A dreadful confusion of forms has emerged. These forms no longer have roots in life and its essential content. We build theaters in the form of temples, banks in the form of cathedrals, apartment complexes in the form of palaces. Working days and Sundays merge into one another.
—Guardini (1994), Letters From Lake Como, p. 59.

Introduction: The Need for an Apocalyptic Imagination

Part I ended by connecting liturgical signs to the AI age on the basis of the philosophy and practice of interface design. While the question of design inspired by liturgical signs will be taken up again in Part III, this section of the book relies on the ideas of two outstanding theologians to afford new entry points into the project of a Catholic cosmotechnics founded on the twin qualities of liturgical signs—epiphany and asceticism. The theologians in question are Romano Guardini, to whom this chapter is devoted, and St. John Henry Newman, the Church’s newest Doctor, whose work is taken up in the next.

To recapitulate: the previous chapters identified two essential qualities of liturgical signs: they are epiphanic (disclosive of a ground) and ascetic (self-limiting through juxtaposition, refraining from capturing the whole). These twin characteristics prevent liturgical signs from becoming “formal signs”—mediations that hide in plain sight, collapsing the ground into the figure and thereby foreclosing alternative possibilities for action. On that basis, the present chapter sets out from the sobering possibility that to live in a technologically-mediated world might be to live in a world dominated precisely by such formal signs. It follows that the very possibility of a Catholic cosmotechnics hinges on the ability to (re)gain awareness of technological mediations that are ordinarily hidden in plain sight. This is where Romano Guardini’s critique of technology plays a pivotal role. In particular, Guardini (1994) stresses the apocalyptic value of technological “accidents.” Here I use “apocalyptic” not in the popular sense of catastrophic destruction, but in its root meaning of unveiling or revelation. Technological accidents, in this sense, reveal the finite and fallible character of new technologies, making visible once again the work of mediation they actively undertake: they only disclose particular experiential possibilities at the cost of foreclosing alternative modes of perception that are rendered inaccessible, right when they could provide traction for questioning the deeper telos of a particular technological path.

Following the French Catholic theorist Paul Virilio, I will show how technology’s accidents are not mere failures or glitches, but they point to constitutive features of the process of technological change. Where Virilio focuses primarily on spectacular crashes, I want to press deeper into what might be called the “perceptual” accident: the tendency of technology to “hide in plain sight” its own work of mediation, leading to an imperceptible—if decisive—collapse of ground into figure. “Perceptual” accidents are rooted in what Guardini, and McLuhan with him, identifies as abstraction: the isolation and privileging of one mode of perception at the expense of others that gives rise to a “formal sign” (i.e. one that gives an impression of immediacy while actually hiding its shaping effect on perception).

The most vivid historical example of this pattern appears in the transition from cathedral to book, which marked a shift from the multimedia richness of liturgical worship to the privileging of a single medium. Reading Guardini alongside Marshall McLuhan reveals how this transition does not amount to a mere change in the “channels” of communication but embodies a veritable transformation of consciousness itself. As we observe in chapter 4, the cathedral maintained what Newman called “separate but concordant” (Loss and Gain, II, chapter 20) modes of perception—visual, spatial, acoustic, tactile—all working together without merging into uniformity. The printed book, by contrast, “abstracted” and amplified the visual sense, reshaping human consciousness around private reading and linear conceptualization.

The stakes extend directly to our contemporary moment. If we are to develop what we call here a “Catholic cosmotechnics,” an approach to interface design rooted in liturgical wisdom, we must first understand how technology shapes perception through abstraction—and this requires attending to what makes it visible in the first place: its accidents. Only then can we imagine genuine alternatives: interfaces that resist single-medium dominance and preserve the multimedia vibrancy of liturgical signs.

Technology’s Apocalyptic Accidents: From Crash to Perceptual Paradox

The development of any new technology includes what Paul Virilio calls “the accident” (Virilio, 2007). The invention of the train, for example, includes the invention of the train’s derailment, and the invention of the airplane necessarily includes the airplane crash. In Virilio’s telling, the accident is not simply a description of the shadow side of technology, but a philosophical term connected to the essential nature or substance of technological change. Accidents are typically understood as non-essential attributes of a substance (the color of a chair, for instance), but in the case of technological change, accidents are integral to its substance. The popular claim that technology is a neutral tool and that our ethical task is to avoid its misuse fails to address this essential character of technology as an “accident waiting to happen.”

Yet we must press beyond the spectacular accidents Virilio emphasizes—the derailments and crashes—to recognize a more insidious form of accident: perceptual abstraction. This is the feature of technology whereby it manages to hide its own work of mediation in plain sight, presenting itself not as one possible way of doing things but as the only conceivable way. When a technology achieves this status, it has succeeded in collapsing the ground into the figure, eliminating the space for alternative significations that liturgical signs so carefully preserve through their “ascetic” multimediality.

Guardini (1994) identified this perceptual accident with remarkable clarity in his Letters from Lake Como, quoted in the epigraph. “A dreadful confusion of forms has emerged,” he writes. “These forms no longer have roots in life and its essential content. We build theaters in the form of temples, banks in the form of cathedrals, apartment complexes in the form of palaces. Working days and Sundays merge into one another” (p. 59). This confusion of forms parallels precisely the liturgical critique we encountered in earlier chapters: when any form of mediation loses its epiphanic connection to reality—i.e. when it ceases to function as figure pointing to a ground—it becomes engulfing. It appropriates the entire field of perception rather than providing access to a richer ground of experience.

It is by attending to these perceptual accidents that the “apocalyptic” revelation of the nature of technological change comes to the surface. Apocalypse in this sense does not refer to a revelation of the destructive potential of technology but of the ways in which any technology reorients perception in service of its uptake. We come to see the world differently because new technologies suggest alternative ways of relating to nature and to one another. The automobile is not merely a new tool; rather, it embodies an entire mechanized mode of relating to the world that requires a new infrastructure of highways and suburbs and homes built for housing and caring for mechanized beasts of burden. What is performed in these moments of dramatic change are tacit assumptions about what it means to be human, what constitutes a flourishing society, and what the telos of our innovative impulses is actually directed toward.

The sacrifice of 4,000,000 people at the altar of the automobile since its invention has been deemed a calculated risk, implying that the good of motorized transport outweighs the human and environmental costs (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2025). More traffic regulations, safer cars, and caps on carbon emissions are prudent interventions, but they do not address the deeper structural transformations that remap our relationship to each other and to nature. The logic of speed and efficiency has become a cultural imperative for transcending embodied limits that impede human “progress.”

Digital networks and artificial intelligence systems transcend both physical and psychological limits in new ways. Reams of data being processed and delivered at the speed of light introduce a new mode of knowledge creation and transfer that is no longer fully dependent on human ingenuity and inspiration. The shift is epistemic as much as it is technological. Moreover, globalized information networks and semi-autonomous AI systems raise the specter of unforeseen consequences reverberating on a planetary scale, for instance in the form of global economic collapse, geopolitical instability, or environmental catastrophe. Such dystopian scenarios have fueled increased anxiety over these powerful systems and led to a rush of ethical reflection. However, embedded within modern ethical judgment is the idea that the possibility of progress is superior to the absence of progress. Technological “accidents” are thus seen as unintended consequences that can be averted or controlled through more progress. This introduces the perceptual paradox we have been tracking: the possibilities for action with a new technology are constrained by the prevailing structures of thought and moral reasoning of the era in which they are being created. Chief among these constraining structures is the very concept of “progress” itself, which shapes how we understand technological accidents—whether as unfortunate setbacks to be overcome, or as revelations worthy of sustained attention.

Progress is a uniquely modern concept based on linear, cumulative advancement. The ancient Greeks understood that technical progress was often at odds with ethical, political, or spiritual progress. For the Greeks, progress was multifaceted and centered on the human person (Postiglione, 2020). In modernity, the calculus shifted to what is good for “society” as defined by those who have the political and economic resources to develop transformative technologies. Taking the existential risks of technology seriously is impeded by a failure to transcend the impoverished account of human dignity and anthropology inherited from the dualistic philosophies of the Enlightenment that separate body and soul. The cultivation of the human soul has become a private affair distinct from the material concerns of the body. The modern scientific and technological mindset brackets out humanity’s spiritual nature in service of material progress. Ironically, technology has taken up a spiritualized rhetoric that offers mythologized narratives about the manifest destiny of human creative power to neuter the natural world (Robinson, 2013).

Philosophical and political questions about the proper use of technology for serving material ends and avoiding significant harm predominate the discussion. This is understandable, but it fails to move outside the “immanent frame” in which technology is imagined (Taylor, 2007). The immanent frame avoids the question of what technology is for (i.e. asking after the kind of human form of life it enables, and how) and turns it instead into an absolute and absolutizing reference. In the “immanent frame,” technology resides within a matrix of political, economic, and philosophical commitments aimed at evolutionary progress (Kelly, 2010). In this context, questions of cosmological and eschatological significance are treated as vestigial remnants of an unenlightened age. As a result, at the very moment technology poses serious risks to a planet in crisis, the theological categories best suited for addressing existential crises are crowded out by a return to the progress narrative that elides the possibility of “reversing” the abstraction of perception that is coextensive with any technological evolution.

Contemporary ethical responses to digital technology have ranged from calls for stricter AI regulation to reactionary solutions that seek an escape from the system (Kingsnorth, 2025). On the one hand, stricter regulation attempts to apply ethical norms to a technological infrastructure that is already largely determined by the philosophical, political and economic commitments that led to its creation in the first place. To complicate matters, the astronomical cost of AI data centers and the resources required to power them have limited AI development to a handful of companies that must privilege profitability over morality. On the other hand, seeking escape from such a system also requires escape from the broader neoliberal infrastructure that powers the global economy. This has given rise to romantic neo-Luddite movements that begrudgingly make use of centrally-controlled social media platforms to promote their views. Even if one chooses to go “off the grid” entirely, there is still the practical reality of living inside of a thoroughly technologized environment that has already reshaped the surrounding culture. Thus, both regulation and escape fall short of addressing the structural tension at the heart of highly-technologized society.

This is not to say that prudent policy decisions or romantic returns to simpler ways of life are entirely irrelevant. On the contrary, they serve to reveal the structural tension already noted. What these decisions have revealed is that the institutions once charged with mitigating the threats posed by unfettered scientific and technological development have lost the cultural authority and confidence to respond to the historical moment of the technocene, discussed in the Theological introduction. The Catholic Church, once the paragon of spiritual and historical cohesion, has ceded significant ground to the bureaucratic domain of democratic institutions and corporations. At the same time, the democratic institutions and corporations that promised a renewed social order without the theological baggage of the Middle Ages have undergone their own process of dissolution at the hands of the so-called “democratizing technology” of the internet. Online tribalism and the political and religious in fighting that characterize online discourse is one such illustration of this dissolution. So who will save us?

Retrieving an Apocalyptic Imagination in Times of Crisis

The apocalyptic imagination is never more active than in periods of dramatic social change when the world “as we know it” is coming to an end and a new world is coming into being. One can think of various paradigm shifts in human history, particularly in the sciences, when new discoveries undermined prior assumptions about the nature of reality. Galileo’s heliocentric observation that the Earth was not, in fact, the center of the universe, had profound implications not just for science but for theology. The modern age experienced a series of these upheavals that made it increasingly difficult to square medieval cosmologies rooted in the ontological frame of Revelation with the emerging scientific consensus that came to dominate knowledge systems in the centuries to come. The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution reimagined the divine order of the cosmos in empirical terms, and in so doing, dismantled the edifice on which the premodern mind was structured. This cosmological downshift also threw into question the privileging of humanity as the pinnacle of God’s creative work. Closer to us, the concerns about the anthropocene, the destabilizing effect of the acceleration of technological development on the Earth’s bio-geo-physical processes (Thomas, Williams & Zalasiewicz, 2020), cast humanity as the villain in an apocalyptic unfolding of technological accidents that are crippling the planet (Francis, 2015b).

Thus, the task at hand is to interrogate the perceptual framework through which we have imagined and deployed these new technologies. Doing so requires an ability to step outside the immanent frame of progress and harm reduction and into the apocalyptic and eschatological frame that reckons with the telos of human creativity. This sets the stage for Guardini’s crucial intervention: to understand technology’s accidents not merely as technical failures but as “apocalyptic” revelations of how technology reshapes human perception through abstraction. It is at such junctures that the question around which modes of perception a given technology enables or disables has a brief window of being asked in all its import. To illustrate Guardini’s mode of technological critique that retrieves this richer form of questioning, the historical transformation from cathedral to book provides a helpful case study.

“This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice,” declared the archdeacon Claude Frollo in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo, 1831). Hugo explained the archdeacon's comment this way:

It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable (bk. 5, ch. 2).

Here we see the way in which the forms that preserve and transmit knowledge are implicated in the restructuring of knowledge and experience. The cathedral was a multimedia architecture—with visual, spatial, and acoustic signs working together in unmerged ways, creating vibrant thresholds that do not hide in plain sight. The advent of the printed book at the dawn of the modern age marked an epistemic shift away from the communal experience of objective truth revealed in stone, glass, and liturgical acts toward a private experience of individualized introspection and a newfound subjectivity. For Guardini (2001), this transition from cathedral to book represents not merely a change in information technology but a wholesale transformation of the “world picture” itself.

The elevation of one liturgical sign—text—above the multimediality of the cathedral had momentous consequences, which Guardini examines in his book The End of the Modern World (Guardini, 2001). While the title sounds apocalyptic (the cover of the ISI edition is an image of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement), it is not about the end of the world. Instead, it is a theological account of the “world picture” being altered by the introduction of a new cosmology that superseded older ideas. The first occurred in the transition from the world of antiquity to the Middle Ages when Revelation, the divine truths revealed by God, displaced the mythological world picture held by the ancient Greeks. As the Renaissance demonstrated, there is a critical period of transition from the old to the new that attempts to synthesize what has come before with the coming age. Pagan thought was taken up by Renaissance thinkers who incorporated ancient ideas and aesthetics into the Church’s pedagogy. Platonic ideas about the ascent of the soul toward the Good became a Christian ascent toward God. The goddess Venus in Botticelli’s work became a symbol of divine beauty meant to lead the soul upward. The Renaissance thus maintained a metaphysical continuity with the age that came before it. Yet this synthesis proved fragile; the very tools that enabled Renaissance learning—particularly the printing press—would ultimately dissolve the unified cosmology they had temporarily preserved.

The shared metaphysical horizon of antiquity and the Middle Ages was lost in the transition to modernity. The domains of science, politics, economics and religion that previously exhibited a unity of purpose, to promote human flourishing, were reimagined as autonomous and self-referential pursuits. Science had no need to consult religious authorities, and politics dispensed with the divine right of kings and the spiritual authority of the Church (Gregory, 2015). The hierarchical cosmos of unified symbolic meaning that found its center in Christ, the Logos, was swept aside by new discoveries that expanded the scope of the world picture to reveal an infinite universe of possibilities and unexplored territory. The role of new technology in this shift cannot be understated. The advent of the printing press provided the kindling for the explosive growth of mass production, first with books and then with the mechanical production of all manner of goods. However, the significance of the printing press and its capacity to accelerate the transmission of knowledge and the growth of commerce paled in comparison to its capacity to transform consciousness. This represents precisely the perceptual accident I have been tracking: not a spectacular crash but a subtle—if decisive—reorganization of the sensorium that privileges one medium over others until that medium becomes “the only conceivable way” of accessing divine truth. The book became the medium that is the message. Print did not merely add a new option to the cathedral’s multimedia array; it fundamentally restructured the hierarchy of the senses and, with it, the modes of knowing available to worshippers.

The Protestant Reformation, a harbinger of the metaphysical crisis to come in religion, was the first indicator of this shift in consciousness. The private reader of Scripture, no longer bound to the authority of the Church’s interpretation of holy writ, could proceed by way of sola scriptura to formulate his or her own magisterial framework. What is worth noting here goes beyond doctrinal debates and extends into the realm of consciousness itself. The multimedia openness that preserved the ascetic quality of liturgical signs gave way to monological figuration under a single dominant medium. In particular, the experience of reading dictated by the form of the printed book allowed private reading to become a gateway for introspection and the birth of the modern individual. Free of corporate knowledge systems, the modern individual could cultivate a distinct personality. Those who were most successful at cultivating personality through the acquisition of knowledge could ascend to the level of genius, the new measure of human value (Guardini, 2001, p. 34). The modern individual traded the sense of being a participant in an established objective order in exchange for a more tenuous subjectivity that granted him the freedom to be master of his own destiny. This new consciousness contained the simultaneous thrill of self-definition and the anxiety of losing “a ‘real’ and symbolic place in reality” (Guardini, 2001, p. 35).

Coming at it from the angle of media studies, Marshall McLuhan (2017) also articulated this transformation with characteristic precision. A cathedral differs from a book because the cathedral requires different conditions of attendance than the book. Certain senses are heightened while others are diminished. The book is a primarily visual medium whereas the cathedral engages all of the senses. To dwell in a cathedral suffused with symbols and liturgical acts is phenomenologically distinct from trying to apprehend concepts on a printed page. However, for McLuhan, the real transformation of conscious experience does not happen at the level of concepts (a well-written book could certainly describe the same conceptual realities embedded in a cathedral’s architectural form) but at the level of percepts. The oral and communal culture that built the cathedrals wasrooted in acoustic and shared experience while the print culture that emerged in the early modern period favored detached conceptual abstraction. McLuhan and Guardini both point to abstraction as one of the formal features of modern technology that breeds a sense of “strange unreality [. . .] coming over human beings and things” (Guardini, 1994, p. 20).

McLuhan echoes Guardini when he talks about the process of abstraction that followed the invention of the printing press. Print abstracts experience by isolating the visual sense and breaking apart the acoustic-tactile unity of oral cultures. The printed word becomes a substitute for lived presence by disembedding meaning from communal performance. The “strange unreality” lamented by Guardini and analyzed by McLuhan is an experience of losing the sense of participation in a shared cosmos by absolutizing conceptual distinctions relative to nature and reality. In Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como, he labels each letter individually: abstraction, artificiality, mastery, and dissolution of the organic. McLuhan would call these the formal effects of technology. They do not describe the content of the technology, the words on a page or images on a screen, but the new context or environment they create. While many ethicists focus on the particular algorithms or outputs of AI, the real transformation is more totalizing; it is the disclosure of a new environment that gives rise to new modes of perception. If technological abstraction contracts the multimediality proper to liturgical signs under a single style of signification, then recovering the vibrancy of liturgical perception becomes an urgent task—not as nostalgia for a lost past, but as a resource for imagining technological futures that preserve rather than eliminate the conditions for genuine disclosure of reality (epiphany).

The Quest for Renewing Perception in Catholic Cosmotechnics

Guardini’s liturgical theology provides a helpful framework for thinking about the challenges posed by the new technological order. The modernization of society and culture in the early twentieth century raised fresh questions about forms of religious worship rooted in ancient rites and texts. The birth of mass media technologies like film, radio, and television contributed to an exponential increase in the speed and quantity of images and information. Guardini understood this cultural shift as a transformation occurring at the level of the symbolic order.

In the liturgy, the faithful continued to read along with the liturgical texts but were losing their ability to see the deeper meaning symbolized by the material and spiritual acts of worship. This was not so much a problem of the presentation of the sacred rites but a lack of individual formation at the level of body and soul. The modern mind, formed as it was in radical subjectivity and individualism, had succumbed to creeping rationalism and a reductionist view of reality. The dualist conception of body and soul that began with Neoplatonism and Gnosticism found deep purchase in modern thought, most notably in Descartes. This in no way led to the disappearance of spirituality; rather, it separated the interiority of the soul from the external expression of the body. Spiritual perfection belonged to the individual soul, and the imperfect medium of the human body stood in the way of its flourishing.

Reading Guardini’s liturgical theology in light of technological change recovers the eschatological dimension of human existence and overcomes the artificial split between soul and body. In Guardini’s view, the rise of technological progress has spiritual implications because it alters the very embodied perception of liturgical acts. This is not mere coincidence; rather, it points to a shift in the symbolic order of human culture that swapped religious formation for technological formation. The irony is that technological rhetoric has taken up the same religious and salvific tone that once belonged to faith in God and the eschatological character of the created order (Robinson, 2013). In both views, the desire for transcendence is present, albeit in different ways. For the technologist, the goal is to transcend natural and human limits in support of a tenuous freedom from toil and suffering. For the liturgically minded, the goal is also transcendence, but one in service to a more enduring vision of communion with God and Creation.

Each time the liturgy is celebrated, humanity’s desire for transcendence is taken up in the material aspects of the sacramental order. Natural elements are not seen as inert matter for exploitation and extraction but as mediums for transformation and renewal. Water, wine, bread, and oil are signs that point beyond themselves toward an eschatological reality made manifest in the liturgy and sacraments of the Church. Baptismal water does more than cleanse the body; it rejuvenates the soul by healing the primordial wound of original sin inherited from our first parents.

Here the unity of substance and accident takes on a different character than that of technology, where accidents of an unwanted kind become the defining feature of technology’s existence. In the theological view, the substance of water retains its natural properties while its accidents—washing, refreshing, even drowning—are left unchanged. However, through the intention and form of the sacrament, water is elevated to an instrumental cause of grace. The liturgical act of “drowning” under baptismal waters symbolizes death to sin and emergence to new life. The grace of new life conferred by the sacrament is not added to the water as a property but to the act in which the water is used. It is in this material, embodied, and spiritual way that God saves humanity through matter, not abolishing nature but perfecting it.

The eclipse of this theological perception has been hastened by the superhuman forces of the technological order that seek to perfect the natural order by removing the “sin” of material suffering. The undeniable benefits of modern medicine and the tantalizing encounter with machines that promise unlimited knowledge serve to reinforce the idea that science and technology offer a more expedient means for transcending the limits of the natural world—not by elevating the stuff of nature but by subduing it through experimentation and force. This techno-logic forms the tech-faithful to subscribe to a man-made “invisible reality”—one that hides in microscopic forms like nano-scale silicon chips that power the vast digital infrastructure required by the internet and AI systems. Faith in manufactured systems becomes a new religion in which the promise of infinite knowledge and immortality is brought down to earth and incorporated into humanity's evolutionary destiny (Robinson, 2013).

The substitution of religious faith in modernity by faith in human progress offers a counterfeit transcendence that ends up serving as an anti-liturgy (on this point, see also the Theological introduction). In this anti-liturgy, the material world is significant only insofar as it is useful and subject to mastery. For Guardini, this development was not a rejection of the religious worldview to make way for a secular one. Rather, it was the insidious reform of religious sensibilities in the modern era that shifted the focus from the oral, communal and participatory world of the cathedral where human fulfillment was found in glorifying God to an interior spirituality of concepts and schematics that paved the way for religious life as ethical exercise (Guardini, 2022, p. 38). As McLuhan (2017) rightly notes, the phenomenology of print and literate culture created the environmental conditions for this perceptual shift from the exterior world of embodied things and persons to the interior world of ideas and formulas.

At the same time, Guardini’s agenda is not the stoppage of technological progress and a return to premodern existence. Rather, it is an observation that modernity has dramatically altered human perception in ways that have skewed our sense of moral responsibility in the face of dramatic technological change. Invention has outpaced moral introspection. The eschatological horizon of the Church—in which humans are invited into the infinite and immortal life of God through embodied liturgical acts—has been usurped by a technological horizon where humans are invited into a programmable escape from material constraints through virtual means.

Moreover, Guardini's approach is not strictly theological but also sociological and psychological. The implications of his view that modernity has led to a dissolution of human perception can also be found in the work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a practicing Catholic, but his analysis of media technology brackets out theological concerns and focuses on the transformation of human perception accelerated by modern means of communication. Beginning with the printing press, McLuhan (2017) has shown that changes in media forms also bring about changes in conscious awareness. New structures of thought and expression emerge by mirroring the mediated forms that give them expression.

What both Guardini and McLuhan help us see is that noticing technological forms and the environments they create requires an ontological awareness in addition to an ethical one. To ask what a technology is in terms of what it does is to focus almost exclusively on instrumental cause and effect. To ask what a technology is in terms of how it reshapes our relationship to the world of real things makes room for considering its formal effects on perception. Both instrumental and formal effects raise important ethical questions, but the primacy of form precedes the instrumental particulars of the tools themselves. New forms induce new social and cultural patterns that transcend the particular uses of a technology. For instance, mobile devices are more than sophisticated communication technologies; instead, they alter the rhythm, rituals, and relationships of everyday life. Attending to these new patterns of existence and perception opens up a much broader ontological horizon that privileges questions about what it means to be human in the first place. This is precisely where a Catholic cosmotechnics enters the conversation: not primarily to regulate technology’s uses but to interrogate and reimagine the forms through which technology mediates human experience.

