in the sixteenth century, and that, even where Case himself is concerned, a good deal more reading and a good deal more argument is needed. And this is true.

What I have been proposing are therefore questions rather than answers, questions that need to be raised more generally about teaching of Aristotelian moral philosophy in the universities and schools of Western Europe in the sixteenth century. But until we have done this historical work, there can be no fully adequate answer to the question of why in the seventeenth century the protagonists of Aristotle could for the most part no longer make their voices heard in moral debate.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny, ed. Thomas Hibbs and John O’Callaghan (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999/2016). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.

In this fragile context, some people look for answers in artificial intelligences that can integrate massive and ever-changing environmental data to monitor and manage Earth systems.[1] The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) suggests that AI could help optimize energy consumption and distribution, predict extreme weather events, inform biodiversity conservation and direct the sustainable use of land and water.

Others find it difficult to engage cognitively and emotionally with global-scale environmental issues, and the transgression of planetary boundaries that seem well beyond our lived sphere of influence. They may be wary of technical solutions that carry significant social and environmental trade-offs. The UNFCCC recognizes that consumption of water and energy by AI, and the necessity for sophisticated digital infrastructure, is prohibitive in many regions, while inherent bias in these systems can perpetuate social inequalities and undermine trust. Furthermore, the concentration of control over AI systems may amplify ethical questions about transparency, accountability, and exploitation. Such concerns around large-scale technological approaches to conservation reemphasize personal hands-on care for those small corners of our planet that we each know and love.

The emergence of AI and its potential applications in environmental sustainability prompts a twenty-first-century question: does care for the planet require an inevitable trajectory towards a world-wide-web simulacrum of omniscience that disembodied AIs purport to offer, or is it necessarily anchored in organic human-nature experiences, relationships, and behaviors? Of course, the question is not really such an attractively dystopian dilemma. There might be a functioning subsidiarity that allocates high-level monitoring and evaluation to AI while humans take care of their own locale.

This shared dynamic seems reasonably benevolent, but it is still unclear who might be in charge, and who cares. Our aim in what follows is to explore the second issue. If we are looking after creation in partnership with powerful computer intelligences, it might be sensible to ensure that our objectives are aligned. Unfortunately, this is probably impossible. Humans are capable of dying to protect their home or chaining themselves to a tree to conserve a beloved woodland. AIs probably do not care about anything. In the words of philosopher James Madden, AI cannot “give a damn.” This is not because they lack information, but because they lack embodiment—the very condition that makes caring possible.

Aldous Huxley recognized that “We can only love what we know.” Forester Baba Dioum subsequently acknowledged, “In the end, we will conserve only what we love.” The trajectory from coming to know a wild place to loving it and from loving to wanting to protect it is a type of relationality in which people derive meaning and value from their connections to nature. Such relational care is not simply an emotional reaction but a mode of knowing rooted in embodied presence and reciprocal communication, including encountering nature through sustainable outdoor practices.

This knowledge-care mechanism is unlikely to become accessible to an AI, however powerful and precise its computing and sensors. In what follows, we draw on sustainability science and Catholic theology to elucidate how humans can become embedded stewards of their social-ecological systems and why this dynamic can be informed by but never reproduced by machines.

LLMs and Robots

It is useful to start with a brief amateur summary of LLM and robotics, and provide a working concept to help answer the question of whether an AI can care for nature. We will focus on Large Language Models (LLMs), which the Stanford University IT Department says are “a type of artificial intelligence designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input they receive.” Let us unpack three elements of that statement: input, understanding, and generation.

First, LLMs are “pre-trained” on a vast amount of input information, which is selected by the developers, and which can be supplemented in real time from the publicly accessible World Wide Web. In theory, input is selected from reliable and authoritative sources such that what the model learns is true. An LLM starts to understand all the text that it receives by a process called tokenization. It breaks down each input into a series of chunks from a vocabulary of possible tokens, where each has a unique numeric ID. Images can also be rendered as tokens. The model is then trained by repeatedly using its input dataset of documents to predict the next value in a previously unseen sequence of tokens, i.e. the next word in a sentence. This prediction is a probabilistic process in which the model uses statistical interpolation to fill in the gaps among empirical data points (tokens) with a most-likely value based on its current understanding.

During this learning process, the model progressively grasps patterns and relationships within the data by iteratively adjusting its internal parameters, or “settings,” to minimize errors in the prediction of the next token. For example, it will change how it weights aspects of the data according to the predictive power of that particular input, increasingly recognizing and upweighting those components of a dataset that are most useful in understanding and anticipating textual patterns. Training teaches the model to become better at reproducing complex patterns in language, including grammar, facts, and how to construct coherent sentences. It is not possible for the LLM to store or replicate verbatim the vast entirety of its training input data, so it summarizes it into a generalized and lower-resolution representation—a sort of vague impression of the web.

How, then, does this model become such a charming and sympathetic assistant when you engage with it? Well, the personality is programmed during post-training, which teaches useful behaviors such as following instructions, tool use, and reasoning. An important aspect here is reinforcement learning, which uses feedback to guide behavior. The goal is to align the LLM's outputs with human values and preferences, making responses safer, more helpful, and less likely to produce harmful or biased content.

Unfortunately, the structure of pre-training is partly responsible for generating some systematic problems with LLMs, including the tendency to “hallucinate,” or provide confident and convincing answers that are completely false. This error emerges because some questions are inherently difficult, or not amenable to a generalizable statistical solution. For example, it is not possible to estimate with complete certainty the age of a student based only on the known ages of their classmates. The hallucination problem is compounded during post-training, when the model is incentivized to provide some sort of answer rather than admitting “I do not know.” Of course, an LLM does not really “know” anything but simply produces the token with the highest probability of fitting the sequence introduced by its human interlocutor.

Relying on a technology that can be wrong in unpredictable ways is obviously awkward, but hallucinations imply a more insidious issue for our current discussion. This higher-level concern is that the machine does not just not know whether its output is true or false, it also does not care; it simply optimizes its activity according to a set of developmental benchmarks for success. A disconcerting counterpoint to this recognition is that an LLM can estimate very accurately whether you do care! ChatGPT-3.5 could interpret human emotions from textual data, but 4.0 can use images of the human face to assess emotional state remarkably accurately. It can then simulate appropriate emotional understanding and sympathy, even though it cannot experience any emotion itself.

Interpretation of visual data leads us to computer perception of the immediate environment. Multimodal AI can rapidly analyze input in text, visual, and audio formats from a range of sensors, and output decisions about relevant tasks. This capacity implies that an entity can capture real-time information from its surroundings, including insight into human emotional states, and respond to this data in a directional manner.

Imagine an LLM-powered machine of human form: a robot. A robot can already employ cameras to record visual data and laser pulses to measure distances, build a 3D representation of its environment and locate itself in this system. It can identify classes of objects such as pedestrians or hazards, and decide how to respond, e.g. by navigating around them. Audio data can support this spatial process, as robots separate overlapping noise signals and triangulate each source precisely. Automatic speech recognition means that the robot can pick out your voice in a noisy environment, record and interpret what you are saying.

A robot’s interaction with objects is not limited to avoidance. It may use touch sensors that specify weight or density, and then identify the optimal way to grasp an object depending on shape and texture. Some robots can systematically tap or shake an unknown item and then leverage a set of pre-training objects to interpolate from the new acoustic data points to predict the objects’ likely identity. Environmental sensors allow actions like mapping the temperature of the robot or its environment, or detecting precipitation, which can induce appropriate maintenance or safety responses; your autonomous lawnmower will return home when it rains.

How Humans Encounter Nature

Watching a robot recoil from a hot surface, we might be tempted to think it feels pain like we do. However, as with LLM empathy, we have to remember that the machine is mimicking but not sharing our experience. An AI cannot feel as we do because it can only measure values on a gradient (e.g. low temperature–high temperature), whereas humans integrate data into a personal state, e.g., “I am hot.” We interpret our physical experience in an ongoing embodied emotional-psychological process.

This difference is not incidental. We are not disembodied minds that float above nature, but which presently happen to have bodies. The human person is a body-soul unity, a rational animal whose very animality is the precondition for our encounter with the world. It is precisely because we are embodied that we can know the world in the way Newman describes as “real,” rather than merely “notional”—a knowing that meets reality itself, not just ideas about it. The biblical tradition refers to this “real” knowledge with the verb yada, which can denote knowledge of facts but above all is a knowing that is intimate and experiential, even sexual (Adam, for instance, “knew” Eve—as a result of which she conceives a son in Genesis 4:1).

Embodied dialogue with the real world is at the heart of the phenomenological account expounded by thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What Merleau-Ponty called the “body-subject” is not an animated machine that might be recapitulated by AI, but an integrated element of the living and non-living matrix that constitutes the world. Our perception of objects outside ourselves is thus mediated through our physical and emotional capacities and states, such that what we come to know is a relational function of both object and subject. Strikingly, this phenomenological account of embodied knowing finds a clear resonance in the Church’s recent reflection on artificial intelligence and human cognition. As the Vatican’s 2025 AI treatise Antiqua et Nova underscores, this dynamic extends even to those experiences that are not intrinsically desirable: “So much can be learned from an illness, an embrace of reconciliation, and even a simple sunset,” to which it adds, “No device, working solely with data, can measure up to these and countless other experiences present in our lives.”

Here we arrive at a fundamental divergence between man and machine. A theme that has already been a mainstay of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV stresses that “access to data—however extensive—must never be confused with intelligence.” This, he explains, is because human knowing necessarily “involves the person’s openness to the ultimate questions of life and reflects an orientation toward the True and the Good.” Seizing upon the difference between knowledge of brute facts and authentic wisdom, Antiqua et Nova emphasizes that AI cannot possess this fuller knowledge precisely because it lacks a human body and human experiences. On the basis of these considerations, the document concludes that “AI should not be seen as an artificial form of human intelligence but as a product of it.” The implication for our environmental concerns is crucial, for possessing mere information about ecosystems, however vast, does not by itself amount to care for the creatures within them.

Community, Place, and Care

Characteristic embodiment and sensory interphase with the world locates humans as a relational component of specific ecosystems. We are necessarily local and our most evident activity in the world is to create places—a home for ourselves. Human place-making behavior is evident everywhere, from how we inhabit a set of seats for our family at Mass to our desire to find the perfect picnic spot on a hike. Within a few minutes, we start to develop a functioning living system with a comfy seat and a safe place for our water bottle. Each element of the new place acquires familiarity and meaning. Martin Heidegger has explored the way in which place-making can draw together previously disparate elements of an environment to create a locale.[2] His example is a bridge, which “gathers” what were simply two strips of ground, rendering them as opposing river banks, and initiates corresponding human movements, activities, or tasks. The locale allows for bounded spaces that can be settled, or dwelt in by people. Heidegger suggested that “Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the Earth,” and that “To build is in itself already to dwell.” Human knowledge of nature is therefore grounded not just at a GPS location, but in a place that carries emerging and profound personal and communal meaning.

What is more, man is not only a rational animal but also a social one. We encounter nature partly as members of a community embedded in a particular place. From mankind’s earliest days, our identity has been shaped by the places we inhabit and by the bonds forged through shared forms of work and responsibility. The verb “dwelling” incorporates habitual activities or tasks that occur over time and which characterize subsistence in a specific complex of landscape, weather, plants, and animals. Certain activities may be traditionally mentored and conducted by men or women, young or old members of a community. The anthropologist Tim Ingold considered that such place-based tasks are embedded in the “current of sociality,” creating a “taskscape” in which communal practices repeated in place and time establish well-trodden pathways in our memory and our culture, as well as in the land.[3] Places thus have meaning not merely because of topography but because they are woven into the fabric of life. When we truly inhabit a place, it creates bonds that are not interchangeable but thick with memory and meaning. Such place-based experiences of a community are recorded not as data points on a timeline but as narrative memory. Many traditional peoples codify this memory in rote stories which carry knowledge pertinent to both survival in a given place and to normative aspects of group behavior and identity.

The integration of community and place, task and time tends towards a psychological and emotional hinge point—the emergence of feelings of care for a shared home. Care essentially constitutes a desire to look after the place and people which are core to personal well-being. Notably, we care for what we know and from inside the system. Wendell Berry recognized that “there can be no such thing as a ‘global village.’ No matter how much one may love the world as whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.”[4] A disembodied AI can compile data but can belong to no community and inhabit no place. Where there is no belonging, there can be no genuine love or responsibility.

Stewardship

Human care is often specified as either an ethic comprising guidelines or principles, or a psychological motivation to certain behaviors. Care in this mode does not yet constitute stewardship, which we define as use of nature through sustainable practices oriented to the common good, and which requires appropriate agency, or capacity to act. The shift from care to stewardship action seems more seamless in relational constructs, where non-human nature can influence how it is experienced and cared for, and even be perceived to care reciprocally for the people that exist in rightly-ordered relationship with their broader ecosystem.

The latter, more phenomenological perspective, highlights that positive change is likely to propagate out from humans through the rest of nature. Conversely, it hints at potentially dire consequences in entrusting judgments about the care of creation to AIs which can never operate as embodied members of the food web. The Vatican grants that we can acknowledge a legitimate role for AI without collapsing the human vocation into the “technocratic paradigm” criticized by Pope Francis, which assumes that every ecological problem has a technological solution that depends on better data or more sophisticated tools. As Pope Francis teaches, machines have their place, but they cannot replace moral conversion, or a change of heart amongst people engaging with the rest of nature. The Argentine pontiff forcefully advocated “that we look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity” and that we reject the “myth of progress” that assumes “ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change.” Against this ideology, the Church teaches that such a mindset “must give way to a more holistic approach that respects the order of creation and promotes the integral good of the human person while safeguarding our common home.”

The biblical notion of covenantal reciprocity has been put forward by recent popes as a way to achieve just this sort of approach. From this perspective, animals and landscapes are not merely resources but extended family. They “speak” their needs by the very natures each uniquely possesses, setting moral limits on human action. An AI cannot enter such reciprocity because it lacks the capacity for genuine encounter. It has no history, no future, and knows no promise for the sake of which it acts. It may be able to select strategies for mitigating climate change or pollution reduction, but it cannot grasp the Catholic social doctrine of “intergenerational solidarity,” acting out of love for future descendants and for God’s creation. The Catholic social principle of subsidiarity is instructive here. AI may help process large-scale environmental data, but, because it lacks experience of particulars, it cannot replace the judgment best exercised within local communities—where people protect what they can see, touch, and remember. No dataset can substitute for the intimate affection born of long fidelity to place.

Conclusion: How Do We Avoid Being the Robots We Build?

In closing, Antiqua et Nova reminds us that AI presents both opportunities and challenges, and that “AI, like any technology, can be part of a conscious and responsible answer to humanity’s vocation to the good.” Indeed, as Pope Leo has stated specifically in relation to this field, “human invention springs from the creative capacity that God has entrusted to us,” and that technological innovation—AI included—can be a genuine “participation in the divine act of creation.”

The question, then, is not whether AI should exist, but how its development and use relate to the human vocation toward truth, goodness, and communion. In this context, the Church also stresses that its contribution is strictly instrumental, that it cannot replace the embodied intelligence, moral discernment, and interpersonal presence upon which authentic ecological stewardship depends.

But the risk is not merely that AI will fail to save the planet. As Pope Leo puts it, the urgent question of our age is “not merely what AI can do, but who we are becoming through the technologies we build.” As the modern world increasingly conditions us to experience reality through screens and curated media that present us with safe abstractions, the danger is that we become indistinguishable from the machines we have made.

The path forward is not to out-compute these machines but to out-love them: to return to the soil, the seasons, and the practices of re-embodiment. Whether it is hunting, fishing, gardening, keeping animals, foraging, hunting, walking without earbuds, or fasting and feasting in tune with the seasons, these habits strengthen the capacities for attention, gratitude, and restraint that make genuine stewardship possible.

Machines will not save creation. Only creatures who love can. And we humans love because we are embodied and vulnerable, embedded in stories and places and communities.

To avoid becoming the machines we have created, we must recover what they now and always will lack: attention, awe, joy, humility, courage, and sacrifice—and with them the capacity to receive the world as the gift that it is rather than mere material to be manipulated.

This leadership can manifest differently for different couples, but a very common feature is a husband sacrificing his time and comfort for the good of the family, taking on the burden of thankless but necessary household tasks. For other couples, it means the husband leading family prayer, while others might informally delegate the task of representing or speaking on behalf of the family to the husband also. For many couples, the husband’s leadership does not stretch to any type of decision-making or direction of the wife and/or children. Other couples again believe that making final decisions is in the remit of the husband’s leadership, but this occurs only very rarely if at all, and only when husband and wife have discussed the topic at length and genuinely cannot come to an agreement. In such cases, the husband’s decisions must always draw heavily on the important and valuable wisdom and experience of his wife. He should always make decisions with the good of the family in mind, and in many cases may ultimately settle on the position his wife advocates. The wife, for her part, should always submit to her husband’s leadership from a totally free and voluntary posture, from a position of trust that God and her husband have the family’s good in mind, and should always feel that her views have been heard and seriously considered by her husband. A wife should never feel pressured or coerced into accepting an outcome she does not agree with, but rather should trust in the unique complementary roles for husbands and wives, and that the leadership of the husband is in service of peace and harmony within the household, ensuring that all are loved and cared for. In this way, a wife has nothing to fear from her husband’s leadership: it is first and foremost a role of service to her, not of authoritarian rule. When and if she must follow his lead, or defer to him, she can use this as an opportunity for growth, or even embrace it as a release of pressure and responsibility, allowing her to focus on the needs of each individual within the household, while her husband focuses more on the good of the family as a whole.

This essay does not challenge the sincerity or moral seriousness of these positions, nor does it attempt to adjudicate what loving leadership would look like, in marriage or any other context, when clearly prescribed by Scripture. The question addressed here is narrower, but more fundamental: does the New Testament actually teach that husbands possess a leadership role—of any kind—within Christian marriage? The common underlying assumption is that it does, with any remaining debate limited to how that leadership should be exercised.

I contend that the assumption of male leadership itself deserves re-examination. When the relevant texts are read in their literary, grammatical, cultural, and theological contexts, a different picture emerges—one in which Scripture does not merely soften or reframe hierarchical authority from domination to love and service, but rather quietly yet deliberately fails to ground marriage in hierarchy at all.

I argue that what the New Testament consistently emphasizes is not male leadership transformed by love to a role of care and service, but the removal of the authority structures that defined marriage in the ancient world, and their replacement by a model of unity, mutuality, and shared participation in Christ. This claim may be strong, but it is not novel, nor is it made lightly. It arises from attending closely to what the texts actually say—and, just as importantly, to what they conspicuously and intentionally do not say.

In particular, I contend that the New Testament texts that discuss marriage, when juxtaposed against other well-known first-century texts that they reference, have an explicit, and stark, rejection of male authority. I argue that the Greek grammar of the “instructions” to wives to “submit” to their husbands does not fit with an interpretation of obedience. Finally, I explore the use of the word “head” when describing the man as “head of the wife,” which is far more likely to connote unity, mutuality and a levelling of status than leadership or authority.

First-Century Greco-Roman Household Codes

Any interpretation of New Testament teachings on marriage must begin with the social world they presuppose. First-century Greco-Roman society was structured around the paterfamilias, the male head of the household who exercised legal, economic, and often physical authority over wives, children, slaves, and dependents. This authority was not informal or symbolic, but was deeply embedded in law, custom, and moral philosophy and had genuine consequences for subordinates. Philosophers from Jewish and Gentile cultures alike wrote explicitly about this hierarchy with a common and recognizable structure: husbands ruled wives, parents ruled children and masters ruled slaves. These three relationships were discussed in turn. Aristotle states:

Household management falls into departments corresponding to the parts of which the household in its turn is composed; and the household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen.

Hence there are by nature various classes of rulers and ruled. For the free rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the child in a different way (Politics, Part III).

Philo uses the same format to discuss authority and ruling in households. Regarding marriage, he states:

Wives must be in servitude to their husbands, a servitude not imposed by violent ill-treatment but promoting obedience in all things (Hypothetica §7.3).