Technology can be revelatory, as Virilio shows, when we consider the technological accident as inseparable from its substance. The apocalyptic scenarios that have emerged in the age of AI represent far more than displaced dystopian anxieties. They are occasions for insight where the possibility of existential collapse reveals the true face of our technological pursuits. This is where we arrive at the constructive insight: awareness of technology’s apocalyptic accidents—its capacity to reshape perception through abstraction—invites not an attempt to craft other totalizing media that try to (re-)capture the entire ground, but rather a strategy of restraint through the layering of multiple media without trying to homogenize them under a single mode of signification. Just as liturgical signs maintain their epiphanic quality precisely through their mutual juxtaposition, so too might interfaces be designed to sustain rather than collapse the tension between different media.

If Virilio shows us, through catastrophe, the moment of ontological disclosure inherent in technological development, Guardini and McLuhan reveal the moments of perceptual transformation that do not change the world as much as they change the ways we see and experience the world. As such, Guardini—and McLuhan with him—embody a style of technological critique that seeks to undo the perceptual abstraction in order to reopen certain fundamental questions around the ultimate ends of technology: What kind of world do our technologies presuppose? What kind of human being are they forming? And, crucially: How might an apocalyptic imagination around technology’s accidents guide us toward interfaces that embody liturgical restraint rather than totalizing capture?

While Guardini and McLuhan inoculate an apocalyptic imagination to invite technological developments that are not just “more of the same,” John Henry Newman begins to unfold a constructive thread by helping flesh out the mentioned qualities of liturgical signs (epiphany and asceticism) that distance them from the kinds of “perception-distorting” mediations Guardini and McLuhan warn against.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Catholic Cosmotechnics for the AI Age.

Perhaps no phrase is more commonly associated with the ecclesiology of Vatican II than “People of God.” For that reason, and also for its “populist” and perhaps “democratic” overtones, and, in the U.S., its almost irresistible if subliminal suggestion of the harmonic, “We the People,” it has come virtually unglued from the Church as Mystery, the subject of the first chapter.

To many, without really explicitly asserting it, “people of God” has a more exclusively horizontal sound to it, with the vertical dimension of transcendence or mystery much attenuated. It is tempting to disconnect the “society equipped with hierarchical structures, . . . the visible society, . . . the earthly church,” implicitly identified as the People of God, from the “mystical body of Christ, . . . the spiritual community, . . . the church endowed with heavenly riches,” forgetting the exhortation of LG §8 (just cited) not to think of them as two separate realities.

This tendency is exacerbated by the also subliminal but nevertheless seemingly ubiquitous tendency to hear the phrase “People of God” and to equate it with the lay faithful, such that the clergy serve the “People of God” rather than themselves being a part of it.

But a careful study of this chapter shows these tendencies are completely foreign to the logic and content of Lumen Gentium.

The text continues:

He therefore chose the race of Israel as a people unto himself. With it he set up a covenant. Step by step he taught and prepared this people, making known in its history both himself and the decree of his will and making it holy unto himself. All these things, however, were done by way of preparation and as a figure of that new and perfect covenant, which was to be ratified in Christ, and of that fuller revelation which was to be given through the Word of God himself made flesh. . . . Christ instituted this New Covenant, the New Testament, that is to say, in his Blood (see 1 Cor 11:25), calling together a people made up of Jew and gentile, making them one, not according to the flesh but in the Spirit. This was to be the new People of God.[2] For those who believe in Christ, who are reborn not from a perishable but from an imperishable seed through the word of the living God (see 1 Pet 1:23), not from the flesh but from water and the Holy Spirit, are finally established as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people . . . who in times past were not a people, but are now the people of God (1 Pet 2:9-10).

If anything, this text demonstrates a radical continuity with the first chapter’s claim that the Church is “mystery,” as a further specification, not as a disclaimer.

The comparison to the election of Israel connects the Church to the mystery of election: Israel is the “People of God” not in the first place through any work, merit, or sign of their own making (not even circumcision), but because of God’s electing will. The mystery of Israel is that, wherever you encountered Israel, you encountered first and foremost the electing will of God which makes it the Chosen People. That electing will of God is not present abstractly in history or invisibly, but very visibly and concretely in Israel, such that when Israel, the Chosen People of God, is scattered into the nations, God’s name is defamed, and also such that, no matter how terrible or corrupt their leadership (to wit, most of the kings), the scandal could not render null and void the electing will of God. The mystery of Israel could not be undone by the failure of any leader or even of the whole people, sent into exile for that very reason.

The presence of Israel in the world, because it is the presence of God’s electing will concretely and not abstractly, is the presence of God’s eternal Wisdom, his plan, already mentioned in LG §2 (“the free and hidden plan of the Father’s Wisdom and Goodness”), concretely in the world. Israel is, as it were, the “sacrament” of God’s electing will and eternal Wisdom (“making known in [Israel’s] history both himself and the decree of his will and making [Israel] holy unto himself”).

The mystery of Israel is that, as the presence of God’s electing will in history, it is such as “a preparation for” (praeperatio) and a “figure of” (in figuram) the Church, and thus the mystery of the Church is further specified as the fulfillment of God’s mysterious (“hidden”) plan, with God’s electing will choosing to save people through mutual bonds which now transcend the boundaries of any “people” or “nation” defined any other way, including blood descent from Abraham. “For,” the text says, though in the flesh, the mutual bonds of association are not “from” the flesh: “reborn not from a perishable but from an imperishable seed through the word of the living God, not from the flesh but from water and the Holy Spirit.” The “universal” scope of God’s electing will fulfilling its figured presence in Israel does not abstract God’s will from history, but more firmly establishes it in the concrete visible structure of the Church formed by bonds of “rebirth,” of baptismal grace, from “incorruptible seed,” thus highlighting that it is only God’s electing will that binds this people together so that it is a “chosen race . . . who in past times were not a people, but now are the people of God” (citing 1 Pet 2:9-10).

As noted in LG §1 (sec. 3), the “origin and growth” of the “kingdom of Christ already present in mystery,” that is, the Church, is “symbolized by the blood and water which flowed from the opened side of the crucified Jesus,” and “as often as the sacrifice of the Cross by which Christ our Pasch is sacrificed (1 Cor 5:7) is celebrated on the altar . . . the unity of believers, who form one Body in Christ (see 1 Cor 10:17), is both expressed and achieved.” In Chapter 2, this very same mystery is expressed in terms of promise (citing Jer 31:31-34), figure, and fulfillment, the Old Covenant being a “figure of the New and Perfect Covenant,” the “New Covenant in [Christ’s] blood (see 1 Cor 11:25),” the “New Israel,” the People “purchased with his own blood” (later in LG §9).

There is certainly therefore no diminution of the “mystery” of the Church or the Church as “mystery” intended in the title “People of God.” This is a people which did not make itself, which could not have made itself, which does not make itself, but is constitutively defined by the blood of the New Covenant which is what forms the “mutual bonds” among the members and so constitutes a visible society in the world, the blood of Christ symbolizing and effecting the self-giving love of Christ.

This also has implications for how we think about “Church life” and what that “life” is that we share as mutually related in Christ’s blood.

It is not in the first instance a physical, biological life because it (we) are born of an “imperishable” or “incorruptible” seed, “from water and the Holy Spirit” (see John 3:5-6). To say it is not of the flesh is to say that, like the conception of Christ, it is not of human or worldly initiative, and neither is its destiny: As LG §9 puts it later, “its end is the kingdom of God, which has been begun by God himself on earth, and which is to be further extended until it is brought to perfection by him at the end of time, when Christ, our life (Col 3:4) shall appear, and creation itself will be delivered from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the sons of God (Rom 8:21).” The life of the Church, which makes us Church, is Christ, his life poured out for us on the Cross, and this very life is the life by which creation itself will be delivered from . . . corruption. That is so very clearly not a life we could have created, or given ourselves, or initiated! It is worth pausing to consider the awesomeness that is the “life” of the “Church,” the awesomeness of that life which will be revealed fully in the catching up of the whole cosmos into itself, when it—when he, Christ our life—appears at the consummation of the ages.

And yet, maybe even more awesome, that life, not from us, not of our initiative, not of the flesh, nevertheless appears and is lived in the flesh, as a visible society, a “communion” in the flesh “of life, love and truth,” a “seed of unity, hope and salvation for the whole human race” (still LG §9). “Seed” is an organic image, an image of potential life already actually present and alive, not abstract, not “merely” spiritual (to use the language of LG §8) but an “instrument for the redemption of all,” the “visible sacrament of this saving unity” whose “source” is “Jesus.” This phrase provides a sure connection to LG §1 (“sacrament”) and LG §8 (“visible”). Until then, Chapter 2, echoing Chapter 1, reminds us that we are on pilgrimage, “advancing through tribulations and trials . . . until, through the Cross, it may arrive at that light which knows no setting” (LG §9). We can never, in other words, take credit for any achievement, enrichment, success, etc. in “church life” as though we had reached perfection in that achievement, instead experiencing the awesome gift of our communion in a life we did not give ourselves as “ceaseless renewal.” Alternatively, no scandal should lead us to believe that any action of ours could extinguish this life completely, even if it can damage, sometimes very seriously, the Church’s witness.

Section 9, in talking about the People of God specifically as the “messianic people,” is describing the “royal” vocation of Christ the anointed kind (“messiah”) and the royal freedom which characterizes church life:

[The] messianic people has Christ for its head, Who was delivered up for our sins, and rose again for our justification (Rom 4:25) and now, having won a name which is above all names, reigns in glory in heaven. The state of this people is that of the dignity and freedom of the sons of God, in whose hearts the Holy Spirit dwells as in his temple. Its law is the new commandment to love as Christ loved us (LG §9).

The life of the Church is a participation in the royal freedom of Christ, free to love, free with his freedom, but experiencing that freedom always in its purification and renewal.

Christ the Lord, High Priest taken from among men (see Heb 5:1-5), made the new people “a kingdom and priests to God the Father" (Rev 1:6; see 5:9-10). The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, in order that through all those works which are those of the Christian man they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the power of him who has called them out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Pet 2:4-10). Therefore all the disciples of Christ, persevering in prayer and praising God (Acts 2:42-47) should present themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God (see Rom 12:1) (LG §10).

Chapters 10-11 are on Church life as a participation in the one priesthood of Christ the High Priest. This includes especially the priesthood, common to all the baptized, the worship of the whole People of God, clergy included, such that the presence of the Church in the world is the presence of Christ the High Priest offering spiritual sacrifice on behalf of the world.

Note that this is not just a statement about Church life narrowly speaking. Because it means that life in the world, outside the visible boundaries of the Church, is an experience of the presence of Christ the High Priest offering spiritual sacrifice on behalf of the world. In a way, and without denying the special character of Church life properly speaking, the whole world becomes “Church life,” a very different world than if the Church, the priestly People of God, were not present, a world without the one true sacrifice continuously being offered in its midst. This is what it means to say that the Church is a “sacrament” of this life in the midst of the world, and the specification of the Church’s mystery as People of God allows this emphasis on the transformation of “worldly life” into “Church life,” broadly speaking, to be brought forward into special clarity. Just as the world with the Chosen People Israel in it was not the same world as the world without Israel in it, without the promises and their visible presence, so the pilgrim People of God, clearly transcending all ethnic boundaries by uniting them, makes the world the site of God’s sharing of his own life, concretely and in the flesh, the “Good News.”

The relationship between the common priesthood of the baptized and the ordained priesthood of the clergy is taken up in the next, famous paragraph:

Though they differ from one another in essence and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest, by the sacred power he enjoys, teaches and rules the priestly people; acting in the person of Christ, he makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the offering of the Eucharist. They likewise exercise that priesthood in receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, in the witness of a holy life, and by self-denial and active charity (LG §10).

The priesthood conferred by Holy Orders is not a mere difference “in degree” (essentia et non gradu tantum differant) as though it were a new infusion of “more” baptismal grace, elevating the ordained priesthood “above” the common priesthood of the baptized. That would make the ordained “super Christians,” as it were, and would thereby inscribe “clericalism” into the very charter of the People of God. They differ “in essence” because they are “interrelated,” or in a better translation, “ordered mutually toward each other” (ad invicem ordinantur). The ordained priesthood is not derived from Baptism but from a different sacrament, Holy Orders, which orders the ministerial priesthood not in the first instance towards the world, as it were competing with the common priesthood, but towards the common priesthood itself, serving it so that it can fulfill its vocation to offer spiritual sacrifices.

There is only one true Priest, Christ, and one true and wholly pure sacrifice, his own, as both Priest and Victim, and Holy Orders confers the “sacred power” of acting in the person of Christ the High Priest, making him present in the Eucharistic assembly, such that it is truly Christ who is offering himself in the Eucharistic sacrifice, truly present, signifying and by signifying, effecting, the communion of the Church as his one Body.

The ordained minister does not act in his own person, as though the Church were his and he were the Head, but, configured to Christ the High Priest in a special way by the sacrament of Holy Orders, he, in a way, gives the assembly to itself, gives the Church to herself by making present the true Head of the one Body, the true head of the Priestly People, so that it may fulfill its vocation of offering spiritual sacrifice (including his and any other clergy’s own vocation as baptized person). And thus the faithful truly, “by virtue of their royal priesthood, share in the offering of the Eucharist.” Note how beautifully and precisely this is further elaborated and specified in the next section.[3]

Ultimately the doctrine of difference “in essence and not in mere degree” preserves the mystery of the Church, so that the Church is not in the first instance “our” work—including that of the clergy—but his, acting in our midst, offering himself, truly making the Church-making sacrifice on Calvary present and available for us to enter into communion with it as our own, by participation.

The dimensions of the life of the Church as irreducibly priestly, as priestly life, is set forth in the next section, LG §11, which specifies its unfolding in the sacraments and the virtues that flow from them and are configured precisely as enactments of the “spiritual sacrifice” proper to the People of God as priestly. The virtues are not independent achievements with no relation to the life of grace on offer in the sacraments. Ultimately as exercises of the priestly character of the baptized, as such they are the fruits of the sanctification on offer in the sacraments and present to the world the “holiness” to which all the baptized are called, and in which is made visible the vocation of all of humanity: “Fortified by so many and such powerful means of salvation, all the faithful, whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord, each in his own way, to that perfect holiness whereby the Father himself is perfect” (LG §11). It is important to notice that this theme of the universal call to holiness, the subject of its own chapter later on (c. 5), is first introduced in the context of the priestly character of Church life as properly speaking the life of the “holy People of God” (LG §12, segue from LG §11).

Chapter 12 takes up the third dimension of Church life as a participation in the vocation of Christ, that is, of prophet: “The holy people of God shares also in Christ's prophetic office” (LG §12, first sentence), this especially because “it spreads abroad a living witness to him, especially by means of a life of faith and charity and by offering to God a sacrifice of praise, the tribute of lips which give praise to his name” (ibid.). The charisms of the Holy Spirit, offered for the building up of the Church, belong here in the life of the Church as prophetic witness to the God who brought us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Section 10 noted that the gift of governance belongs to the sacred power of Holy Orders; section 11 shows that “governance” is not the only form of leadership in the Church, since the charisms are there to build the one Body too, though with regard to such gifts, “judgment as to their genuinity and proper use belongs to those who are appointed leaders in the Church, to whose special competence it belongs, not indeed to extinguish the Spirit, but to test all things and hold fast to that which is good.”

Sections 13-17 show in a detailed way what dimension of the Church as Mystery the designation “People of God” is intended to bring forward, as already hinted above (in 4a). It is a title that emphasizes the relationship of the Church to all other “peoples,” featuring its continuity with Israel as a people among peoples, offspring (“seed”) of Abraham, in whom “all nations will be blessed” (Gen 22:18, cf. Gal 3:29). The Mystical Body of Christ, as the People of God, is the presence, among the nations and drawn from all of them, as this “blessing.” In this way, precisely by remaining one Body, the Mystery of Christ’s Life present in the Church, and without renouncing this particularity but preserving and uplifting it, the whole world, in a way, becomes “Church.” The title “People of God” is the theological “site” (if that is not too jargony, which I suppose it is) that allows the doctrine stated in LG §8, that the one true Church of Christ, organized as a society visible in this present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, to be “performed” as a doctrine of degrees of communion and proximity. There is only one true Church and it cannot be separated from the visible communion of the Catholic Church as though there could be more than one:

All men are called to belong to the new people of God. Wherefore this people, while remaining one and only one, is to be spread throughout the whole world and must exist in all ages, so that the decree of God's will may be fulfilled. In the beginning God made human nature one and decreed that all his children, scattered as they were, would finally be gathered together as one (see John 11:52). It was for this purpose that God sent his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things (see Heb 1:2) that be might be teacher, king and priest of all, the head of the new and universal people of the sons of God. . . . It follows that though there are many nations there is but one people of God (LG §13).

The transition from LG §13 to LG §14 introduces, as a corollary, the idea of degrees of communion and proximity: “All men are called to be part of this catholic unity of the people of God which in promoting universal peace presages it. And there belong to or are related to it in various ways, the Catholic faithful, all who believe in Christ, and indeed the whole of mankind, for all men are called by the grace of God to salvation” (LG §13).

The Church is “necessary” for salvation (opening lines of LG §14); there is no other communion or societas or people that is saving and is the sacrament of the Kingdom of God on earth. That very necessity is what is truly transformative of the whole world, an ongoing transformation expressed in the idea of degrees of communion and proximity:

a. Those in full communion, “fully incorporated into the society of the Church” (LG §14), who are to remember that their exalted status is not because of their merit but because of grace.

b. Those (LG §15) Christians in various degrees of separation from the Catholic church, here understood as various degrees of partial communion. These bodies are not called “churches” (except for the special case of the Orthodox) because that would make the word “church” simply a sociological category. Rather they are members, if in imperfect communion, of the one true Church: “in some real way they are joined with us in the Holy Spirit, for to them too he gives his gifts and graces whereby he is operative among them with his sanctifying power. Some indeed he has strengthened to the extent of the shedding of their blood” (LG §15). But just as those in full communion are not to ascribe it to their merit, in a corresponding way, those in partial communion are not saved by what separates them from full communion, but by what communion with the one true Church still remains, some of the dimensions of which are mentioned.

c. Those who are not Christian, especially the Jews, but also the Muslims as to some extent Abrahamic, and those in other religions or no religion, more distant from the one true Church but still in some kind of relationship to it by virtue of the “call” to all people.

Section 17 concludes the chapter with a rousing declaration of the Church’s call to mission, ending with the fitting and sublime declaration:

The obligation of spreading the faith is imposed on every disciple of Christ, according to his state. Although, however, all the faithful can baptize, the priest alone can complete the building up of the Body in the eucharistic sacrifice. Thus are fulfilled the words of God, spoken through his prophet: From the rising of the sun until the going down thereof my name is great among the gentiles, and in every place a clean oblation is sacrificed and offered up in my name (Mal 1:11) In this way the Church both prays and labors in order that the entire world may become[4] the People of God, the Body of the Lord and the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and that in Christ, the Head of all, all honor and glory may be rendered to the Creator and Father of the Universe (LG §17).

Thus is drawn together two of the major images of the Church from chapter 1 (Body of the Lord and Temple of the Holy Spirit) with the image of the People of God, from chapter 2. The mystery of the Church is one mystery, carried in these several, interrelated images.

The porch served not only to link town and gown but to support a vaulting statue of Our Lady, with the Christ Child in her arms. The “Virgin Porch,” as it is usually called, was built at a time when Oxford was the site of much debate and much violence over what counted as Christian orthodoxy in the British Isles. The statue of Mary the Virgin, somewhat miraculously, did not suffer the fate of most of her counterparts throughout the city. It was neither beheaded nor dethroned from its niche—although, to this day, it bears bullet holes shot by Cromwellian troopers passing through Oxford in 1642. The statue itself was described in 1641 as “very scandalous” and evidence of Popery by Puritans who opposed both Roman Catholic doctrine and the emerging Anglican Church.

This statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained a remarkably important sign of hope, as well as of lamentation, for recusant Catholics throughout the early days of the Reformation and well into the nineteenth century—when most of the remaining penalties against Catholics were lifted through a serious of emancipation acts. It also features markedly in the life of St John Henry Newman, in his personal life as well as in his writings, particularly his novel, Loss and Gain—the first work published following his conversion to Roman Catholicism on October 9, 1845. And, as he admits in his autobiography and elsewhere, the Marian presence at the University Church, where he had formerly served as Anglican vicar, gradually influenced his growing appreciation for the sacramental system and various, related doctrines, including Marian doctrines and the Doctrine of the Communion of the Saints.

The Doctrine of the Communion of the Saints led Newman to contend that the animating force of history is not power politics but, rather, intercessory prayer. His writings always hold a special affection, however, for the ways in which providence paradoxically manifests God’s plans for salvation history in hidden ways, in the lives of saints who lived on the margins of public life. Newman’s extended reflections on the value of the hidden life for history is fleshed out in many works, but especially Parochial and Plain Sermons (1868). For instance, in the sermon called the “Secretness and Suddenness of Divine Visitations,” he focuses on the degree to which history is renewed, and providence singularly communicated, through the lives of solitary saints and prophets, through those who withdraw from public life to seek out the still voice of God in order to understand their times: “it is but holy Daniel,” he says, “solitary among princes, or Elijah the recluse of Mount Carmel, who can . . . forecast the time of God’s providence among the nations.”[1]

As much as Newman shows his ardent affection for the saints of the Church as well as the Old Testament prophets, he makes it very clear that Mary, the Mother of God, not only parallels them, she far outstrips them. Mary is like “meek Moses,” he says, but, by virtue of her immaculate conception and fully attentive conscience, she “heard the word of God” and faithfully kept it, pondering it in her heart (Luke 11:28).[2] In his reflection on Mary’s status as “The Seat of Wisdom,” Newman explains at length the ways in which the Mother of God supersedes the status of all the Old Testament prophets, Moses included: “There was one, viz., Moses, to whom [God] . . . vouchsafed to speak face to face. . . . . This was the great privilege of the inspired Lawgiver of the Jews; but how much was it below that of Mary! Moses had the privilege only now and then, from time to time; but Mary for thirty continuous years saw and heard him, being all through that time face to face with him, and being able to ask him any questions which she wished explained.”[3]

As Newman increasingly devoured the writings of the Early Church Fathers, he discovered a pervasive Marian presence in their work, a presence which would become crucial to his understanding of the conscience as well as his idea of history. As he contends in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Mary is the Queen of all Saints, who helps guide the Communion of Saints, the Church of Christ in History, towards her Son: “A special office is assigned to St. Mary, that is, special as compared with all other Saints” but which, he hastens to stress,

is marked off with the utmost precision from that assigned to our Lord. Thus she is said to have been made the “arbitress of every effect coming from God’s mercy.” Because she is the Mother of God, the salvation of mankind is said to be given to her prayers. . . . “Merit is ascribed to Christ and prayer to St. Mary.” In a word, the whole may be expressed in the words, Unica spes mea Jesus, et post Jesum Virgo Maria. Amen.[4]

Elsewhere, Newman concludes that in “the history of our Lady” we discern the model of human obedience to providence throughout history. She is, therefore, “the beautiful gift of God, which outshines the fascinations of a bad world, and which no one ever sought in sincerity and was disappointed. She is the personal type and representative image,” Newman concludes, “of that spiritual life and renovation in grace, ‘without which no one shall see God’”; moreover, she is humanity’s especial protector who “brings [us] . . . forward in the narrow way, if [we] . . . live in the world.”[5] In his theology as well as his devotional writings (starting from his later Tractarian period), Mary is his key for understanding history as a dramatic account of conformity to, or rebellion against, the divine plan for the world’s salvation, a plan which first makes itself intuited or sensed in the voice of the conscience (which Newman called the “aboriginal vicar of Christ”).[6] The Mother of God’s quiet witness as the humble and holy reader of God’s plan for her life and, by extension, for history itself, is a striking, yet often implicit, insight of Newman’s.

Although Letter to Pusey (1864) is the only book-length work that he wrote, “ex professio,” on Marian dogma, Newman’s poetry, letters, personal devotions, and sermons are saturated by a Marian sensibility and sensitivity. It is difficult to read more than a few pages of Newman without finding a reference, whether explicit or hidden, to Mary, the Second Eve.[7] Given this, it is crucial that approaches to Newman’s thought offer a more sustained account of the place that Marian dogma plays in his understanding of the inner depth-dimensions of history. To date, treatments of Newman’s idea of history have tended to focus primarily (and, quite understandably) on his systematic and careful treatment of ecclesial history in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845/1878). If Newman’s Mariology is considered at all, it tends to be treated along explicitly historicist or biographical lines. However, it is crucial to think about Newman’s approach to Mary as devotional and personalist in its devotion—that is, as appreciative of the place that her very person and personhood has within history and, by extension, across salvation history more broadly.