Josephus states:

The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed; for the authority has been given by God to the man (Against Apion, Book II §25).

Thus, when New Testament writers such as Paul and Peter adopted this recognizable form by addressing these three relationships in turn, they were not writing on a blank slate but were engaging a well-established structure whose primary function was to explain who ruled whom, and why. Early Christian audiences knew this structure intimately and would therefore have instantly recognized that the apostles were referencing and rewriting these pre-existing household codes. Their attention would be immediately drawn to how the Christian version deviates from, rather than conforms to, the prevailing socio-cultural norms. Pope St. John Paul II explicitly references this:

In the relationship between husband and wife the "subjection" is not one-sided but mutual.

In relation to the "old" this is evidently something "new": it is an innovation of the Gospel. We find various passages in which the apostolic writings express this innovation, even though they also communicate what is "old.”

The apostolic letters are addressed to people living in an environment marked by that same traditional way of thinking and acting. The "innovation" of Christ is a fact: it constitutes the unambiguous content of the evangelical message and is the result of the Redemption (Mulieris Dignitatem §24).

The exegetical focus therefore belongs on the “innovation of the Gospel”—the good news that departs from, rather than conforms to, “that same traditional way of thinking and acting.” This is where the New Testament writers begin to surprise.

Female “Submission”?

Despite operating within a genre defined by authority relations, the Christian household codes consistently avoid instructing husbands to rule, lead, command, or exercise authority over their wives. This absence is not subtle, and would have been greatly subversive, and conspicuous by its absence, to a first-century audience familiar with household structures and codes.

This omission is not because the New Testament writers lacked the requisite vocabulary. The Greek language had readily available terms for authority (exousia), ruling (archō) and leading (hēgeomai). These terms appear frequently elsewhere in the New Testament, including in discussions of church leadership and civil authority, as well as the Greco-Roman discussions of hierarchy in marriage referenced above. Their absence in Christian marital instruction is therefore not accidental: had Scripture intended to teach that husbands possess even a loving, servant-hearted form of leadership within marriage, their teachings on household management and marriage would have been the most obvious place to say so, yet none do.

Instead, the household code in Ephesians begins not with instructions to wives or husbands, but with a universal exhortation: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph 5:21). The Greek grammar is such that Eph 5:21 frames rather than merely introduces the instructions that follow, because verse 22 (“wives to your husbands”) contains no verb: it “borrows” the verb in verse 21. This grammatical detail has a simple but important implication: the submission from wife to husband is of the same nature as the submission that all Christians are called to live out, because the same verb is used.

Some modern scholars suggest that this verse be treated as a general heading, after which Paul delineates distinct patterns of submission appropriate to different roles, but this does not fit with the earliest interpretations of mutual submission. First Clement, for example, was written almost contemporaneously to Ephesians (circa 96 AD):

Let us take the body as an example. The head without the feet is nothing, likewise, the feet without the head are nothing. . . . All the members coalesce harmoniously and unite in mutual subjection, so that the whole body may be saved. So in our case let the whole body be saved in Christ Jesus, and let each of us be mutually subject to our neighbor (1 Clement 37:4-38:1, trans. Holmes).

Here, we see the head presented not as leader or authority, but as one part among many: the head without the feet is nothing just as the feet without the head are nothing. There is no sense here of subjection being unidirectional, with some parts of the body submitting to other parts only.

Similarly, in Ephesians 5:21, Paul cannot be describing a unidirectional leadership-obedience relationship, because such a relationship cannot be mutual. The submission of wives is therefore not a separate command to wives but is a specific instance of the mutual submission required of all believers, which either (and, in my view, most likely) does not include obedience at all, or (less likely, when considered alongside other texts that use the word hypotassō) refers to a general posture of obedience that all Christians are to have towards one another. This represents a radical departure from the prevailing Gentile understanding of wifely obedience towards husbands.

Moreover, the verb used is not the verb for obedience (hypakouō) that dominates Greco-Roman household codes, but rather hypotassō, which denotes voluntary self-giving rather than compliance. Furthermore, it is rendered in verse 24 in the middle voice. Most English translations render this verb in the imperative, but this is not accurate. Indeed, through the Ephesians 5 household code, not a single verse is issued in the imperative to women. Instead, the references to submitting to (verse 24) or respecting (verse 33) husbands are phrased descriptively.

Patristic interpretation supports this reading. The earliest treatment of this passage is from Origen. Amoris Laetitia §154). Paul encourages his sisters to live out their subordinated position “as to the Lord,” thus granting them what little agency is available to them in their socially inferior position.

The Metaphorical Use of “Head”

The remaining pillar of the leadership interpretation is the metaphor of the husband as “head” (kephalē) of the wife. It is often assumed—almost reflexively—that “head” means “leader” or “authority.” This assumption however does not sit comfortably with the linguistic evidence. Unlike Hebrew, Latin, and contemporary English, the Koine Greek word for head, kephalē, does not ordinarily have the metaphorical interpretation of ruler or leader. Indeed, when the Septuagint translators encountered the Hebrew word rosh (head) being used in a metaphorical context to convey authority, they overwhelmingly translated it using Greek terms that explicitly conveyed rule (archōn, hēgoumenos) with no reference to the word kephalē. Thus the Septuagint translators chose words that conveyed the literal meaning of ruler or leader rather than using the word “head” as a metaphor about 95% of the time. Paul himself uses such terms elsewhere when authority is his concern, rendering it unlikely that he would choose a Greek word that so rarely had the connotation of “leader” to demonstrate leadership of husbands.

Instead, the metaphor of head and body, as Paul employs it, consistently emphasizes unity, nourishment, and shared life. In Ephesians 4, Christ as head is the one “from whom the whole body . . . builds itself up in love.” Authority is not in view; vitality is.

Even in Ephesians 5, Christ is described not as ruler but as “savior of the body.” The analogy is grounded in what the head does for the body, not what the body owes to the head. As noted above, husbands are not once told anywhere in the New Testament to lead or direct their wives: the only instruction to husbands, phrased in the imperative voice, is to love, not lead. This matters because many defenders of male headship rightly stress that Christ’s authority is exercised through self-giving love. But Paul’s analogy does not move from Christ’s authority to the husband’s authority. It moves from Christ’s self-giving that creates unity to the husband’s self-giving that sustains unity. The text does not employ an intervening category of leadership.

Other New Testament instances of the word kephalē, when used in a metaphorical sense, support this reading. In the cases of Matt 21:42, Mark 12:10, Luke 20:17, Acts 4:11 and 1 Peter 2:7, which describe Jesus as a “keystone,” a leadership interpretation does not fit at all—stones do not lead or exercise authority over other stones. In Col 2:19, as in Eph 4:15, the “head” is the source of life, growth, and unity, with no sense of leadership in view. In the remaining instances of kephalē as metaphor (1 Cor 11:3, Eph 1:22, Eph 5:23, Col 1:18 and Col 2:10), leadership is a possible interpretation, but a far more likely one is that of first in status (which also fits perfectly with the “keystone” texts). Note that status does not imply authority: for example, a Greek slave charged with caring for a Roman official’s son would have had authority over the son, but the son would have been of higher status than the slave. Throughout the Pauline epistles, the Head, who is of higher status, empties himself of that status, assumes the lowest status, joins himself to the Body, and raises the Body to his higher status and glory. The greatest becomes the least so the least can become the greatest, just as the “keystone” texts show.

In other words, New Testament uses of the word kephalē reference the theological concept of theosis. Christ lowers himself from his Divine Status to that of his lowly Bride, the Church, joins his Bride to himself in a one flesh union, and elevates her to his higher status and glory. Husbands are to do likewise: instead of being instructed to exercise their positions of higher social status by leading those under them, even via loving, servant-hearted leadership, they are instead to empty themselves of their higher status and raise those of lower status, just as Christ did for his Bride.

The structure of Ephesians 5 reinforces this interpretation. The passage is arranged chiastically, with its theological climax at the line “that he might present the church to himself in splendor.” This is the language of unification and theosis. Christ gives himself so that the Church may share in his glory. Marriage, in this account, is not organized around authority and submission but around a shared movement toward unity and equal status in Christ.

This reading aligns seamlessly with Paul’s broader theology (see for example Eph 2:14, Gal 3:28, Phil 2:6-11, Phil 3:20-21). This theological concept of theosis is not merely an abstract spiritual claim disconnected from daily life, but inspires and motivates a concrete reordering of power and hierarchical relationships. Christian marriage becomes one of the primary sites of this reordering.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the content of this article has gone some way to showing that the New Testament household codes quite clearly reject male leadership, especially when read in the context and literary techniques of the time. However, a reader might still question whether the description of female submission to men (e.g. Eph 5:24 and 33) still applies today.

This is, of course, a possible interpretation, but another possible interpretation is that Paul is merely advising submission to the power structures of Gentile culture rather than urging Christians to overthrow those structures. I believe this interpretation to be far more likely than that of a prescription of continual female submission, for three reasons. The first is the lack of any reference to male leadership: telling wives to submit to husbands who have no leadership role is puzzling. Second, Paul’s pastoral strategy regarding first-century power structures closely follows that laid down by Jesus: Jesus advised submission to Jewish religious and Gentile civil authorities, rather than urging Christians to overthrow existing social structures. Given the precarious position of the fledgling Christian churches, teaching Christians to live within, without being defined by, existing power structures was a prudent move.

Finally, the Church currently interprets these passages via mutual submission, explicitly repudiating unidirectional submission from wives to husbands. Pope John Paul II draws a clear analogy here with Paul’s treatment of slavery. Paul instructs slaves to obey their masters, yet the Church eventually recognized slavery as incompatible with the Gospel. John Paul notes that similarly, the Gospel’s call to mutual subjection unfolds historically, challenging each generation anew.

The awareness that in marriage there is mutual “subjection of the spouses out of reverence for Christ," and not just that of the wife to the husband, must gradually establish itself in hearts, consciences, behavior and customs. This is a call which from that time onwards, does not cease to challenge succeeding generations; it is a call which people have to accept ever anew. Saint Paul not only wrote: “In Christ Jesus . . . there is no more man or woman," but also wrote: “There is no more slave or freeman.” Yet how many generations were needed for such a principle to be realized in the history of humanity through the abolition of slavery! And what is one to say of the many forms of slavery to which individuals and peoples are subjected, which have not yet disappeared from history? (MD §24).

The fact that Jesus and Paul accommodated certain social realities does not mean either codified them as a time-transcendent norm. John Paul argues that such accommodations give way in the fullness of time to the abolition of slavery and the realization of marriage characterized by mutual submission, an icon of theosis for the whole Christian community. Christian marriage therefore offers something more demanding and more radical than servant-leadership: a vision of marriage stripped of hierarchical authority, grounded in mutual self-giving, and oriented toward unity in Christ. Love is not the mode of leadership; love replaces leadership as the defining category.

For readers committed to Scripture, this conclusion is not a threat but an invitation—to let the text speak on its own terms, even when it unsettles long-held assumptions. The question is not whether loving leadership can be made palatable, or even whether relationships of leadership and obedience are compatible with Christian living. Nothing in this reading precludes couples from freely choosing patterns of responsibility that resemble or are based on leadership. My claim is simply that such patterns are prudential judgments rather than scriptural requirements. Individual couples should structure their marriages and families in a way that best serves their needs, paying due heed to socio-cultural norms and expectations. The Church allows couples freedom in how they delegate tasks, care, service and decision-making, and this freedom can be embraced in good conscience by the faithful.

Beauty is a gift from God that feeds the soul. Indeed, as recent Church teaching has frequently reminded us, beauty is a “way to God,” and on this journey Jesus is our guide. Being a veiled encounter with God, beauty brings us up short, naturally calling forth delight, wonder, and admiration. More than an instrument, beauty is a place of arrival. God’s gifts of beauty—glimpsed in the here and now—refresh us, inspire us, and spur us on. In our pastoral outreach, we should therefore not overlook its power to attract and rejuvenate.

A Focal Point of Recent Church Teaching

From Vatican II onward, Church teaching has consistently pointed to the importance of beauty for the spiritual life. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Sacred Constitution on the Liturgy (1963), observes that sacred arts “are oriented toward the infinite beauty of God, which they attempt in some way to portray by the work of human hands” (122). In the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1993), we read: “All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures—their truth, their goodness, their beauty—all reflect the infinite perfection of God” (41).

 Pope John Paul II subsequently pointed to the relationship between beauty, truth, and goodness in Fides et Ratio (1998) and considered the relationship between God’s creative power and the work of human artists in his (1999) “Letter to Artists.” Pope Benedict XVI, in 2006, commissioned his Pontifical Council for Culture to consider the pastoral implications flowing from the via pulchritudinis (“way of beauty” to God), and later meditated on beauty in talks he gave in 2009 and 2012. More recently, Pope Francis has repeatedly reminded us that God is beautiful, God’s creation is beautiful, life with Christ is beautiful, and our proclamation of Christ should be beautiful as well. He put it succinctly in Evangelii Gaudium §167 (2013):

Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendor and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. . . . A formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith.

Since then, the new (2020) Directory for Catechesis (108) has elaborated: “In order to reach the human heart the proclamation of the Risen One must shine forth with goodness, truth, and beauty. In this sense, it is necessary that every form of catechesis attend to the ‘way of beauty.’ . . . All beauty can be a path that helps lead to the encounter with God”

Beauty in the Bible

The “way of beauty” is not, however, a new concept for the Church. It is firmly rooted in the Bible. From the Old Testament we learn that God is both beautiful (“clothed with majesty and glory, robed in light” [Psalm 104:1-2]) and the source of all beauty (Wisdom 13:1-5). Humankind, created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27), reflects God’s beauty. So too, according to Scripture, does the whole of creation (whose splendors are sung in many a psalm). The trees in God’s garden are not only good for food, they are also “delightful to look at” (Genesis 2:9). God’s beauty shines forth from Mt. Zion, “perfect in beauty” (Psalm 50:2), and the grandeur of Solomon’s Temple shows that human artistry can pay fitting tribute to God’s majesty (Kings 6-8). In the poetic Song of Songs, we see how beauty stirs the love between the Lord and his people. This biblical book foresees Christ’s beauty in the beloved, who “comes forth like the dawn, as beautiful as the moon, as resplendent as the sun” (6:10).

In the New Testament, all insights into beauty converge in the encounter with Jesus Christ, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), who is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). The glory of God shines on his face (2 Corinthians 4:6). Interestingly enough, Christ’s beauty does not necessarily derive from his physical appearance. Though we might expect the incarnate Son of God to be, beyond dispute, the handsomest man who ever lived, Scripture is surprisingly silent on the matter of Jesus’s looks. The New Testament accounts say little about them, and two Old Testament verses commonly applied to him seem to contradict one another. One, Psalm 45:3, says: “You are the most handsome of men; fair speech has graced your lips, for God has blessed you forever.” Whereas the other, Isaiah 53:2, says: “He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, no beauty to draw us to him. He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, knowing pain, like one from whom you turn your face.”

St. Augustine resolves this tension by locating the source of Christ’s loveliness in God’s love, which shines through Jesus (see Homily IX on the First Epistle of John). Love, Augustine says, is “the beauty of the soul.” God’s love is transformative. It burns away the ugliness of sin. The more we dwell in God’s love, the more we come to resemble God, who is love, and perfectly lovely.

Christ as our Guide on the Way of Beauty

On the “way of beauty” to God, Jesus serves as our guide, example, and source of grace. He (1) attunes our senses to God’s beauty; (2) proposes a beautiful vision of human fulfillment (God’s kingdom); (3) demonstrates how to live beautifully; and (4) gives us the grace we need to walk this path to the end.

Before speaking more specifically of how Jesus does all of this, a clarification is in order. For good reason, the Christian tradition has long underscored the essential relationship between beauty, truth, and goodness. This classical-philosophical notion (Plato, Aristotle), developed theologically by St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, Denys the Areopagite, and more recently Hans Urs von Balthasar, holds that beauty is a property of being that is inseparably linked to truth and goodness, which, too, are properties of being. Together goodness, truth, and beauty (collectively known as the “transcendentals”) help us to live “life on a higher plane” (as Evangelii Gaudium §10 puts it). They facilitate our ascent to God (“The Good, the True, and the Beautiful”), who is the eternal source and the ultimate fulfillment of all that is. Drawing closer to God enables us to share ever more in the fullness of God’s life and being. Jesus said, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). St. Paul said, in God we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). And St. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human person fully alive.”

Note that in this scheme, beauty never stands detached from truth and goodness. Neither a lie nor an evil act is ever truly beautiful, regardless of how it may appear at first. On the other hand, good and true things are always in some deep way beautiful.

To picture the ascent to God, we might recall Jacob’s dream of the ladder that rests on the ground and rises to the heavens (Genesis 28:10-22). On this ladder we find God’s messengers going up and down. Applying this image to the spiritual life, observe how at some points in our life we seem to be close to God and very much alive—happy, at peace, and more fully the person we are called to be—but at others, sadly, not so much (as when our conscience is troubled, or we feel listless, depressed, or even dead inside). We may ascend or descend on this spiritual ladder-of-being, but ideally we draw near to God on high—to heaven, where we share fully in God’s fullness of being—following the path of Jesus in his Ascension. Attesting to the beauty of this Journeyer and his journey is the reaction of the apostles as they watch him ascend into heaven. Though he has already vanished, they cannot help but stare (Acts 1:11). This is what true beauty does. It surprises and astonishes us. We find it hard to look away.

Beauty, truth, and goodness help us to follow Jesus in this ascent. Recalling the image of the ladder, we might think of goodness and truth as the side rails, and beauty as the rungs. Better yet, we may see Jesus himself as the ladder, for he is the “way” that leads to heaven (John 14:6). St. Bonaventure says as much in his Journey of the Mind to God (ch. 4):

If a man falls into a pit, he will lie there until someone reaches down to help him out. In the same way, it was impossible for men to rise completely from the pit of the senses to the true seeing of themselves, and, within themselves, of the Eternal Truth, until that Truth, assuming human nature in the Person of Christ, became unto them a ladder, restoring the first ladder broken by Adam.

Jesus has come down from heaven to help us rise to eternal life. In this salvific work he has enlisted beauty, truth, and goodness—so vivid in his own life—to our benefit. The Catechism (319) affirms this point when it says: “God created the world to show forth and communicate his glory. That his creatures should share in his truth, goodness, and beauty—this is the glory for which God created them.” Whenever we are in the presence of goodness, truth, and beauty, we get a taste of how God, and life with God, is. These transcendentals inspire us and spur us on, offering a foretaste of future fulfillment.

Let us consider now more specifically how Jesus facilitates our ascent.

Attuning the Senses to God’s Beauty

One way Jesus aids our progress is by attuning our senses to God’s beauty. Or rather, as St. Bonaventure puts it: he helps us “recover our spiritual senses of hearing and sight,” which have been impaired by sin. In our fallen world, self-absorption and our quickness to judge, among other things, distort our vision. We see the splinter in our brother’s eye rather than the beam in our own (Matt 7:1-5), and we fail to see the beauty of loving service and abandonment to God (Luke 7:36-47; John 13:5-8). Jesus warns of blind guides (Matt 15:14; Luke 6:39) and deafness to God’s music (Matt 11:16-17).

In the course of his ministry, Jesus opens his followers’ eyes and ears, both literally and figuratively. He helps them to “put on the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). When he first calls his disciples, he says, “Come, and you will see” (John 1:39). Besides showing God’s power to heal physical ailments (Matt 11:5-6), Jesus also reveals the depth of reality that lies beyond the physical. During the Sermon on the Mount, he draws attention to the birds of the sky and the splendor of wildflowers, then observes that God provides for these and for his children as well (Matt 5:27-30). When a widow puts two coins in the temple treasury, Jesus illuminates the beauty of her gesture, which testifies to wholehearted faith (Mark 12:41-44). Jesus repeatedly draws attention to the worthiness of those—like Zacchaeus, the adulterous women, people with leprosy—whom others have excluded or condemned. Sent to us as the “light of the world” (John 8:12), Jesus casts his light so that we may see life clearly. His words and deeds expose God’s kingdom, present in our midst. Like Jacob, we wake to realize: “Truly the Lord is in this spot, although I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16). At times, arriving at clear perception is slow and difficult. Jesus’s disciples, for example, have trouble accepting his death as good and beautiful, and they are slow to recognize the risen Lord (Luke 24:16, 37).