For Newman, Mary was not just an important historical figure; she was, to borrow Jerome Bertram’s words, a fully-fledged person firmly “lodged in his heart,” inspiring and transforming his imagination, theological orientation, and philosophical concerns.[8] Her ways of behaving, her practice of pondering, the humble and magnanimous grammar or logic of her Magnificat profoundly shaped Newman’s life and thought—to the point where, in several sermons, he points to her as “the pattern” of philosophy and not just of devotion. For, in Mary, the human person’s capacity to seek out wisdom and to love wisdom is fully actualized, most fully realized in the person of her son, the Jesus of history who is also the Christ of God.

We see this throughout his writings over the course of his long life. For example, in his meditations on the Stations of the Cross, he writes that “to be devout is to be devoted” and Mary is the model of devotion par excellence, this side of the veil.[9] Mary’s quiet and steadfast pondering of God’s word—even on the via crucis—enriched Newman’s “theology of conscience,” which Ratzinger so admired, and also firmly directed him towards an understanding of history as a conduit of divine providence. This is because Mary, so attuned to the word of God, provides through her life the unrivalled example of a contingent and limited creature.

Newman’s growing devotion to Mary was not always straightforward or easy. As with all things in Newman’s life, it can be said that his appreciation for Mary’s central place in the life of the Church, for her special patronage of history itself, developed only gradually. In what follows, then, I will consider how Newman’s early, poetic interests in the relationship between holiness and hiddenness demonstrate how his heart already stirred after the Marian, even before he recognized (let alone fully accepted) the Mother of God’s central and distinctive importance within salvation history. In other words, I will consider the gradual, Marian turn in his thought. I will then consider how his assessment of Mary’s status as model of holiness and patroness of history comes from his deep readings of history, readings informed by the devotional examples of the Early Church Fathers which Newman then thoroughly absorbed as his own. In so doing, the essay proposes that we must follow a very specific path if we are to gain a fuller sense of Newman’s idea of history, and, alongside it, his theology of conscience. The path is as follows: ad Jesum per Mariam.

Hearts in Hiding: Turning towards Mariology

Awed by the hidden and flaunting beauties of Oxford alike, the young Newman turned his hand to writing poetry in earnest during his undergraduate years, even co-founding a periodical called The Undergraduate. One of his earliest student poems, “Solitude,” dates from the 1818 Michaelmas Term. In it the dreamy yet discerning Newman yokes together Romantic reverie with a remarkably mature and detached Christian piety, thereby serving as an early example of the kind of poetic sensibility that would later characterize Tractarian aesthetics (“Solitude” was written over a decade before the Oxford Movement emerged in any straightforward way). “There is in stillness oft a magic power,” the seventeen-year-old wrote, which “calms the breast” and “lower[s]” competing passions. It also serves as an “influence” through which “Diviner feelings” can “arise,” leading us to hear the inner or “heavenly love” which, he says, only finds description if we resort to musical analogies. Beauty is a “mystic sound” which “breathes such tones” only angels can sing, and which only solitary saints can hear this side of the veil.[10] Only solitary saints, the hidden hearts throughout history, can hear the music clearly. Variations of this poem’s central themes appear and reappear throughout Newman’s long life, in his writings and even in his approaches to pastoral ministry. It not only encapsulates his own inclination towards solitude; it also supplies a key to his understanding of the saints, providence, and history, an understanding which, as I have already noted, eventually constellated around the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Solitude,” then, nicely serves as an early germ of Newman’s later and expanded ideas on the role and value of the lives of the saints for our understanding of history. The solitary saint is never alone; he or she is in constant communion with God and participates in the renewal of the world through a life dependent on prayer, service, and quiet attunement to the nature of things. Newman’s persistent interest in the hidden life deepened throughout his Oxford days, playing a pivotal role in the quasi-monasticism he later lived in the Littlemore Community, and influencing his adaptations of Oratorian congregational life to an English context after he was clothed in the habit of St. Philip. Through these experiences of contemplative solitude within established communities, Newman’s views on the nature of the solitary expanded; his early depictions of the lyrical nature of solitude (as seen in his undergraduate poetry) become more fully agapic (or other-centred) and enriched through his eventual subscription to definite doctrines such as the Communion of the Saints and Marian dogma—all of which helped him discern how the solitary soul or poet must, within the Christian economy, confess dependence on God and help from other Christians.[11] (As he would preach in later life, “it is the one peculiarity of the Christian character to be dependent. . . . It is the Christian’s excellence to be diligent and watchful, to work and persevere, and yet to be in spirit dependent; to be willing to serve, and to rejoice in the permission to do so; to be content to view himself in a subordinate place.”)[12] The feast of the annunciation was, to Newman’s mind, the historical event in which the efficacy of the “subordinate place” is on full display: the low is raised high, a young woman becomes the ark of the covenant regained, the person who, throughout all of history, exercised her freedom most fully in response to the highest call.

During his Tractarian period, Newman drew ever closer to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. Take, for instance, his initial involvement between 1843-1844 as an author and principal editor of the collaborative, Tractarian anthology, Lives of the English Saints, which aimed, as he put it, to carefully render the lives of the saints with fidelity, seeking to sketch the “historical” and “ethical character” of the holy persons treated.[13] Part of Newman’s intention in Lives was to show how holy persons within history showcase aspects of God’s provident and specific care for his creation in different times and contexts, according to the needs of diverse cultures and countries. (Lives focused exclusively on tracing glimpses of providence within the English historical context, but Newman’s insights into the specific operations of providence within England can be applied, with some adjustments, to other cases in other countries and times). Indications of Newman’s interest in exploring how points of doctrine help explain the operations of providence through history and across cultures abound. As just one more example, in his characteristically reserved, Tractarian poem “The Hidden Ones” (1829), later published in Verse on Various Occasions (1868), Newman celebrates the “secret heart[s]” of the unknown saints in whom “Christ rears his throne” so as to transform the world by revivifying “old history” and “bidding the slow heart dance, to prove her power / O’er self in its proud hour.”[14] Written as the Oxford Movement was taking shape and amassing more followers, the poem serves as a snapshot of Newman’s increasingly broadened out and metaphysical vision of history, a vision not unlike Blondel’s view that “real history is composed of human lives; and human life is metaphysics in act.”[15] Newman’s turn to Mariology confirms this. It showed Newman that solitude is always already communal in the Christian context; it is constituted by the soul’s communication with God and participation in the communion of saints through the liturgy and the life of the Church, which operates within and beyond history.

***

Newman’s Marian devotion began in earnest during his Anglican period, through the influence of his fellow Tractarians and dear friends, John Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude in particular. As we know, it was especially thanks to Keble’s wildly successful collection of devotional poems, The Christian Year (1827), that a revival of pre-Reformation, medieval devotions (Marian ones included) began to crop up in the popular art of the Victorian period. Newman praises The Christian Year in the Apologia, saying it imparted to him a definite sense of the key articles of doctrine (such as the Communion of Saints), the “sacramental system” of the Church, and the attendant mysteries of the faith, Marian devotion included.[16] Keble’s influence extended well beyond Newman’s admiration and the growing Tractarian set. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings, for instance, relied heavily on “Art Catholic” themes derived from emerging Tractarian poetry like Keble’s. Christina Rossetti, likewise, drew from Keble’s devotional prosody while significantly contributing to the early, pre-Raphaelite medieval, devotional aesthetic of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Rossetti even leant her face to various members of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, modelling for paintings which depicted the early years of Mary’s life and Christ’s life, too.

Although a greater cultural liberty was slowly afforded to artists who depicted Marian themes favorably, advancing Marian devotion, let alone Marian dogma, remained a contentious if not scandalous activity in mainstream Victorian culture and within the established Church of England. As we know, Newman himself admits in the Apologia and elsewhere that Marian doctrine was something of a stumbling block to him, too, and one which was only fully removed when he began to read the early Church Fathers in earnest. In their treatises, hymns, biblical exegesis, and spiritual reflections, Mary and her glories are a constant refrain.

Around the time that he was appointed vicar to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, Newman especially recalled how Froude’s Marian devotion enkindled in him a special love for the Mother of God. Recounting his personal ‘turn’ to Mary in the Apologia, Newman writes that Froude “had a high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity; and he considered the Blessed Virgin its great Pattern. . . . He fixed deep in me the idea of devotion to the Blessed Virgin.”[17] As a result, many of Newman’s University sermons in the early 1830s began to touch on aspects of the life of Mary and Marian dogma, even prior to the public “launching” of the Oxford Movement around 1833, onward.[18] On the Feast of the Annunciation in 1832, for example, Newman advanced a defence of the Immaculate Conception which was energetically rejected by most Anglicans of the time and about which even the Roman Catholic Church made no official pronouncements until Pope Bl. Pius IX officially affirmed the ancient doctrine of the Immaculate Virgin in his 1854 declaration, Ineffabilis Deus (which was confirmed by Mary, herself, in her apparitions to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858).

As Newman would point out to Edward Pusey, while the Church did not pronounce on the Immaculate Conception until the nineteenth century, it had been traditionally treasured as one of her prerogatives since “the doctrine of the [Church] Fathers from the earliest times.”[19] He elaborates on this fact in Discourse XVII of Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849), entitled “On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary.” Here, he foregrounds the inextricable relationship between the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Hypostatic Union, and the Glories of Mary. He writes that those Catholic doctrines concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, particularly the Immaculate Conception and her status as the Second Eve, enjoy a special and fitting “harmony with the substance and main outlines of the doctrine of the Incarnation” because they explain how and why Mary uniquely enabled it and, throughout Church history, communicates it through her continual acts of intercession.[20] God chose to rely on the fiat of a young and obscure Nazarene woman in order to accomplish the entrance of Christ into history. It is through Mary’s status as Deipara (God’s Mother) that, as Newman puts it, “the historical reality” of salvation is actualized: as he puts it, through Mary, “the Almighty is introduced into his own world at a certain time and in a definite way. Dreams are broken and shadows depart; the Divine truth is no longer a poetic expression, or a devotional exaggeration, or a mystical economy, or a mythical representation.”[21] Or, to put it another way, drawing from CS Lewis, “myth became fact.”

In this, Newman shows that the historical events of the Annunciation and Incarnation together reveal the eschatological character—or, as it were, eschatological calling—of history itself. As importantly, he stresses that the life of Christ cannot be read as one myth among others, thereby implicitly critiquing the rising emphasis on historicism (to the strange exclusion of metaphysics) in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship and criticism. The Jesus of history is the Christ of God who entered fully into the mundane and ordinary experiences of human life to redeem them. Mary’s humble fiat, which allows the Incarnation to take place, firmly establishes Jesus’ historicity while also testifying to the metaphysical dimensions characterizing the Incarnation. Given this, Newman concludes that it is Mary’s perfect accord with her (unfallen) conscience (her immaculate heart, as it were), that makes her the greatest human witness to truth in history. Mary’s glories (the doctrines about her) are therefore fitting, Newman contends, drawing on the Patristic and Thomistic tradition of interpreting revealed truths according to the category of fittingness (which is adjacent to but distinct from the category of necessity). Newman justifies Mary’s glories and her role as hermeneutical key to history when he appeals to Christ’s own words in scriptural, post-resurrection accounts. Referring to the resurrected Christ’s encounter of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Newman explains that the Lord draws from the category of fittingness to explain the inner coherences between revealed truths. He “appeals to the fitness and congruity which existed between this otherwise surprising event [of the resurrection] and the other truths which had been revealed concerning the Divine purpose of saving the world.”[22]

The “great principle” of fittingness “which is exemplified so variously in the structure and history of Catholic doctrine . . . is brought before us,” Newman concludes, in the seasons of Marian feasts when we celebrate the woman who “was so singular and special, both in herself and her relations to him [Christ].”[23] Mary’s singularity lies in her perfect accord with the divine will, and her glories, Newman suggests, are God’s honoring of her obedience, an honoring which is in some instances prevenient: in the order of history, Mary is immaculately conceived before she makes her fiat.[24] This shows, in a hidden yet paradoxically manifest way, the metaphysical character of history; grace transforms persons and events within and beyond (sometimes, even despite) the chronological when divine providence deems it fitting.

Newman supplies further justification for the fittingness of Mary’s glories and, derivatively, her special value for history in his sermon, “The Reverence Due to the Virgin Mary,” which was dedicated to the feast of the Annunciation. Meditating at length on her canticle of praise (Luke 1: 46-55), he concludes that her greatest witness to providence in history is found in her desire to live only in so far as her soul “magnifies the Lord” (Luke 1: 46). Newman marvels how, through Mary’s fiat, God accomplishes the “promise which the world had been looking out for during thousands of years” and which guarantees that the “destinies of the world were to be reversed.”[25] He then insists that the Annunciation depends on its historicity for its significance—this cannot be mere myth, as he so frequently argues—and shows how the Visitation sheds further light on the Annunciation. He drives home this point by focusing on the example Mary sets for future generations through her Magnificat. Mary’s Magnificat, which she proclaims in the sight of her cousin Elizabeth, is a priceless treasure, Newman reminds his listeners, passed down over the course of history. He therefore recommended the Magnificat as a resource for anyone who wished to grow in prayer and to those who pray the Divine Office. He laments the thoughtlessness of those who “do not think of the meaning of those words which came from the most highly favored, awfully gifted of the children of men.”[26]

Newman concludes his sermon by underscoring the fact that the Magnificat, as a fruit of the Annunciation, not only confirms Mary “is doubtless to be accounted blessed and favored in herself” but also indicates the great “benefits she has done us” as a result of her free choice to become the Mother of God; generation after generation will now enjoy the fruits of the Incarnation.[27] Given this, he proposes humanity owes Mary a debt of gratitude. The daily rounds of life (our lived history) as well as the great sufferings and joys chronicled throughout time take on the shape and direction of definite hope and consolation because Mary assented to the divine will: “instead of sending his son from heaven, [God] . . . sent him forth as the Son of Mary, to show that all our sorrow and all our corruption can be blessed and changed by him. The very punishment of the fall, the very taint of birth-sin,” he concludes, “admits of a cure by the coming of Christ.”[28] In the quiet solitude of her heart, where Mary discerned the presence and will of God, Newman implies we find a model for history as well as our own place within it.

In Newman’s gloss on the scriptural accounts of the Annunciation and the Visitation, there exist unsurprising but nevertheless richly illuminating, conceptual sympathies between his Mariology and von Balthasar’s own. For instance, in Mary for Today, von Balthasar proposes that true humility is, in a profound sense, unconscious; it is the very mode or operation of being, and so Mary’s humble obedience made her the most singularly unconscious human of all time. This helps account, he proposes, for Mary’s ability to withstand the Angel Gabriel’s visitation, even as fear arises within her. Mary’s holy fear, Balthasar suggests, comes from reluctance to, as it were, enact a certain self-consciousness or self-consideration. She is troubled by the Angel’s message about her because she naturally does not think about herself:

When the girl is greeted as “Full of grace” by the angel she is afraid. It casts a light on her own essential nature that she had never reflected on. “Poverty of spirit” (or, what is the same, humility) is not some veritable virtue—capability, suitability, competence is something one can be conscious of—but the unconsidered awareness that everything that one is and has is God’s loan and gift and is only there to bring the giver into the spotlight. . . . It is only the sinner who twists himself back on to his or her ego: the person who is sinless (the only one there is) does not know this backward glance but looks steadfastly forward at what is good, and “no one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:1). It is precisely this lack of knowledge about her own sinlessness that makes Mary the “seat of wisdom.” Wisdom is not something one possesses but a radiant light from God. . . . Its light is given as their own to the poor and humble. . . . [This is why] Mary can only point to Jesus, just as Jesus can only point to the Father: “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (John 7:16).[29]

The fittingness of Mary’s glories come from her radical purity and poverty, as Balthasar shows us so persuasively, and which Christ proclaims in his adage, “blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11: 27-28). With the Patristic interpretation of this very passage as inspiration, Newman also often concluded that greater than her status as biological mother of Christ is Mary’s perfect obedience to the divine plan for salvation; her lack of self-regard given her complete turn to, her focus on, divine calling.[30] In all this, we see that, in his turn towards Mariology and Marian devotion, Newman discovered a deeply personal and metaphysical articulation of the inner-depth dimensions of history as sites for the unfolding of personal assent to the divine plan. As importantly, he apprehended how the solitude he romanticized in his undergraduate days was, as he had intuited even then, indicative of the deeper dimensions of the self. As he recounts in the Apologia, this deeper sense of the self is more fully known through the spiritual friendship enjoyed within the Communion of Saints and facilitated through the (often-hidden) intercession of God’s Mother. In the remaining section, I will consider the degree to which Newman’s literary approaches to Mariology offer us ways of thinking about the value of the historical for the devotional imagination and vice versa.

Mary and the “Providences of God towards His Church”

According to Newman, history is rarely understood, let alone correctly interpreted, without great care and contemplation over long periods of time. It would take a holy prophet, a saint close to God, a divinely inspired poet to discern the patterns of events and their significances in “real time,” as it were. However, he argues that it is nonetheless incumbent upon historians and especially theologians to seek to interpret the past in light of the present, to see how the known parts of history hang together and testify to the presence of God who operates within and beyond them. Writing for The British Critic in 1841, Newman laments the lack of a systematic, historical study of Church history in the Anglican Church. “Perhaps the greatest of wants under which our religious literature labors at this day is that of an ecclesiastical history,” he writes.[31] He argues that Christian doctrine and history uniquely inform each other, showing the “providences of God towards his Church.”[32] For Newman, history is to doctrine what the body is to the soul; the two are meant to be a unity and understood relationally. “Our view of doctrine affects our view of history,” he argues, “and our view of history our view of doctrine; and our view of doctrine the sense we put upon Scripture.”[33] After justifying the “associations” between history and faith, between lived experience and divine revelation, Newman considers what is involved in the challenge of interpreting the present in light of the past:

The history of the past ends in the present; and the present is our scene of trial; and to behave ourselves towards its various phenomena duly and religiously, we must understand them; and to understand them, we must have recourse to those past events which led to them. . . . It is the association [between past and present] which is everything; but to those who know not the true history of that to which the name [or event or idea] belongs, there are no associations with it [or them], or wrong ones.[34]

As he proceeds to assess how the study of history can serve theological concerns, Newman makes it clear that any such assessment should be primarily made for the sake of religious duty, to aid us in “behav[ing] ourselves.”[35]

This claim is brought to an even greater pitch in Development of Christian Doctrine (which Newman was completing when his essay was published by The British Critic). For, as we know, the overview of Church history Newman undertakes in Development helped confirm his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 (the same year Development was published). This is just one indicative example of the seriousness with which Newman understood the effect of historical study on religious convictions and the devotional sensibility. Another example can be found in Newman’s fascination with, and defence of, Mariology in key sections of Development. In these sections, he shows how Mary’s role within salvation history is to help pilgrim souls better love and know her Son. In other words, one of Mary’s key roles in history is to help humanity behave better, see better, imagine better.

In his chapter on the “Office of St. Mary,” in which he says Mary’s “special prerogatives . . . are intimately involved in the doctrine of the Incarnation itself,” Newman quotes from St. Irenaeus’s declaration that Mary is the Second Eve. In so doing, he meditates on how Mary’s fiat is used by providence to begin to redress the wounds of history, caused by the fall in Genesis. According to Irenaeus, just as “Eve . . . was seduced by the Angel’s speech so as to flee God having transgressed his word, so also Mary by an Angel’s speech was evangelized so as to contain God, being obedient to his Word.”[36] Irenaeus extends the parallel even further: “And as one was seduced to flee God, so the other was persuaded to obey God, that the Virgin Mary might become the Advocate (Paraclete) of the Virgin Eve, that as mankind has been bound to death through a Virgin, through a Virgin it may be saved.”[37] Piling reference upon reference and authority upon authority, Newman draws from Irenaeus and other theologians (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, etc.) in order to further confirm Mary’s “high office” and her interventions in history to sustain the hopes and goodness of humanity under trial. He is clearly fascinated by Irenaeus’s description of Mary as an advocate, a paraclete for humanity throughout the unfolding drama of history. Additionally, Newman pulls from devotional accounts of Mary’s interventions in the early Church to further his cause. In this instance, his primary motivation is to instruct or educate, but an important derivative of his choice to appeal to devotional accounts is to show the value of the poetically imaginative within historical accounts of the life, nature, and scope of the Christian Church.

One such striking example of Newman’s use of poetic accounts in Development is his extensive assessment of a third-century record of a Marian apparition. He claims that mystic accounts of Marian apparitions can serve as cultural confirmations of “Mary’s interposition” in history.[38] While the evocative language of the record clearly strikes a chord with Newman, he analyzes the text systematically, too, defending the historicity of the vision. To justify his turn to a devotional text (as opposed to a theological treatise), Newman appeals to the authority and credibility of the story’s witnesses. In this instance, they are St. Gregory of Nyssa, “the historian” of the apparition, and Bishop Thaumaturgus (also known as Gregory the Miracle-Worker) of Neo-Caesarea (who is “the subject” of this mystical encounter).[39]

Tradition and ecclesial authority legitimize the historicity of the story, Newman concludes, as do the fruits of the apparition itself—namely, the clarification of the Trinitarian formula in the ante-Nicene period (100-325), which followed on from the Apostolic Age. However, in seeing Newman’s treatment of the account, it becomes clear that it is also important to him because a poetic approach to Church history can open up deeper affective appreciations, appreciations which cannot be so fully supplied by other means or through other modes.

It is worth quoting a series of passages and choice phrases from the apparition account as they illuminate Newman’s conviction that Mary is not only a divinely chosen and special instrument of divine providence throughout history. She also illumines understanding by appealing to reason as well as the heart. The account begins with Thaumaturgus “passing the night” in prayer when “one appeared, as if in human form, aged in appearance [and] . . . saintly.”[40] This venerable figure is Christ’s beloved apostle, St. John the Evangelist. John calms the frightened bishop, who is “amazed at the sight,” and filled with attending “perturbation.”[41] John assures the bishop with a “gentle voice,” saying he has appeared by “divine command . . . in order that the truth of the orthodox faith might be revealed to him.”[42] As John assures the bishop, filling him with “courage,” a still more sublime figure arrives on the scene. The bishop “cannot bear” the sight of the Mother of God and struggles to explain her in words so he settles on the inadequate description of a figure “in shape of a woman, but more than human.”[43] This figure turns out to be God’s Mother.

While gazing upon these two figures, the bishop overhears a theological discourse between them. It becomes evident that John is only able to pronounce the correct Trinitarian creed and formula once “the Mother of the Lord” has instructed him.[44] Here, Mary is the primary theologian and John her receptive student. As spouse of the Holy Spirit and Seat of Wisdom, she is the one who gives John the correct way to offer “a formulary, well-turned and complete” before both saints vanish from the bishop’s sight. The apparition ends and Thaumaturgus records the Trinitarian formula and incorporates it into his preaching, offering it, as Newman says, as a gift to “posterity, as an inheritance [of] heavenly teaching” which aids the doctrinal clarifications concerning the Trinity which were needed at the time. Pondering the elements of this account, Newman concludes by using the words of Gregory of Nyssa (the historian of this vision), saying that Mary is history’s paraclete, a “loving Mother with clients” throughout history.[45] Influenced by Gregory’s writings, and other early mystical poems, hymns, and treatises on the Mother of God, Newman came to see her according to her role in Thaumaturgus’s vision: history’s clearest icon of Christ’s redemption of humanity. “She will show you her Son, your God, and your all,” Newman would later preach.[46]

Mary’s status as patron of history is one which especially captured Newman’s devotional imagination, informing his philosophical and theological reflections on the place and value of hidden holiness in the outworking of providence through time. As discussed above, this is evident when Newman discusses articles of Christian doctrine. But just as importantly, his idea of history and aesthetics are also shaped by his belief that Marian doctrine held a special place in English history and English self-understanding. Although this Marian element in English culture was disturbed and displaced during the Reformation, Newman believed it needed to be re-established if Roman Catholics were to help pave the way for the Church’s fuller restoration in Victorian Britain.

In his seminal 1852 sermon, “The Second Spring,” delivered on the occasion of the restitution of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, Newman transposes verses from the Song of Solomon (Canticles 2: 10-12) as he petitions Mary to resume her patronage of his beloved country: “It is the time for thy Visitation. Arise, Mary, and go forth in thy strength into that north country, which once was thine own, and take possession of a land which knows thee not. Arise, Mother of God, and with thy thrilling voice, speak to those who labor with child, and are in pain, till the babe of grace leaps within them. Shine on us, dear Lady, with thy bright countenance.”[47] His desire for England’s return to true devotion to God’s Mother is earnestly expressed in his Letter to Pusey as well as the Marian hymns and devotions he wrote during decades of pastoral service as a Roman Catholic priest.

Of course, praying for the return of public Marian devotion to England’s shores is not unique to Newman. The Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom Newman received into the Church) also often turned to this theme in his poetry—as seen in the final lines of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in which he prays that Christ (whom he calls the “Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame”) will come “back, oh, upon English souls.”[48] However, few nineteenth-century Roman Catholic poets or theologians were as persistent as Newman in his belief that the revival of Marian devotion was crucial to the restoration of the religious sense in public life and, among other things, to a deeper understanding of the unfolding of providence throughout history and of the role that individual persons play within that very unfolding.