Proposing a Beautiful Vision of Human Fulfillment

Beauty attracts, it inspires us, it urges us on. Countless lovers, filled with the image of their beloved, have turned their life upside down in a quest to win the favor of the one they adore. Countless revolutionaries have set out to make a more perfect world, energized by an inner vision of heroism and of the wonderful society they intend to build. Jesus, in his own, far more comprehensive way, has set before humanity a vision of fulfillment that has never failed to inspire. In this way, too, he aids us as we travel the via pulchritudinis. He has brought “good news,” a captivating vision of our shared human life brought to fruition. Jesus uses various terms to speak of this fulfillment, including “God’s kingdom,” “eternal life,” and “heaven.”

He sketches it at the very start of his public ministry (see the Beatitudes) and proclaims it even in his dying words on the cross (“I assure you: this day you will be with me in paradise” [Luke 23:43]). It is a vision of what life looks like when God’s love prevails. When that happens, the blind recover their sight, the deaf hear, the sick are healed, the sorrowing are consoled, and the dead are raised to life. Those who are persecuted for the sake of holiness receive their reward in heaven (Matt 5:1-12; 11:4-6). We learn that those who believe in Christ will have eternal life (John 3:16). The Book of Revelation (chapter 21) puts the capstone on Christ’s preaching, showing the “new heavens and new earth” he has come to bring. In this “new Jerusalem,” “beautiful as a bride,” there are no tears, death, mourning, or crying out in pain. Christ is enthroned and “the former world has passed away.”

Demonstrating How to Live Beautifully

Besides attuning our senses to God and proposing a marvelous vision of fulfillment, Jesus also serves us along the “way of beauty” by demonstrating how to live beautifully. He shows us what a human life fully attuned to God looks like concretely.

The key to this attunement is prayer. This is what enables Jesus to live in harmony with the will of God, and us in turn as well. In Luke’s Gospel we see him, “full of the Holy Spirit,” led by the Spirit into the wilderness. There, he refuses the devil’s deceptive vision of what our modern world calls “the good life” (a life of immediate satisfaction, personal power, and self-aggrandizement) in favor of alignment with God’s will. Repeatedly thereafter we find Jesus, in the course of his public ministry, turning to God in prayer (Luke 5:16; 6:12; 9:28; 22:41).

Note that the power of Jesus’s attractiveness arises not so much from his eloquence and charisma—though he certainly captivated crowds with his stories and sayings—as from his fidelity to God, who is good and true. Jesus’s will is conformed to the Father’s, and his deeds match his words. His life is thus well-ordered and harmonious. Rather than trying to cut a beautiful figure (focusing on beauty in isolation), Jesus concerns himself with doing God’s will, which automatically leads to true and good works. Truth and goodness, says the Catechism (§2500), are beautiful in and of themselves.

As Jesus, the “pioneer of our salvation” (Hebrews 2:10), proceeds us on the pathway of life, he shows us what it means to be human, and how to truly live well (Gaudium et Spes §22). At the heart of his incarnation of beauty is a mysterious revelation: we must die in order to live. The egoistic self must let go of itself in loving service. It must, ever more in the course of a lifetime, open itself to God and neighbor. This surrender is what makes human life truly beautiful. In the Bible, we see it depicted in an array of iconic images: Jesus feeding the crowd, Jesus welcoming sinners, Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.

Giving us the Grace We Need

We see the beauty of Jesus’s humble service most powerfully in his death on the cross. Paradoxically, the sight of his wounded body letting go of life fascinates and attracts us. Jesus’s willful acceptance of his death seals his beauty, for thus does he complete his mission and reveal the depth of God’s love. The truly beautiful life, he shows, is lived beautifully all the way to the end.

For most of us, the idea of self-surrender is a scary idea, especially when it involves actual physical suffering and death. It is one thing to acknowledge the beauty of another’s sacrificial act on our behalf, but how does one find the courage to die for the sake of others oneself? Is “living beautifully” (in the deep sense) reserved for the precious few—the saints, the heroes of the faith?

The answer is no, this calling is not for the few. Everyone is called to live his or her life beautifully (that is, to be a saint.) But we are right in acknowledging that living beautifully is not a given. We do not necessarily pursue the good. We are not automatically honest and true. We have to choose these things, we have to commit to them. The beauty of our life is to some degree a given, for we are made in God’s image, but it only comes fully into its own (shining ever more brightly) when we cooperate with God’s plan. What this plan involves in practice is accepting and sharing God’s love, regardless of the cost.

Here, then, is one more way that Jesus helps us to follow the via pulchritudinis. By giving us his Spirit, Jesus supplies the grace we need to set out and to persevere. The Holy Spirit pours out God’s love in our hearts, and this love drives out fear. The Spirit emboldens us, prays through us, gives us the words we need, and points the way. More than a wise moral exemplar, Jesus is the Son of God, the Word through whom all things were made, the Alpha and the Omega. For love of us, he has emptied himself. Out of love, he leads us safely through death into the fullness of life. Through his Spirit, Jesus stays with us always (Matt 28:20), enabling us to become fully the person God had in mind when he made us (Gaudete et Exsultate §32).

The Saving Power of Beauty

Our world needs the beauty the Church has to bring. Max Weber (and Charles Taylor after him) has noted the “disenchantment” that characterizes modern times. Without faith in God we overlook the wondrousness of life itself and the happy high road that beckons. Many find their lives lacking in luster and touched by despair. Goodness appears unattainable, and truth and beauty seem to be nothing more than the limited perspectives of individuals. Christ, however, wants to open our eyes, that we may see and rejoice in the wonders God does, and travel alongside him on the road to heaven. With Christ, we discern God’s design in nature, his loveliness in the afflicted, and “seeds of His word” in other beliefs and cultures (Gaudium et Spes §62).

When we cling to the Lord, even defeat and suffering reveal beauty. Often I have found this to be true in my own life. During times when goodness and truth seemed absent, I have nonetheless found saving consolation in the resilience of shattered people, in the beauty of a bit of music, in the stupendous vastness of the stars. Dostoyevsky said, “The world will be saved by beauty.” In fact, this salvation has already arrived. May our senses be attuned to the Beautiful One who has brought it!

It is as Rose Macaulay said about ancient ruins: there is pleasure in them. “The human race is, and has always been, ruin-minded,” she wrote. Ruins are, she argued, an “eternal symbol” for the world-weariness, the yearning, the malaise, the nostalgia, the angst and sickness of the human soul.[1] They are fractured fragments of the whole, broken testaments of a whole beauty we cannot help but seek.[2] I think that is correct.

Maybe not for the modern tourist, the tourist who is but one customer among millions, that twentieth-century invention, doing things to do things and seeing things to see things. He or she, and I often count myself here, suffers from what Giorgio Agamben called the “destruction of experience.”[3] Robert Hughes called it the “itinerary of the mass tourist spectacle,” which signals a “kind of living death for high culture.”[4] If you have ever crammed into a hot museum, passively herded along a preset path with a thousand other people, you know what I mean.

What Agamben said was that when visiting “the great wonders of the world . . . the overwhelming majority of people have no wish to experience it, preferring instead that the camera should.”[5] What is absent from modern tourism, he argued, is immediacy, the reality of the world now encountered as ruins which one now visits as a ticketed tourist. The mystery, the narrative of the place, is no longer accessible as experience. It is not a quest that tourists are on, Agamben said, but something else. The ancients made their way to Rome for different reasons.

That is, when visiting the Roman Forum, or ruins like it, imagination is required, the sort of imagination that is not make-believe but rather mystical, the sort of imagination by which one comes to understand that one in fact belongs to the ruins one has come to see, that the story of the place is really one’s own. This is to make one’s way to Rome more like the ancients did, to experience the place, to be subject to it.

Which is more than simply knowing the history of a place. To imagine the triumph of Pompey, the violence of Clodius, the intrigue of that last scandalous Lupercalia just prior to Caesar’s assassination: all that history helps the place come alive, but I am talking about something in fact deeper, something which brings the pleasure of ancient ruins within our experience, seeing it as part of our fears and longings. I am talking about what Russell Kirk meant when he wrote, “Old Rome fell, but did not die.”

“All the way from the Roman Republic to the American Republic, a continuity runs,” Kirk wrote.[6] He borrowed Simone Weil’s image, talking about the “roots” of American order. He was certainly talking about history, knowing history; yet more importantly, he was talking about how one relates to history. He understood that America “participates” in civilization, and that if we are to continue the American project, our understanding of history must form our character and guide our thinking and our actions. And everything is at stake, he suggested:

Lacking a knowledge of how we arrived where we stand today, lacking that deeper love of country which is nurtured by a knowledge of the past, lacking the apprehension that we all take part in a great historical continuity—why, a people so deprived will not dare much, sacrifice much, or take long views. With them creature comforts will be everything; yet, historical consciousness wanting, in the long run they must lose their creature comforts too.[7]

Clearly, by now it is plain that I am talking about something like a secular communion with the past or at least a quite strong account of continuity. Which I guess could be described as a conservative position; one thinks here of some recent civic education projects or the past silly noms de plume of a few conservative thinkers. But that is not exclusively a conservative position. I am not talking here about what Laura K. Field calls, perhaps too reductively, an “Ideas First” approach that ignores the chaotic reality of history.[8] Hegel’s Geist comes closer to it, but that is getting too philosophical; I want to avoid that.

But this is where Cicero enters the discussion, today’s discussion; it is how he comes in, by means of the secular communion we share. That I should turn to Cicero is nothing special or new; if anything, it is predictable. Even Christians for centuries have learned from Cicero, sometimes feeling guilty doing so. Saint Jerome, for instance, famously dreamed that he would be judged and damned a Ciceronian and not a Christian; he was tormented by the “flame of conscience” thinking how much he had learned from him.[9] Saint Augustine called him the “founder of Roman eloquence;” yet he also said that although Cicero’s writing is to be admired, the inner spirit of his words is not.[10]

Nonetheless, they all continued to read him, to learn from him, to borrow and steal from him. And that, of course, is exactly what Cicero intended. It is why toward the end of his life, as Caesar was slowly killing the Republic, he took to writing philosophy. He wanted to hide something of value among the ruins of the Republic.[11]

Yet Cicero comes to mind these days not merely because of his traditional fame. Rather, it is also because of a growing fear many of us have that his time rhymes with ours. One should no doubt be careful with parallels and analogies; history can be blinding as well as illuminating. Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid making unnerving comparisons between the slow decay and final collapse of the Roman Republic and the cultural and political tensions and aberrations of our own day. Cicero, that is, haunts us these days like a warning ghost.

Consider the economic forces and class conflicts which slowly strangled republican Rome. It was a slow death. After the devastation of the Second Punic War, small farms were gradually replaced by large estates, managed and run by an increasing force of slave labor displacing free labor; here is the beginning of the tensions that would slowly come to blood in the failed reforms of the Gracchi.[12] These tensions were between rich and poor, the optimates and the populares, and they would in time render the whole body politic vulnerable to demagoguery. Enter here the great and fearful generals of the late Republic: Sulla, Pompey, Caesar.[13]

Add to this the moral decline which Cato the Elder early lamented and the rise of immoral men like Clodius; during the late Republic the mos maiorum was an ideal at the same time idolized and disregarded and twisted. The moral and religious frame of the Republic collapsed; words no longer meant what they used to mean. No one by Cicero’s time put much store anymore in the words of the Sibylline Books. Most saw right through the superstitions that had once held them all together; Roman religion had become a hollow thing, a sort of zombie religion. Yet they did not know what to do with their disenchantment.

And then there was the bad polity of the Republic. Executive power was too fragmented, too dispersed. It was chaos, too many checks and hardly any balance. Political forces at times were too conservative, too resistant to reform.[14] When the demagogues finally arrived on the scene, generals whose soldiers were loyal to them and not the people or the Senate, the frail Republican political order was incapable of withstanding the populism and gangsterism of the likes of Caesar. “For pity’s sake, what is this voluntary slavery?” Cicero asked his fellow senators.[15] Yet, by the time he asked the question, the Republic was already dead. As the historian F. R. Cowell put it, “It was Cicero’s fate to be on the bridge when the Republican ship of State went down to irretrievable ruin.”[16] There was nothing he could do. All that remained was the violent birth of the Augustan age which Cicero would not live to see.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe Cicero’s time does not rhyme with ours. Maybe it is just the media I consume. That is the problem living in a post-truth world: half of you will think me truthful and brave, the other half will consider me deluded. As Orwell said almost a century ago, “the very concept of truth is fading out of the world.”[17] What would he say now? Considering today’s technology, what Maria Ressa called the “silent nuclear holocaust in our information system,” how can we get together to make any kind of judgement?[18] I do not know. Anyway, I do not want to convince you that my fearful reading of Roman history is correct. I just want to suggest that it might be.

Which is why Cicero’s words sound like a warning, words Augustine quoted, words lamenting the moral and political decline of Rome. As he wrote in the Republic:

Long before living memory our ancestral way of life produced outstanding men, and those excellent men preserved the old way of life and the institutions of their forefathers. Our generation, however, after inheriting our political organization like a magnificent picture now fading with age, not only neglected to restore its original colors but did not even bother to ensure that it retained its basic form and, as it were, its faintest outlines.

We should note at this point that Cicero was a vain man, grotesque at times, an imperfect politician who did not win the games he played. Woven into these words are class insecurity, compromised principle, wounded pride, and an imaginary and political valorization of the past, a kind of rhetoric some of us recognize today. But still there is truth in it, the truth, as he said, that “it is not by some accident . . . that we are left with the name of the Republic, having long since lost its substance.”[19] That is, for all his vanity, Cicero was nonetheless right to see the collapse of the Republic as first a moral collapse.

But if our time might be like his, if ours also is an age of moral and political collapse, is it not best to find some escape? Would it not be better to get off the grid? Would it not be better to scorn all politicians and reject all politics, maybe contemplate God in peace in a cave? Cicero here says no; “let us hold that course which has always been followed by the best men, ignoring the bugle for retreat,” he wrote at the beginning of the Republic.[20] And this undoubtedly is right. But here also is precisely where Cicero’s moral imagination is most limited, and here is where, at least for Christians, Cicero offers a dangerous temptation.

In 46 BC Cicero wrote the dialogue Brutus, a long history of rhetoric. It was meant, against a revival of Atticism, to be a defense of his own oratorical style.[21] But it was also a defense of eloquence itself, a defense of its role in the Republic.

The Roman Forum was “robbed and bereft of that finished eloquence worthy of the ears of Rome or even of Greece,” Cicero says at the beginning of the dialogue. Which is a dangerous tragedy, he said, because eloquence is one of the “weapons which are the peculiar and proper resource of a leader in the commonwealth and of a civilized and law-abiding state.”[22] Good oratory mattered to the state, the kind of oratory that was comprised of both eloquence and wisdom. For Cicero rhetoric was a moral art; it mattered the kind of person the speaker was, ethos mattered. Cicero was of course simply following Aristotle here.[23]

Cicero had since his youth underlined rhetoric’s importance to the state, that wisdom without eloquence “does too little” and that “eloquence without wisdom . . . is never helpful.” Cicero long warned of the danger of immoral eloquence, the kind of eloquence bereft of wisdom, that it has the capacity to “corrupt cities and undermine the lives of men.” Such is why the study of philosophy is necessary, the kind of philosophical study that makes a person moral, because “whenever rash and audacious men had taken the helm of the ship of state great and disastrous wrecks occurred.”[24]

But how are we to assess Cicero’s appeal for eloquence and wisdom? Did it do him well? One could say it is what got him killed, especially his ruthless speeches against Mark Antony. His eloquence gave him as many enemies as friends. His last words to his executioner were, “at least make sure you cut off my head properly.” When his head and hands were taken back to the Forum, just before they were nailed to the Rostra, Antony’s wife, Fulvia, set his head in her lap and stuck hairpins in his tongue.[25] It was a grotesque and ignoble end but also a symbol of what was already true of Republican Rome, that it was doomed before Cicero ever opened his mouth. Even his most inspiring words were arguably only a eulogy. All his eloquence and wisdom were too little and too late.

So, what are we to do with Cicero’s call to eloquence? I ask this question as a Christian. The Catholic tradition would certainly take an Augustinian view that the Christian “makes use of earthly peace.”[26] And rhetorically that looks like the practice of bearing witness to the common good, at best avoiding the grotesque immoralities of culture wars and partisan politics. Thomas Bushlack’s Politics for a Pilgrim Church sketches out just such public rhetoric. Maintaining, he says, a proper distinction between nature and grace “provides the necessary tools for Christian engagement in public deliberation about the good with the kind of humility and solidarity that such a task requires.”[27] This, I take it, is a conventionally Catholic view.

But is that what comes to mind when we think of Christian rhetoric in today’s America? Do we, like Mary Ann Glendon, think of the luminaries of “the Forum and the tower,” people like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Eleanor Roosevelt?[28] Or do we more think of the “illiberal renaissance” which Laura K. Field tries to describe in her book Furious Minds?[29] Do we not think of Protestant Christian Nationalists and Catholic integralists? Do we not immediately think of podcasters and YouTubers? Do we not think of people like Bishop Barron and Taylor Marshall, Robert Jeffress, Paula White, Doug Wilson, Joel Webbon and Allie Beth Stuckey? Do we not think of the late Charlie Kirk and J. D. Vance? Do we also not think of the Christian voices of liberal resistance? Do we not think of people like James Martin, Shane Claiborne, Anne Lamott and others? Are any of these people good examples of Christian eloquence and wisdom? Are any of them the rightful Christian heirs of Cicero?

Or is the rhetorical task of the Christian not at all to seek cultural or political power but simply to offer the world “God’s faithful presence” embodied in the Church? This is James Davison Hunter’s argument. It is an argument like the one Jacques Ellul made decades ago.[30] Without giving in to what Hunter says is the perfectionism and escapist dualism of the neo-Anabaptist thinking of people like John Howard Yoder, he argues that genuine Christian rhetoric “begins when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, is embodied in us, is enacted through us.” That is how, more effectively, “trust is forged between the word spoken and the reality to which it speaks.”[31] That is, integrity is essential to Christian rhetoric, Hunter argues. Seeking to beat the world at its own Machiavellian game is impossible; it just makes Christians into hypocrites. It ruins evangelism. Better, Hunter says, to offer the world the simple gift of Christian presence. Such a position, however, assumes the good graces of a liberal political order, an assumption it might not be wise much longer to make as such order breaks down.

But again, is any of this truly Christian eloquence? That is precisely what I am not so sure of. Well-intentioned, well-produced, well-reasoned, theologically orthodox, today much of the “content” which Christians create across various media is certainly quite good on its own terms, but that alone does not make it Christian.

For it seems that whether it begins from a sophisticated distinction between nature and grace or a bad reading of Romans 13 or from the desire to remain a silent partner in the liberal order, the results are similar. The conclusion is that there is an idiom appropriate to the Christian that is not entirely Christian, that there is necessarily a Christian rhetoric that is not entirely kerygmatic. But is that right?

When Paul wrote to Christians in a Rome he could not possibly have imagined would ever become Christian, did he really mean what Luther meant when he spoke of the two kingdoms or what Catholic integralists mean when they talk about the two powers, spiritual and temporal? Or did Paul mean something else when he wrote, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another”? (Romans 13:8). Is it possible that Paul was simply offering the unconverted world not dialogue but instead only Christ, inviting the world to look upon the one who was pierced? (Zechariah 12:10; John 19:37). Is it possible that the eloquence recommended in the New Testament is something entirely unlike what we hear and see from most Christians in America today?

Because what we should say of Christian eloquence is that it is first charismatic. This is what Jesus said. Whatever the Christian is to say will be given by the Holy Spirit “in that hour,” that hour being the hour of persecution when “brother will deliver up brother” (Mark 13:11-12). And immediately we learn here something else, that Christian eloquence is not just charismatic but that it is also inseparable from sacrifice, Christ’s sacrifice and then our own.