Rather than define history as the march of linear progression (the conceit of scientific positivism championed in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth), Newman understood it as the processual movement towards a deeper understanding of the action of God within and among his creation. And in stark contrast to the historical theories of power politics which shaped late modernity or the “modern humanism” which, as Henri de Lubac points out, so often relied upon claims of “resentment,” Newman offers a philosophy of history rooted in prayer and hiddenness, stemming from Christ’s humble and sometimes obscure redemptive work which Mary, as the Mother of God, uniquely supports and makes known throughout history—for the sake of her Son.[49]

Like Augustine, Newman held that history’s ultimate significance lies well beyond the rise and fall of civilizations. He discerned that the true heart of history beats within the relationship between each person and God, and in the extension of these private relations through a life of friendship and definite service. It is in searching the conscience that, according to Newman, the heart and mind are opened up to the transcendent horizons granted by divine revelation and made manifest, firstly, in Christ’s life and, secondarily, in the lives of the saints which he described as “the remanent fruit of largely-scattered grace” who are under the special protection of God’s Mother, history’s paraclete.[50]

EDITORIAL NOTE: You can listen to an interview with the author about this essay on the Church Life Today podcast. The author wishes to thank Religion and Literature for permission to republish part of her essay, "The Marian Turn in Newman's Idea of History."

It is an ongoing challenge to find the right balance between personal effort and faithful abandonment to divine assistance. This challenge is the subject of St Bernard’s first sermon on Psalm 90, which engages with the Psalm’s opening verse: Qui habitat in adiutorio Altissimi, “He who dwells within the help of the Most High.”

God’s help, says Bernard, is rightly called a habitat in as much as it forms a sustaining reality within which we can live, move, and have our being. God’s help is not occasional to us; it is not an emergency service we call out now and then, when a house is burning or someone has been hit by a car, the way we might dial 911. God’s help is an attribute of his Being that keeps us in being. When Christ says, “without me you can do nothing,” this is literally true. The fact that we exist is positive proof that God does help. The question is, do I make my home within that help, as in my Father’s house, or do I pine for some “distant country” where I imagine I might live off my own resources? If I do, it is an unproductive dream. What seems to me a place of autonomy where I might be myself undisturbed is in fact, Bernard would insist, a “region of dissimilitude” where I cut myself off from the roots of my identity.

We can best appreciate what it means to dwell within God’s help, Bernard tells us, by considering three kinds of people who do not dwell there. He defines them with reference to the virtue of hope. The three groups are, variously, those who have no hope, those who despair, and those who hope in vain.

The literally hopeless are those who see no need to inhabit God’s help because they are comfortably ensconced in self-sufficiency. Such people can be found even in the Church. A man strong in vigils, fasts, or works may begin to think of himself as rich in merits. He slackens in the fear of God. Thinking he can manage quite well on his own, he yields to “a pernicious security” expressed in growing superficiality and in arrogance. He turns into a bully. He gossips about others. He becomes a counterwitness to the religious state he imagines he embodies to perfection.

Those tending to despair stand for a second class of people estranged from God’s help. So impressed are they by their own weakness that they lack energy and, really, will to reach for God’s strong help, finding instead perverse satisfaction in their miseries, which they never cease to recount to any captive audience. Neediness, too, can become a golden calf whose cult induces a daze of introspection.

The third kind, those who hope in vain, take God’s mercy for granted, so they see no need to bother with amending their faults. Their hope, notes Bernard, is vain for it lacks charity, springing instead from assumptions of entitlement.

If we want to learn what it means to dwell within God’s help, graciousness is called for and courage, as well as an awareness of our own needs. More often than not, it is by falling that we learn to be helped. The just and the unjust alike fall, but there are differences. Those who live within God’s help find they can fall without being crushed by falling. God “places his hand underneath” them. Because the just who live by faith in God’s help ascertain this, they can rise strengthened from a fall. Those who discount God’s help, whether for arrogance or pusillanimity, will incline, rather, to stay knocked out, not minded even to attempt to rise.

What Bernard says makes sense. But what about occasions when God-fearing people fall and are apparently abandoned, crying out to heaven but getting no perceptible response, hearing only the desolate echo of their own voice?

The Scriptural type of such plight is Job, masterfully expounded by Gregory the Great in a text dear to the first Cistercians. Gregory’s Moralia in Hiob was copied in the scriptorium of Cîteaux already in 1111, the year of Robert’s death. To put Bernard’s thoughts about God’s help in perspective, though, I should like to draw on a contemporary interpreter who sheds surprising, helpful light on this theme.

The French Protestant theologian Marion Muller-Colard begins her essay on Job, L’Autre Dieu, with an account of a pastoral visit. The year is 2001. She is 23, has done the requisite courses, studied Greek and Hebrew. She is duly dispatched to gain experience by visiting an old lady in a wheelchair. She asks some locals for directions. They oblige “the way roadside peasants show a knight the way to the dragon’s den,” silently, with a gesture of the chin and an anxious look. Having rung the doorbell, she ascertains: “She hated me as soon as she set eyes on me.”

The young woman realizes that everything about her—her youth and charm, her brisk mobility—seems a reproach to the chair-bound, ailing one. As she enters and sits, brought down to eye level, her host spins a paralyzing web about her as she recites her bitterness, points to objects of desolation, and recalls grievances.

Outside there is spring. The visitor knows she can soon re-enter it while the old woman will stay imprisoned in her wintry world, surrendered to “a chaotic succession of empty hours, of days and weeks untouched by any appetite for life.”

The scene is conventional. We recognize it. What sets this account apart is Marion Muller-Colard’s awareness of a subtle change of tone as her companion, warmed up, continues her soliloquy. At one point the litany of specific complaints yields to something more fundamental. Muller-Colard calls it the Lament. She spells it with a capital first letter, as if it were a subject in its own right.

“The real Lament rose crescendo. It poured forth like a groan from the depth of the ages.” “I do not recall the words,” she notes, “the Lament doesn’t care about words, has no need of them. Words are just a pretext. The Lament did not have an object either. It was the Lament, pure and simple, and I recognized it.” After a while the effusion stops. The old woman, abruptly silent, fixes her visitor. The two of them sit there, opposite each other, resembling, mutatis mutandis, boxers in a ring.

The Lament has been a form of anticipated attack against expected platitudes. The challenge is clear: “Counter this one!” Muller-Colard is aware of being trapped. She knows it is her turn, now, to step forward. A response is required; a word is called for. But what sort of word might be sufficient? Clutching her pocket Bible she knows: “Were I to produce an unctuous word, the Lament would leap at my throat. Were I to say nothing, it would likewise leap at my throat.” The Lament, long settled as master of the house, holds the old woman in a tight grip. A bright plaster of hope would be no remedy for the wound it inflicts. Muller-Colard is conscious of a single strategic advantage. She has heard the Lament before. She can recognize it.

This recognition gives her audacity to open her Bible and read:

Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night which said, “A man-child is conceived.” Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, nor light shine upon it . . . Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning; because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes. 

Stunned silence follows, but silence of a different kind, unlike the one that reigned before, no longer hostile but open, wondering.

Muller-Colard remarks matter-of-factly: “It was not I who paid the old lady a visit that day. It was my old brother Job. And it was to him she opened the door the following week with a smile she astonished herself to have found in her archives.”

This story tells us that helplessness cannot stand easy recipes. It can only stand itself. That is why our all-wise God, whom we adore as “Almighty,” emptied himself and assumed a helpless form to come to our help. When a person has been hurt in spirit, mind, or body, it may take anti-poison to draw accumulated poison out. The soul needs time for the spasms that enact its bilious eruptions. These belong to the birth-pangs of hope. The human response such a soul calls for does not have to be explanatory or comforting. It must be compassionate. The soul needs to hear that it has been heard, that its signal has been picked up and understood.

Marion Muller-Colard next turns specifically to an exegesis of the Book of Job. She considers how, in the introduction to the drama, Satan, the Accuser, parleys with God insinuating that Job’s exemplary piety is contractual. “Have you not,” Satan asks God, “put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side?”

In other words: have you not extended your help as an enclosure, hemming Job in, keeping him from any need to doubt or rebel? What wonder, then, if he comes across as “blameless and upright”? The question is what would happen if Job thought God’s help had let him down. The Lord, certain of Job’s probity, surrenders him to Satan’s temptation. Great disasters befall. Job declares nobly: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.”

From this point, the end of the prelude, Muller-Colard understands the Book of Job as a symphony in three movements. The first is that of the Lament. When Job, after seven days and nights in silence, opens his mouth, it is to utter the very words we heard resound in the wheelchair-bound woman’s flat. They rise like a rebellion from within. They are strikingly unspecific. Nowhere does Job refer to the loss of his seven sons, three daughters, 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen et cetera. At the level of faith he accepts that these are no more. He knows he cannot have them back. His Lament is an effort to say it as it is and to speak his conviction that there can be no neat explanation; his trial will not fit into parameters simply of guilt and retribution. Tribulation’s sensed senselessness, its darkness, is the core of it. That is what Job’s Lament spells out. And it is what his three friends cannot bear to hear.

The friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, are in many ways admirable. They come to sit quietly with Job in his desolation, sharing his mute grief. Only when he speaks do they rise up in dismay, feeling called to defend the underlying justice of a universal order, to insist that God will have his reasons for what he has brought Job through. Job is immovable. He refuses to posit that God is just working out sums in his life as if it were a balance sheet. Unhelped, he is determined to find God present in his affliction, calling out heroically: “If it is not he, who then is it?”

This is the point at which the symphony’s first movement, the Lament, flows into the second, which Muller-Colard calls Menace. It stands for realization that faith in God is not tantamount to safety. Job had been a belt-and-braces man. He had both lived justly and made supererogatory sacrifices of expiation, should unwarranted sin occur, despite him, in his house. His loss has taught him that he stands unprotected.

The Lament is a post-traumatic utterance. Think of a man who, after an earthquake, spends hours beneath rubble. He begins to sob only once the weight is lifted, having needed all his strength, till then, to stay conscious and to keep madness at bay. The Lament embodied by Job lurks in any soul. It is mostly asleep, but prepared to be awakened in the aftermath of liminal experiences that force us to peer over the edge of our existence into an apparent abyss. Specific pains may provoke the Lament, but the Lament is not reducible to specific pains. Like a predatory wild beast “it carefully covers,” writes Muller-Colard, “the paths leading to its lair.”

Physicians and pastors tend to fix their attention on individual bruises when, in fact, what is at stake is the vast, all-encompassing trauma of devastating questioning: “What if, after all, nothing makes sense? What if God does not help?”

As believers we may at some level regard our religion as an insurance policy. Certain of subsisting within God’s help, we may think we are out of harm’s way. A world can seem to collapse if—when—harm strikes. How do I face trials which cause my carefully assembled, customized protective fencing to fall? Is my relationship with God one of barter, disposing me to follow, when things are hard, the counsel of Job’s hard-headed wife to “curse God and die”? Or do I live at greater depth? To help others faced with existential Menace, I must have worked through it myself. The consolation I carry will have no authority if it is only words.

The second movement of the symphony of Job bids us look whatever Menace may surround us in the eye, and to own our brittleness—physical, moral, and spiritual. Only once these inward depths are scoured are we ready for the third movement. It stands for the discovery of Grace. This turning point is first announced halfway through the book when Job, who has long seen nought but darkness, cries out: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth . . . and my eyes shall behold and not another.” The motif of Grace erupts impenetrably unexpected without any outward change of circumstances.

What prepares it? Not the hackneyed catechesis of Job’s well-meaning friends, but the hollowing out, within Job, of a new capacity for perception. Relieved of false, idolatrous notions of a string-pulling god who deals in currencies of calculable grace, he is ready to encounter God in the immensity of his mystery, no longer as a private protector-god, but as The Other God of Muller-Colard’s title—as the Unfathomable.

When the Lord at last answers Job, after Job has spent 37 chapters pouring forth his Lament and sense of Menace, it is not to dictate a taut theodicy in defense of divine justice. No, the Lord tells Job: “Gird up your loins like a man: I will question you.” “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” “Have you entered into the springs of the sea?” “Can you send forth lightning?”

We may wonder: is this a pastoral approach? It is, here. It helps Job burst the chains of a self-centered quest, to look up and glimpse the true God who in this grandiose book is invoked under the title of El Shaddai, a mysterious name that is open to diverse interpretations. One of these, according to the Rabbis, would translate El Shaddai as: “He who says: Enough!” Even as God, in the beginning, created the cosmos by fixing boundaries for the tohu wawohu, he orders our chaos by blowing it into the seas, letting dry places appear to turn these, later, into fertile land.

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. He, the supremely tested, confesses: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, now my eye sees you.” To live within God’s help as St Bernard would have us do is not to peddle securities. It is to pass through Lament and Menace in order to live graciously at this new level. So as to enable others to find it.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Alight With Hidden Glory: The 2026 Papal Retreat (Bloomsbury, 2026). This book of reflections preached by Bishop Erik Varden to Pope Leo XIV and the Roman Curia at the 2026 Lent retreat will be available on 19 May 2026, All rights reserved.

Set in a small town in Indiana during the mid-eighties, the narrative kicks off with a group of kids playing Dungeons and Dragons, who stumble on an alternative world under their town, which they call “the upside-down.” It is a nightmare place that mirrors the everyday world but in a degraded form, where no light penetrates and slimy black tentacles twist around houses and trees, the air floating with what looks like polystyrene fragments. It is a realm where vulpine humanoids with venus-fly-trap heads drag people off to be offered to a diabolical entity.

Over five seasons, to a drumbeat of fantastical Cold War themes, the show juxtaposes the worst with the best of humanity. At the heart of the horror is Vecna, a psychopathic entity who warps and manipulates everyone in his path. One of his favored torture techniques is the dislocation of the human body, though his ultimate tactic involves invading the mind of his victims, finding their weakest points and exploiting them.

In the final season [SPOILER ALERT!] we realize that the plot is even thicker than we thought. Vecna, once a man named Henry, is himself possessed by an alien entity: this is the true Mind Flayer, the source of the upside down and of Henry/Vecna’s powers. Set in a pre-internet age, the show seems to point to our own time, when the tentacles of the internet eat young minds for breakfast.

Ranged against this seemingly insuperable evil, the forces of good in Stranger Things are rooted in down-to-earth elements. The heroic resilience of a mother, the dogged loyalty of friends, and the old-fashioned American instinct to protect vulnerable and displaced people. I lived in the U.S. during the period when the show is set, and remember the era fondly: the bouffant hair, the vinyl records bringing us the enduring sounds of Kate Bush and David Bowie. One of the most attractive elements of Stranger Things is the way powerless people, beginning with children, use their wits, alongside an array of hilariously low-tech weaponry, to ride into combat. It is no surprise, at the very start of the show, that Tolkien is referenced, and as time goes by, an inter-generational Fellowship forms (albeit using language that JRR would hardly endorse!).

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A debate has raged around the conclusion of Stranger Things, due to the apparent suicide of its central character, Eleven. It is this element that I want to dwell on now. El is the true super-hero figure in the show, endowed with psycho-kinetic powers bred through a terrifying lab-rat childhood where she first met Henry, as he was then. She is the trump card that the fellowship must employ to defeat him now, though it seems as though all she has achieved so far is to drive him deeper into the realm that fuels his hatred.

By the same token, El comes to see herself as a threat to her own friends, and the wider world, since her blood carries the markers of the antagonist himself. Plus, guess what? The U.S. army wants to make super soldiers from her DNA. Her adopted lab-rat sister, Kali (the embodiment of the Kali Yuga the perrenialists speak of, perhaps), tries to persuade her that once Vecna is killed, El herself must also die, in order to protect humanity.

This is heavy stuff. It is a fact that suicidal ideation involves self-loathing: the desire to scratch out your own DNA and end your “line.” It is also a fact that existential despair is often rooted in the disconnection between past and future identity. It is a dis-location, an ab-ortion. The closing in of an airless space on a being that needs oxygen and connection to grow and thrive.

El’s adoptive father, Hopper, tries to persuade her that she has everything to live for (whatever you might think of the show as a whole, his character conveys a wonderful, wonky Josephine presence). He knows how earnest her desire to do the right thing is, in spite of all the trauma she carries. He does not want her to despair of the possibility of an existence which allows for some sort of normality. It is here that a second tether to hope occurs, in her love for Mike, one of the original fellowship. She knows what it will do to her soul-mate, too, if she dies. And yet, apparently, she chooses to go through with it.

Except that gut-wrenching jeopardy is not the end of the story. Eighteen months after the destruction of Vecna and all his slimy works, with El disappearing in the mix, Mike furrows his grief toward an alternative explanation. After they graduate from high school, he tells his friends another story. During their final mission in the upside-down, El made a pact with Kali, whose superpower was the ability to project an illusory reality. Kali, who significantly heard Hopper’s pep-talk to El, would make it appear as though El were standing in the rift between the worlds: whilst cloaking her real body so that no one would see her disappear from the scene and make her escape.

Many viewers did not find this explanation credible, which arguably makes for a flaw in the narrative (the Duffer brothers have admitted to feeling at sea with the final resolution). When I questioned friends and family on their take, they all said that Mike’s story is just that: something you could believe if you want to, but not something that genuinely consoled them. Yet after noting all the plot points, the imagery and the dialogue, I find Mike’s minority report curiously coherent.

First and foremost there is the story arc of Eleven herself, the capacity for love which is firmly embodied in her in spite of her background. Her horror at the sight of heavily pregnant, sedated women in the military lab, being infused with and poisoned by the same “super blood” as hers, is palpable. It is one of the most disturbing images of the final season. Along with the anti-Christ elements of the plot (and they are legion, from violent jocks to a deranged military), there is also an anti-Marian horror here. The one time the words “holy mother of God” are exclaimed is when the hellscape of the Mind Flayer drops into close contact with our world (the words feel more like an invocation for protection than a blasphemy).

In stark contrast with this is the scenario that Hopper puts in front of El, of a future in which she might be able to protect and nurture her own child—not a pro-life message so much as a vision of life without coercion, without artificiality. Similarly, in El’s final moment of communion with Mike, when she pulls him into her mind and tells him that one day he will understand what she is doing (NB: she does not tell him what this is), she establishes clearly the ground of her hope. That there is one human being on the planet who truly understands her, even if his anguish in the moment consumes him. And presumably Mike will know her well enough to eventually figure out what her final move consisted in.

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I will leave it there and turn to another TV series which you are more likely to have been watching in recent years: The Chosen, an ecumenical effort to portray the life of Christ through a slow dramatization of his mission. I came to this show somewhat reluctantly a couple of years ago, after being persuaded by my eldest daughter. While I have something of an allergy to what I call Jesus-riffing, I have to admit that The Chosen is, as they say, on the side of the angels. The actor playing Jesus is compelling. A Catholic of Lebanese and Irish descent, Jonathan Roumie embraces his role like a participant in a mystery play, with inhabited conviction. Roumie has said that his own prayer life has been deepened by the role, which he first undertook in the pilot of 2017 (season one premiered two years later, after a crowd-funding campaign). His great gift is to embody the full humanity of Christ, without flattening the divine.

While I have sometimes felt The Chosen could have benefitted from a British script-editor, I have been struck by how they have unpacked the narrative threads around the lives of Christ’s early followers. The impact of the call is powerfully portrayed, for example in the scene where Simon-Peter encounters Jesus in the most abject moment of his life. Most of the plotlines, spinning off from the known elements of the Gospels, are pretty convincing and in keeping with the Gospels.

I know some Catholics have niggles with the Marian material, but personally I love the depiction of Our Lady, especially in the Wedding at Cana, a favorite passage of mine. Overall, I like the exploration of female discipleship. One of the most moving scenes in season six, which covers Holy Week up to the point of the arrest of Jesus, is the alternative Seder with the women—obviously a non-scriptural element. The story arc of Mary Magdalene also stands out, her steadfastness woven closely in contrast to the vacillating shadow that engulfs Judas in this last season.

Overall, The Chosen strikes me as a sincere communication of the world’s most compelling story, the evangelium, complex and psychologically part whilst being historically situated. This is, as the mythographer Martin Shaw might say, a story with a zip-code. We need such storytelling at this time. We need the hope it conveys.

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But there is one interesting contrast to draw out with Stranger Things, and it concerns a crucial matter. In The Chosen, Judas betrays Jesus not because he does not believe in him. He betrays him because he believes, somewhere in his manipulable soul, that Jesus is superhuman. In a revealing dialogue with his brethren, he posits that the Son of Man will indeed be put to death: but only to reveal his power by defeating death and his enemies in that same moment, and unleashing the messianic age. Pause there for a moment and think about what is happening in the world right now.

Then go back to Stranger Things. El is not a Christ-figure. She is not even an angelic figure. She is a superhero, which is an entirely different trope. Superheroes are simply power-endowed human beings. What they do with that power is the hinge on which everything turns. El extracts herself from her compromising situation in a very different way from Judas. She surrenders the power to harm. My gut feeling is that this motive does not actually endorse suicide. It simply endorses sacrifice: of known security, known life. Beyond that, we do not get to follow her.

Back to The Chosen. The point about Jesus is that while both human and divine, he is precisely not a superhero. He will not, as Judas believes, slay his enemies at the last moment: that has never been his MO. Judas’s main flaw is a failure of the imagination, which you could characterize as, simply, bad theology. This is the scandal of Christianity. The author of life, in some way, must die. The Christ will descend, voluntarily, into the valley of bones, through the agony of the Passion. The agony of defeat: of real, absolute, undeniable death. Already in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him being mentally tortured by what is coming, and by the sleepiness and fearfulness of his followers. Nicodemus caught in his ivory tower trying to belatedly join the dots. Peter and James and John bewildered and afraid. The apostles clutching a few primitive weapons as a ten-ton-truck hurtles down the infested freeway of hell.

No one is on point. No one is going to win. Jesus knows all this. His human body is racked with fear and troubled to the point of collapse. But he goes to meet his betrayer anyway. What follows is the cry of the innocent the world over and through to our time, this time, this terrible moment in history. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

No super-heroes here. Only the awful mystery of Divine Love. Nevertheless, not mine, but Thy will be done.

Hail, cross, our only hope!—this is what the holy church summons us to exclaim during the time for contemplating the bitter suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ . . .

The Savior looks at us today, solemnly probing us, and asks each one of us: Will you remain faithful to the Crucified? Consider carefully! The world is in flames, the battle between Christ and the Antichrist has broken into the open. If you decide for Christ, it could cost you your life. Carefully consider what you promise. Taking and renewing vows is a dreadfully serious business. You make a promise to the Lord of heaven and earth. If you are not deadly serious about your will to fulfill it, you fall into the hands of the living God.

Before you hangs the Savior on the cross, because he became obedient unto death on the cross. He came into the world not to do his own will, but his Father’s will. If you intend to be the bride of the Crucified, you too must completely renounce your own will and no longer have any desire except to fulfill God’s will. He speaks to you in the holy Rule and the Constitutions of the Order. He speaks to you through the mouth of your superiors. He speaks to you by the gentle breath of the Holy Spirit in the depths of your heart. To remain true to your vow of obedience, you must listen to this voice day and night and follow its orders. However, this means daily and hourly crucifying your self-will and self-love.

The Savior hangs naked and destitute before you on the cross because he has chosen poverty. Those who want to follow him must renounce all earthly goods. It is not enough that you once left everything out there and came to the monastery. You must be serious about it now as well. Gratefully receive what God’s providence sends you. Joyfully do without what he may let you be without. Do not be concerned with your own body, with its trivial necessities and inclinations, but leave concern to those who are entrusted with it. Do not be concerned about the coming day and the coming meal.

The Savior hangs before you with a pierced heart. He has spilled his heart’s blood to win your heart. If you want to follow him in holy purity, your heart must be free of every earthly desire. Jesus, the Crucified, is to be the only object of your longings, your wishes, your thoughts.

Are you now alarmed by the immensity of what the holy vows require of you? You need not be alarmed. What you have promised is indeed beyond your own weak, human power. But it is not beyond the power of the Almighty—this power will become yours if you entrust yourself to him, if he accepts your pledge of troth. He does so on the day of your holy profession and will do it anew today. The loving heart of your Savior invites you to follow. It demands your obedience because the human will is blind and weak. Your will cannot find the way until it surrenders itself entirely to the divine will. He demands poverty because hands must be empty of earth’s goods to receive the goods of heaven. He demands chastity because only the heart detached from all earthly love is free for the love of God. The arms of the Crucified are spread out to draw you to his heart. He wants your life in order to give you his.

Ave Crux, Spes unica! Hail, cross, our only hope!