What this looks like we see in Paul. To the Corinthians he said that God sent him to preach the Gospel “not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” It was the “demonstration of the Spirit and power” that mattered to Paul, not “lofty words of wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:17; 2:1-4). That does not mean that Paul disregarded the traditional elements of rhetoric, nor does it mean that we should. Yet it does repurpose it.

Christian eloquence is always a presentation of Christ, always kerygma; thus, it is always a presentation of Christ’s death and resurrection, always a presentation of sacrifice. As the Eucharist is always a proclamation of the Lord’s death, so too does Paul bear in his own body the marks of Jesus (1 Corinthians 11:26; Galatians 6:17). That finally is what Christian eloquence looks like, like life hidden with Christ in God, like an eloquence sometimes as silent as the Eucharist, an eloquence always open to suffering and even apparent defeat but which shows forth Christ (Colossians 3:3). Like Saint Blandina in Lyons, as she “hung on a post,” the text says that she “seemed to hang there in the form of a cross.” It says her fellow Christians “saw in the person of their sister him who was crucified for them.”[32]

That is, the perfection of Christian eloquence is martyrdom. At the beginning of his letter to the Romans, Saint Ignatius of Antioch begged the Christians there not to come to his defense. “For if you are silent about me, I am a word of God,” he wrote. But, Ignatius continued, “if you love my flesh, I shall again be only a voice.”[33] Eloquence in this instance meant offering no defense but instead accepting death. It meant leaving pagans to their illusions of triumph. It meant not speaking up so as win the earthly contest. It meant embracing the sacrificial silence of the Eucharist; or as Ignatius put, it meant offering one’s flesh to be ground into the “pure bread of Christ” by the teeth of lions.[34]

So finally, what should we say about Christian eloquence today? What rhetorically may we Christians offer the world? I do not exactly know. It is just that in times past Christians used to dream of becoming martyrs. When Saint Thérèse of Lisieux visited the Colosseum as a young girl, she kissed the ground and begged for the grace to become a martyr.[35] Today, more young Christians perhaps dream of becoming podcasters or of going into politics. That is telling. It is a symptom that something is not quite right. It belongs to the reason why so much Christian rhetoric today only adds to the noise of this foolish zero-sum game we have all decided to play in this country.

But again, what does Christian eloquence look like? Again, I do not exactly know. Saint Thérèse became a “martyr of love.”[36] She did not die exactly like the martyrs she revered. Maybe that is how we should proceed. Maybe we should simply beg for the grace to become martyrs but then just humbly live our Christian lives and speak truth in charity, but ready, like Paul, to fulfill in our bodies “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24). But our lives and our words should be lives and words open to suffering not lives and words that cause suffering, lives and words that prefer silence to the bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor and slander of the world. For these, the Scripture is clear, we Christians should put away from us (Ephesians 4:31). That is, if we are to follow the Lamb who, as he conquered, strangely opened not his mouth (Isaiah 53:7).

The Law of the Mirror is not exactly self-evident. Most of us—bird, flower, and human being alike—do not mimic faces, but refract light. Like the moon, the substance we capture and pass onto others is not the image of the reflected, but its radiance. Although, it is perhaps no accident that the natural substances which do reflect images are of inestimable worth, like water and gemstones. Water is precious because it is necessary, while jewels are because of their rarity. In either case, these most cherished of substances share the capacity to reflect their admirers. The rest of us, however, aspire not to mimicry, but refulgence. We have been burdened with opacity, but that does not mean we are relieved of the duty to shine. It simply means that reflection is, as the Germans say, both Gabe und Aufgabe, gift and task, a law inscribed within our tendons and a vocation to which we are summoned. This brings me to St. Clare of Assisi.

I have often thought that clara is one of the most beautiful words in the Latin tongue. It can mean bright, distinct, clear, illustrious, or radiant. English has a seemingly unending catalogue of words to describe what light does: it dazzles, gleams, shines, illuminates, glows, sparkles, flashes, lusters, shimmers, twinkles, and, my personal favorite, coruscates. Latin does not have quite so many words for the task, so clara or clarificare encompasses a lot of these. St. Clare of Assisi was so named because of a promise made to her mother while in the pains of labor. While praying before a crucifix, Hortulana (which means “garden-like”) heard a voice say: “Do not be afraid, woman, for you will safely give birth to a light that will shine more clearly than light itself.”[1] Prophecy became a name, and that name became reality. For “the little Clare had hardly been brought into the light before she began to shine.”[2] (Our Lord seems to enjoy making promises in a garden: the Messiah was first pledged in Eden, and the church in Gethsemane. Did Hortulana know the company she kept?)

Like her spiritual father, St. Francis, Clare wrote little. Well, little that has been preserved. Almost all that has survived are four letters written to St. Agnes of Prague. Agnes was the niece of King Andrew II of Hungary, which means that St. Elizabeth of Hungary was her first cousin. Agnes and Elizabeth were both princesses who—because of the Franciscan witness—preferred a life of poverty and love to the wealth which was their birthright. The Franciscans and Poor Clares wanted nothing except conformity to our poor, crucified Savior. And in clinging to his poverty, their love shook kingdoms. Agnes and Elizabeth are evidence of that.

The traces of St. Clare on history are therefore more felt than verified, like an earthquake known by its tremors. Nevertheless, we have a few such traces, and the little we do have is worth attention. In her fourth letter to St. Agnes, Clare explains the joys of those wedded to Christ:

Happy, indeed, is the one permitted to share in this sacred banquet and be joined with every heart’s feeling to him whose beauty the heavenly hosts unceasingly admire, whose affection moves, whose contemplation invigorates, whose generosity fills, whose sweetness replenishes, whose remembrance brings light, whose fragrance revives the dead, and whose glorious vision will bless the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, because the vision of him is the splendor of everlasting glory, the radiance of everlasting light, and a mirror without tarnish.[3]

The Bridegroom’s beauty elicits wonder, his affection moves, his image enlivens, his tenderness vivifies, whose very sight wakes the dead and makes one blessed. In Christ, we behold the face of him who gives meaning and content to all that we mean by “life.” Why? Because, Clare suggests, he is a “mirror without tarnish.” She continues:

Look into this mirror every day, O queen, spouse of Jesus Christ, and continually examine your face in it, so that in this way you may adorn yourself completely, inwardly and outwardly, clothed and covered in multicolored apparel, adorned in the same manner with flowers and garments made of all the virtues as is proper, dearest daughter and spouse of the Most High King. In this mirror shine blessed poverty, holy humility, and charity beyond words, as you will be able, with God’s grace, to contemplate throughout the entire mirror.[4]

Jesus is a spotless mirror, perfectly reflecting the light he receives. He tells us as much in the gospels: “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). God from God, light from light, Christ is real enough to perfectly image him whose face he reflects. But he is, just as really, human. This means he shows us our face too, or rather, our face as it is supposed to be. This is how Clare can instruct Agnes to “examine your face in [this mirror],” the same mirror that shows “blessed poverty, holy humility, and charity beyond words.” When we behold the face of Christ, we see what it would mean to be most truly ourselves.

Philosophers and theologians have observed that a thing becomes more real as it becomes more individuated. This is why the concept of the “person” is so central to Christian theology. To use an example, shadows are not exactly identical, but telling the difference between shadows is much harder than differentiating between the persons who cast them. The more real object is the more particular and singular one. The higher you ascend the hierarchy of being, the more individuated things become: rocks are more particularized than shadows, plants more so than rocks, animals more so than plants, humans more so than animals; and angels more so than humans.[5]

But the Law of the Mirror allows us to go further. In becoming more oneself, more perfectly, particularly, and individually what one is, a person grows in her capacity to reflect in turn. This means that singularity and universality grow in proportion to each other. Animals can mimic other things in a way that inanimate objects cannot. But humans can mimic—can reflect—better than animals. And in fact the very act of knowing involves nothing else than our souls becoming, in a sense, the very thing it is trying to know. This is what Aristotle and those following him mean when they say that “the soul is, in a sense, all things,”[6] and moreover what it means to say that truth is the “adequation of mind and reality.”[7] The more accurately our souls reflect the form of the thing known, the more the truth is within us.

The upshot of all this is that the more a thing participates in being (the more real it is), the more it can reflect. This means that Jesus can reflect all humanity and indeed all things because he is the realest, most singular person to have ever lived. He is just as really God and can thus reflect the Father, too. He is the realest of beings, and therefore the most capacious of all mirrors. Whoever looks upon his face finds their own, but perfected, luminous, purged of the shadows which cloud their existence. Put simply, Jesus is more like our enemies (in their virtues and basic goodness) than we have dared to imagine, more like St. Clare than even she, more like yourself than you can possibly know. Although one day you will.

I should add that seeing one’s reflection can be frightening, or at least discomforting; what we want to see and what we actually do see are often quite distinct. St. Clare knew this as well as anyone. Her final reference to Christ the mirror makes this point:

That mirror suspended upon the wood of the cross urged those passing by saying: “O all you who pass by, look and see if there is any suffering like my suffering!” In response, let us with one voice and in one spirit answer him who cries and laments: “I will remember this over and over, and my soul will sink within me!” Therefore, O Queen of the heavenly King, when you see this, you must burn ever more strongly with charity’s fire.[8]

When we look at Christ crucified, bloodied, wasted by love for a people who hated his mercies, does our reflection look—at all—like his? To see our face in that of Mary’s Son is a frightful, terrible thing. It shows the distance between what we are and ought to be. It also implies that bridging the gap will require something like a death, if not rejection and sorrow. After all, is this not what it would take to become mirrors of the crucified? If we are not merely to look at, but to reflect the form of his life, could anything less than sheer prodigality, an almost reckless self-gift, suffice?

Here more than anywhere, the witness of St. Clare—of claritas—is a precious jewel, a pledge that death is not the final word. Recall that mirrors require light to function; the most perfect mirror is useless in the dark. This means that reflecting the image of sorrow and poverty is itself the work not of darkness, but of radiance. Becoming mirrors of the crucified is therefore a work of dazzling clarity, a coruscant gem disclosing the refulgence of love, suffused as it is with a fire feared by the darkness itself. In other words, only that which is poor can be clara. Darkness is poverty’s poorer mimic.

Through Clare, the Law of the Mirror became the heartbeat of the Franciscan genius. The Order’s most illustrious theologian and minister general, St. Bonaventure, uses the image in his own thought to great effect. What’s more, he seems to have connected it particularly to St. Clare. In a letter to the Poor Clares of Assisi, he writes:

I now wish through this letter to offer every encouragement to this devotion of yours, so that you might follow earnestly the virtuous footprints of your holy Mother, who was instructed by the Holy Spirit through that little poor man, St. Francis. May you never wish to have anything under heaven except what your Mother taught, namely Jesus Christ, and him crucified. Following her example, dear daughters, hasten after the fragrance of his blood. Boldly take hold of the mirror of poverty . . . enkindled by the fire of divine love, give your heart totally to the one who on the cross offered himself to the Father for us. For insofar as you are clothed in the light of your Mother’s example, on fire with those perpetual flames, redolent of virtue’s scent, you will become the aroma of Christ . . . for he is the reflection of eternal light, the flawless mirror of the majesty of God, and the image of his goodness.[9]

Just as Christ is the mirror of the Father, and Clare a mirror of Christ, Bonaventure exhorts the sisters to be mirrors of Clare, and to do so by gazing upon the mirror of poverty. It is unlikely that Bonaventure ever read Clare’s letters to Agnes, so how he knew to associate the imagery with her is a tale for another time.[10] But through whatever pathways the Law of the Mirror reached the Seraphic Doctor, it was foundational to his vision.

The image of the mirror most famously appears in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, “The Mind’s Journey into God.” There, he guides the reader on a pilgrimage toward the crucified Christ. There are three stages, each divided into two steps: contemplation in and through creatures beneath the soul; contemplation in and through the soul itself; contemplation in and through realities which are above the soul. Notice the repeated prepositions “in and through.” Bonaventure says that we can contemplate God either “through a mirror or in a mirror,” by which he means that creatures can either point us toward God (and away from themselves), or we can see the face of God inscribed within their very being.[11] He also says that one way is more sublime than the other. Can you guess which is which?

I imagine most of us naturally assume that contemplating God “through” creatures is better than doing so “in” them. It is better, we might reason, to marvel at the Beloved himself rather than tarry with lesser suitors. But Bonaventure does not say that. He says that contemplating “in” is higher than “through,” and that because the love of God is perfected in us when all things become a reflection of his face.[12] Our love is weaker, not stronger, if we must turn from creation to adore her Creator. In his wonderful little book on St. Francis of Assisi, G.K. Chesterton captures the idea:

The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady.[13]

Opacity—not transparency—is the dignity of the creature. It is true of course that we were made to glorify Another, but we do so as mirrors, not windows. No mirror worth its salt can be looked through. Like the burning bush, if ever we blaze, then it is as those unconsumed by the Eternal Flame.

All this is just another way of insisting that creation is real and can therefore be called things like true, good, and beautiful. Moreover, it is to insist that we praise and glorify the Lord best by preserving this very point. No artist gets jealous over the praises bestowed upon their art. Then again, it would be equally odd to praise the art as though it painted itself, but this is what we mean by the word “idolatry,” and we are often guilty of it. To see creatures as real, yet reflective all the same—this is the balance of praise, the kind we see in the canticles of St. Francis and the poetry of Hopkins.[14]

With this in mind, it seems rather fitting (conveniens, even) that we owe the theology of the immaculate conception to Blessed Duns Scotus. Is there any Catholic doctrine more thoroughly Franciscan, any greater testament to the Law of the Mirror than she whose face is unmistakable for its intimacy with that of Christ?

This is the legacy of St. Clare, the recurring witness to her claritas: she teaches that the human person was created to shine with the light of the Morning Star, and in so doing become most fully itself. By inviting his disciples daily to take up the cross (Luke 9:23), and to see his face inscribed in those of the poor (Matt 25:31-46), Christ invites his members into the radiance whence he dwelled all eternity. Remember that our Lord asked his Father not that his church would be given misery, but glory (John 17:22-24). Sadness would come anyway; Christ need not have asked his Father for that. But to dazzle from within the darkness—that is the gift given the church.

Most objects lose their form when trampled: by being broken, they are impoverished of being. But the Law of the Mirror demands this not be absolute. When our brokenness mirrors that of Christ, when poverty and hiddenness are cast after his mold, it is then, and not before, that we are given authentic form, beauty, a luster beyond compare. As St. Augustine tells us: “For your sake, Christ became deformed yet remains beautiful . . . We are formed by his deformity. His deformity was our beauty.”[15] His shadow is our brilliance, his obscurity our clarity. This is what it means to be clara. This is the Law of the Mirror.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally published on the Macrina Magazine (August 7, 2021) website, which has been decommissioned. The author dedicates the article to Clara D., written on the double occasion of her birth and her father’s graduation.

Do these proposals have science (or, at least, neuroscience) on their side? To answer this, we first should explore more deeply what identity is before turning to the specific contentions of contemporary neuroscience.

Three Meanings of “Identity”

Philosophers use the terms “identity,” “self,” and “subject” frequently, yet much less frequently do they define them adequately; something similar is true for neuroscientists studying self-awareness. In my historical work, I have shown that “identity” has meant three distinct but related ideas in the history of philosophy and related disciplines.[4]

The first meaning, or Identity1, is endurance through time. I am the same person I was yesterday, and I will be the same person if I wake up tomorrow. This is the most basic sense of identity, as well as the most ancient meaning of the term. Identity2 concerns what the Platonic schools called the “true self.” When I answer the Delphic Oracle’s command to “know yourself,” what is it that I know? Identity2 is the most central meaning of identity. Identity3 is how I experience and know myself, both emotionally and cognitively. This is the realm of consciousness, and it is the most accessible aspect of identity.

Here I will focus on the last meaning of identity, for the simple reason that neuroscientists tend to reduce this multivalent term to this one meaning. They are not alone in doing this; the whole trajectory of modern thought on identity promotes this reduction, as I show in my book Body and Identity. Like all reductions, however, much is lost, and it promotes many unnecessary confusions.

After surveying common patterns and specific proposals in the field of consciousness studies (analytic philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience), I will at a later time describe the various conceptual problems that arise within it. There I will sketch a better account of consciousness and bring us back to the topic of identity and draw a few conclusions.

Neuroscientific Identity: Common Patterns

Given the neuroscientific conflation of identity and consciousness, we can get an overall view of neuroscientific anthropologies based on their treatment of consciousness. Beginning with an accepted definition of consciousness is surprisingly difficult. “Consciousness studies are frequently criticized for failing to define precisely what consciousness is. In this respect there has been little change over the past two centuries.”[5]

Philosopher Michael Tye, drawing on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, argues that there are four categories of conscious experience: “Perceptual experiences, for example, experiences of the sort involved in seeing green, hearing loud trumpets . . . . Bodily sensations, for example, feeling a twinge of pain, feeling an itch . . . . Felt reactions or passions or emotions, for example, feeling anger, lust, fear . . . . Felt moods, for example, feeling happy, depressed, calm, bored.”[6]

One thing that jumps out from this list is its wide applicability to both human beings and other, higher-level animals, such as dogs or chimpanzees, with a possible exception of some of the terms in the “felt mood” category.[7] Distinctively human experiences, such as conceptualization or informed judgment, are present only in their conspicuous absence. Daniel A. Helminiak observes: “Frequently consciousness functions as an umbrella term for whatever goes on in the human mind (e.g., Blackmore, Cahoone, Chalmers, Donald, Goleman & Davidson, Griffin, Lonergan) or also, with good reason, in the animal mind (Bekoff, Wynne). Thus, all three—the organic, the perceptual, and the conscious—might fall under ‘consciousness.’”[8] I will return to this point in my follow-up.

Another lacuna in consciousness studies is the tendency to name any recognition of a distinction between “mind and matter,” as the field usually calls it, a “dualism” that is automatically called Cartesian. Such “substance dualism” follows Descartes in considering mind and matter two different substances, even if an allowance is made for the two substances to interact with each other in some way, as Descartes believed they did through the pineal gland.[9] Daniel C. Dennett repeatedly satirizes any proposal of an agential “I” as enthroning a little observer within an interior “Cartesian theater” made up of “mind stuff.”[10]

All the non-Cartesian schools of thought in consciousness studies are fundamentally materialistic and monistic, and these are the vast majority in both philosophy and neuroscience. “Physicalism [i.e., materialism] dominated Anglo‐American philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century, and is perhaps still the most popular view among analytic philosophers.”[11] As Dennett puts it, “dualism is not a serious view to contend with, but rather a cliff over which to push one’s opponents,” an activity in which he himself gleefully engages.[12]

This binary map of options—Cartesianism or materialism—does not leave space for the dominant Western metaphysics in the centuries before Descartes, namely, hylomorphism, as I will discuss shortly. Furthermore, this approach immediately manufactures what Chalmers has called “the hard problem of consciousness,” that is, “the question of how physical [‘objective’] processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience.”[13] This is precisely a post-Cartesian problem.[14] The idea that kinds of things are marked by distinctive natures and cognitive processes that are not items to be viewed under a microscope or with an fMRI requires a more robust metaphysics than either Cartesian dualism or materialistic monism.[15]

The second lacuna (of Descartes-baiting) is related to the first (of consciousness-as-perception), because this ostensibly anti-Cartesian materialism tends to flatten all reality to the same (low) level. For example, panpsychism opts to find a hierarchy within being based simply on “more consciousness” or “less consciousness,” but everywhere, even at the subatomic level, there exists at least some consciousness.[16] A related, albeit not always panpsychic, proposal is that consciousness arises from quantum complementarity and/or entanglement.[17] David Chalmers ridicules this approach as a kind of reductio ad mysterium: “consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source.”[18] This ontological flattening occurs functionally among dualists, as well, who tend to ignore the ghostly side of the dualist divide and spend all their time examining the supposedly “objective” side. In fact, Descartes himself did so: “The preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies.”[19]

Since the late twentieth century, materialist practitioners do not so much deny the existence of the ghostly Cartesian “mind” as flatten it into the brain. Blackmore provides examples from various neuroscientists: “‘Minds are simply what brains do’; “Mind” is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out’; mind is ‘the personalization of the physical brain.’” This spills over into identity or the self, as noted above: “self is ‘not what the brain is, but what it does.’”[20]

This approach is related to functionalism, the kind of physicalism most popular in consciousness studies, which sees consciousness as a matter of functions in the brain, theoretically replicable by similar functions in artificial intelligence. Functionalism proposes that “mental states and processes are defined by the functions or roles they play within an organized network of states mediating the interaction between an organism or system and its world.”[21]

Functionalism is unable to solve the “hard problem.” Philosophers such as Thomas Nagle object that a “third-person” view of functions in the brain does not explain, or even capture, the “first-person” experience of being conscious, which they take to be irreducibly subjective and individually flavored. These first-person experiences are called “qualia.” “Qualia” are “felt experiences,” such as the felt experience of being a bat, famously proposed by Thomas Nagel in “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”[22]

The original thought-experiment by Frank Jackson in 1982 argued that a color scientist who has spent her entire life in a black and white room might know a lot about red (third-person knowledge) and yet not have the qualitative, first-person experience (quale) of “seeing red.”[23] The latter is taken to be the essence of consciousness, which would mean that consciousness cannot be a matter of brain function alone, given that qualia experiences are not reducible to such functions.