The world is in flames. The conflagration can also reach our house. But high above all flames towers the cross. They cannot consume it. It is the path from earth to heaven. It will lift the one who embraces it in faith, love, and hope into the bosom of the Trinity. The world is in flames. Are you impelled to put them out? Look at the cross. From the open heart gushes the blood of the Savior. This extinguishes the flames of hell. Make your heart free by the faithful fulfillment of your vows; then the flood of divine love will be poured into your heart until it overflows and becomes fruitful to all the ends of the earth. Do you hear the groans of the wounded on the battlefields in the west and the east? You are not a physician and not a nurse and cannot bind up the wounds. You are enclosed in a cell and cannot get to them. Do you hear the anguish of the dying? You would like to be a priest and comfort them. Does the lament of the widows and orphans distress you? You would like to be an angel of mercy and help them. Look at the Crucified. If you are bound to him as a bride by the faithful observance of your holy vows, your being is precious blood. Bound to him, you are omnipresent as he is. You cannot help here or there like the physician, the nurse, or the priest. But you can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief, in the power of the cross. Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart. Its precious blood is poured everywhere—soothing, healing, saving.

The eyes of the Crucified look down on you—asking, probing. Will you make your covenant with the Crucified anew in all seriousness? What will you answer him? “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Ave Crux, Spes unica!

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from A Sure Way: Following Truth in a World on Fire (Plough, 2026). Used by permission of ICS Publications, All rights reserved. 

For the discerning reader, this should raise a question. Has divine providence—God’s power to guide and direct human affairs—overridden free will? Has Absalom lost all his agency and become just a pawn on a much larger chessboard that the prophet Nathan has just described? The Bible’s answer to that question is a decisive “no.” And the way it makes its point is through the principle of double causality. That is, the notion that both God and human beings can be simultaneously responsible for the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Most of us think of divine providence and human free will as antagonistic principles. Either God is in charge, riding roughshod over our wills to bring history to his appointed end. Or we are in charge while God stands on the sidelines, rueing the results of what we plan and carry out. In other words, it is a simple zero-sum arrangement. If we do 60% of the work then God must do the other 40%, and so forth. But as we will see shortly, this is a false dichotomy. God guides human history in such a way that our freely made choices become the very means by which he achieves his appointed ends. In a word, we do not have to choose between divine providence and free will; God brings about the former through the latter.

Joseph Story

The textbook example of this principle can be found in the Joseph story. Stretching from Genesis 37 through 50, this is one of the longest continuous narratives in the Bible. Strikingly, unlike the preceding stories in Genesis—where God frequently intervenes through dreams, visions, or angelic visitations—this tale possesses a surprisingly “secular” atmosphere. The human actors appear to be in full control of their actions, guiding the plot toward its conclusion without direct divine intervention.

Consider how the story begins:

This is the history of the family of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; he was a lad with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought an ill report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him (Gen 37:2-4).

Immediately, we are informed about significant family tensions. Joseph is presented as a tattletale (“bringing ill reports [about his brothers] to their father”), one of the most despised roles in human affairs—not only in the Bible but in modern life as well. While the Bible offers ample wisdom on how to correct the behavior of a friend or family member, Joseph bypasses these strategies and goes directly to his father to report on his brothers.[1] And what is worse, his father not only tolerates this behavior, but he also dotes on Joseph. He signals his preference by cloaking his son with a special garment (the famous “coat of many colors”).[2]

In the very next scene, the tension within the family reaches its breaking point when Joseph shares his dreams of grandeur:

Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they only hated him the more. He said to them, “Hear this dream which I have dreamed: behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and lo, my sheaf arose and stood upright; and behold, your sheaves gathered round it, and bowed down to my sheaf.” His brothers said to him, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to have dominion over us?” So they hated him yet more for his dreams and for his words. Then he dreamed another dream, and told it to his brothers, and said, “Behold, I have dreamed another dream; and behold, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him, and said to him, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?” And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind (Gen 37:5-11).

As readers, of course, we know that these dreams will come true. Joseph is going to rise to second-in-command when he is sent to Egypt. And during the world-wide famine that then takes place, his brothers will make the trip to Egypt and bow before him upon their arrival.[3] But just because the dreams that Joseph had were “destined” to become true does not mean he should have disclosed them to his family.

Contrast, for example, Joseph’s behavior with that of the young Samuel, who receives a harrowing vision regarding his mentor, Eli:

Then the Lord said to Samuel, “Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel, at which the two ears of every one that hears it will tingle. On that day I will fulfil against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. And I tell him that I am about to punish his house for ever, for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them (1 Sam 3:11-13).

At first, Samuel refuses to tell Eli what he has learned. Only when sorely pressed by Eli, does Samuel finally relent and disclose what he has learned.

Samuel lay until morning; then he opened the doors of the house of the Lord. And Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. But Eli called Samuel and said, “Samuel, my son.” And he said, “Here I am.” And Eli said, “What was it that he told you? Do not hide it from me. May God do so to you and more also, if you hide anything from me of all that he told you.” So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him (1 Sam 3:15-18).

The contrast to Joseph could not be stronger. Whereas the arrogant young lad is only too happy to disclose his dreams to his brothers in order to let them stew in their predicted humiliation, Samuel must be “strong-armed” by Eli into revealing what he has learned.

Provoked by Joseph’s inappropriate behavior, the brothers grow so angry that they decide to take matters into their own hands. They throw Joseph into a pit and seem content, at least for a while, to allow him to stay there until he dies. But when the Midianite traders appear they think better of that plan and sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt. There Joseph rises to a position of great prominence, a famine takes place, and Joseph’s family descends to Egypt to buy food. Eventually Joseph discloses his identity to his brothers and brings the whole family into Egypt to ride out the rest of the years of famine.

After Jacob’s father dies, however, the tensions that had been brewing at the beginning of the story return with a vengeance. The brothers have good reason to expect that Joseph’s long-held resentment will finally boil over:

When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil which we did to him.” So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this command before he died, ‘Say to Joseph, Forgive, I pray you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.’ And now, we pray you, forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. His brothers also came and fell down before him, and said, “Behold, we are your servants” (Gen 50:15-18).

One might have expected that Joseph would have savored this display of obeisance. Wasn’t this what one of his dreams had predicted? Yet Joseph resists the temptation for vengeance.

But Joseph said to them, “Fear not, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he reassured them and comforted them (Gen 50:19-21).

Joseph’s declaration is an exquisite expression of the principle of double causality. He acknowledges that God brought his plan to fruition through the free, albeit sinful, choices of his brothers. The sale of Joseph into slavery was doubly caused: it was an act of divine providence to place Joseph in a position to save the world from an impending famine, yet it was simultaneously the result of genuine human anger and sibling rivalry.

Absalom’s Revolt

We find a similar example of double causality in the story of Absalom’s revolt in 2 Samuel. In the story of Nathan’s rebuke of David, we read that the penalty that God will impose entails that “the sword shall never depart from [his] house.” The immediate consequence of this decree is the revolt of Absalom. Yet, as the story unfolds, we learn that this revolt required no explicit prompting from God; every event that unfolds is the direct result of free choices made by David and his sons.

Let us take a closer look at how this tragedy unfolds. The story opens with the report that Amnon, David’s son, is in love with Absalom’s sister, Tamar (2 Sam 13:1). To secure her presence at his side, he feigns illness and asks that Tamar be sent to prepare food for him so that he can eat from her hand (v. 6). David, in all innocence, sends Tamar to Amnon’s house to prepare the meal (v. 7). When she does so, Amnon takes hold of her and demands that she lie with him (v. 11). Upon her refusal, Amnon forces her to lie with him (v. 14). In the wake of this brutal rape, Amnon develops a bitter hatred for Tamar and calls to his servant: “Put this woman out of my presence,” he demands, “and bolt the door after her” (v. 17) Tamar was devastated by this humiliation: “[She] put ashes on her head, and rent the long robe which she wore, and she laid her hand on her head, and went away, crying aloud as she went (v. 19).”

Predictably, Absalom—Tamar’s brother—grows very angry at Amnon. Astonishingly, however, David fails to discipline Amnon:

When King David heard of all these things, he was very angry, [but he did not rebuke his son Amnon, for he favored him, since he was his first-born].[4] But Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad; for Absalom hated Amnon, because he had forced his sister Tamar (2 Sam 13:21-22).

The discerning reader will note that David’s passivity mirrors that of Jacob in Genesis 37. Just as Jacob’s favoritism blinded him to the rage brewing among his sons, so David’s failure as a paterfamilias to render judgement on a favored child created a moral vacuum that Absalom is only too happy to fill. And just as Jacob unwittingly sent Joseph to his near-death at the hands of his brothers, so David sends Amnon to his death at a sheep-shearing festival:

After two full years Absalom had sheepshearers at Baal-hazor, which is near Ephraim, and Absalom invited all the king’s sons. And Absalom came to the king, and said, “Behold, your servant has sheepshearers; pray let the king and his servants go with your servant.” But the king said to Absalom, “No, my son, let us not all go, lest we be burdensome to you.” He pressed him, but he would not go but gave him his blessing. Then Absalom said, “If not, pray let my brother Amnon go with us.” And the king said to him, “Why should he go with you?” But Absalom pressed him until he let Amnon and all the king’s sons go with him (2 Sam 13: 23-27).

Upon Amnon’s arrival, Absalom strikes:

Then Absalom commanded his servants, “Mark when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine, and when I say to you, ‘Strike Amnon,’ then kill him. Fear not; have I not commanded you? Be courageous and be valiant.” So the servants of Absalom did to Amnon as Absalom had commanded (vv. 28-29).

Absalom’s extrajudicial murder of Amnon understandably provokes the ire of his father. Absalom becomes a marked man and must flee from his pending punishment.

But Absalom fled, and went to Talmai the son of Ammihud, king of Geshur. And David mourned for his son day after day. So Absalom fled, and went to Geshur, and was there three years (vv. 37-38).

Eventually, Absalom returns to his father’s household (ch. 14), but the reception is chilly (end of ch. 14). David’s lingering resentment fuels Absalom’s own bitterness. Before long, Absalom is actively plotting to overthrow his father and seize the throne (15:1-12).

Conclusion

As we have seen, we do not need Nathan’s dire prediction to understand the mechanics of Absalom’s revolt. As in the Joseph story, divine providence guides human history through the agency of free choices, not in spite of them.

However, we have learned something else. In our previous essay, we applauded David for his faith in God and the virtuous behavior he displayed after Nathan’s rebuke. But David, like us, remains an unfinished person, a man still burdened by human weaknesses. Even as David makes atonement for one set of sins, he inadvertently sets the stage for more. The process of forgiveness turns out to be a complex and multifaceted affair.

God, to be sure, intends to make us immaculate (see Ephesians 1:4)—free from sin—like the Blessed Virgin Mary. But for most of us, this transformation will not be complete until that final process of purgation after this life. If David, the model penitent, required ongoing correction, we should not despair when our own experience of the Sacrament of Reconciliation does not repair us instantly or permanently. Growth in grace is a lifelong journey.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is adapted from the fifth installment of the McGrath Institute's six-part Lenten Illuminating Scripture series, which you can watch in its entirety below.

The Architect of Love has built the door into heaven so low that no one but a small child can pass through it, unless, to get down to a child’s little height, he goes in on his knees.
—Caryll Houselander

I propose the person of Mary as the key to understanding the “narrow gate” of the Gospel teachings in Matthew 7:13-14 and Luke 13:22-30. Christ’s depiction of salvation’s entry as a narrow gate is one of the most troubling in the Gospel. It seems to portray salvation as restricted, exclusive, and elusive. Yet, while Christ states that “those who find [the narrow gate] are few,” he also promises that those who seek shall find; to those who knock, the door shall be opened (Matt 7:7). Our ever-merciful and loving God does not withhold salvation from us. Rather, he opens “the road that leads to life” for all. He prepares his children to pass over to this new road throughout the course of salvation history and, at last, opens the way with his seed in the womb of Mary. In Mary’s union with the Holy Spirit, humanity is wed to God. The embrace between Mary’s humanity and God’s Spirit is so full that the fruit of their union is Christ, God-and-man, who is the new road to life, our salvation. He is the way of humble love made accessible to humankind.

So fused to the divine life, the mysteries of Mary’s life eternally open to us, making accessible the way that is the life shared with Christ. Her life, then, is not only the key to understanding the narrow gate, but it is the narrow gate itself. Her life is the precise, embodied opening through which humanity meets God. This matters because the life under the mantle of Mary is the very opening, or portal, to the Way who is our Savior and Salvation. It is by entering into the mysteries of her life ourselves—marriage to the Holy Spirit, bodied-forth and shared life with Christ, and ultimate confession of our poverty and reception of the Father’s love at the foot of the Cross—that we may be gathered together from our dissipated ways of self-seeking and fused anew in God’s life and love.

In this light, we see that the narrow gate is not so much a guarded barrier but rather an open invitation. The gate is “narrow” in the sense that it is mystically enfolded in the life of a person. And the nature of this person’s life is one of lowliness, of surrender and reliance on grace. This life is indeed accessible through the unique life of Mary, but the Holy Spirit makes that life universally available to us all. Broadly, our ego-centric world rejects the invitation to the little way of a life wed to God. “Those who find the way are few.” Preferring to seek worldly favor, to become “big,” we brush away the unattractively “little” invitation to divine favor. Yet, just as in the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit finds surprising and intimate ways to meet us in our small moments. He announces Christ to us, making it possible for us to accept this invitation, to become small enough to pass through this narrow door.

Mystical and spiritual works, most prominently, The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander, inspire what follows, while the doctrinal development of Mariology from Vatican II to the present forms its context. St. Paul VI (Lumen Gentium; Marialis Cultus) addresses the need to clarify the legitimacy and proper placement of Mary in the order of Catholic belief. St. John Paul II (Redemptoris Mater) and Benedict XVI further develop Mariology in the realm of spirituality, recognizing her as the Mother of the Church and of the Church’s children. Contemporaneous writings from Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger (Mary: The Church at the Source; Mary for Today; Daughter Zion) align with and deepen the doctrine into more robust theology and spirituality. Though not always explicitly stated by these sources, I offer that the Mariological doctrine and spirituality from this period naturally grows into mystagogy. As we draw close to Mary, Marian spirituality blooms into intimate, enfleshed participation in the unique graces of her blessed life.

Exposition: The Problem of the Narrow Gate

Someone asked him, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” He answered them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough. . . . [You will] stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’ He will say to you in reply . . . ‘I do not know where [you] are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!’ . . . You yourselves [will be] cast out, and people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God. For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” 
—Luke 13:22-30

“Lord, will only a few people be saved?” This initially sounds like a genuine theological inquiry about salvation. Yet, a deeper read exposes the self-seeking attempt to frame the question, and so glean a response, that measures salvation in quantitative terms. More honestly expressed, he is asking, “How probable is it that I will attain salvation? What are my chances?” Depending on the person, the intonation here could result in one of two extreme attitudes: presumption or paranoia. The presumptuous person expects the answer to affirm his superior righteousness. “I am one of God’s chosen people, set apart and worthy of salvation, yes?” On the other hand, the fearful person worries about not making the cut. He frets, “What must I do to preserve my life?”

Of course, this sort of eschatology results not in eternal life and rest, but in profound insecurity. Doubting God’s mercy, we have staked our faith on the shifting sands of our own selves and our human efforts. We consequently establish our notion of favor or blessedness in self-centered, human terms. We form an inverted conception of the Blessed Life, an “ego-projection . . . that is limited to our own narrowness,” and which sounds something like this: “Blessed are the comfortably well off, the cheerful, the highly respected. Blessed are the flattered” (Houselander). Blessed are the efficient and the prosperous. Blessed are those who enjoy good health, who fit into the centerfold. Blessed are those who ace their exams and get green lights. Blessed are those who smell good, have good teeth, and sane minds. Blessed are they who pray on schedule, who sit in the front pew, and who display piety for the rest.

The same calculative thinking behind the question, “Lord will only a few people be saved?” misleads us to seek salvation in graspable human terms. Holding this as our beatific vision, we confuse God’s favor with the favor of the world, which is truly a limited and elusive resource. Not only is this path insecure, but it is also self-defeating; for “no one can serve two masters” (Matt 6:24). Placing our faith in our own human merit means withdrawing that faith from God; it means infidelity to the One Lord, the God of our Salvation.

Christ’s Response: The New Way

His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him . . . He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise 
—Luke 1:50-55

Christ meets us, in our inconstancy, with his unwavering fidelity. As we hear in his reply to the question—“Will only a few people be saved?”—he does not indulge our fearful or prideful urge to quantify. Rather, he entirely upends our understanding of favor and salvation, lifting our gaze to the wholly other way of divine generosity. The end of his response in Luke reads: “people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God. For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” This final line serves as the interpretive key for the whole response. His way defies self-righteous presumption, as it is the last who shall be first; it casts out the fear of exclusivity, as it opens indiscriminately to people from all four corners of the earth.

Christ not only speaks, but also embodies this other way for us: “though he [is] in the form of God, [does] not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he [empties] himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness” (Phil 2:6-8). This self-emptying to the lowly is his very countenance, which is portrayed in the Beatitudes (CCC §1717). To the world, this way is “madness” (Houselander, 21). Indeed, the Beatitudes directly contradict the worldly order, giving preference and favor to the last and least: “Blessed are the poor, the mourners, the reviled, the persecuted, the calumniated; blessed are those who hunger and thirst” (Houselander, 21; Matt 5:3-12). Our poverty is blessed in its potential to become a path, a narrow way, to reconciliation with his love. He desires all of us, and so it is to our lowest extreme that he chooses to descend. The summit of Mount Zion, the chosen meeting place between God and humanity, paradoxically lies in the lowliness of humanity.

The life of mercy and self-giving appears distasteful to a world that values self-preservation and that judges by appearances. Christ’s response disturbs us, not because it is meager in mercy but because it is superabundant, and conforming to this level of mercy costs us. The heart, the longing, of Mercy beckons us to sell everything we own and follow. Thus, when Christ responds that “many . . . will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough,” or similarly states in Matthew 7:14 that “those who find [the narrow gate] are few,” he speaks in the trans-worldly terms of the wholly other God. “Few” here refers to the unpopularity of the salvific life in the fallen world. Christ personally offers salvation to all, but few are willing to accept the way of a God who, rather than elevating them like gods, humbles himself and becomes human.

Blessed Are You Among Women

Throughout salvation history, God has intended his chosen people to be “set apart” in the sense of being reconciled to his order of mercy and generosity. Chosenness, or favor, has meant being distinct in humility and love, but it has not warranted gloating superiority over other nations. It has not meant salvation for Israel at the exclusion of others, but rather that, by becoming humbly dependent on God, they would become the locus of God’s meeting with all of humanity. The chosen people are to be Mount Zion, where divine life shall enter and then flow out to the four corners of the earth and bless all nations.

The Lord endures with his people, preparing them for himself through a long line of patriarchs, kings, and prophets. But it is not until he graces us with someone small enough to pass through the low door that he, at last, finds a heart ready for his humble entry into the world. His favored one is a peasant girl named Mary. By all counts, Mary has heretofore done nothing remarkable or memorable. She is a virgin in the fullest sense. With the simple dependence of a child, she has abstained from worldly ambition and has given herself solely to the waiting, the longing for love. This longing for love is a fertile space within her, a womb. It appears to the world an empty void, but it is in fact the very capacity in her for him; and so, her virginity, her waiting, is a positive prayer, rising to the Lord and drawing him to her. The simple fact of her being is dear to the Lord, before any doing that could impress the world (Houselander, 15). Her lowliness becomes the mountaintop.

Sweetly, the Lord meets her longing with his self-gift. With unwavering faith, she consents, submitting so totally that she receives the fullness of his life into herself. The fruit of the Spirit in her open womb is Christ himself, love incarnate. Houselander describes Mary’s reception of Christ as “tremendous, yet so passive. She [is] not asked to do anything herself, but to let something be done to her. She [is] not asked to renounce anything, but to receive an incredible gift.” And, even following the incarnation, “she [is] not asked to lead a special, [cloistered or rigorous] kind of life . . . She [is] simply to remain in the world,” in a family and among the crowds. She allows her life to remain ordinary and lowly so that he may take it up and make it his own. (Houselander, 16).

Here, we might pause and consider how Mary further disrupts our expectations of the favored life. Once again, she witnesses to us an “overthrow of values” (Daughter Zion, 18). As we commonly refer to her as “our life, our sweetness, and our hope,” we often imagine her as a lofty figure, set apart in accord with the “worthiness” eschatology’s notion of favor. We think, if anyone in history has deserved the gift of God’s life, it is Mary, no? The guiltless one, the very flesh and blood of Jesus Christ the Savior, should be guaranteed salvation. For her, it is surely a given. She, at least, deserves to be set apart and exempt from the consequences of sin. But even for Mary, salvation is not a given but a purely unmerited gift. For, again, salvation is not just freedom from sin or exemption from consequence. Its positive content is the self-offering of God to each of us. Yes, Mary’s purity is an opening for God; it is a strength that elevates her to the mountain top (“Blessed are you among women”). However, even the highest point on earth is like an anthill before God’s majesty. Regardless of our virtue, salvation still is primarily and ultimately God’s movement: he stoops to lift us up to his height.

And, so, Mary has no thoughts of setting herself apart. Rather, she magnifies the greatness of the Lord, her Savior, precisely because “He has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness” (Luke 1:48). In this way, Mary is a clear prism through whom we behold the truth of humanity. Fully redeemed from sin and fulfilled by her union with the Holy Spirit, she definitively images the human potential: our openness for Christ. To the world, this openness looks like poverty, but to the Lord, it looks like a positive offering, a sacrifice of love and faith.

Indeed, as Mary progresses in her life of Divine favor and allows his beatific countenance to grow in her, she becomes inversely diminished in the world’s eyes. More and more, she must rely on the sight of faith to recognize the favor of her life. St. John Paul II speaks of this in Redemptoris Mater: Mary “bears within herself the radical ‘newness’ of faith: the beginning of the New Covenant.” But, this faith also experiences the dark night: ‘Through this faith Mary is perfectly united with Christ in his self-emptying,” or kenosis (§§17-18).

Like the living waters of Mount Zion, the kenotic exchange of self-gift between Mary and Christ is an overflowing reality. For, in receiving Christ, Mary also receives his heart for the world. He desires to give himself to us, so Mary follows, giving her continual yes to solidarity in Christ with the poor, the lowly, the mourners, the ashamed, the stigmatized. She perseveres alongside him on this beatific path unto Calvary, the point of self-death, where all distinction between herself and the poor is erased. She is no longer in solidarity with the poor, but she is one of the poor herself. She is no longer one suffering for but discovers, in her most stripped-down moment, that she is ultimately one suffered for. Despite her guiltlessness, the favored Mary draws closest to the Cross, claiming first place only to receive his purgative outpouring of mercy on the world. “At the foot of the Cross Mary shares through faith in the shocking mystery of this self-emptying” (RM §18).

Mary as the Narrow Gate

Mary’s fruitfulness, although she is unique and specially chosen, opens a new way for everyone. As Mary is included in the work of salvation, so she includes all and lets an eternal cycle of love between herself and her divine Son become living for everyone . . . When she allows everything to happen to her, she becomes co-operative in all that happens to her . . . The first fruit of her co-operation is the Son himself; and the second is the Son’s work, the redemption.  
—Adrienne von Speyr

In the Church’s development of Marian theology, it has repeatedly affirmed that Mary plays a central and indispensable role in God’s plan of salvation. Yes, she is a handmaid, a helper, to the Lord. But beyond that, she models redemption and opens the way. Her roles as daughter of God the Father, Bride of the Spirit, and Mother of Christ are for all Christians and, in fact, constitute our narrow path to salvation.

In Mary for Today, Hans Urs von Balthasar posits, “Certainly, she is unique, the only one who brought the Savior bodily into the world. But are we not all called to give birth to Christ into our world? In this travail, the whole Church is Marian—men and women alike” (14).

The word “mystery” here points to yet a further, mystagogical, dimension of Mary’s role in salvation. True to the Mount Zion metaphor, God chooses to meet us, not abstractly but in the particularity of who we are, as we are. This he does in the person of Mary. Because her life is totally bound to the divine life on earth and in heaven, her life becomes an eternal, mystical event that is open to us. In other words, Mary not only models but actually makes present the narrow gate. For she herself is the narrow gate, that small aperture through whom God permeates human nature and transubstantiates it into his own Salvific Body. To us, “poor sinners . . . she is the ‘gate of heaven’ . . . who makes it possible for us to reach her son. [. . .] She is the help we need for our birth into heaven to be successful” (Mary for Today 43). It follows, then, that the narrow gate is “narrow,” not in the sense that the invitation to Christ is exclusive, but in that it is particular; it is personal, it is intimate, it is enfleshed, and it is feminine.