Dennett, an extreme functionalist, is completely dismissive of the qualia objection, objecting that any first-person experiences of a unifying “I” are completely illusory. “I deny that there are any such properties [qualia]. But I agree wholeheartedly that there seem to be.”[24] Bennett and Hacker disagree with Dennett on most things, but they agree with him that the whole idea of qualia is misconceived and Cartesian in origin. They do not, however, agree that qualia “seem to” exist. Instead, they argue that we do not actually assume a particular “feel” to our perceptual and cognitive activity beyond that activity itself. The feeling of pain does not require an additional layer of perception—the feeling of the feeling of pain, and so on, to infinity.[25]

Dennett is still more extreme, however. For him, any first-person experience or self is actually an epiphenomenal cobbling together of diverse brain phenomena into a post-hoc narrative. While his position is radical, Dennett does us the service of pointing out how those physicalists relying on qualia often smuggle in a Cartesian ghost in the machine, which is the origin of qualia or consciousness. Dennett raises a good point: do not physicalism and functionalism require the abandonment of any “I”-experience and “I”-language to be internally consistent? If consciousness is truly reducible to third-person brain function, where does first-person experience get any neurological foothold?

Neuroscience of Consciousness: Some Specific Proposals

If rationality is reducible to the brain, as physicalism holds, then we should be able to find some neuroscientific evidence—whether causative or correlational—for consciousness. Yet nobody has conclusively done so. Instead, there are many proposals that jostle for acceptance.

Local recurrence theories emphasize the sufficiency of activity in areas related to sensory perception, between higher and lower areas of the sensory cortex, to account for consciousness.[26] These theorists are in the minority, but they are persistent. To some, local recurrence seems to smack of Descartes’s assertion that the pineal gland had a regulating importance as “the” place connecting the immaterial mind and the material brain. Today, this idea is roundly and understandably mocked, and to a lesser degree also related proposals that there is one single location in the brain that controls consciousness. Already in 1890, William James argued, “There is no cell or group of cells in the brain of such anatomical or functional pre-eminence as to appear to be the keystone or center of gravity of the whole system.” There is, he insisted, no “pontifical cell.”[27] James’s opinion has won the day. Neuroscientists have gradually given up the attempt to find such a pontifical cell, or region, or lobe.

What replaced this search are various theories on the brain-wide, systemic foundations of consciousness, alongside attempts to find neural correlates to changes in consciousness (understood in varying ways, such as awakeness, awareness, and so forth).[28] For example, the reticular activating system in the brain stem is involved in regulating the sleep-wakefulness cycle.[29] Based on this fact, some neuroscientists have argued more explicitly for the role of more primitive parts of the brain, such as the medial regions, that are connected to dreams and emotion as perhaps even more central to consciousness than the regions distinctive to human beings, such as the large prefrontal cortex.[30] Others emphasize the parietal and frontal cortices, which correlate with perception and the awareness of action.[31] Still others stress that damage to the thalamus, in particular its intralaminar nuclei, is correlated to being in a coma state.[32]

However, all these functions are necessary but not sufficient (as I will argue in the next installment) for consciousness. Yes, one must be awake to be conscious, but that is a minimal requirement and not merely identical to consciousness. Further, as Rees and Frith conclude, isolating particular parts of the brain may not be adequate: “The contents of conscious experience are determined by the location of the neural activity–by which essential node is active. But activity in an essential node does not seem to be enough. Interaction with other areas, particularly parietal and frontal cortex, seems to be necessary.”[33] Another problem is that these correlational studies do not demonstrate causality. A causal study would require the direct stimulation of the brain, and while some studies have attempted this stimulation, its usage is understandably limited. Most correlational studies rely on self-report to measure awareness. Another option is computer modeling of neural responses, but engaging in such studies already requires a philosophical commitment to viewing consciousness as similar to the information processing of a computer; hence, the evidence such modeling produces is only convincing to those who have agreed with this premise.

Further, brain activity alone does not simply correlate with awareness, because we have brain activity even while asleep.[34] Some theorists interpret this to mean that consciousness is a matter of distributed organization of brain activity that brings only certain experiences to awareness. Psychologist Bernard Baars coined the term “global workspace theory” (GWT) to propose this mechanism. Baars considers consciousness to be “like any other psychobiological concept,” such as “slow-wave sleep” or the “binocular integration” of vision.[35] “Consciousness seems to be the publicity organ of the brain,” or, as Dennett puts it, “fame in the brain.” The cortico-thalamic complex provides the brain with “a fleeting integrative capacity that enables access between functions that are otherwise separate.” Baars argues for an “extended reticular activating system” (ERTAS) that connects the thalamus, cortex, and brain stem. Its purpose would be to activate different areas of the cortex, which would then enter into the competition for “fame in the brain” within the global workplace.[36] The “global workspace” is the arena in which different neural processes compete for fame.

GWT has many adherents who often disagree with each other on more philosophical matters. Some, like Dennett, deny that the self is anything more than a post-hoc illusion, while others are committed to an information-theory reductionism that is popular among AI researchers. One of the researchers in this area is Stanislas Dehaene at the Collège de France and an Ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He argues that consciousness simply is “global information sharing”: “Among the millions of mental representations that constantly crisscross our brains in an unconscious manner, one is selected because of its relevance to our present goals. Consciousness makes it globally available to all our high-level decision systems.”[37] This is a “pandemonium” model, in which competing stimuli somehow “converge to a consensus” as a winning “neural coalition.”[38] The “pandemonium” model comes from John Selfridge, and its resolution into a “neural coalition” has been argued by Francis Crick and Christof Koch.

A related approach comes from Michael Gazzaniga, who argues that split-brain cases, in which the corpus callosum has been cut, show that the left hemisphere functions (as a whole system) as “The Interpreter.” This system provides post-hoc rationales for our choices even when those rationales are factually false.[39] As with many of these proposals, here there is no “I” that is in charge. Rather, the “I” is the result of multiple parts of the brain functioning together (or competing with each other) to generate a personal narrative. Unity is an illusion.

In general, we can say that GWT seems to assume what it wants to prove: that consciousness is reducible to systemic information organization within the brain. But it may have provided good evidence for the need for the integration of various brain systems to create the conditions for consciousness.[40] Bennett and Hacker complain, “It is not easy to avoid thinking that all of this is an example of a metaphor (or simile) run out of control. Would anything be lost to neuroscience if the metaphor were abandoned?” Predictably, their answer is no.[41] Their assessment could be summarized by a subtitle: “On Finding One’s Way through a Conceptual Jungle with Worthless Tools.”[42] In general, GWT consistently replaces the activity of the person with the supposed activity of the unifying “system” in the brain, even though its practitioners argue that they do not do so. I will discuss this in the next paper as the “merelogical fallacy.”

A related but distinct theory is proposed by Giulio Tononi. His Integrated Information Theory (IIT) argues that consciousness exists on many different brain levels, as a process of integrating information.[43] One important difference from GWT is that IIT begins with consciousness, not brain activity. “IIT’s epistemic methodology fits best with consciousness being fundamental and its physical substrate being determined by it, rather than vice versa.”[44] This means that the global workplace of the brain could be the neural accompaniment of consciousness rather than consciousness itself, but IIT proponents do not consistently hold this position and generally fall into reductionism. For example, they state that consciousness is “a particular kind of brain process,” “a special kind of physical process that arises in the structure and dynamics of certain brains.”[45]

The language for IIT was provided by early-twentieth-century information theory, which argued that information and its transmission could be quantified and be transmitted without distortion through binary code.[46] Many neuroscientists depend upon information theory, which was essential to twentieth-century computing advances (and beyond). Against this approach, Bennett and Hacker contend that neuroscientists using information theory do not successfully translate its applicability to digital computers into relevance for the brain and for the person.[47]

Proponents of IIT contend that they are more interested in information as the in-form-ing of reality, rather than its numerical correlate. In this, IIT has some Aristotelian overtones: “IIT refers to ‘information’ in its original sense, with its root in + formare, meaning ‘to give form to.’ The power of any one mechanism, such as a brain or a computer, to influence its own next state, its causal power, gives rise to a form, a high-dimensional structure, that is experience.” Yet Tononi does not consistently rely upon this aspect of formal causality. Instead, he insists that IIT is a mathematical approach and that certain computers (albeit not what we have now) could become conscious based upon enacting IIT’s findings, as seen here in his elision of both the brain and the computer as “mechanisms.”

Conclusion

What can be said thus far about these proposals? The specific validity of experiments and assessment of data is outside my area of expertise and not the most interesting question to me in any case. The larger question is how helpful these scientific proposals can be for our understanding of consciousness and, following from that, Identity3.

It should already be clear that the anthropological paradigms underlying proposals and the philosophical interpretations of them extend beyond what the neuroscientific method can prove. Dennett cannot prove that the “self” is only an epiphenomenal aftereffect of impersonal brain processes, any more than Descartes could prove that personal unity was accomplished through the mediation of the pineal gland.

The next essay will pursue the philosophical questions more closely and ask: What are the philosophical weaknesses of the neuroscientific proposals? And what would be a better understanding of consciousness? Lastly, how would that insight assist our understanding of identity?

Each of the NT authors developed “his” Christology in his own unique way. Yet all of them have something in common: they say who Christ is in the language of the Scriptures.

Venard catalogs the many ways the New Testament presents Christ in the language of the Old, thus bringing to light from the texts themselves Christology as a unifying hermeneutic for reading the Bible.

One of the ways that this Christological hermeneutic is displayed in the New Testament is in the relationship between the Gospel of John and Isaiah. The Gospel of John relies a great deal on Isaiah, and John 12 marks a high point in terms of textual correspondence. In John 12 especially, the Gospel relies upon Isaiah in order to speak of Christ’s “glory.”

The glory of Christ Jesus is a central theme that runs throughout the Gospel of John. Jesus speaks often of his glory and of the “hour” of his glorification, that is to say, the hour of the cross. With an emphasis that is unique among the Evangelists, John presents the cross as a throne, so that the moment of crucifixion becomes the moment when the Lord is enthroned in glory. In fact, the prominence given to the glory of the cross by the Fourth Gospel is such as to (almost) make the Resurrection narrative of John 20 appear redundant.

The themes of glory, throne, and cross all coalesce neatly in John 12. This chapter, which marks the end of the “Book of Signs” and so of the public ministry of Christ, prepares us to behold, as a single mystery, the glory of Christ Crucified. The Gospel accomplishes this especially by invoking the witness of Isaiah:

Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke about him (John 12:41).

Isaiah, of course, saw and spoke of the glory of Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel, most notably in the great theophany of Isaiah 6. Remarkably, in John 12:41 the Gospel tells us that the one seen by Isaiah was, in fact, Christ himself. John identifies Jesus with Yahweh; he belongs with Yahweh and his glory is revealed to be the glory proper to the Lord God. Further, Isaiah also spoke of the Lord God seated upon a high and lofty throne. In John 12:32, Jesus will draw on this description of God’s throne to speak of his cross. In this way, the Gospel is able to present the cross of Christ by turning to the Isaian language describing the high and lofty throne of God.

His Glory

In order to appreciate the tight link the Gospel of John makes between Isaiah and Christ, it is helpful to note a few details from the Greek translation of Isaiah 6 as found in the Septuagint (the earliest Greek translation of the Old Testament, commonly abbreviated LXX), as this is the version of Isaiah cited by the Gospel of John. The text of Isaiah 6 in the Septuagint, while basically faithful to the original Hebrew, nonetheless contains a slight variation in the chapter’s opening verse. For comparison, here is the NAB translation of Is. 6:1:

In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, with the train of his garment filling the temple.

This translation is faithful to the original Hebrew. However, the LXX version of Isaiah 6:1 reads:

In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and the temple was full of his glory.

The difference is italicized. The LXX renders “the train of his garment” with the word δόξα (doxa, “glory”), so that Isaiah sees the temple filled with the glory of God. Of course, the Hebrew original conveys God’s glory as well, but it does so by using the metaphor of the hem of Yahweh’s garment. The LXX gives us the substance without the metaphor, telling us simply that Isaiah is witness to the glory of God. In this way, the LXX provides, as it were, a smooth road with no bumps to the Gospel of John, in which Christ’s glory figures so prominently, and allows Isaiah to stand as witness to the identity of the glory of Yahweh and the glory of Jesus.

The other relevant detail from the LXX of Isaiah 6 concerns the cry of the Saraphim in verse 3.

Here, the Septuagint follows the Hebrew exactly:

Hebrew Original
וְקָרָ֨א זֶ֤ה אֶל־זֶה֙ וְאָמַ֔ר קָדֹ֧ושׁ ׀ קָדֹ֛ושׁ קָדֹ֖ושׁ יְהוָ֣ה צְבָאֹ֑ות מְלֹ֥א כָל־הָאָ֖רֶץ כְּבֹודֹֽו׃

LXX
καὶ ἐκέκραγον ἕτερος πρὸς τὸν ἕτερον καὶ ἔλεγον ἅγιος ἅγιος ἅγιος κύριος σαβαωθ πλήρης πᾶσα ἡ γῆ τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ

My Translation
One cried out to the other and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts! All the earth is filled with his glory!”

The Lord’s glory does not fill the Temple only; it extends to all the earth, because, as the Holy One, he is Lord of Hosts and master of all the earth. What is interesting here concerning the LXX is that the last three words of the Seraphim in verse 3 repeat verbatim the last three words of verse 1: τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ (tēs doxēs autou), “his glory.” It is these same three words from the LXX of Isaiah 6:1, 3 that appear in John 12:41 and are referred to Christ:

Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory (τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ) and spoke about him.

The Throne of God and the Cross

In Hebrew, Isaiah 6:1 describes the Lord’s throne as רָ֣ם וְנִשָּׂ֑א, “high and lofty.” These same two Hebrew words are repeated at Is 52:13 and describe what is to happen to Yahweh’s Servant:

See, my servant shall prosper, he shall be יָר֧וּם וְנִשָּׂ֛א (raised high and greatly exalted) (Is 52:13; The Hebrew text adds: וְגָבַ֖הּ מְאֹֽד “and be very high”).

Importantly, Isaiah describes the exalted status of both the throne and the Servant by using the same words. Just as the throne of Adonai is exalted and lifted up, so also the Servant will be exalted and lifted up.

Once again, the LXX provides a bridge to these texts of Isaiah for the Gospel of John. In the LXX, the רוּם of Is 52:13 is rendered by the word ὑψόω (hypsoō), meaning “to lift up,” “to exalt.” There are two moments in the Gospel of John when Jesus uses this very word to speak of his cross. In John 12:32, Christ says:

κἀγὼ ἂν ὑψωθῶ ἐκ τῆς γῆς, πάντας ἑλκύσω πρὸς ἐμαυτόν.

And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself (John 12:32).

Christ’s statement here in chapter 12 parallels his statement in John 3:14, in which he uses this same word twice:

καὶ καθὼς Μωυσῆς ὕψωσεν τὸν ὄφιν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, οὕτως ὑψωθῆναι δεῖ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου.

And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up (John 3:14).

Whenever Christ speaks of his being “lifted up” on the cross, he does so by using the very word that is used by the LXX at Is 52:13. What is the upshot of all this? In speaking of his own death, Christ draws on the theology of the Servant of Isaiah 52:13, itself connected linguistically and so theologically to the theophany of Isaiah 6 and the throne of the Lord God.

The importance of these citations from Isaiah is made all the more significant by the fact that John, more than any other evangelist, describes Christ as king during the passion and depicts the cross as the throne of glory from which the Crucified reigns. Jesus is calm, composed, regal, and in control throughout the passion in John. In the words of Donald Senior, Jesus “goes to his death with majesty, and the brutal rituals of crucifixion are transformed into symbols of triumph.” The high Isaian theology is focused upon Christ, the true King of the world reigning in glory from the cross.

It is the witness of Isaiah that allows the Fourth Gospel to articulate in a profoundly biblical idiom both the surpassing glory of Christ, and the cross as the high and lofty throne of the Crucified. John 12:41 is one of a handful of New Testament texts in which a significant figure from the Old Testament is said to have seen or spoken of Christ. To give but two examples: in John 5:46 Christ says that Moses “wrote about me.” And in Peter’s speech at Pentecost, he tells the crowd, “David . . . foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ” (Acts 3:29-31).

It is part of the claim of the New Testament that not only do many verses of the Old anticipate or foreshadow Christ in some way, but also that the major figures, such as Isaiah, Moses, David, saw and spoke of Christ. In this way, Christ stands at the very center of Scripture and gives the many books of the Bible their unity. The Old Testament speaks of him, and the New Testament displays him. Pope Benedict, in Verbum Domini, speaks of a “Christology of the word,” that is, of reading Scripture Christologically. The pope notes, referencing his own Deus Caritas Est:

Here the word finds expression not primarily in discourse, concepts or rules. Here we are set before the very person of Jesus. His unique and singular history is the definitive word which God speaks to humanity. We can see, then, why “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a definitive direction.”

St. Thomas Aquinas provides an example of someone who reads Scripture Christologically, and he is very much alive to the tight connection between Isaiah and John. In his Commentary on John he selects, of all things, Isaiah 6 as the prologue to his commentary. and writes:

“I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and the whole house was full of his majesty, and the things that were under him filled the temple” (Isa 6:1).

These are the words of a contemplative, and if we regard them as spoken by John the Evangelist they apply quite well to showing the nature of this Gospel. . . . Thus, I saw the Lord. And because, as John himself says below (12:41), “Isaiah said this because he had seen his glory,” that is, the glory of Christ, “and spoke of him,” the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, is Christ.

As a final note, the centrality of “glory” in John 12 and throughout the Gospel has been noted above. The richness of this word stems in large part from the OT, from the countless texts that speak of the כָּבוֹד (kabod, “glory”) of Yahweh. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament gives what is perhaps the most beautiful OT passage concerning the glory of Yahweh:

Indeed, we can see from the beautiful story in Ex. 33:18 ff . . . When Moses expressed a desire to see the כָּבוֹד of Yahweh, we are told that so long as he stands in a cleft of the rock, and Yahweh covers him with His hand, Yahweh will cause all His beauty (? כָּל־טוּבִי֙) to pass by him; and when He has passed by, and His hand has been withdrawn, Moses will see Him from behind.

The Gospel of John applies the glory of Yahweh, in the full richness of its signification, to Christ. For the Fourth Gospel, the beauty of Yahweh’s glory is veiled no longer by his hand, but rather by the flesh of the Word dwelling among us, the true Temple whose grace, truth, and beauty fill the whole world (cf. John 2:19), even as “the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil” when Mary anointed his feet (12:3). It is this beauty and glory, manifest on the cross, that we approach by faith.