Mary is the name of the beautiful, salvific life that invites our participation. The Marian life blooms into mystagogy: her pregnancy with Christ becomes our privilege, her discipleship alongside him our path, her surrender to his lowly image our calling.

In giving her humanity to God, Mary gave all humanity to him, to be used for his own will. In wedding her littleness to the Spirit of Love, she wed all lowliness to the Spirit of Love. In surrendering to the Spirit and becoming the Bride of Life, she wed God to the human race and made the whole world pregnant with the life of Christ (Houselander, 66-67).

Under her Mantle: Portraits of the Marian Life

I would like to conclude this proposal of Mary as the narrow gate by contemplating the initial and final mysteries of Mary’s life with Christ. Mary is a clear prism through whom we behold the truth of humanity. She images both poles of human redemption: our lowliness and God’s glorious mercy for us. The saints have called her the “Gate of Heaven.” She is also the “Narrow Gate.” The mysteries within her life narrative illustrate this contradiction of the favored life appearing starkly unfavorable. This contradiction challenges Mary’s faith and ours. Yet even when the events of her life surpass her understanding, Mary remains anchored in God’s favor for her, abides in her identity as his. Thus, despite the world’s view of her, she is free to continue uttering yes. By her free, resounding yes, she bears the full bloom of human faith and magnifies the Lord, the one who is surpassingly worthy of her fidelity. Mary’s attitude of firm faith forms our own response. Persevering in unison with her yes, we discover the blessed privilege of union with Christ’s love, precisely in the lowliness that he takes upon himself.

The Light in the Darkness: Annunciation, Advent, and Nativity

The Gospel accounts of the Annunciation, Advent, and Nativity have become so familiar that we often fail to note the strange paucity characterizing them. But these events in Mary’s life appear, at best, ordinary and hidden, and at worst, unorthodox and scandalous. The Annunciation occurs within the modesty of Mary’s bedroom; and just as swiftly as the messenger proclaims new light into her life, he departs. Mary remains in the dimness of her room, pondering. The Word is growing secretly within her, but she is left, embarrassingly, without words to vindicate her inexplicable pregnancy. Mary persists in quiet trust.

The Nativity, too, hardly seems “favorable.” Mary’s labor and delivery in a stable flies in the face of the vain expectation for the favored life to be painless and easy. And, after the pangs of birthing Christ, she and he—innocence and purity—are rendered ritually unclean from her blood for the first weeks of his earthly life. Again, though guiltless, Mary does not seek exemption from the consequences of sin, but again, she “stands in solidarity with the mother of the race [Eve] precisely because she is free of sin, and she stands even more closely in solidarity with [God’s chosen people], which as a whole is continually experiencing the birth pangs of the Messiah” (Mary for Today, 35).

In a world of darkness, bearing the light of the world is a necessarily painful and humbling process. It defies the “shoulds” of expected ease and prosperity, and it instead looks like undertaking those consequences in a way that reorients them into sacrifice for the Christ Child—a sweet act of worship. Mary accepts humanity’s stigma. This, too, will flower into blessedness, will give way to the stigmata of Christ Crucified, who bears the confusion of our guilt and so loosens us from its bondage (Love Alone is Credible, 104).With Mary in the specific graces of the Annunciation, Advent, and Nativity, God dignifies us with the purpose of ones who suffer for. We may offer the hardship of bearing light into the world for Christ and for the world to whom he gives his life.

At Christ’s Side and Christ’s Feet: Discipleship and the Cross

At the foot of the Cross, Mary’s life becomes a sacrificial offering to the Lord, in union with the sacrifice of Christ. In her, we behold the humbling reality that even humanity in its perfected form cannot merit salvation. Ultimately, even Mary comes to the end of herself, is brought to kneel, open handed under heaven like a lily. She is asked to bear the greatest suffering: the loss of Christ. She believes the Word that the Lord has spoken to her, and she says “Be it done unto me” (Luke 1:38). Yes. The favored one surrenders her life in him.

None of us can envy Mary in this result of her favor. She is asked to let go of her precious Son, love himself. Each of our losses is a partaking in this ultimate loss. But this is not the end of the narrow pass; on the other side, the sacrifice of her Son abounds in cosmic fruitfulness. This ultimate loss becomes the ultimate outpouring of mercy onto the world. By her loss, Christ, Mary is broken open to become the mother of us all: “Behold your mother” (John 26:27). She receives us with her open hands and, in her maternal care, she bears Christ in each of us. To accept the sacrifice of her loss and her yes to mothering us to heaven is the most humbling gift, one we could never merit. We can only respond with a thankful "Yes."

Throughout her life with Christ, Mary’s heart is pierced seven times (Luke 2:35). Christ’s death on the Cross is the final piercing. It is the definitive opening, the full longing for God. Incredibly, Mary’s heart is not crushed by this experience. Instead, she continues surrendering herself to the seeking. She continues seeking and finding him in us, in the lowly. Each of her piercings becomes an opening to love, wounds which bleed the content of heaven—sacrificial love—onto the wounded world. The pierced heart of Mary is the “Gate of Heaven.”

To appreciate the magnitude of that decision, one must recall how unlikely it once seemed. By the late 1930s, the University offered only seven doctoral programs: chemistry, metallurgy, philosophy since 1936, physics, mathematics, biology, and politics.[1] Even by 1952, when doctoral work had expanded to include English, history, sociology, education, mechanical engineering, medieval studies, botany, and zoology, there was still no graduate program in theology.[2] Theology, the intellectual heart of the Catholic tradition, had not yet found a home at the doctoral level in America’s flagship Catholic university.

Yet, there were signs of movement. A small undergraduate program in liturgy had existed since 1947, supported by the School of Liturgy founded by Michael Mathis, C.S.C.[3] Beginning in 1948, Mathis also offered a summer graduate program in liturgical studies.[4] But within the regular master’s curriculum of the University, only a general major in “religion” was available then.[5] A doctoral degree explicitly in liturgy would not be conferred until 1970.[6] A regular graduate program in liturgy itself began in 1965 with the appointment of Aidan Kavanagh, O.S.B.[7] The big transformation, however, came with Vatican II.

Between 1962 and 1965, the Council reshaped Catholic life and thought. Dei Verbum articulated a dynamic and Christocentric understanding of Revelation. Sacrosanctum Concilium renewed the Church’s liturgical life. Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae, promulgated in December 1965, opened new paths of dialogue with non-Christian religions and offered a robust affirmation of religious liberty. The Council called the Church to engage the modern world not defensively but with intellectual rigor and spiritual openness. University president Theodore Hesburgh grasped immediately what this meant. In a major address on campus on March 20, 1966, he outlined Notre Dame’s responsibility in implementing the Council’s vision.[8]

Shortly thereafter, the University announced an ambitious theological conference for the spring of 1966.[9] The gathering brought together Catholic theologians such as Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, and Yves Congar with Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant thinkers, including Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum, Georges Florovsky, and George Lindbeck. The proceedings would later appear as Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal (Notre Dame 1967). The message was unmistakable. Notre Dame intended to stand at the center of the Council’s reception. The University archives still preserve the photographs and audio recordings—unfortunately, not all are digitized yet—from this landmark symposium, which first established Notre Dame as a major place of theological discourse. This gathering of the world’s leading theologians helped usher into existence what would become the world’s leading doctoral program in theology.

It was during this time that Hesburgh also announced the creation of the doctoral program in theology. Structured initially around systematic theology, biblical theology, and liturgy, the program aimed to expand into ecumenical studies, history of religions, and pastoral theology. In a University that had once lacked even a master’s degree in theology, the shift was dramatic. Strategic appointments quickly followed. David Burrell, C.S.C. would pioneer engagement with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, later publishing works such as Learning to Trust in Freedom and Towards a Jewish Christian Muslim Theology. John S. Dunne’s The Way of All the Earth exemplified a theological method attentive to existential questions across religious traditions. Rabbi Samuel E. Karff began teaching Old Testament in 1966, while James Kritzeck deepened Catholic engagement with Islamic theology. News reports in 1967 already highlighted the growing prominence of the new program.[10]

The University went further still. It established the Institute for Advanced Religious Studies, conceived along the lines of the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Institute for Advanced Study. The Institute aimed to host annually twenty-four residential scholars to examine the relationship of religion to contemporary life and to “encourage studies of the convergence of' religious values with education and science, and of the relation of Christianity to the non-Christian world.”[11] Although it had already received in 1968 a sizeable endowment from the Rosenstein Foundation for a fellowship in Jewish Studies, it could not attract major donors and closed its doors in 1974.[12] In the decades that followed, the theology department became a global leader. Eugene Ulrich and James VanderKam advanced Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship at the highest level. John P. Meier completed his monumental five-volume Jesus – A Marginal Jew, arguably the most comprehensive study of the historical Jesus, while teaching at Notre Dame. Dialogue with Jewish thought flourished, particularly through Rabbi Michael Signer (on faculty 1992–2009).

Protestant theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas (from 1970 to 1983), Robert L. Wilken (from 1972 to 1985) and Gerald McKenny (since 2001) enriched ecumenical conversation, and a number of its female scholars began shaping different fields of theology. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1970 to 1984), and later Catherine LaCugna (1981 to 1997), advanced feminist theology; Jean Porter (on faculty 1990–2025) spearheaded the retrieval of natural law from a Thomistic perspective; and with Eating Beauty, Ann Astell (since 2007) made a field-defining contribution to medieval theology, inspiring generations of readers. As a Catholic theology department with a sizeable number of Jewish faculty (today also Muslim), the department embodied the Council’s hope that mutual understanding between Christians and Jews would arise “above all from biblical and theological studies as well as from fraternal dialogues” (Nostra Aetate 4).

Since 1965, professors of systematic and historical theology at Notre Dame have also excelled in their commitment to the Council’s pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes and engaged contemporary philosophy, art, and culture. During the 1980s, under the chairmanship of Richard McBrien (1981–1992), the department became, however, highly politicized and found itself often in the national spotlight as a center of theological controversies. Yet even in that period, important seeds were planted for a different future. The 1988 appointment of Joseph Wawrykow proved decisive. By directing dozens of dissertations on Thomas Aquinas, Wawrykow became a central figure in the post-Vatican II recovery of Thomism in the United States. A clearer shift came under McBrien’s successor, Lawrence Cunningham (1992–1997), who reoriented the department toward sentire cum ecclesia—thinking with the Church, rather than defining itself in opposition to her.

That renewed ecclesial fidelity culminated in the 1997 appointment of the young Augustine scholar John C. Cavadini as chair. Cavadini inaugurated his expansive vision to make Notre Dame the premier place in the world to study theology. Over the course of his thirteen-year tenure (1997–2010), he executed that vision with strategic precision and persistence. The appointments of Cyril O’Regan in 1999 and Gustavo Gutiérrez in 2002 sent a clear signal to the global academy: at Notre Dame, rigorous intellectual inquiry would be inseparable from the lived vocation of the theologian—attentive both to the deepest resources of the tradition and to the cry of the poor. The message was: truth and discipleship belong together. Alongside figures such as fellow Ratzinger Prize winner Brian Daley, S.J. (on faculty 1996 to 2021), and Francesca Murphy, O’Regan helped shape a distinctive culture of theological ressourcement, marked by sustained engagement with Scripture and the tradition. Moreover, Cavadini convinced the university administration to continue its commitment to a strong theology program, dramatically expanding the department’s size and reach.

By establishing World Religions/World Church as a formal area of expertise, Cavadini positioned Notre Dame at the forefront of both ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. The result was not merely growth but formation. Graduates carried Notre Dame’s ecclesially rooted, intellectually confident theology into hundreds of colleges and universities, quietly renewing the American Church from within. At the same time, the department demonstrated that American theology could engage European scholarship on equal footing. Such sustained, strategic leadership bore visible fruit. The department rose to worldwide prominence in subject rankings, becoming Notre Dame’s only globally top-ranked PhD program.

Remarkably, there is still no institutional history of the department’s development. The complex story of how Vatican II was received and implemented at Notre Dame remains a significant scholarly lacuna. Such a study would shed light not only on the University’s own trajectory but also on the wider evolution of Catholic theology in the United States—an importance recent works, such as Benjamin Dahlke’s Katholische Theologie in den USA (unfortunately not translated into English) have begun to underscore. As theology declines in some regions of the world, it continues to thrive at Notre Dame. That vitality is not accidental.

The vitality rests on a clear mission: fidelity to the Catholic intellectual tradition, openness to ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, intellectual excellence, and an unwavering stance against antisemitism, anti-religious bigotry, and the undermining of religious liberty. Sixty years after its founding, the doctoral program in theology stands as one of Notre Dame’s most consequential achievements. It has helped the Church to do its thinking, as Fr. Hesburgh used to say. It has formed generations of scholars who teach, publish, and lead across the globe. And it has shown that faith and reason are not opponents but thrive best in open and generous dialogue, grounded in the awareness that we all belong to the same human family.

The anniversary is more than a commemoration—it is a summons. If 1966 marked a bold beginning, 2026 calls for courage no less steady. The Church still needs places where difficult questions are examined with intellectual honesty and faith, and the world hungers for theologians who can bridge traditions, confront injustice, and help the next generation of Catholics to encounter Jesus. Sixty years ago, Notre Dame rose to that challenge. The task now is to sustain and strengthen that work with equal resolve.

I am very grateful to have an opportunity to reflect on some ways in which catechesis and evangelization can be enriched, made more effective, by engaging science. The issue of ecclesial disaffiliation revolves around the assumption that faith and science are in conflict. The only effective way to dispel the misconception of conflict is through fostering genuine dialogue between teachers and students, between witnesses and the curious. St. John Paul II saw this as the future path for the engagement of science in all areas of theological reflection and religious instruction: “we must overcome every tendency to . . . fear and self-imposed isolation,” asserting that “a community of interchange . . . expands partial perspectives and forms a new unified vision” (“Letter to Coyne,” 06/01/1988). Otherwise, in their inevitable assimilation of scientific ideas, he continued, the faithful will assimilate them unreflectively and with shallowness. And what could be more shallow, or more unreflective, than to allow one’s impression of a physical theory to be that it replaces the widest and deepest perspective on reality?

Dialogue is animated by courage, imagination, generosity, and patience. It seeks unity through respect for the integrity of each perspective. In the words of Jacques Maritain, it distinguishes in order to unite. It means truly believing in your gut that there is a unity to truth, and “that the sciences of today . . . can invigorate and inform those parts of the theological enterprise that bear on the relation of nature, humanity and God.” Only when science is received that way by the Catholic witness and teacher, when respect for it and openness to it is modeled, can the catechist or the evangelist take seriously the questions, concerns and even the prejudices of those whom we seek to re-affiliate or newly affiliate in that deepest sense of the word, its Latin root, which means “to adopt as one’s child”—divine affiliation. I add prejudices here, because what is the conflict prejudice other than various questions that have been hardened into working assumptions, questions that have been answered badly because they have been answered hastily and alone, because they have remained without the light that comes from reflection and discussion and mentorship?

Of course, it benefits no one if they gain all knowledge of the world’s workings yet fail to know the One who measures everything, as St. Augustine made clear in his Confessions. But what our Catholic scientists have shown us is what it looks like when one knows much about how the universe was made and works, and have found in that knowledge a path to the One who causes all things to live and move and have their being. So let us thank them once more for their witness to us.

St. Augustine was right, of course—our knowledge of God is enough, we do not need to be scientists in order to be saved. But what we see in these witnesses is a truth proximate to that one—that believing scientists will seek genuine consonance between scientific discoveries and the truths of faith. In a post-Christian but scientifically advanced society, even those who are not scientists will have sincere questions about how to relate them in dynamic and compelling ways. And I propose that this search for consonance is not mere curiosity, but the work of the Holy Spirit. As St. Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians, “the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.” And so the movement of the mind in wonder about how all things are related to the deep things of God is surely the Spirit’s work and domain.

So how do we usher questioners into this mutual interchange, in which science is embraced by faith and its findings contemplated by it, especially by the young who learn science and begin to wonder if and how it “fits” with what God has revealed to us in Christ? In the rest of my presentation I would like to share some ideas about what this looks like when it leaves behind defensiveness and moves toward what John Paul II called a “relational unity.” I will offer two steps; the first is propaedeutic to the second:

1. The role of apologetics—taking scientific thought captive to Christ by freeing it from monstrous mentalities
2. Finding a path from scientific thought to the central mysteries of the faith—arguments from fittingness

Let us start with apologetics. When John Paul II spoke of apologetics in this arena, he most often expressed caution about attempting to dispel all questions with tidy answers that misrepresent the science in question as well as the progressive nature of the scientific endeavor. As he said to scientists in 1983 at a symposium commemorating the 350th anniversary of the publication of Galileo’s Dialogue Between Two Chief World Systems, “The Church does not first turn to your discoveries in order to draw from them facile apologetic arguments for strengthening her beliefs.” In regard to the doctrine of creation itself and our belief in a temporal beginning to the universe, he warned in his 1988 Letter to the Director of the Vatican Observatory against “uncritical and overhasty” uses of the Big Bang Theory as a demonstration of these truths of faith. Be wary, he would tell us, of the slam dunk argument that cuts away thistles but leaves intact the roots of doubt, that leaves the doubter thinking that science can give us everything.

Much more essential is to affirm the power of well-demonstrated scientific explanations, but also to find where such explanations are accompanied falsely by words like “only,” or “merely,” or “nothing but.” When any scientific explanation is accompanied by such adjectives, the problem is not the scientific explanation, it is the unscientific claim that the scientific explanation is the only explanation.

Students often ask questions or make assertions that are impaired by only’s. And I noticed early on in my teaching that they are rarely interested in defending the only’s. By a kind of instinct, most see that trying to fit everything into the tiny frame of the only, that they have ceased to allow the evidence to shape their explanations. They sense that they have made a giant, unjustifiable leap, but they often are simply animated to take that leap because they see something true, and think that it requires them to do so.

My 2026 student survey is packed with only questions, but here are three:

● “How can God be involved in the universe while science explains natural laws?”
Translation: Natural laws are the only explanation for the universe.

● “How can God have a plan when evolution is a matter of chance?”
Translation: Evolution is nothing but chance.

● “In the Bible, God creates it all but science argues for a completely natural formation.” Translation: Completely here means a merely natural formation.

Now let us pause and recognize that such ways of thinking not only close the mind to the transcendent. They also close the mind to other complementary and compelling scientific explanations. As soon as someone says that life is nothing but complex chemistry, he has not gained insight. He has simply abandoned biology as a science. To return to my three examples, here are some responses in which insights are affirmed, and only’s are challenged:

● “How can God be involved in the universe while science explains natural laws?” Natural laws are explained, if by that you mean discovered, by science, and everywhere these laws are essential; you cannot understand the universe without them. But how can a universe have intelligible laws, and intelligent minds to understand them, if there is no Intelligent Source from which they come?

● “How can God have a plan when evolution is a matter of chance?” Evolution does involve chance, and does so essentially. But how can we even know the nature of chance if there is no order to which it can be compared and contrasted? Can chance be included in a plan intentionally and for a good reason? Does shuffling a deck of cards between poker hands mean denying the order of each suit from 2 through Ace? Or does it bring novelty to the way each hand is played?

● “In the Bible, God creates it all but science argues for a completely natural formation.” Science does indeed explain the natural formation of the universe, and of living things. But why is there a real universe, and living things, for it to explain?

In each case, notice that the scientific explanations emerge undamaged by a surgical attack on the only, the merely, the nothing but. The questioner sees something real that we can affirm and see with them. “When we want to correct someone usefully and show him he is wrong,” Blaise Pascal once observed, “we must see from what point of view he is approaching the matter, for it is usually right from that point of view, and we must admit this, but show him the point of view from which it is wrong. This will please him, because he will see that he was not wrong but merely failed to see every aspect of the question” (Pensées, I.9).

Here are some questions my students never think of, but are questions I suggest we want those in our classrooms and parish halls to consider:

● Can something be paradoxical to the human mind but also be real? Science has discovered physical realities, such as the wave-particle duality of light, which are essentially strange and unimaginable. We cannot imagine light as both a particle and a wave at the same time, and yet somehow it is both. In such cases, as Albert Einstein often noted, we know reality better when we relinquish distinct ideas and claims of complete comprehension. If we allow this, then we must dispense with the assumption that when a limit to understanding is reached, anything beyond that limit must be false. The dogmas of the faith—God as One and Three, Jesus as fully God and fully man—stand beyond that limit. We can defend them with reason, but reason cannot make them imaginable to us. The difference is that, unlike wave-particle duality, the mysteries of faith could never be discovered through reason unaided by faith.

● Must there be only one kind of causality, the physical kind, in which A causes a physically measurable change in B? Could there be a causality that is not change, but the causing of existence itself, which is necessary for there to be any changes? If so, then it is not absurd to say, with St. Thomas Aquinas, that God and creaturely causes are together wholly responsible for all that we see. God causes all things to be, and to be causes of each other.

● Is God one more explanation, or the ground of all explanations? For St. Augustine, God fills all things not by dwelling in the universe. He fills all things by containing them. If so, then what they can do is to his greater glory and majesty. Here we may have some inkling of what Ben Sira meant in the enigmatic declaration he places at the end of his recounting of the wonders of nature: “Though we speak much we cannot reach the end, and the sum of our words is: ‘The LORD is the ALL.’ Where shall we find strength to praise him? For he is greater than all his works” (Sirach 43:27-28).

The ideal outcome of this more modest apologetics is not to give answers. It is to turn premature answerers into questioners who realize that there are more questions than scientific ones to be asked.

But if the catechist or evangelist were to halt here, her work would remain propaedeutic. In catechesis and evangelization, engaging the deepest spiritual realities should be the goal, and arguments ex convenientia, from “fittingness,” are most suitable for inviting questioners into the heart of the Christian mystery. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that the verb convenire “refers primarily to the bringing together of various things”; the greatness of arguments from fittingness is that they draw various assets together for the same end. For example, in response to the objection that God should have not added Christ’s Passion as an additional means to his divine will to save, St. Thomas uses a biological example, noting that “even nature uses several means to one intent, in order to do something more fittingly: as two eyes for seeing” (ST III.46.1 ad 1). Fittingness arguments that engage science, therefore, make it an ally in coming to contemplate the One True God, and Jesus Christ whom the Father has sent.

As St. John Henry Newman once observed, “If the Author of Nature be the Author of Grace, it may be expected that . . . the principles displayed in them will be the same, and form a connecting link between them” (Essay, Chap. 2, sec. 1.17). If he is right (and he is!), it was fitting for God to create a world in a process of development, a world which never finds a still point at which we can mislead ourselves into thinking that “it (nature) is all there is,” rather than “He (God) is the ALL” to nature. It is fitting that he causes a universe that can never, on its own terms, be everlasting. The development of the biosphere and human evolution are fitting instances of salvation prehistory, and have certain ways of rhyming with revelation, the history of the Church, the liturgy, the Incarnation, as Dan Kuebler showed us in his presentation. They are fitting to the greater realities of grace and salvation.

Consider this proposal: It is fitting that the universe contains God’s image as a creature with a natural evolutionary history that unites it to every stage of the cosmos’ development, but also with a spiritual soul that transcends the cosmos.

Why humanity? Without humanity, the universe would still be an expression of God’s goodness. It would still communicate God’s goodness to the angels. But that subtle shift in the First Creation Account at the end of the sixth day, where God ceases calling each thing he creates “good” to calling all things “very good,” happens only after he has created human beings. Does this not suggest that until there is a creature within the visible creation who can rejoice with God over all of it, something is missing? The human being unites the realm of atoms, amoebas, and apes with the realm of angels. Great theologians like Maximus the Confessor have always seen this, but now we can see it in staggering detail.

Of course, God could accomplish this unity in diversity seamlessly if he chose to specially create humanity de novo, body as well as soul. But that unity would be imposed and extrinsic, rather than integral and organic, were humans simply to have been added to the universe without sharing the universe’s history. AI, which deals in the stuff of rationality without being a rational agent, is an artifact imposed by humans on the cosmos. And without an evolutionary history, humans would be artifacts added to the cosmos. Of course, God could have done it that way. But it is fitting that God chose to give his creation an essential part in producing his image, so that not only the elements, but the universe’s history, would be reflected in the human person in an essential way.

Just as the Trinity is integral in its unity and diversity, it is fitting that the beings to whom the cosmos is given as a gift share a history with that cosmos in an analogous way to the way in which the divine Persons share an eternity—through begetting, procession, and relation. For human beings who are produced in part by the natural world, and produced naturally, every act of scientific understanding will be, to some degree or other, a threshold to self-understanding. To praise God for my own life will always be incomplete without praising him for creation, for my neighbor, for everything that lives, for sun and moon, stars of heaven, and you know the rest.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally given as a lecture at “The Relation between Science and Faith as a Pastoral Issue in an Age of Disaffiliation,” a Symposium for Bishops and Archdiocesan and Diocesan Catholic Educational Leaders sponsored by the USCCB Committee on Doctrine and the McGrath Institute for Church Life, on February 25, 2026. Part II was offered by Heather Foucault-Camm PGCE, MSc, MA, Program Director for the Science and Religion Initiative.

As the story unfolds, David finds himself in a predicament that is similar to, but not identical with, that of Saul. As we discussed in an earlier essay, the question for Saul was whether he would demonstrate contrition and make an honest confession when confronted by Samuel. Though Saul failed, David passed that test. His confession was immediate and heartfelt. But we still do not know whether David will undergo his punishments in an honorable fashion or not.

In chapters 13-14, we learn of the events that will eventually lead to the revolt of Absalom, David’s son. We will return to that material in our next essay. What will concern us presently is the story of David’s flight from Jerusalem in the wake of the coup d’etat that Nathan had predicted. The story of Absalom’s rise to power and usurpation of the throne is told in the first half of chapter 15. In the second half, David takes flight in order to save his life.

And a messenger came to David, saying, “The hearts of the men of Israel have gone after Absalom.” 14 Then David said to all his servants who were with him at Jerusalem, “Arise, and let us flee; or else there will be no escape for us from Absalom; go in haste, lest he overtake us quickly, and bring down evil upon us, and smite the city with the edge of the sword.” 15 And the king’s servants said to the king, “Behold, your servants are ready to do whatever my lord the king decides.” 16 So the king went forth, and all his household after him. And the king left ten concubines to keep the house. 17 And the king went forth, and all the people after him; and they halted at the last house.

As David begins his retreat into exile, his attitude is one of absolute trust in God and unselfish concern for those who have chosen to follow him. His concern for others is evident when he encounters the 600 men from Gath (or “Gittites”) who are going into exile with him.

Then the king said to Ittai the Gittite, “Why do you also go with us? Go back, and stay with the king; for you are a foreigner, and also an exile from your home. 20 You came only yesterday, and shall I today make you wander about with us, seeing I go I know not where? Go back, and take your brethren with you; and may the Lord show steadfast love and faithfulness to you.”

Let us pause for a second and consider David’s predicament. In his hasty exit from the city of Jerusalem, David did not have the opportunity to gather a large army to himself. Absalom’s forces will certainly be larger, presumably much larger. If David had only his own safety in mind, he would certainly take every soldier he could lay his hands on. But David does nothing of the sort. He puts the needs of his men before his own. This is a true sign of his underlying character.

We should also note carefully David’s words to Ittai. In urging him to act prudently and seek Absalom’s favor, David describes the usurper simply as “the king” (v. 19: “Why do you also go with us? Go back, and stay with the king”). While this might appear to be a mere formality—or perhaps even a cynical reference to the man pretending to be king—we will soon see that David’s acquiescence to the “facts on the ground” is far more profound and far-reaching than it first appears.

Ittai, however, does not imitate David’s vocabulary, nor follow his advice. Not only does he reserve the title “king” for David alone, but he is willing to put his own life at risk in order to demonstrate his fidelity to that office. In response to the king’s suggestion, he says: “As the Lord lives, and as my lord the king lives, wherever my lord the king shall be, whether for death or for life, there also will your servant be” (v. 21). And with this expression of loyalty, David answers: “Go then, pass on.” So Ittai the Gittite passed on, with all his men and all the little ones who were with him (v. 21).

This short vignette is more than just a charming tale; it serves as a testament to David’s character. It is difficult to imagine a sacrifice as profound as Ittai’s without a recipient worthy of its cost. There must have been something deeply virtuous about David’s leadership to command such devotion. The narrator need not record every noble deed of David’s reign to make this point; it is enough to show how those closest to him responded in his hour of greatest calamity.

The next episode, however, reveals the true depth of David’s soul. You will recall that David accepted both Nathan’s rebuke—“You are the man!”—and the penalties that followed. In the scene that follows, we see that David’s acceptance was not merely a matter of words, but, more importantly, a commitment expressed in deeds.

David humbly submits to what he believes is his due. By accepting the terms of his punishment, he does more than just deepen his contrition; he also—quite ironically—prepares the way for his return to the throne. His suffering is thus transformed: it becomes a means of spiritual renewal rather than a mere balancing of the scales through some primitive form of “karmic justice.”

The pivotal moment occurs in 2 Samuel 15:24–29. In a bid to help David secure a victory against his son, his allies in Jerusalem remove the Ark of God from the city so it might accompany David and aid his return. The Ark, as you know, was the earthly dwelling place of the God of Israel within the Tabernacle and the Temple. Because the Divine Presence was so closely tethered to this holy object, it was often carried into battle to protect the Israelites in times of peril. We see this concept reflected in the words of Moses addressed to the Israelites as they go forth to their conquest of the promised land:

And whenever the ark set out, Moses said, “Arise, O Lord, and let thy enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee.” 36 And when it rested, he said, “Return, O Lord, to the ten thousand thousands of Israel” (Numbers 10:35-36).

But David refuses this symbol of divine power and might. Rather, he puts his future as Israel’s king wholly in the hands of God.

24 Abiathar came up, and Zadok also, with all the Levites, carrying the ark of the covenant of God. They set down the ark of God, until the people had all passed out of the city. 25 Then the king said to Zadok, “Carry the ark of God back into the city. If I find favor in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me back and let me see both it and the place where it stays. 26 But if he says, ‘I take no pleasure in you,’ here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him. . . . 29 So Zadok and Abiathar carried the ark of God back to Jerusalem, and they remained there.

Not surprisingly, some commentators have drawn a comparison to Christ as he made his way out of the city of Jerusalem on Holy Thursday. Like David, he knew his life and kingship was in danger and this was the source of considerable consternation. In Mark’s Gospel we read that when Jesus had repaired to the Garden of Gethsemane, he said to his disciples:

“I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.” And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want, but what you want” (Mark 14:32-36).

Yet against all odds, both Christ and David chose to put everything in the hands of their heavenly Father. This act of self-renunciation becomes, in the grace-filled logic of the Bible, the best way of advancing the Kingdom.

But I would rather not dwell on the Christological dimension today. More important for my immediate purposes is the scriptural principle that forgiveness does not result in an immediate return to the status quo ante. Forgiveness is a process in which the corruption found within one’s soul has to be expunged and set in proper order. The benefit of comparing David to Christ is that we see the punishment of David becoming the path to his Christomorphic transformation. True, he is paying the price for his transgression, but at the same time he is conforming himself to the cruciform shape of Christ’s life. What had threatened to be mere punishment has become an act of making satisfaction.

Punishment or Satisfaction?

At this point, I would like to step back and reconsider our comparison of David and Saul. As we have noted, these two men responded to prophetic rebuke in diametrically opposed ways. Saul attempted to mislead Samuel regarding the nature of his transgression, offering a full confession only when backed into a corner—and even then, he continued to hedge, appealing for a way to save face. David, by contrast, confesses his guilt immediately. He accepts not only the full responsibility for his sin but also the total weight of the punishments that follow.

A defining feature of Saul’s tragic plight was his refusal to accept Samuel’s verdict in 1 Samuel 15. He was told in no uncertain terms that he would be denied the privilege of dynastic succession and replaced by a man of the Lord’s own choosing. Yet, for the remainder of his life, Saul contested the terms of his punishment, doing everything in his power to thwart David’s rise to the throne. In resisting the divine decree, Saul transformed his penalty into a lifelong struggle against the inevitable.[1]

The contrast between these two men could not be more complete. In searching for a vocabulary that encompasses this difference, I found none better than that of Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas uses David’s repentance to argue that the effects of sin linger even after the words of absolution.[2] More importantly for our purposes, he distinguishes between the mere meting out of punishment to meet the requirements of justice and the merciful acts of satisfaction, which not only satisfy justice but also repair a soul weakened by sin. Rik van Nieuwenhove, a noted scholar of St. Thomas, helpfully defines this distinction:

The person who makes satisfaction to God freely submits himself to penance so as to renounce sin in his will. Therefore, whether afflictions are actually “punishments” or “satisfactions” depends on the attitude of the person who is subject to them. If we accept afflictions about which we ourselves cannot do anything, they lose their penal character and acquire instead a “satisfactory” or purifying character. . . . This illustrates that [punishments] are not inflicted by God for their own sake, “as if God delighted in them,” but for something else, namely redirecting the creatures toward their genuine goal.

What I find compelling about this distinction is how perfectly it captures the spiritual value of David’s penance. When David surrenders his future as king to God alone, that very act becomes the path to his eventual restoration. To paraphrase the Gospel: to truly gain his throne, David must first be willing to give it up.

We see something very similar in the movie The Mission. One of the lead characters, Rodrigo Mendoza, is a slave trader and mercenary for the Spanish colonial authority. After being imprisoned for killing his brother, he meets Father Gabriel. To seek freedom from the weight of his sin, Rodrigo agrees to carry his heavy armor up a steep mountain—an act of grueling penance. At the summit, he encounters the indigenous people he once hunted, who instantly recognize him. Rather than seeking revenge, they cut the rope holding the armor, freeing him from both his physical and spiritual burden. The tearful reconciliation that follows is pure cinematic genius.[3]

I would like to conclude with one final text that pulls together the threads of this essay. It is from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and it articulates the vital importance of “making satisfaction” within the penitential process:

Many sins wrong our neighbor. One must do what is possible in order to repair the harm (e.g., return stolen goods, restore the reputation of someone slandered, pay compensation for injuries). Simple justice requires as much. But sin also injures and weakens the sinner himself, as well as his relationships with God and neighbor. Absolution takes away sin, but it does not remedy all the disorders sin has caused. Raised up from sin, the sinner must still recover his full spiritual health by doing something more to make amends for the sin: he must “make satisfaction for” or “expiate” his sins. This satisfaction is also called “penance” (§1459).

As this paragraph establishes, the words of absolution are only the beginning. Just as we saw with David, forgiveness is a process or journey whose ultimate goal is the recovery of full spiritual health.

Having introduced the concept of penance, the Catechism goes on to define more fully its character and purpose.

The penance the confessor imposes must take into account the penitent’s personal situation and must seek his spiritual good. It must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. It can consist of prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbor, voluntary self-denial, sacrifices, and above all the patient acceptance of the cross we must bear. Such penances help configure us to Christ, who alone expiated our sins once for all. They allow us to become co-heirs with the risen Christ, “provided we suffer with him” (§1460).

The requirement that penance “correspond to the gravity and nature of the sins committed” is perfectly illustrated in the figure of David. Because David misused his royal power to facilitate both adultery and murder, it is fitting that his healing entails a radical rectification of his attitude toward that very office. Nathan’s prophecy—that David would be driven from the throne by the sword—was not merely a “tit-for-tat” punishment or a simple balancing of the scales. Rather, it was a call for David to stop treating the perquisites of kingship as tools for selfish gain and instead place his life entirely in the hands of God. As he fled Jerusalem in shame, he declared: “If [God] says, ‘I take no pleasure in you,’ here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him.” In submitting to this grueling penance, David was paradoxically transforming himself into a spiritual vessel fit for the throne he had once abdicated through sin. Rodrigo Mendoza undergoes a near-identical process in The Mission. For both sinners, the patient acceptance of a cross transformed their punishment into a path toward wholeness.

Lest we worry that the Catechism has veered in a “Pelagian” direction—proposing, that is, that sinners “save themselves” through the punishments they endure—the text pauses to identify the true agent of the transformation we have witnessed. It clarifies that our efforts at satisfaction do not stand alone, but are always sustained by a prior grace.

The satisfaction that we make for our sins, however, is not so much ours as though it were not done through Jesus Christ. We who can do nothing ourselves, as if just by ourselves, can do all things with the cooperation of “him who strengthens” us. Thus man has nothing of which to boast, but all our boasting is in Christ . . . in whom we make satisfaction by bringing forth “fruits that befit repentance.” These fruits have their efficacy from him, by him they are offered to the Father, and through him they are accepted by the Father (§1460).

These words from the Catechism recall those of St. Augustine in his commentary on Psalm 51 which we looked at in the essay that began this series:

There is a holy spirit in everyone who confesses, for it is already due to a gift of the Holy Spirit that you are disgusted by what you have done . . . That makes two fighting against your illness—you and the doctor. Confession of sin and the will to punish sin cannot be present in any of us by our own doing; and so when we are angry with ourselves and find ourselves displeasing, it can happen only by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

Our focus over this series has been the rebukes Saul and David received from their respective prophets—or, more accurately, the way each man responded to those rebukes. The Catechism teaches that a good confession consists of three elements: the grace of contrition, the courage of confession, and the discipline of penance.

In Saul and David, we see these factors unfold in opposite directions. When Samuel approaches Saul, he does not immediately reveal the extent of the king's disobedience. He creates a space in which Saul, moved by contrition, might offer a full and unforced confession. Saul fails this test. When a penalty is subsequently imposed, he fights it with every fiber of his being. Justice is served, but Saul is left utterly humiliated.

David’s response could not be more contrastive. Faced with his crime and its consequences, David makes a full and sincere confession. As he must undergo the penalties which his actions justly deserve, David assumes them willingly and refuses the aid of the ark to lessen, in some way, his alienation from his God. As a result, while justice is served, David’s punishment is ordered not toward his humiliation, but toward his eventual exaltation. By accepting a potentially permanent exile, David secures his restoration. To gain his life, he was willing to lose it. In the books of Samuel, we find a profound illustration of the difference between suffering a punishment and making satisfaction.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is adapted from the fourth installment of the McGrath Institute's six-part Lenten Illuminating Scripture series, which you can watch in its entirety below.

The political importance of Maritain is that he made what he took to be a Thomistic case both for the modern state as an institution through whose structures and procedures the common good of political society can be realized and for a conception of human rights which assimilates a Thomistic understanding of what justice requires to a modern liberal democratic understanding of human rights. If Maritain’s projects were successful, then the doubts that I have suggested about what I take to be problematic in the most influential versions of Catholic social teaching are unjustified. It will be my claim that they do not succeed. Maritain’s political thought developed through three stages. In the first which lasted from just before the First World War until 1926 the chief influence on Maritain was that of Charles Maurras. In the second which lasted from around 1931 perhaps until the Second World War the chief influence was that of Emmanuel Mounier. The third period from 1944 to 1952 is one in which political activity as French ambassador to the Vatican and as president of the French delegation to UNESCO was accompanied and followed by the publication of the two books which define Maritain’s mature political thought, The Person and the Common Good (1947) and Man and the State (1951). In all three periods Maritain’s primary work and achievement was as a Thomistic philosopher, in dialogue and controversy with other Thomists and nothing that I say about his political arguments and stances should be read as incompatible with admiration for his philosophical achievements.

Maritain, Maurras, Mounier, and the United Nations

Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was the most gifted enemy from the right of French republicanism and democracy. As such he would in any case have had a sympathetic hearing from those considerable sections of the conservative French Catholic bourgeoisie, who until the First World War had never fully accepted the Third Republic and who rejected Catholic social teaching. But Maurras’s positive doctrines also attracted them. For he and the extreme right-wing movement that he cofounded, L’Action Française, wished to restore in large measure the Catholic France of the past, putting primary and secondary education under the control of the Catholic Church. Why so? Not at all because he was a Catholic. Maurras was by conviction a Comtean positivist, an atheist, who as a Comtean believed that ordinary people, being less than rational, needed the guidance and the motivation of religious belief, so that they might understand themselves as inhabiting a social and political order in which it was right and natural that they should be ruled from above. On Maurras’s view what the French needed were those Catholic beliefs and practices through which the traditions of the French prerepublican past had been transmitted.

At the core of Maurras’s politics was his conviction that the common good of the French could not be achieved in a republic in which the different political parties represented different and rival sectional interests and nobody represented the common good. A restoration of the French monarchy was required in which the care of the common good would be the responsibility of the monarch and his advisers. Maritain for a time endorsed Maurras’s critique of the politics and the political parties of the Third Republic and, although he was never persuaded by Maurras’s monarchism, he agreed that the central problem of French politics was that of how the common good was to be identified and achieved. That concern remained with him after he broke with Maurras and L’Action Française in 1926, a result of its condemnation by Pius XI, and in a remarkably short space of time moved from being a Catholic of the more or less extreme Right to being at least in conversation with the Catholic Left. The new influence on his thinking was that of Emmanuel Mounier.

Mounier, a student of Bergson’s student Jacques Chevalier, had been open to a wide range of influences, both Catholic and other, and had in consequence become persuaded that all the major political movements of the twentieth century misconceived human nature in their theory and deformed human beings in their practice. The concept that had eluded them was that of the human person as one whose spiritual and moral possibilities can only be realized through certain kinds of social relationship, among which the relationships of family life, of the workplace as a place of meaningful work, of friendship, and of a political community that shares this recognition of family, of work, and of friendship are of the first importance. It was in these terms that Mounier framed his criticisms not only of fascism and communism, but also of the politics of bourgeois individualism. In 1934 he published his Manifeste au service du personnalisme. By this time Maritain had already separated himself from Mounier’s politics. But the concept of the person was from then on central to his thinking.

It is worth noting that in his political writings Maritain never acknowledged his debts to either Maurras or Mounier, although here is not the place to ask why. But his conceptions both of the common good and of the person had in fact been detached from the theoretical and practical contexts in which he had first encountered them and therefore had to find a place within a new framework, a framework that also had to accommodate the lessons that Maritain took himself to have learned from his political and other experiences between 1940 and 1950. In 1940, when France was defeated, the Maritains were in the United States and Maritain remained there until late in 1944, when, as I noticed earlier, De Gaulle’s provisional government appointed him ambassador to the Vatican. It was through his subsequent work for France in UNESCO that he played a small part in formulating and became committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948. So to the concepts of the common good and of the person there was added that of a universal human right. Add to this that Maritain took no part in the conflicts in postwar France over the form that the Fourth Republic should take, conflicts in which rival conceptions of and attitudes towards the common good were at stake, but in practice identified himself, although not uncritically, with American democracy. In 1948 the Maritains left France and Maritain took up an appointment at Princeton in the Fall of that year.

The problem had thus been set for Maritain: How can the concepts of a person, of the common good, and of a universal human right be understood within the framework of Maritain’s Thomistic philosophy, so that they can inform the political practice of a modern liberal democratic state, such as the United States?

The Person and the Common Good

In 1947 Maritain put together some of his lectures and essays from 1939 onwards and published them in English translation as The Person and the Common Good. Four theses are central to Maritain’s overall argument. The first contrasts the individuality of a human being with her or his personality: “In each of us, individuality, being that which excludes from oneself all that other men are, could be described as the narrowness of the ego, forever threatened and forever eager to grasp for itself.” Personality “signifies interiority to self.” It is that in us which “requires the communications of knowledge and love.” A second thesis relates the vocation of persons to goods that transcend the common good of political society. Each person is directed towards a final good that belongs to the order of eternal goods and the service of the common good must not interfere with, but contribute to the attainment of that final good. Yet persons, because of their concern for others, must be concerned with the common good of political society which includes “roads, ports, schools, etc.,” fiscal health and military power, “just laws, good customs and wise institutions,” the nation’s cultural heritage and the integration of virtues, liberty, material prosperity, and “friendship, happiness, virtue and heroism in the individual lives of its members.”

A third thesis concerns the relationship of the concept of a person to that of the common good: “There is a correlation between this notion of the person as a social unit and the notion of the common good as the end of the social whole. They imply one another.” Neither has priority over the other and neither can be fully spelled out without reference to the other. The common good is common because it is a good communicated to and received by persons. Fourthly and finally Maritain draws political conclusions. Bourgeois liberalism must be rejected because it conceives of all goods as goods of individuals and so misconceives the common good as a sum of individual goods. Communism in reacting against bourgeois individualism subordinates the individual to society and the state, so that once again the common good is misunderstood. Authoritarian dictatorships suppose that society can be organized for its good from above and so do not recognize the part that persons must play in achieving their own individual and common goods. So we should reject these three types of regime. What is it that we should strive for instead? Maritain’s answer is set out in Man and the State.

Man, the State, and the Common Good

The lectures which were published as Man and the State were delivered at the University of Chicago in 1949. He had already settled in Princeton, where he would live until 1960. The political institutions that he presupposes in his lectures are those of American constitutional democracy and the questions that he frames concern how those institutions must be structured and understood, if the political common good and a proper respect for persons is to be achieved. Maritain seems to have been anxious to secure as much common ground with his Chicago audience as possible and, although he presents his views as Thomistic, he generally argues from what he takes to be widely shared premises. I shall focus on what he says about the political common good and on what he says about rights.

A people compose a body politic and the common good of a body politic “demands a network of authority and power” and therefore “a special agency endowed with uppermost power, for the sake of justice and law. The State is that uppermost political agency,” a means to the body politic’s ends. The common good is characterized using exactly the same words that were used in The Person and the Common Good. The common good will be realized only in political societies in which moral constraints are imposed on the choice of political means (chapter III) and it is only in democracies that the right moral constraints will be imposed. The state is in permanent danger of violating those constraints and no institutional protection will always be effective. But politics is a rough business in which coercive force has a necessary place and, just as Machiavellianism is a vice, so is the “fear of soiling ourselves” by dealing with the harsher political realities. The citizenry must be united in their allegiance to democracy and the range of permitted political disagreements must be consistent with this underlying agreement. The educational system will be designed to produce belief in democratic principles. For every one of these theses Maritain has arguments and a fair treatment of Man and the State would require us to engage with these arguments and with his always interesting discussions of a number of topics that I have left unmentioned. Moreover it would be quite wrong to present Maritain as wholly uncritical of the workings of American democracy. His friendship with Saul Alinsky is strong evidence to the contrary. But Maritain invites criticism as much for what he left unsaid as for his theses and arguments. So let me draw attention to what went unsaid in three major areas.

The first is the relationship between the contemporary state and the market economy. In the sixty years since Maritain wrote that relationship has become increasingly complex at both national and international levels. But even so it is notable that Maritain devotes only two pages to the place of social and economic issues in politics, where he briefly summarizes Catholic social teaching. About the following two questions, for example, he has nothing to say: Is the distribution of economic power in modern liberal democracies such as to exclude the relatively powerless from participating in setting the agendas for political discussion and from getting a hearing for any view that is unacceptable to the relatively powerful? And is the distribution of educational resources in some of those democracies such that many of the children of the economically less well off fail to receive the kind of education needed for effective participation in political debate?

A second area where he has nothing to say is that which concerns the centralization of power, authority, and political debate in the modern state and the relationship of grass roots political discussion and activity to the achievement of the political common good. Maritain never asks what kind of institutions are needed at local, regional, and national levels, if there is to be ongoing debate at local levels which is a genuine expression of the concerns and claims of plain persons and if the conclusions of those debates are to have an effective influence at regional and national levels. Thirdly, he does not reckon with anything like the range of different and incompatible moral and religious outlooks that are found within many modern states and so never asks whether a modern liberal democracy can have enough of a common moral and political mind for government to function as the kind of educator in the virtues that Aristotle and Aquinas described. It was in part because Maritain provided no answers to these questions that he also failed to address five issues that are crucial for any attempt to translate Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s account of the political common good into contemporary terms.

First, the most obvious differences between modern states and the kinds of political society that Aristotle and Aquinas had in mind are differences in size and scale. Moreover those societies in various parts of the modern world in which some degree of regard for the common good has been embodied—the kinds of cooperative enterprise to which I have referred in earlier papers—have all been relatively small scale. Add to that the contentions by anthropologists about the numerical limits on our abilities to keep track of and give weight in our own reasoning to the intentions and actions of others (R. I. M. Dunbar for one view, H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth for another) and the evidence provided by Elinor Ostrom that prudent cooperative use of shared resources for the common good, in which everyone participates, has to be small scale and it becomes close to incontrovertible that societies on the scale of most contemporary nation states cannot have a politics informed by any strong Aristotelian or Thomistic conception of the common good.

The politics of the common good is then primarily a politics of local community. For such a politics a second type of issue arises, that of the relationship between the common goods of families and households and the common good of the political society. Questions of employment and wages, of housing, of schools, and of transport and communications are of key importance for both and so is that of how these questions are to be dealt with justly, effectively, and in a way that preserves the independence and decision-making powers of families. So the question of what the well-being of families in contemporary societies is is a crucial political question. Any systematic attempt to answer it makes it impossible to avoid engaging with a third issue.

Maritain’s characterizations of the common good are highly general and, given his purposes, understandably so. But those purposes distance him from the local and particular realities of politics. The problem for those committed to a politics of the common good is that of how to translate those generalities into concrete and particular terms, so that a set of goals are identified, the achievement of which would constitute the achievement of their common good by this or that particular community with its particular resources in its particular circumstances. To identify those goals would be to provide a set of major premises for the shared political reasoning of the members of that political society. A precondition for them to arrive at such an identification is that they are able to agree—an agreement characteristically expressed in their everyday practice rather than in theorizing—in a rough and ready way on their rank ordering of goods. And their agreement must extend further, if they are to reason together not only about ends, but also about means. For, if they are to arrive at conclusions about what actions to take in order to achieve the proximate ends of the common good, they will have to agree in their understanding of what law and justice require, since it is only through relationships governed by the precepts of the natural law and informed by justice that common goods can be achieved.