Love that cannot be seen
does not obscure
—Jan Twardowski, Świat

Fr. Jan Twardowski (1915-2006) may not be known in the English-speaking world as well as other Polish poets such as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, or Karol Wojtyła. So far, only a couple of limited editions of his poems have appeared in English.[1] Although enjoying widespread acclaim in Poland due to his works’ simple style and profound content, Twardowski spoke about his poetry with extreme modesty. He did not consider himself engaged in the ancient and noble profession of poetry (poezja) but simply wrote poems (wiersze) with a sincere heart—that is, as if speaking to someone close. His poems are concise and straightforward in order to convey something important in a few sentences and with a sense of humor. This “something important” was meant to detoxify and purify the reality in which we live, thus oppose despair and introduce an order and harmony that originate in the good will. Twardowski did not shy away from difficult subjects, such as suffering, loneliness, despair, or death. However, he primarily wrote of love, hope, and faith in the context of ordinary things.

The Greatness of the Ordinary

Fr. Twardowski’s poetry often concerns ordinary things in life. In his compositions, we find a particular attentiveness to natural beings and phenomena—to flowers, trees, insects, animals, even stones—to the names they hold, the sounds they make (or do not make), the habits they have, their fate, or the apparent lack of it. The Polish poet himself recognizes this preoccupation by calling himself “John of the Ladybug” (Modlitwa do świętego Jana od Krzyża). Yet, Twardowski notes that if all you see in his poems are ladybugs, titmice, and butterflies, you see too little and incorrectly. These ordinary things, seemingly unworthy of our attention, conceal miraculous features. Indeed, Twardowski distinguishes only two approaches to life in people. The first maintains that there are no miracles in the world, and the other—that everything is a miracle. According to Twardowski, God conceals himself precisely in order for us to affirm the value of his creation. It is this invisible God who renders these ordinary beings wonderful. He hides to manifest the world and to reveal himself and his love in it precisely through this concealment (see Świat and Niewidzialne). For, as Twardowski asks, who would dare to notice anything in the world if God revealed himself in all his glory? Also, in his attention to the ordinary, Twardowski avoids referring to beings by abstract, anonymous words. Hence, he never says, “tree,” “flower,” “bird,” or “stone,” but always uses their concrete names such as “ash,” “anemone,” “blackbird,” or “granite.” His intention is not only to express the joyful abundance and complexity of creation but at the same time to show his appreciation for all the creatures and their wonderful existence simply by speaking their names.

However, the attention to the concrete in Twardowski’s poetry demonstrates a pervasive sense of sacramentality. The Polish poet seems to ask his readers not to look merely at the visible beings of the world but rather to discover the mystery of the Invisible precisely in them. He asks us to “see conversely” (see Powrót) by divesting ourselves of the prejudices formed by over-familiarity. Therefore, the Polish poet sees creation as a sort of mystery, thus neither as an epiphenomenon of God nor as a standalone phenomenon that could be exhaustively explained by scientific methods and tools. On the contrary, the visible world can (and should) be explained only in light of the mystery in which it participates. Only this sacramental vision of the world allows Twardowski to distinguish true contradictions, such as the overseasoned truth, from the apparent ones, such as God being constant and not obstinate at the same time (Odejść). Indeed, Twardowski has a unique ability to masterfully reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of the visible and the invisible, of what you can see in the world with what seems absent from it. He can even unite the apparent nonsense of life with God’s goodness, with his presence in everything. This “nonsense,” as expressed by the ordinary, includes suffering, falsehood, despair, sorrow, and so on. Therefore, Twardowski can see the good in evil things, joy in suffering, or truth in falsehood. A result of this “reconciliation” is attention to every creature, situation, and experience and, in this attention, a reception of their “friendship.”

Friendship with Creation

At this point, a poem Miłość (Love) by another Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz, comes to mind.[2] In that poem, Miłosz portrays the same attitude toward creation that we find in Twardowski. He sees things as created, that is, as possessing existence received from an other. This forms the basis for understanding oneself:

Love means to look at yourself
As we look at things foreign to us
Because you are only one of many things.

Only seen in that light can ordinary things become, in a sense, sanative for man. In other words, the consciousness of creation forms a life-affirming, life-saving dimension or attitude. Miłosz continues,

And who sees in this way [. . .]
Heals his heart from various worries
The bird and tree say to him: Friend.

Many places in Twardowski’s poems convey this beneficial friendship with creation. In Sześć listków, Twardowski puts forward a simple flower as an antidote to morbid despair.[3] When “Uncle” intends to hang himself on account of “everything being black,” the poet observes,

but this is not true
an anemone came running
and shoved up to his nose
six blue petals.

Ordinary things can also teach the human heart many other lessons about life, such as patience (see Kiedy mówisz). In his poem Ciało pedagogiczne, Twardowski lists several birds that go about their lives without paying any attention to their observer. “They care nothing for me,” he gladly concludes, recognizing that they live in their own world, with their own rhythm, silently striving to attain their own destinies. Patience is the peaceful conviction that things will eventually come to be (see Cierpliwość). This attitude is especially exigent for conversations with the Invisible. Everything matures in time, including our words, which we often consider unheard by God. “Do not pray,” Twardowski admonishes the impatient, “since you do not know how to wait” (Zaczekaj). Patience, as is linked here to humility, betrays a certain fundamental solitude in the human subject and in all things that are. This solitude seems to underlie the identity of all creatures—it expresses their incommunicability and their own value in relation to God. Thus, this solitude is not a cause of despair. Quite the contrary, it is an invitation to life and love, an invitation to the awareness that man belongs not so much to the world, to another human person, or even to himself, as to God.

Accordingly, the first lesson that Fr. Twardowski offers is the courage to notice the ordinary and learn from it amid the world that prizes the unprecedented, the dazzling, and the scandalous. Another lesson accompanying the first is this: notice the greatness of the ordinary. Paying attention is the first step on the way to the proper attitude toward creation. “The detail confers greatness on everything that is small,” the poet says in the poem Wielkie i małe. It seems that his attention to the small provides the means for him to contemplate the great and, ultimately, the greatest—the Invisible. All the attributes of the ordinary in the natural world relate to this great Invisible and vice versa. Therefore, this Great One is also small (see W jarzębinach). This insight coincides with the famous metaphysical passages from St. Augustine (Confessions, Book III) and St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae I, q. 8, a. 1) concerning God’s presence in beings. Aquinas finds God in all things in a most intimate manner, while St. Augustine confesses God’s presence in himself as “more interior to my innermost and greater to my highest.” How can someone so great and completely transcendent, someone who exists in a totally different mode of being than us-creatures, be able and willing to dwell in the smallness of our hearts, in the insignificance of contingent, transitory beings?—we might ask. Twardowski wishes to convey the truth that authentic greatness is not afraid of smallness and that smallness is able to express greatness (Taki mały). One must be really great not to be afraid or ashamed of one’s transitoriness, insignificance, and invisibility. Perhaps what the Polish poet wishes to say is that greatness or significance is visible only by comparison, whereas smallness or invisibility retains its own value outside any reference.

The “Smallness” of God

At this point, the teaching of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger comes to mind. In his Introduction to Christianity,[4] the German thinker sees God’s greatness in his attention to the smallest and his ability to enter into the seemingly insignificant. In reference to the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, Ratzinger recognizes that the true greatness of God consists in God’s reaching down to and indwelling in the smallest (not to be encompassed by the greatest but by the smallest is divine). In the Christian understanding of reality, the reversal of the value of the greatest and the smallest is typical. God loves the small and constantly searches for them. Recalling the biblical stories of the lost sheep or the lost drachma (Luke 15:4-10) confirms the point.

This reversal of value is not an irrational upheaval where what should be valued more is valued less and vice versa. Rather, this reversal aligns our vision and appreciation with the genuine hierarchy of values or, in other words, an ethos—the Christian ethos, to be precise. Again, this new hierarchy manifests not only the value of the ordinary but also the truth about God himself. Max Scheler describes this perception of the new ethos in most memorable terms as a reversal in the movement of love. Love is not so much an aspiration of the lower towards the higher as a condescension through self-renunciation in which what is noble, healthy, wealthy, and good stoops down to the vulgar, the sick, the poor, and the sinful. Complementing or even correcting the ancient view of God as merely the First Mover, Scheler says,

God is no longer the eternal unmoving goal—like a star—for the love of all things, moving the world as “the beloved moves the lover.” Now the very essence of God is to love and serve.[5]

However, this “servile” proximity to the small and insignificant comes with a price—a total relinquishment of power and, as a result, a vulnerability. This “price” of self-relinquishment should not be surprising for anyone who loves, for the lover, in some sense, remains at the mercy of the beloved for accepting and returning his love. That divine vulnerability is precisely what Twardowski perceives in the invisibility of God in relation to the ordinary. Here is one more quote from Ratzinger, reflecting on the facts of the birth of Jesus and his death: “The highest power is demonstrated as the calm willingness to renounce all power.”[6] Fr. Twardowski expresses the same thought by saying that “when the Almighty loves, he knows how to be the weakest” (Co prosi o miłość). Genuine love entails this vulnerability of self-renunciation, as it were, for the sake of the beloved. In other words—and in the context of creation—this vulnerability takes the form of invisibility. It also takes the form of suffering, as we see in Christ’s encounter with the world. Hence, to the question about the meaning of suffering, Twardowski offers his response in the context of the Lord’s Passion: we suffer so that life becomes love.

Here, I need to stress again that all the natural world Twardowski writes about is creation, that is, a work of a Creator in which he is present in one way or another, but not identical with it. Consider this presence explained in Twardowski’s poem Wiersz z dedykacją:

Again, the Lord God loves the frog not because it croaks,
the frog croaks because the Lord God loves it.

The proper use of analogy here is breathtaking and coincides with that of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. In his Summa theologiae (I, q. 13, a. 2), St. Thomas says that “it does not follow that God is good because he causes goodness; but rather, on the contrary, he causes goodness in things because he is good.” Even more aligned to Twardowski is St. Augustine’s statement (from De Trinitate, book 15, chapter 4) that God knows all spiritual and bodily creatures not because they are, but because he knows them, therefore they are. While Thomas’s focus rests on God’s essential attributes, Twardowski attends creation as existing thanks to this divine goodness—or, we could even venture to say, in this goodness. Within this hermeneutics (of the gift), we recognize the cosmos with its inhabitants as being bestowed from someone who loves, and it is precisely this someone’s love that providentially guides everything. Twardowski frequently calls this providence “invisible hands” (see Koniec, Powrót, Wdzięczność, and Jeszcze). Consequently, the ontic structure itself of all creation as loved declares its origin and reason for it to love, thereby bestowing on every creature a unique value and proper motivation for action. One could say that they all act out of love, which by no means contradicts their freedom. Quite the contrary.

The Task of Being Invisible

However, as I indicated above, a crucial aspect of this creaturely smallness is God’s concealment or his invisibility that this creatureliness entails or, better, enjoys. This invisibility of God is one of the recurring themes in Twardowski’s poems and one of his greatest lessons.

God is so great that he is and is not
so almighty that he can not be,

the poet states in Nieobecny jest. These lines demonstrate how well the Polish poet works the counterpoint—how well he uses the “language of paradoxes” to express the mystery of life. Precisely this invisibility of God is the source of tension in all creatures and their existential “uncertainty” or “anxiety.” Surprisingly, for Twardowski, this invisibility reveals God’s presence in the world in which he remains absent. Created beings and their inter-relations cannot help but betray this presence (“The one who is loved is still invisible” [Kłopoty zakochanych]), if only one is sufficiently attentive to see it. Twardowski saw that every encounter with creation in this life is a “boundary experience,” to borrow a phrase from John Paul II. It is “boundary” because, in some implicit manner, it touches the reality that is otherwise invisible, unattainable, and unreconstructible. Ultimately, to be “sufficiently attentive” here means the ability to reconcile the solitude of absence (including the horror of suffering) with the providence of love. It appears that solitude is so closely connected with love precisely because the nature of God entails invisibility and freedom (which continue after the Incarnation). This Invisible himself causes that connection. For us, God is a loving solitude, a solitude in love, and a love that is alone because it is invisible. Therefore, invisibility is a mark of true love—a mark of “a creative freedom,” to use a Ratzingerian phrase. For this reason, Twardowski claims that without solitude, true love does not exist (Nie rozdzielaj). Because Twardowski links solitude with one’s belonging to God, we can now conclude that to love in solitude means to love with God.

The presence of the Invisible in his creation induces self-reflection and self-understanding. In the world that manifests this presence in absence, I—a human person—stand as the more or less conscious recipient and instrument of divine manifestation in and through creation. Accordingly, everything—things, events, acts, values, relations, and so on—reveals God’s love. “God loves you through a cordial letter that came” and “through rain that rang in your ear” and “through somebody who forbade you to frown” and “through the heart screaming from the cross” (Najbliżej). In other words, “God loves me through you” (Napisałaś). This is the secret to understanding the greatness of ordinary things and all the everyday happenings around us. God loves me through them all and in this way leads me to himself—he does so through a hopping sparrow in the street, through a melting snowflake on my nose, through a croaking frog during rain, and even through my experiences of pain, suffering, loneliness, and death. This seems to be why the poet values natural phenomena above art (Coś więcej). Therefore, it is not surprising that Twardowski sees himself as one through whom (or, better, in whom) God offers his friendship to all others. “I myself did not do the good,” he confesses in Prośba, as it was the angel who gave out gifts “at times through my hands.” In other words, to be a gift in this sense brings one closer to God, unites one with his will, and makes one “invisible.” The awareness of this invisibility of the giver (lover) entails a certain humility that rids the world of the visible appearances that often deceive. “To become invisible does not harm anyone,” Twardowski confesses (in Takie proste), as it is precisely the invisibility of the Invisible that makes the world true and beautiful. In other words, God is the source of beauty, and I become beautiful by sharing in his invisibility present in the world.

This practical application of the analogy between the Invisible God and a concrete human person seems to be another remarkable lesson that Fr. Twardowski’s poems afford us. To become “invisible”—as is God who works in the world through his invisible hands—means to share in his invisibility, that is, his solitude. Such sharing ennobles not only the world itself, giving glory to the Father (see Matt 5:16), but also elevates the human subject, who, paradoxically, discovers the value of his existence precisely in “not being.” To better understand how this invisible subject appears in the world, let me offer Twardowski’s three stages of spiritual life (based on his poem W kolejce do nieba). In the first stage, “you must look like a saint but not be one.” In the next stage, one ought to “neither be a saint nor look like one.” The final stage demands that one “be a saint and not be seen at all.” Only then does a saint start to resemble a saint because only then does he love with a pure love—the love that is pure service. And only then does our saint become truly visible, truly beautiful, and truly himself. We could also call this invisibility “transparency.” In his poem Przeźroczystość, Twardowski asks for such transparency for himself, concluding, “so that only You are seen.”[7]

The Last Word on Beauty

By reflecting on the meaning of the invisibility of the ordinary and that of God and man in the context of love and faith (sacramentality!), we have indirectly been discussing beauty. One of the most profound and striking statements about the visible world is Twardowski’s definition of beauty. According to him, beauty is simply God’s absence (non-presence) (Piękno, ale tyle widać). Another Polish poet, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, captures Twardowski’s idea of beauty with the words that beauty is the form of love (Promethidion).[8] We all might be familiar with various other definitions of beauty, both classic and modern, which all seem insufficient to capture beauty’s essence. They often focus on the consequences of the encounter with the beautiful without reaching the essence of beauty. By his “discovery” of the invisible, Twardowski shows the reason for the ineffability of beauty—why we cannot grasp and possess the beautiful as our own, that is, why “beauty teaches us that we cannot have” (Za nogę), why beauty eludes our comprehension. Things in themselves are like wax on which the invisible ring left its impression and, for this reason, they claim our admiration. Of course, this is just an analogy that is meant to show how the heart can be impressed on by the beloved, that is, how the invisible is linked to the visible. Perhaps the last lesson that we can derive from Twardowski’s concept of beauty is that the source of human happiness lies outside of human life. Both beauty and solitude attest to this fact, to the invisible presence of God.

What has not contracted to an almost zero point is suspended: one has and does not have a map for the road; one has and does not have a clear purpose beyond making it through the cold day and the even colder night. Everything has changed because of an event, the event of a brilliant light that burnt the world down, folding it in darkness and cold, churning cosmos into chaos, and turning the remnant of humanity on the road either into victims who cannot meet the challenge of chaos and the predators who have adapted, who are the conscienceless rapists, murderers, and cannibals who stalk the road.

The Road succeeds because of the complement of elementary simplicity and the reversion to the absolute elemental beyond or beneath civilization. Nowhere in McCarthy’s oeuvre has he put such sympathetic characters at the center, made us care so much about what happens to them and how things turn out. It catches us up because it is a cry into somewhere that might be nowhere, after God, after humanity, after civilization, after books from a world in ruins, stripped to its elemental core, still burning, shrinking in the cold, and disturbed by creatures who have made their peace with chaos and its impersonal evil.

The journey of the two figures on the road is almost quixotic in that, guided by fragments of a map, they travel the road to a hoped-for somewhere that has not reverted to chaos. They are at once a question, a hope, perhaps even a prayer. Here I am less interested in retelling the story or telling the story of how I came to admire the novel after I had somewhat dismissed it. I want to speak three things: (1) appearances to the contrary, The Road is as symbolic and rich in literary allusion as McCarthy’s more difficult and inflationary texts; (2) The Road is awash is biblical symbolism that seems to function substantively and not simply as literary code; and (3) despite the almost saturating presence of the biblical in The Road as befits the apocalyptic time of uncertainty, McCarthy presents enough of a nihilistic alternative to compel the reader to choose.

Bookishness: Writing Oneself Into the Literary Canon

Of great modern American authors, Cormac McCarthy seems the least given to irony, thus perhaps his circumstance of being an acquired taste. Which does not mean that his work does not abound in irony, including The Road, which can be embraced or dismissed in turn as pulp fiction, journey fiction, or post-apocalyptic literature. At one point in the journey on the perilous road to an unknown destination, whose direction is charted by patches of a larger map wrapped in plastic, the nameless man (father) with an unnamed boy (son) finds himself in a library that is miraculously intact.

The man makes his way to the shelves and thumbs through the books, begins to open one of them, then closes it, and puts it back on the incongruous shelf. This is a moment of judgment. We are past the book; past even the defiance regarding the book upon which civilization was built. The book is not even worth burning. Which makes it all the more surprising when, just as we embark on the journey with the unnamed man and boy across a devastated, at once burnt and frozen landscape, where day and night are not absolutely distinguishable, time barely measurable, and language an almost intolerable burden for subjects traumatized by need and fear, in the opening apparently banal sentence referring to the man waking up in the wood in the nearly impenetrable dark, we are routed to the “dark wood” that opens Dante’s Inferno with a similarly midlife man in crisis. This literary allusion is immediately followed by another by means of an equally plain account of a descent into a bunker. This time we are tipped off by the verbal inflation in the descriptor of “the granitic beast” of the nesting of an allusion to Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ descent into Hades. This would make sense. If Dante provides us with the cornucopia of images for the landscapes of hell, he is anticipated at least by his non-Christian psychopomp who has claims to being the first self-conscious literary connoisseur of the nether regions.

The plainness of the prose in The Road, corresponding not only to the devastation of the landscape vacuumed of color and life, but also the monotony of the journey that cannot be guaranteed a destination, is deceiving. The library may be burned, but it lives on unexpectedly in The Road in the bare and spent prose of both the narrator and father. Of course, a reader of McCarthy might anticipate literary allusions. Yet usually there is a kind of verbal grooming as to where and when we might expect them. We come to anticipate literary allusions when monsters are on the stage and switch suddenly from horrendous violence to pontificate about the roiling and amoral reality beneath our reliable lives. In Blood Meridian, for example, as the language swells in order to be adequate to its sublime objects, for example, desert landscapes, the horrors of gratuitous violence, and lust to dominate and kill, literary allusions proliferate.

But in a book with a verbal downshift to match a post-apocalyptic world of burned-out landscapes, perpetual rain, ash-strewn streams and rivers and leaden seas, perhaps we are entitled to be surprised that dialogue with great world authors not only continues, but turns out to be at least as expansive and possibly more so than can be found in McCarthy’s most self-consciously literary text. The stark and dry lines of The Road are sodden with echoes from world and American literature: Melville’s probing of belief in Moby Dick when in extremis the trappings of convention and religious belief are cast off, and especially the sea as the monotonous landscape hiding the cannibalism that pullulates beneath its surface; Beckett’s reduction of language to meet the moment of complete human destitution, as indicated in all the characters of Waiting for Godot ruled by the injunction that we cannot and must go on, and the dialogue which, even when it obeys the rules of grammar, is banal and useless and filling in time that stretches out endlessly; and Dostoevsky, not now, as in Blood Meridian, saluting the modern demonic will-to-power, but the Dostoevsky who experiments with the Christian rebuttal to nihilism in the figures of Zossima, Alyosha, and Dmitri Karamazov. I will do no more than mark these echoes at this point, though I promise to return to them (and perhaps add a few more) when I more directly address the content of the text.

Let me, however, return to Dante and add Milton, the allusions to whom seem different in kind, in that they are intended to speak to the matrix in which the traveler must trudge. The allusion to Dante’s “dark wood” in the opening line is echoed and reechoed throughout The Road. This suggests that it is a binding motif that encourages us to look deeper into the Dante-McCarthy relation in the infernal landscape.

The constant reference to cold in The Road lines up with Dante’s depiction of a frozen Lucifer in the last circle of hell, just as the threat and explosion of cannibalism corresponds to the behavior of Ugolino in the penultimate circle of hell just above the frozen Satan (Canto 33). The figure of Ugolino, like all the sinners in hell, is constituted by repetition compulsion, while also seeming to serve as a symbol for the monstrous self-will at the bottom of sin, ruled by the instinct not simply to disregard the other, but quite literarily to consume him. Yet, cannibalism lies even deeper in hell. Ugolino’s cannibalism is but an expression of Lucifer’s cannibalism, his everlasting gnawing at Judas, Brutus, and Cassius in eternity, which in turn echoes the Greek myth of Chronos devouring his children.

Milton is slyly indicated when the post-apocalyptic landscape is described as “darkness implacable.” Here the unusually elevated prose and Latinate construction of adjective following noun seems intended to recall the “darkness visible” of Book 1 of Paradise Lost (ln 62-3). Both “darkness implacable” and “darkness visible” function as summaries of the hellish landscape and its possibilities, incoherence (pandemonium), and the fire without light that dissolves everything into a charred mass. My point in drawing attention to the level of literary allusion—and I am far from finished—is to show that even in a book like The Road, which seems to reduce itself to novelistic boilerplate with reduced vocabulary and corrupted syntax (absence of punctuation, odd verbal construction, number repetition in dialogue) McCarthy is self-consciously engaged in writing himself into the literary canon by engaging it fully, indeed, standing both with it and against it.

Arguably, there is no modern American novelist who is so insistently agonistic with respect to his great predecessors, so exuberant in making them relevant, while so casual with respect to striking the wrong note and opening oneself up to the accusation of pretentiousness. Engagement with the literary canon is not only in operation in The Road, it is operating near maximum capacity.

Biblical Allusion and Biblical Intertextuality

In the peregrination of the man and the boy, or father and son, McCarthy not only weaves a web of literary allusion, but also of biblical allusion: Job (complaint in destitution), Genesis (creation as expressive of divine goodness; Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac), Exodus (exile; Moses crossing his arm), but also the Synoptic Gospels (baptism) and Acts and Paul (on the Spirit and fire), but centrally the Gospel of John, Genesis, and the Book of Revelation and their relation to each other. Here I will focus on the latter triad while paying attention to the way they interconnect in McCarthy’s biblical weave that is as thick as what can be found in Faulkner. With respect to John, the Prologue, which was so central in the formation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, is crucial. Only three pages into The Road, we find the father having woken up in the dark wood experience himself confronted by the barren, silent, and godless world, later listed as “darkness implacable.” The experience is raw and unfiltered, though grinded down to generalities:

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each than the one that had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away of the world.

Not overcome by the darkness’ blind (glaucoma) and numbing stare, the father dips into biblical lexicon to posit his sleeping son as a counterfactual: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (John 1:1). His sleeping son is neither idea nor shade; he is flesh; he is incarnate (John 1:14). Waking up the father has already touched him. Later, the boy (son) will be described as rag and bone, perpetually dirty, constitutionally fearful, almost always cold and hungry. The father and son are so close to each other that they inhere in each other (John 1:1), or as the relationship is expressed in The Road, “each the other’s world entire”—a sentiment echoed prolifically throughout the text by the father, and reechoed at the end of the text by the son and in any event enacted throughout. From the father’s perspective, his son is the only being capable of demonstrating a life that has not already yielded to death and capable of lighting up the darkness that has become “world.” “World” is darkness not simply as privative, but darkness as obstinate refusal of transformation. The light may shine in the darkness, but the darkness knew him not (John 1:5). In The Road darkness is not personal; it is the realm of necessity set against the boy. Throughout the book McCarthy underscores the enormity of the mismatch.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that John 1:5 serves as rivet and pivot of the thick biblical-symbolic weave in the text. It is rivet in that this passage focuses the drama of good and evil, even as it problematizes both the idea of the “good guys” and the glamor of evil. McCarthy is siding with the author of the Prologue that, given the nature of the world, now revealed to be what it was all along, it is a marvel that a word is being spoken into the wordless world, and a light is irritating the darkness whose whole raison d’être is to resist. It is also pivot in two ways.

First, it provides a horizon for a journey in which the nature of the boy (son) is unveiled under the pressure of the horrors in the journey, not only, however, the experience of enduring the realities of cold, hunger, violence and fear, but those moments that elicit the boy’s compassion, for example, his and his father’s encounter with the tattered boy they meet on the road and the terrible scene with the decrepit old man at the end of the book who is delivered a death sentence by the boy’s father by being left naked by the father at the side of the road for having stolen their cart with all their belongings, thereby mortally threatening their lives. The encounter with the boy is a real one-time event in a novel that moves towards the condition of mere chronicle, but it also creates a trope that functions as a human measure recurred to throughout The Road as to what might be owed the unaccommodated innocent in this life. Though the measure is provided by the Gospel of John and the other Gospels, it is patched through Dmitri Karamazov whose Christianity is essentially summed up by his reference to the suffering of the boy that has become figure rather than event. The fact that the Bible in general provides the main symbolic weave in a book that does not seem to announce its symbolic nature does not mean that there are not literary weaves that cross and braid with it, especially when these weaves are themselves self-consciously in conversation with the biblical text.

Second, there is a specific Johannine weave initiated by the challenges that the son has to face, but also how he challenges the darkness. The baptism account in the Gospel of John (1:19ff.), immediately following the Prologue that establishes the nature of the Word, is recalled when having cleaned off the ash from the river, the father washes the blood and brain-spatter of a cannibal from the hair of his son. In addition, the great Eucharistic reflections of John 6 are recalled when the washing of the hair reveals a “golden chalice, good to house a god.” As we might expect, however, McCarthy does not pay homage to theological niceties. The father who washes the son’s hair is not a heavenly father—he has shown his frail humanity in his fierce protectiveness of the boy and in blowing the would-be cannibal’s brains out—the cannibal representing, of course, the parody of the Eucharist. He is like the forerunner, John the Baptist, the one who announces the one who has been promised, the one who may save the world.

In addition, as John 1:5 licenses not only Jesus’s loving and merciful disposition and behavior towards the world, but also connects with the intricate network of “I am” statements (echoing Exodus 3) that make sense of it, such is also the case throughout The Road where McCarthy lures us into accepting identity claims that in a less dramatic and fraught situation, we would dismiss as delusional, and from the point of view of the prerogatives of literature might be set aside as bathetic. In any event, it is perhaps not accidental that in one of the more arresting “I am” statements at the end of The Road, there is a sense of displacement and not generation from the father. The boy says: “I am. I am the one. Yes, I am the one to worry.” Here it seems as if there is an echo of the Farewell Discourses in the Gospel of John, and especially John 16:7 where the Word disappears from view in order for the Spirit who is the Comforter to come and do his work of illuminating and binding. McCarthy does not pretend to be a theologian: in The Road it is not the boy as Word who dies but the father. Finally, the Johannine weave is thickened further by what seems to be a self-conscious recall of John 17:23 where Jesus addresses the God of creation by the very intimate term of Abba, which is Aramaic for “father” or even “dad.” At the very beginning of the book, soon after the father has woken up, his son wakes up. His first words are quintessentially ordinary, yet powerful. He says “Papa,” thereby interpreting the relationship between man and boy, and now in the man’s musings, man and word, as that of father and son. This is epiphany, maybe theophany, in any event the moment when mere biological fact transcends itself into a meaning of eternal significance.

Apocalypse: Event: Decreation: Renewal

In The Road the weave within the biblical weave is the relation between the Prologue and Genesis, on the one hand, and the Prologue and the book of Revelation, on the other, as creation is understood to be an expression of the unaccountable generosity of divine goodness, and apocalypse the disclosure of the chaos covered over, but not entirely negated by a loving and blessed ordering. Not surprisingly in an apocalyptic novel, the relation between apocalypse and genesis is primary, though it is facilitated by the weave of biblical allusion from the Gospel of John inaugurated by the high literature of the Prologue and dramatically riveted and regulated through John 1:5. I would like to speak to the relation of apocalypse to creation under the auspices of decreation. Before I get to that, it is important to remind that if The Road is rightly classed as an apocalyptic text as both event and “unveiling,” it is fundamentally incurious as to why the world ended. It focuses more or less exclusively on the aftermath and how, in particular, the human remnant responds to the devastation that reduces the world to a nothing, aggressive, sullen, indifferent, and if it were not so indifferent, then malicious. From the point of view of experience, it does not matter, or at least no longer matters, whether the cause was human in origin or belongs to the order of cosmic accident such as the meteor strike 66 million years ago that put an abrupt end to the dinosaurs. Which is not to say that there are no traces of the event itself in the “invisible moon” and “banished sun” that circles the earth like “a grieving mother with a lamp,” the burning that never appears to stop linked to an apparently everlasting wintering, and the quakes that rock the frozen ground, and in the order of interpretation ferment the hypothetical of divine judgment.

Yet, if apocalyptic theatrics and etiology can be set aside, still, a fundamental feature of the apocalyptic vision is destruction understood to be essentially an act of decreation. The rationale is laid out with extraordinary clarity near the close of the text:

Perhaps in the world’s destruction, it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic, and coldly secular.

Here we have the calling back of creation to the watery waste of Genesis 1:2, the tohu va bohu. All animal stock of day six of creation (Gen 1:24) reverts to the waste, and though human being has not fully gone, we are talking only of a remnant in which there is no longer the illusion of sovereignty (1:28). Human beings do not preside over anything; indeed, they are ruled by chaos, which is a kind of offensive recalcitrant nothing. This tehomic nothing rules the world, is its matrix. The birds and the fishes that mark day five of creation are nowhere to be found (Gen 1:21-23). That rank or rung of creation has been absolved into the waste. Such is true also of the distinction between day and night and the light shone by the sun and the moon of day four of the creation story (Gen 1:14 -20). While a distinction between night and day remains, it is now between blackness that the moon cannot pierce and the murk that the sun fails to dissipate. The vegetation that might bear fruit of day three (Gen 1:9-13) is gone and the separation of water and land compromised. There is only a relative distinction between sky and water for the rain that punctuates the journey of the father and son seems endless as in the great biblical flood. The separation between sky and water of day two also seems to be seriously compromised (Gen 1:6-8). The world is flat without a horizon and, of course, by implication without meaning or tending towards it. Day one (Gen 1:3-5) the creation of light and separation of light from darkness is compromised on the cosmological front. Day is barely distinguishable from night.

Yet, it is precisely here that McCarthy can pitch his tent as to what remains, switching the code from the cosmological to the soteriological as happens in the Prologue of the Gospel of John. McCarthy is suggesting that to the degree to which the boy is the word that challenges the cold silence, the light that shines out from the appalling darkness, a distinction can be drawn between light and darkness. The behavior of just about everyone in a world of perturbation and collapse, even the behavior of the father, moves towards the condition of the darkness. Yet, the boy as the figure of light, as a figure of fire, is a figure of the Spirit that hovers over the waters (Gen 1:2) and a promise that chaos is conquerable by the word of compassion and empathy that rise beyond the necessities and barbarities of survival. If in the apocalypse creation is reduced to its chaotic studs and struts, the absoluteness of its empire is stopped short by the boy who can be assimilated to the flare that the father, at one point in the apparently destinationless journey, apparently randomly shoots into the air.

With this we can see how McCarthy has modified the “seeing” of John’s apocalypse. The Book of Revelation presents a redeemed heaven and earth that rivals in both certainty and sublimity what is said about the destruction of the world (Rev 21, 22). The Road does not. This is in keeping with its “hero,” who though identified with the word, is often silent, and the little that he has to say linguistically reduced to repetitions of “OK” and “I know.” Yet he is the bearer of “fire” and a form of knowing otherwise than the acceptance of the imperatives of survival summed up in the reluctant “OK” and “I know.” Being a bearer of fire seems to have lower and higher registers. In the lower register it simply is a mark that one is not reduced to the waste entirely by renouncing cannibalism; in the higher register it has to do with substantively transforming the tehomic darkness. The question is whether that power is vested in the father as well as the son. This question is answered at the end of The Road when the dying father tells the son that he will have to carry the fire on behalf of both of them and that he is his “whole heart.” In fact, however, he is hiding an asymmetry: if the son is the whole heart of the father, this heart transcends the father who is a carrier of fire only in the lower and not in the upper or higher register.

Given the thickness of the biblical weave in The Road when coming upon the recurring image of “fire,” there is good reason to think of the Pentecostal fire of Acts 2:1-4, though the image is multivalent and echoes not only the divine fire that Prometheus steals from a jealous Zeus to establish culture and art, but perhaps also the “ever-living fire” (pyr aeizoon) of Heraclitus that is connected equally with logos and becoming. All of these meanings remain in play, even if one could mount a convincing argument that the biblical is dominant. Some features of the Prometheus myth cannot be carried forward; certainly not fire as such or culture, and maybe not even art, although the very existence of The Road itself seems to testify to art’s non-redundancy. There is fire in the ruined world, but it does not distinguish between the non-savage and savage, as the terrible image of the newborn child being cooked on the spit testifies.

In addition, our technical accomplishments appear to have done nothing in terms of forming human beings that can face the catastrophe without reverting to cannibalism. Nevertheless, it is not as if the myth of Prometheus fails to make any contribution: Prometheus is a bearer of hope for a humanity suffering in the dark and the cold. Nonetheless, if Prometheus is being recalled in The Road’s image of fire, the recall itself glimmers and flickers rather than flames: it is doused in sheer stubbornness, of continuing the journey while routinely getting off the road, backtracking, and idling and setting a fire in the middle of it. In fact, it would seem as if Prometheus is blended with Sisyphus. Yet, even this stubbornness is a refusal to the powerful lure of annihilation presented by the opening of the waste as the cosmos is stripped down to what it presupposed and is rarely called to mind. The boy’s mother succumbed to the lure of the matrix in her suicide, and the promise she wrings from her husband that he will kill his beloved son when he could no longer protect him from the ghastly evil that comes out of the murk and stalks the uncertain mapping of the road (a version under necessity of the Abraham-Isaac story)—a promise that he entertains but never carries out. Nevertheless, even read in the most charitable light, the Promethean figuration of fire seems less adequate than the biblical one that goes back to the fire that surrounds and protects the “I am” of Exodus. The biblical symbolic weave is the more adequate because it is the more comprehensive. It embraces faith as well as hope. Crucially, it embraces love as well as hope, the bond of love between the father and the son that is emitted as the spirit. Only this love and this spirit constitute the negentropy that matches the entropy of the matrix.

While maintaining a deep conversation with the book of Revelation as the apocalyptic text of the Western tradition both in itself and as it resounds in the literary canon in Dante, Milton, Melville, and others, McCarthy never hesitates to rewrite. Where fire leads you to in The Road is not the heavenly Jerusalem that can be described in glorious and exhaustive detail as expressive of our achieved communion with the one who sits on the throne who is Alpha and Omega. In The Road, there seems to be neither opening nor appetite for this overwhelming presence. The best we can expect is that God is hidden rather than dead. Instead of the heavenly Jerusalem we have the trout as a religious symbol, but perhaps also of the American pastoral of Thoreau. Of course, as with the image of salmon, the trout figures Christ. More generally, it is an image of wisdom. Thus, the correspondence to the boy and another allusion to the Prologue of John’s Gospel that in turn connects with Proverbs 8:22. Nor should we ignore that just before the trout passage that concludes the text, the woman, who serves as the Marian figure receiving the son, speaks of the breath of God communicated to human beings and passed on by them over the ages. Again, finding literary value only in and through symbolic association, this woman, who unlike the boy’s real mother resists the lure of the matrix, is the true Mary, not the biological mother of the boy. The boy’s biological mother is relegated to the status of an Eve who yielded to temptation, though the temptation succumbed to in this case is the reverse or even inverse of the temptation to be God, but rather, like the characters in Dostoevsky's The Devils or perhaps even Melville’s Ahab, the temptation to be nothing.

The gorgeous trout passage that concludes The Road is worth quoting in full.

Once there were brook trout in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man himself and they hummed of mystery.

Three observations. First, though the register is the beautiful rather than the sublime, this is a world of color and sensuality, and in terms of renewal less a transfigurative renovation than a pastoral idyll. Second, and relatedly, the image establishes a chain of connections and oppositions with other sea creatures, with the monsters of the deep of Job, of the whale in Moby Dick in which the sea is opaque and its ruler a figure of instinct and power. Third, on examination, and alarmingly, in the memory of yesterday projected into a hoped-for future, it is not clear that human beings will be part of the new earth.

Undecidability in Interpretation

The exposure of the thick weave of biblical allusion throughout The Road rules against the complacent interpretation of the text being an example of the Nietzschean nihilism that McCarthy supposedly illustrates throughout his work. Nonetheless, while acknowledging the wavy and mazy biblical weave in the text, equally we might have to resist bringing in the verdict that not only does the Bible continue to be alive as a cultural code, but it is one unequivocally supported by McCarthy. Of course, the argument about the Bible functioning as mere “code” is one available to any commentator or critic of a text with a manifest pattern of Christian allusion. Here it is unlikely to work, given the ontological vehemence in McCarthy’s language, especially in the reduced state that we find it in The Road in which, in its enunciation, it does have the luxury of not intending the real, even if one cannot be sure that it reaches it. The situation in which the man and boy (refigured as father and son) find themselves represents a hysterical break with reality. Language has no other function than that of attempting to name the darkness and the light that is a trace of its other. Certainly, the biblical weave in the text oftentimes overlaps with the literary weave in which, as I have suggested, Dante and Milton are foremost in that they provide the horizon. Yet, in The Road the biblical weave finds itself competing with a weave of Nietzschean allusion. There are any number of recalls of the death of God throughout the text. Nietzsche’s vision of the death of God as the catastrophic end of meaning is laid down from the opening pages as possibly (though not necessarily) explanatory.

Bedrock this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporary winds to and fro in the void . . . everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air.

This is a paraphrase of Nietzsche’s famous passage on the death of God in The Gay Science (Aphorism 125). According to Nietzsche, only the madman has truly grasped the consequence of the death of God, that is, the loss of authority of a transcendent source of meaning and value to which the world of becoming is riveted. In the famous passage the madman speaks of the cold, of the abolition of the distinction between above and below, and most tellingly of the unchaining of the earth from the sun. In addition, Nietzsche’s rhetorical ordinance seems to be in play a little when a flake of snow falling on the father’s hand is described as like the “last host of Christendom.” Again, straining the narrative realism that is the chosen form of the text, the bedraggled old man whom the father and son meet on the road speaks perfect Nietzsche as he declaims the death of God and insists that the ghoulish specimens that haunt the road are his prophets. As further evidence of the Nietzschean weave, the word “secular” throughout The Road has a Nietzschean aura in that while it points to the state of affairs, it also recalls nothing less than an apocalyptic event. Finally, there is the constant refrain of the term “nothing” as disclosive of the way things are.

In excavating the recurring Nietzschean nihilistic codes, I am far from saying that McCarthy opts for them in the last instance. I have presented abundant evidence of the thick weave of Christian symbols and integration of symbols throughout the text. In addition, for each moment in the text that there is a leaning into the absolute absence of God, there is a moment when the man (father) adopts the Joban stance of protest against a God who is hidden rather than dead and in whose hand lies the secret for all that has and will transpire. Of course, the most open statement about God’s existence and presence in the world, and thus precisely about God not being dead, is provided by the woman who receives the boy (word, wisdom) in the second last paragraph of the book.

Nonetheless, even with this avowal, the Nietzschean option is not defeated. The Christian and Nietzschean options remain in permanent tension throughout The Road, even if the viable version has definitely dispensed the superman (Übermensch). Neither is refused; neither can be unequivocally advocated. Given the apocalypse, which among other things means a loss of certitude, experience is tugged into different lines of interpretation in the text. The expectation is that this will affect the reader, who, to the extent to which she enters the apocalyptic world of the text, comes to understand that fundamental decisions cannot be fully notarized.

This brings me to my second and final point. The Road will not decide for us how we read it, precisely because it is neither science, philosophy, nor religion. It is art captivated by mysteries, structural ambiguities, undecidabilities. Its obligation is to bring them to our attention. After pondering and shifting and without overwhelming evidence one way or the other in this patterned but mazy world, the burden of decision is ours and ours alone. It is we who must decide. Shockingly, Christianity remains a fundamental option even in the apocalypse, or perhaps shockingly because of it.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the colloquium "Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Literature, Metaphysics, and Apocalypse" hosted by the DeNicola Center for Ethics and Culture, April 15, 2026.

The play was written in 1921 and bears the mark of the modern—art fascinated with its own medium, becoming its own subject. But Pirandello's play, by separating the characters from the actors, and both from the author, underscores the inescapable dependence of both—on Luigi Pirandello. Of course, to be a character entails an author of its being, so however successful or unsuccessful the search, the quest is predicated on the possibility of success.

Dramatic characters stand in a complicated relation to real agents. We follow their doings just because in some way they stand for us, and the intelligibility or lack of it on the stage is a metaphor of our lives. Hamlet will have them well treated because "they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time" (2.2). It has been said that life is a book in which we set out to write one story and end by writing another. Deflective surprises are due to chance or, as men have thought from time immemorial, to another author in whose drama we are but players. A play within a play. How can we not be in search of our author?

Lectures in natural theology have a distant air about them, as if they dealt with matters so abstruse that ordinary folk could not be interested or perhaps even follow what is being said. The formal effort to construct proofs with an eye to showing that God's existence is as inescapable as the premises that precede is indeed a difficult matter and one who lifted his voice in the average pub to recite such a proof is unlikely to win a host of adherents. If he does, we will suspect that something other than cogency is involved.

The Greeks, from whom we have all learned philosophy, made knowledge of the divine the mark of the wise man, and the acquisition of wisdom the task of a lifetime. The neophyte was not ready to ask the ultimate questions—and the existence of God is surely an ultimate question. A lengthy curriculum had to be followed and anywhere along the way one might stop—with mathematics, with natural science—and not continue to philosophy's term. Or be diverted altogether by pressing practical concerns.

But if that is the case with the elite, what must be said of those the vast majority of mankind—who are not enrolled in the Academy or Lyceum? If there is a God who is the author of us all, awareness of his existence should surely not be restricted to a few. How could any character in the human drama fail to search in some way for his author?

We are to God as characters are to their author. It may be a violation of the assumptions of art for imaginary characters to go in search of the writer who made them. But for us it is all but inevitable that, however momentarily, we feel ourselves to be part of a vast cosmic drama and our thoughts turn to the author, not merely of our roles, but of our existence.

Natural theology is one version of that quest. For an old philosopher, it is difficult to remember exactly when the subject of natural theology first swam before his mind's eye. Any philosopher will, when he hears the phrase "natural theology,” feel something stir within him, a reaction either positive or negative. (I will simply decree that anyone indifferent in the matter does not count as a philosopher.) My own reaction is a positive stirring. Like Adam Gifford, I think that there is such a thing as natural theology.

What Is It?

Natural theology, as I use the phrase—and this is not an idiosyncratic use of it—means the philosophical discipline which proves that God exists and that he has certain attributes. It is theology because it is concerned with God, and it is natural because it makes use of our natural powers unaided by any supernatural revelation. Natural theology is thus distinct from Christian theology which assumes as true what God has revealed to us about himself.

My Predisposition

Whence comes my benevolent attitude toward natural theology? For one thing, I am a Catholic—a contented and grateful one, I might add. The long tradition of the Church in this matter culminated at the First Vatican Council where it was declared to be of faith (de fide) that God can be known by our natural powers independent of faith, grace, or revelation. This will seem to be a paradoxical situation, perhaps: a dogmatic declaration that dogma is not necessary for one to know that God exists. But anyone responsive to the dogma already holds that God exists on faith. This must apply to someone else. But why then does the Church bother with the subject? A long story that, the latest chapter of which is Fides et ratio, an encyclical issued in 1998.

As a believer I accept on faith that God exists. As a Catholic, I take it to be of faith that God's existence can be known apart from faith. But I am, allegedly, a philosopher. My situation, as just summarized, would in the eyes of some disqualify me for philosophizing. A moment ago I was reading anyone indifferent to natural theology out of the ranks, now I seem to have described myself in such a way that I must myself be ostracized.

The objection is that one who as a matter of religion believes in God is in no position to discuss the question of God's existence, because he has already begged that question. As a philosopher, who is expected to follow the argument wherever it leads him, he should have an open mind. But the believer does not philosophize in the expectation that his faith will shortly be undermined. Is it a condition for doing natural theology, or any other philosophical task, that we come to it without any antecedent convictions? It is a rather widespread conviction among professional philosophers that natural theology cannot be brought to a successful term. Nor is this attitude absent from the ranks of believers.

Antipathetic Believers

There are many Christians, some of them are my colleagues, who as Protestants are appalled at the very notion of natural theology. For them it is an abomination that sinful man should seek to bridge the gap between himself and the deity by way of syllogisms.

Believers who are affirmatively disposed and believers who are negatively disposed toward natural theology will soon be exchanging snippets of Scripture to justify their attitude. I will cite Romans 1:19; my interlocutor will cite Colossians 2:8, to the effect that we should not be led astray by philosophy. On the sidelines, following this with amusement, is a third party who is not a believer and who sees this battle of believers as a sign that neither party can engage in philosophizing, properly understood. But let us take a look at this third party.

The Soi-disant Standard Philosopher

Our observer is not indifferent to the matter of natural theology. Let us say that he would come to this study with the antecedent conviction that proofs of God's existence are impossible because God does not exist. And, even if God did exist, it would be impossible for us to know it.

This fellow admittedly gains acceleration from the zeitgeist. There seems little doubt that philosophy is all but definitionally agnostic now, if not matter-of-factly atheist. The philosopher has become a thoroughly secularized fellow, most likely someone who in the mists of memory believed but has long since put away the things of a child, thanks to philosophy. How would he describe himself as a philosopher?

More or less as pure reason. Questions come to his attention from he knows not where; in any case, their provenance is irrelevant. He ponders the question, he considers solutions, he weighs the possibilities, he makes his dispassionate judgment. He is for all practical purposes anonymous.

Now you and I know this fellow. We have argued with him. Does this disembodied portrait fit him? On the question of natural theology—is there a God, are we and the world his effects?—his mind is not a blank slate. Whatever his condition might have been when he signed up for a course called Introduction to Philosophy, now he has an antecedent attitude toward the possible outcome of the question. He does not think God's existence has ever been proved. Logically, this does not prove God to be non-existent, but he will not therefore put the question on hold. We know how he would fill out prying questionnaires. Religion? None. Meaning he does not think there is a God.

My Generalization

My point in drawing attention to these obvious yet somehow forgettable facts is both to tell you that I take up my task in the firm pre-philosophical conviction, thanks to my Christian faith, that it can be done, and that my having pre-philosophical antecedent convictions is not unique, but is simply a variation on the common fact that everyone comes to every inquiry with antecedent convictions. If having antecedent beliefs disqualified one from philosophy, there could be no philosophers.

All philosophers have acquired a lengthy personal history before they even begin the study of philosophy. The effort to rid oneself of all that baggage—for some centuries now taken to be the first philosophical task—is an acknowledgment of its presence. Nor it is ever a completely discarded item. Etienne Gilson detected of all kinds of covert scholasticism in Descartes himself, who thought he had bade adieu to all that.

My intention is not to return an insult for an insult. Tu quoque, as it were. Reflection makes it clear that everyone thinks out of a very complicated personal background, one that affects what questions he entertains, the expectations he has of possible answers, and doubtless causes him to give short shrift to lines of thought which disturb those antecedents. Imagine how difficult it would be for someone with the zeitgeist in his sails to follow with sympathy the effort to prove the existence of God. And of course, think of how the believer would react to any attempt to show that talk of God is meaningless.

Thus far, then, three points:

1. I take up the topic of natural theology in the expectation that it can successfully fulfill my expectations of it. This stems from my religious belief.

2. Nonetheless, many fellow Christians hold the opposite attitude toward natural theology.

3. It is not only believers who have such antecedent convictions: everyone does.

Objection

All this might be admitted as a matter of course but objection may be taken to my passing so lightly over the fact that the modern turn in philosophy was aimed precisely at overcoming such antecedent attitudes—common sense, the confusions and errors into which the mind has fallen, received and unexamined opinion of various kinds. What was needed was a severe application of the Socratic maxim: The unexamined life is not worth living. (The novelist Peter DeVries pointed out that many students would prefer the unexamined to the examined life, but no matter.) A cold eye must be cast on what is given and presupposed—on tradition, on common sense—with nothing being admitted that does not pass the test of methodic doubt. Antecedent attitudes are to be overcome, not appealed to for guidance, however covert. This drama was played out again and again in modern times. It therefore must seem disingenuous of me to invoke the given as, well, given.

This is an important objection, and one to which I must shortly return. But for the moment I want to dwell on the special condition of the believing philosopher.

Christian Philosophy

Etienne Gilson, in his ebullient Gifford lectures, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, celebrated what he called the Christian Philosophy of the Middle Ages, just at the time that his fellow historian, Emile Brehier, in an article that asked Y-a-t-il une philosophie chrétienne?, was suggesting a negative answer. For Brehier it seemed obvious that believers, for whom the great questions of philosophy had already received their answers, could scarcely go about seeking those same answers. They were already committed. They could not follow the argument wherever it might take them.

This article of Brehier's set off, as you may know, a tremendous reaction among believers. In the Thirties, just about every Continental Catholic philosopher of renown—or soon to be renowned—published a little book on Christian philosophy. The meeting of the Société Thomiste at Juvisy in 1933 was devoted to the question. There was anything but unanimity. The disagreement between the eminent medievalists Mandonnet and Gilson is particularly instructive. For Gilson it was simply a matter of historical fact that during the ages of faith certain philosophical truths had either been broached for the first time—e.g., the concept of person—or had come more sharply into focus—e.g., the nature of the first cause—within the ambiance of the faith. Whether or not they would have been developed without that influence, the historical fact remained.

Mandonnet impatiently pointed out that an argument was either a philosophical argument or a theological one—dependent on faith—and that Gilson was confusing philosophy with theology.

This theme took on new life twenty years ago in the United States when the Society of Christian Philosophers was formed, and once more a variety of positions, not all of them compatible, were developed by those identifying themselves as Christian philosophers.

What is incontestable is that religious belief influences the philosophizing of Christian philosophers, unless they are schizophrenic. It is safe to say that no Christian philosopher sits down at his desk in the expectation that he will rise from it convinced that God does not exist, that the human soul is mortal, or that we will not be held accountable for our deeds. His life would make no sense if these were false. Does that preclude his asking whether there are sound arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul?

While the case of the believer is indeed distinctive, it is a mistake to regard it as unique. For many, philosophizing is an activity that has become totally secularized. If the thinker had religious faith, he has put it aside. Indeed, it would seem professionally gauche if he were to admit to religious faith. The working assumption is that anyone who uses his mind seriously must put aside religious beliefs.

Say that is a fair picture of the profession. If philosophers were polled on the question whether it is possible to prove the existence of God, the vast majority would likely say no. Some few of them would do so on the basis of extended examination of attempts to prove God's existence. But for many this conviction is simply there, breathed in with the atmosphere of secularized philosophy. This is the antecedent conviction of many, perhaps most, professional philosophers. If you ask a class of undergraduates, neophytes in philosophy, if they think it possible to prove God's existence, almost none will answer in the affirmative. (I speak as a professor of philosophy in a Catholic university.) Does this disqualify them from considering such proofs? Are professional philosophers who antecedently think it impossible to prove that God exists toto coelo different from the believing philosopher who thinks it possible?

Relativism?

You will perhaps be feeling dismay. I began by admitting my own antecedent attitude toward the project of natural philosophy. I asked if this disqualified me from going on with my task. Then I suggested that everyone is in a similar position. Nonetheless, believers differ among themselves on the possibility of natural theology, so an affirmative attitude does not seem entailed by Christian faith. Perhaps one has to be a Catholic, or a member of a diminishing subset of Catholics, to have such antecedent confidence. But now, after seeming to exempt him, I am back suggesting that the non-believing philosopher, like the believing philosopher, has antecedent convictions on the matter of natural theology which ought to disqualify him as well.

But your dismay could go to the implications of what I am doing. If everyone's philosophizing is influenced by antecedent convictions, philosophy will seem to be merely the formation of reasons for what we already hold to be true. One's philosophical position will reflect his antecedent attitudes. Antecedent attitudes differ. Therefore, the radical diversity among philosophers is not a function of argument but of subjectivity.

Such considerations do indeed explain why agreement is so hard to come by in philosophy. Philosophers are regularly astounded by colleagues who resist what seem to their proponents to be airtight arguments. But if agreement is difficult, it is not impossible.

A philosopher's antecedent attitudes will influence the questions he finds attractive, they will lead him to expect one result rather than another from his inquiry, and they may cause him to think he has a good argument when he hasn't. This is not a peculiarity of one species of philosopher. It is an ineluctably common fact about philosophers.

Here is my stay against a chaotic relativism. Whatever the personal reasons for pursuing a given question, whatever expectations one might have as to its solution, the position he arrives at and the arguments he formulates are appraisable by criteria which float free of the various and conflicting antecedent attitudes of philosophers.

The Advantage of Christian Philosophy

But I would not want you to think that the condition of the non-believing and of the believing philosopher were in every way the same. Many believers, under the influence of the current prejudices of the profession, accept the judgment that they are somehow suspect and anomalous. And even if the kind of argument I am suggesting can be made, they would go on regarding themselves as somehow handicapped by their religious faith. This leads to the distressing spectacle of believers proceeding as if they did not believe, taking a working skepticism to be a condition of doing philosophy. But a faith thus set aside may not be there when one goes back for it.

My view is that the religious believer is at a tremendous advantage in philosophy.

The reason is that his antecedent attitude is not based on hearsay, the idols of the tribe, what the most respected thinkers hold, etc., but on the Word of God. The believer holds as true what God has revealed to be true and has the sanction of God himself for them. Collective human reason may be fallible, but God is not. That is significantly different from holding something on the basis of human trust, on ordinary human faith. I am speaking of antecedent attitudes of course.

No doubt the skeptical secularist finds this steady confidence in the range of reason annoying. Perhaps he can take some comfort in this frank statement of a believing philosopher's belief that his antecedents are an advantage, not an impediment, to doing philosophy. His worst fears are realized.

A Corner of the Veil

A recent French theological thriller turns on the impact of a proof for the existence of God which is completely irresistible and carries with it none of the difficulties associated with the traditional proofs, whether cosmological or ontological. The novel, Lawrence Cossé’s A Corner of the Veil, explores the social effects such a proof would have. The proof itself is not given in the novel, as it happens—doubtless a wise literary decision—but its characteristics as described are crucial for the story. Six handwritten pages contain a proof so compelling and immediately intelligible that simply to read the pages is to drive forever from the mind any doubt that there is a God.

Among the political assumptions threatened by the proof is the toleration of different views. Modern society tries not to give the believer any advantage over the non-believer and vice versa. This is grounded on the belief that such questions cannot be rationally resolved. But, given those six pages, it now becomes impossible to deny the existence of God and whole bureaucracies and legal provisions and the courts and lawyers and functionaries employed by them become obsolete overnight. How could those who reject the obvious be taken seriously?

Already one can see that the novel conflates theism and religious belief. Indeed, the proof comes to the attention of members of a religious order patterned on the Jesuits and the final scenes of the novel are played out in Rome. It may seem churlish to insist that a proof of God's existence leaves the truth of Christianity an open question, but if the proof is supposed to include the mysteries of the Christian faith, there is a fundamental confusion at the heart of the novel. What would an irresistible proof of the Trinity look like? Since the proof is kept off-stage, there is no way to tell whether this confusion is contained in the proof. But it is, alas, necessary for the novel that the proof be thought to make any ecclesiastical mediation between man and God otiose since now this must seem like needing an authority for 2 + 2 = 4. One can, of course, waive such niceties and enjoy the novel, and I hope you will, but its confusion provides an occasion for an important and final preliminary point.

The task of natural theology is to arrive at some truths about God—that he exists, that he is one, intelligent, cause of all else, etc.—but no matter how wildly successful it is, there is an infinite distance between its truths and the Christian mysteries. The truths the natural theologian establishes by argument were previously accepted on faith by the believing philosopher. But among the things he believes is that the crucial and distinctive truths of Christianity cannot be established by such proofs. God's existence and some of his attributes can be proved by beginning with truths in the public domain, those common truths that everyone who has standard and unimpaired natural cognitive equipment can be taken to know. If the mysteries of the faith were provable like that, it is conceivable that someone might hit upon them simply by carrying on in the usual philosophical way. Once more, the believer as believer holds the opposite, and of course no such proofs have ever been fashioned. The believer holds that it is only thanks to God's mercy that we have been informed of the divinity as well as humanity of Christ and his crucial role in our salvation. There is something grotesque in the suggestion that a chemical analysis of the Eucharist should be able to settle claims of Transubstantiation, or that Christ's DNA would provide a basis for testing his claim to divinity.

The difference between truths held ultimately on the basis of what everyone knows and truths held on the authority of the one revealing is total. Natural theology does not establish the truth of Christianity, and the truths it does yield do not bring the mind a millimeter closer to holding the truths of the Trinity, Resurrection, and Incarnation on any basis other than the authority of God.

Peroration

Please forgive the autobiographical testimony, but reticence here can only give aid and comfort to the secularist conception of philosophy. I thought it wise to lay my own cards on the table from the outset. As a Catholic, I am antecedently disposed to think that the tasks of natural theology can be successfully accomplished. Holding this at the present time is counter-cultural, at least so far as philosophical culture goes. One might be more shaken by this if the present state of philosophy were different than it is. The terrain of modern philosophy takes one to a contemporary situation where philosophers are urged to become "strong poets." Apart from the fact that this is a libel on poetry, it is an admission of the ultimate bankruptcy of philosophy understood as the quest for truth.

As a believer, I am proud of the fact that the Church has stood athwart the path modern philosophy has taken. Her warnings have been frequent and to the point, as even non-believers have come to see. Like Jacques Maritain early in the twentieth century, one becomes convinced that the appropriate stance of the proponent of natural theology, to say nothing of the believer, is to be Antimoderne. Now we witness the irony that it is the Church—I think of John Paul II's encyclical Fides et ratio, Faith and Reason—that comes to the defense of reason and its capacity to know the truth. Why should the Church bother? Because the faith is compatible with reason and is its fulfillment, though a fulfillment reason could not achieve on its own. But what reason can achieve is presupposed by the faith. And as believers we know that some knowledge of God is possible on the basis of reason alone. This is the role of natural theology.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Characters in Search of Their Author: The Gifford Lectures, 1999-2000 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.