Such agreements are necessary, but not sufficient for those engaging in the kind of shared political reasoning needed to inform activity aimed at the common good. They also need to have shared in an education concerning the history, geography, social structure, and political economy of their own and other societies, so that they know how to make relevant and accurate judgments about the situation in which they find themselves, about what has to be changed in that situation, and about the alternative ways in which such change can be achieved. For, unless everyone from every sector of the political society has shared in such an education, there will be those who will be excluded from or disabled in political enquiry, debate, and decision making. A fourth set of issues therefore for anyone committed to a politics of the common good concerns how such an education, education that is a preparation for engaging in practical reasoning, is to be provided for every citizen.

To pursue any or all of these issues is to take us in a direction very different from that taken by Maritain. Just how different becomes even clearer, if we turn to questions concerning rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In order to approach those questions I need first to consider some different kinds of reason for acting in this or that particular way, reasons that may be advanced as a sufficient justification for so acting. [to be continued...]

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy, ed. Kelvin Knight and Peter Wicks (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026). 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.

What is meant by “mystery” here? “Mystery” in the theological sense refers to a truth of the faith that is strictly speaking revealed, one to which reason could not have attained on its own. It is thus “above” reason, even though, once revealed and received in faith, it is hospitable to reason as reason “seeks to understand” what it believes.

By “above reason” we do not mean something just extra hard, more difficult by degree, such as the difference between algebra and differential equations, or in this case, something AI could find out, whereas human reason is just too limited. We mean something intrinsically unattainable to reason, such as the truth of someone else’s free will and anything in which the will is involved, such as love.

To see, specifically, how the Church is a mystery we have to read further. The primary and ultimate mystery is the mystery of the eternal Father’s will, or as LG puts it, the “free and mysterious design of his wisdom and goodness” (LG §2). In mentioning this will, we also find the first mention of “life” that will be important to keep track of: “The eternal Father, in accordance with the utterly free and mysterious design of his wisdom and goodness, created the entire universe. He chose to raise up human beings to share in his own divine life” (ibid.).

“Father” is used here in its Trinitarian sense, presupposed in the text, that is, the first Person of the Trinity, who eternally begets his divine Son. Further in LG §2 we read: “All those chosen, the Father ‘foreknew’ before time began ‘and also predestined to become conformed to the image of his Son that he should be the firstborn of many brethren’” (Rom 8:29). And, a little later, in LG §3: “The Son, accordingly, came, sent by the Father, who before the foundation of the world chose us and predestined us in him [in the Son] to be his adopted sons [and daughters].”

So the Father chose to raise up human beings to share in his own divine life as he shares it from all eternity with his Son, willing that we would be so intimately united with and in his Son that, though we are not eternal, we would nevertheless become sharers in his eternal Sonship, in his eternal relationship to the Father, “adopted” into that relationship, as the text says, in virtue of our intimate union with the Son.

This life is Church life, essentially speaking. The life of the Church, life in the Church, as a member of the Church, is this sharing in Christ’s eternal relationship to the Father, that is, in the divine life.

We can see this as we read along, because the Church is not an afterthought as presented here, but part of the plan, eternally willed “before the foundation of the world,” as the aim or goal of the foundation of the world and the creation of free human agents and thus already prefigured at “the beginning of the world,” referring here, though it is implicit but nevertheless traditional, to the gendered bodies of Adam and Eve as prefiguration of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church as Bride (cf. Eph 5:32).

The “convocation” of the Church, eternally willed by the Father, prefigured at the beginning of time, is “prepared in marvelous fashion in the history of the people of Israel and in the ancient covenant; established in this last age of the world; made manifest in the outpouring of the Spirit; to be brought to glorious completion at the end of time,” when “all the just” from all time “will be gathered together with the Father in the universal Church” (LG §2).

Far from being an accident of history, a contingency of our plans and projects, the Church is eternally willed by God as the aim of his creation of human beings and it will persist in an eternal life of relationship with the Father, “in,” as we have seen, the Son, “for,” moving on to LG §3, it is “in him that it pleased the Father to restore all things.” Eternal life is Church life, not erased but “brought to its glorious completion.” We have in the life of the Church no less than a participation already, though not in its perfection, in eternal life.

More specifically, reading a little further, “To carry out the will of the Father, Christ inaugurated the kingdom of heaven on earth and revealed his mystery to us; by his obedience he brought about the redemption” (LG §3)—Christ’s obedience reveals the mystery of his eternal relationship to the Father. That obedience and the mystery it reveals takes form, we could even say, takes life, “grows visibly,” in and as “the Church, that is, the kingdom of Christ already present in mystery . . . in the world.”

The “origin and growth” of the mystery of Christ’s life with the Father made present in the world, the “origin and growth of the Church,” are very intimately signified to us (not just “symbolized” as some translations have it), revealed to us, “by the blood and water which issued from the open side of the crucified Jesus (see John 19:34), and were foretold in the words of the Lord referring to his death on the Cross: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (John 12:32)” (LG §3). The origin of the Church is in the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross; she comes forth from that self-gift or sacrifice as the life of Christ poured out in love. It is his life that is hers, even now. The image says more than words can say. From the love revealed on the Cross comes the life of the Church, the life made present on earth of the loving obedience of the Son to the Father. The growth of the Church is in the continued fruitfulness of that sacrifice, always at work drawing all people, as he says, to himself, uniting them to himself in his self-gift and thus in his relationship to the Father, in his divine life.

LG §3, as it continues, shows us very clearly where his work drawing all people into union with himself is continually, even now, made efficaciously present: “As often as the sacrifice of the Cross by which Christ our Pasch is sacrificed (1 Cor 5:7) is celebrated on the altar, the work of our redemption is carried out. At the same time, in the sacrament of the Eucharistic bread, the unity of the faithful, who form one Body in Christ (see 1 Cor 10:17), is both represented and effected” (LG §3).

This is the mystery of the Church. It is the mystery of a “convocation” of human beings, the goal and aim of creation, as a communion in the divine life of the Father that he shares from all eternity with the Son. It is the height of this mystery that it is in the communion we have with each other, not as lone agents, that we are sharers in the divine life. That is because this communion is not a communion we created or gave ourselves, but a communion in the obedience of Christ, his relationship to the Father, as it was revealed and enacted on the Cross through the self-giving love he poured out for us there. It is this love that, made available to us in the Eucharist, binds us together so intimately that we are but one Body and so in our communion we have our participation in the divine life.

This life in Christ is life in the Spirit, as we read in LG §4. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the shared life of Father and Son, their mutual love, which animated the sacrifice of Christ itself and which is imaged as fully released or “sent on the day of Pentecost to sanctify the Church continually and so that believers might have access to the Father through Christ in the one Spirit.” The Spirit of Christ’s sacrifice “dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, as in a temple (see 1 Cor 3:16, 6:19), prays and bears witness in them that they are his adopted sons (see Gal 4:6; Rom 8:15-16, 26), guides the church in the way of all truth (see John 16:13) and . . . bestows upon it different hierarchic and charismatic gifts.” The life of the Church is life in the Spirit. “Hence,” section 4 concludes, “the universal Church is seen to be ’a people made one by the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (quotation from Cyprian).” The life of the Church—Church life—is thus essentially a participation in the Trinitarian life, as, we could say, a communion of and in Trinitarian life.

This is all returned to and expanded upon more fully in LG §7, which we can read as an exact theological description and characterization of Church Life as we might find anywhere. It bears careful contemplation and close reading.

Thus, we get to the passage which I identified as a kind of synecdoche of LG’s description of the mystery of Church life.

Christ, the one Mediator, established and continually sustains here on earth his holy Church, the community of faith, hope, and charity, as an entity with visible delineation through which he communicated truth and grace to all. But, the society structured with hierarchical organs and the Mystical Body of Christ, are not to be considered as two realities, nor are the visible assembly and the spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things; rather they form one complex reality which coalesces from a divine and a human element. For this reason, by no weak analogy, it is compared to the mystery of the incarnate Word. As the assumed nature, inseparably united to him, serves the divine Word as a living organ of salvation, so, in a similar way, does the visible social structure of the Church serve the Spirit of Christ, who vivifies it, in the building up of the body (LG §8).

The mystery of the Church is that it is a “visible assembly,” a society or fellowship like others we could think of, fraternal clubs, countries and kingdoms, even Bible study groups, just as much in the world as they are and composed as they are, on earth anyway, of fallen human beings. And yet this very visible assembly is a “spiritual community” in that it is the “Mystical Body of Christ” which is formed and held together by the love poured out on the Cross by Christ, drawing all to union with himself in every age through the Eucharist, a Body “vivified,” given life, by the Holy Spirit, who is, you could say, the Love poured out on the Cross. It is not the same as, but it is analogous to, the Incarnation, which is wholly God’s initiative and a work of grace, assuming the human being Jesus into Personal union with the divine Son, who is thereby a “living organ of salvation,”—except in the case of the Church, the humanity that is taken up into union with the Son, as his mystical Body, is fallen. The miracle is that he still takes us up, nevertheless, into this life of his, which even now, despite our fallenness, is a participation, as his members, in the divine life, in his relationship to the Father.

This is what it means to say that the Church is genuinely but in mystery, in seed form, yet to be fully perfected, the Kingdom of God on earth. That certainly cannot be said of any other human association, club, country, corporation, and reading group on earth. It helps us to understand two things about “church life” as we experience it now on earth and as mentioned in LG chapter 1.

Unlike any other human association, the Church is immaculate and holy, because the love that makes the Church and gives it life, Christ’s love poured out in the Spirit, is immaculate and holy. Unlike Amtrak and other humanly formed associations. However, since this love binds together sinners all, the Church is always in need of purification: “The Church is at once holy and always in need of purification” (LG §8). Church life is a participation in the holy and divine life that binds us together as a purifying life, ongoing and completed only eschatologically at the end of the world.

Thus the image of the Church as a “pilgrim”: “The Church, ‘like a stranger in a strange land, presses forward amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God’ (citing Augustine, City of God 18.51), announcing the Cross and the death of the Lord until he comes (see 1 Cor 11:26). But by the power of the risen Lord she is given strength to overcome, in patience and in love, her sorrows and difficulties, both those that are from within and those that are from without” (LG §8).

This life of holiness being purified is also expressed in the same imagery earlier in the text. Individually, it means that “all the members must be formed in his likeness until Christ is formed in them (see Gal 4:19),” a work of formation carried out in the first instance by the life of the Lord vivifying the Church. “For this reason, we who have been made like to him, who have died with him and risen with him, are taken up into the mysteries of his life; until we reign together with him (see Phil 3:21, 2 Tim 2:11, Eph 2:6, Col 2:12, etc.). On earth, still as pilgrims in a strange land, following in trial and in oppression the paths he trod, we are associated with his sufferings as the Body with its Head, suffering with him, that with him we may be glorified (see Rom 8.17)” (LG §7).

The image of pilgrimage expresses the way in which the Church’s life, the Church’s communion, the Church as Mystical Body, is formed by the same love that was expressed in the Incarnation: “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God . . . emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave (Phil 2:6-7), and being rich, became poor for our sake (2 Cor 8:9)” (LG §8). This self-emptying love is always a “stranger” in a fallen world, fallen precisely because it is addicted to power, prestige, rank, privilege, grasping, and self-centeredness. The Church’s life, by its very nature, is thus identified with, “emptied into,” “all those who are afflicted by human infirmity and it recognizes in those who are poor and who suffer, the likeness of its poor and suffering Founder . . . holy, innocent and undefiled who knew nothing of sin” (LG §8, alluding to Heb 7:26, 2 Cor 5:21).

That means (the second point) that the Church, even before any works of its members (though certainly hopefully leading to works congruent with its identity) is the seed of a new human community, the kingdom of God, the convocation envisioned by the Father from all eternity, springing up and growing secretly, in the midst of all of the various fallen and distorted versions of human communion we see all around us. This is the meaning of the most famous passage in LG, from its opening lines: “the Church, in Christ, is a sacrament—a sign and instrument—that is, of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race” (LG §1).

There is no principle of human communion coming from this world that is unfallen, no principle of communion that could truly unite all human beings with each other, because every one of them has a vested interest of some kind, an angle, a point of exclusion. The only one is the holy, undefiled, innocent, and sinless love of Christ, self-emptied of any claim for itself or vested interest, a love not of this world but emptied into it by the Father’s eternal will in order to bear witness against all the kingdoms of this world with their claims, and to purify and transform all human association into itself by reforging them in itself. The Church is the visible presence in this world—the efficacious sacrament—of the Kingdom of God, the new community, whose divine life is experienced in our lives as a continual purification, a continual refusal to settle into pathologized human associations as though they had any finality, a dynamism of self-emptying that, “recognizing in those who are poor and who suffer [in any way], the likeness of its poor and suffering founder, and does all in its power to relieve their need and in them it endeavors to serve Christ, who, holy, innocent and undefiled knew nothing of sin” (LG §8).

In closing, two more points just to mention. First, the mystery of the Church and her life is carried principally by images, not by concepts. These are especially mentioned in LG §6, which I did not cover specifically here, but really throughout Chapter 1. The images are biblical, that is, revealed, proposed by the Holy Spirit, and Church life is learning to use and to re-propose and to live into these images. These images tell the “story” of the Church and are to be used in telling our own stories of life in the Church, our own witness to and love of the Church. This is how we can teach love of the Church, by refusing to reduce the mystery of the Church to concepts (without eschewing them in their place, of course) and allowing her mystery to “take hold” through the Spirit-authorized images. Though I have left it to the end, this point cannot be emphasized enough.

Second, the point that the true Church of Christ is “unique,” that there is and can be only one because Christ has and can have only one Body that is truly his own and formed by his one sacrifice, and that “this church, constituted and organized as a [visible] society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him” (LG §8). The document uses “subsists in” rather than simply “is” because if the mystery of the Church is truly that it is a visible communion bound together by a love and life it did not give itself, then it has to be locatable in this world. It is locatable, and is the Catholic Church. But there are Christians who are not in full communion with the Catholic Church and yet, as Christians, they are still members of the only Church there is, the Body of Christ. “Subsists” allows the one true Church to include them, even if in imperfect communion. This, humanly speaking, prohibits triumphalism by Catholics, as though only Catholics had or could have any holiness—while in fact “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its [the Catholic Church’s] visible confines.” But it also prohibits triumphalism by those Christians separated to some degree from the Catholic Church, as though true holiness and reformed purity were a function of their separation—when in fact all these “elements of sanctification and of truth . . . are gifts belonging to the Church of Christ and so are forces impelling towards Catholic unity” (LG §8). This leads naturally to the idea of the new “People of God,” the subject of Chapter 2.

Wicks lords it over a shrinking church whose congregation is a melodramatic secretary, Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), and a handful attractive professionals. In the background lurks a strange story: the rumored fortune of Fr. Prentice Wicks (widowed before ordination) and his strained relationship with his daughter Grace, who is Jefferson’s mother. After Prentice’s death, Grace went on a rampage in search of the inheritance, desecrating the church, its crucifix, and tabernacle. That night defines the parish, which learns to see itself as under attack. “The world is a wolf,” Wicks explains. But when Wicks is found stabbed on Good Friday, it becomes clear that grave threats lie within.

The movie has an uncanny feeling, as though watching someone watch the movie. A surreal quality pervades much of the pablum streaming sites churn out: weirdly manicured scenery, seemingly airbrushed faces, and completely inane dialogue. In an early scene, the gardens where the bishop meets Fr. Jud are implausibly nice, and you are unlikely to find a rural Catholic parish filled exclusively with good-looking professionals. It is just not the way of a universal Church.

However, Johnson’s interviews about the movie reveal that the uncanny feel has a deeper source: its Catholicism is a screen, through which Johnson has his eye on something else. In actuality he is working out his evangelical Protestant upbringing and, as he said, Catholicism provided a double appeal. It first has an aesthetic appeal, beauty, and symbolism unavailable to someone who grew up in churches that “look like Pottery Barns,” but it also gave him some distance when depicting parts of evangelical life left him uncomfortable.[1] So it is not exactly a movie about Catholicism. Although there are exceptions, Wicks’ style and content are pretty foreign to twenty-first-century Catholic life, and it is no surprise that the characters keep referring to the altar as a stage.

Johnson himself is a sympathetic figure. One gets the sense that, despite having been “young, dumb, and full of Christ,” there were troubling experiences that led to his departure from church in his twenties. “Every character in this represents some fragment of my experience with faith,” he says.[2] Sincere as this is, the approach means many characters are just that—fragments, shards of real people, dead men.

As a result, the dialogue gets limp and some of the acting labored. Otherwise talented actors seem like they did not get a lot to work with and lapse into awkward gestures. Fr. Jud once killed a man in the ring, but other than a sporadic guilt complex, he is full of boyish affability. Conversion does real and radical things, but it usually does not just erase the personality of lethal fighters. And one does not find a lot of happy-go-lucky folks at the boxing gym.

The self-professed skeptic Benoit Blanc, whose sexuality and religious mother lie implicit in the background, shows a remarkable openness to Fr. Jud but shuts him down at the last minute. The congregation—lawyer, influencer, paralyzed artist seeking a cure, the burnt-out novelist—turn out each to be stereotypes with some monotone character motivation. Since they are flat, the plot suffers: while the death-and-life mystery at the heart of the movie is carefully unspooled, the plot has one or two major holes.

All this is symptomatic of the movie’s underlying ambivalence about the Cross. Richard Niebuhr captured that ambivalence when he distilled the creed of twentieth-century American Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”[3] At Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, though, Wicks has retained judgment but jettisoned the Cross. After the defining event decades before, the church has left the apse wall bare, an empty space where the crucifix had been. Wicks’ preaching is full of wrath, but Jesus’ passion and death have been overshadowed by a resurrection that visits retribution on personal enemies. This judgment holds the Cross at arm’s length, daring to call things out but refusing to enter real suffering. Martha Delacroix, his sidekick, is anxious about many things but not about la croix.

Fr. Jud mirrors Wicks’ confusion. He appeals to the Cross from the outset and says the Church needs less fighting stance, more arms outstretched in a cross. And while he speaks in an orthodox way for much of the movie, Johnson at the end lets him too fall into a dichotomy, compassion without courage. What Blanc draws from Fr. Jud’s ministry: “God is a fiction. My revelation came from Fr. Jud, his example to have grace. Grace for my enemy. Grace for the broken. Grace for those who deserve it least.” Instead of the free and costly gift of divine life, here is a lightly coated, slightly preachy morality tale, a therapeutic command to show a little empathy—cheap grace.

At the same time, where character motive lags, Catholicism drives the plot forward. Much of the movie takes place during the Triduum, the murder plot revolving around Good Friday and Easter Sunday. At key moments the sacrament of confession, depicted or implied, heightens and then eventually resolves the drama. Amid insipid and scatological dialogue the movie’s most striking writing is, as others have noted, the Church’s own work: the appearance of the prayer of absolution in the final scenes. Perhaps Catholicism is present also as a latent alternative to evangelical Christianity: Johnson’s conversations with priests while making the movie seem to have made an impression. Not accidentally, one of the movie’s few deeply human scenes—when an outsider’s spiritual crisis rips Fr. Jud away from the investigation—was inspired by these conversations. It is perhaps the one time the movie genuinely integrates experience.

In a sense, Catholicism furnishes the deep empathy that Johnson wants but cannot quite get to. Two rather different twentieth-century writers, W.H. Auden and Edith Stein, illuminate why Catholicism so fruitfully drives the plot. In his essay “The Guilty Vicarage” Auden lays out with almost scholastic precision his account of what makes for a true detective story. In describing the human milieu of such stories he asserts that the “detective story writer is also wise to choose a society with an elaborate ritual and to describe this in detail.”[4] While there are still some tells, Johnson tightened up the liturgical details so that the movie is more realistic than most. “A ritual,” Auden says, “is a sign of harmony between the aesthetic and the ethical in which body and mind . . . are not in conflict.” Although this is an idealized description—minds certainly wander during the liturgy—in a detective story ritual, already dramatic in itself, creates a further dramatic contradiction with the communal rupture that murder brings.

The essay is fascinating in its own right and it contains elements that merit elaboration; in his treatment of concealment and his view that murder precipitates a unique social scenario in which “society has to take the place of the victim,” he anticipates René Girard. However, for our purposes his most helpful insight is his distinction between “art” and “fantasy.” Fantasy, he holds, is always an attempt to avoid one’s own suffering, while art “is a compelled sharing in the suffering of another.” Detective stories furnish the reader with the fantasy of innocence, of “being restored to the Garden of Eden,” and “the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer.” A work of art—he cites Crime and Punishment as an example—can feature a murder but compels an “identification with the murderer that [the reader] would prefer not to recognize.”

Wake Up Dead Man refers in passing to G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, as does Auden. Johnson has said Father Brown is a great detective “because he’s a good priest, not because he understands God . . . but because he understands how humans are corrupt and fallible.”[5] What Johnson seems to approach but miss is how Father Brown ever became a good priest. He knows human brokenness—no need to be a good priest to spot that—but he also knows its capacity for repentance and reconciliation with God. As Auden points out, Father Brown solves cases not as a wholly pure outsider “but by subjectively imagining himself to be the murderer.” Auden implies: Chesterton’s stories about Father Brown may be fantasy, but the character of Father Brown is, in reconciling, genuinely involved in a work of art.

If fantasy and art turn at least in part on identification with a suffering other, then Edith Stein may easily take us a step further. She too speaks of fantasy, though in a different sense from Auden: as a phenomenon distinct from but perhaps in analogue to empathy. In On the Problem of Empathy, written before her conversion to Catholicism, she holds that “God can comprehend people’s lives in no other way [than empathy]. As the possessor of complete knowledge, God is not mistaken about people’s experiences. . . . But people’s experiences do not become God’s own, either.”[6] But by the time she wrote The Science of the Cross, she had come to understand something new. When Jesus Christ, true God and true man, offers himself on the Cross he is “reconciling all things to himself” (Colossians 1:2). He “made the both one” (Ephesians 2:14). Without that we are left ambivalent, dead souls in need of awakening.

For all his talk in interviews of empathetic grace-giving, in interviews Johnson protests a bit too much. While Fr. Jud may have left the ring, Johnson makes recourse to images of conflict: he wanted to “pit” the good and bad of church life “against each other” in the movie, to “attack” something personal. He enshrines the binary at the end, when Fr. Jud renames the church (something canon 1218 makes difficult), “Our Lady of Perpetual Grace.” Rather, God’s grace meets costly courage in the one thing Johnson is missing, the Cross. On Ash Wednesday the Roman Missal prays:

Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting
this campaign of Christian service,
so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils,
we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.

The Prefaces for Passiontide laud “the wondrous power of the Cross,” by which “your judgment on the world is now revealed and the authority of Christ crucified.” Venantius Fortunatus’ hymn Pange lingua sings of Jesus’ gloriosi proelium certaminis, a “battle of glorious combat.” None of this precludes but rather gives birth to what one Lenten post-Communion prayer calls “the remedies of your compassion.” The Cross’ judgment on the world is a judgment on sin, on deceived human judgment, on the false love that sunders humanity from God and leaves us at the capricious mercy of our divided impulses. The Cross gathers up the fragments and sutures them together with the wounds that make us whole.

Notably, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein came out around the same time as Wake Up Dead Man. They have some similarities: Netflix-funded, directors haunted by childhood Christianity, suffused with Catholic imagery. But the results are quite different. Johnson’s characters are made from little bits of one man’s experience, while the Creature is made from little bits of many men sutured together. An actual dead man awakened, he yet seems more whole than anyone in Johnson’s ensemble. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Elizabeth, the one character who loves the Creature in his suffering, is always wearing a blood-red cross around her neck.

In the end, Fr. Jud is subject not just to Johnson’s fragmented vision, but to the same mortal error as his predecessors at Our Lady of Something: he lies. When he ends up with the fortune, contained in a jewel, and Wicks’ beneficiary comes armed with lawyers, Jud and Blanc deny knowing anything. The bishop joins them. Like Prentice and like Martha, they hope that a little well-intentioned deceit will keep others from temptation. When Fr. Jud hides the jewel in the sternum of the new crucifix he hews for the church, the movie’s tensions linger: is the Cross a true treasure, or an empty chest concealing just another fiction? It would take more than a detective to find out.

To understand this, we must recall the sins of Manasseh from our first lecture. He was, without a doubt, the worst king in the Bible. Yet it is precisely because—not in spite of—these sins that the famous “Prayer of Manasseh” was composed. For in that prayer, Manasseh makes the observation that forgiving the righteous will bring God little honor, for their sins are trivial in nature. But should God forgive Manasseh, then the true depths of divine mercy will truly be on display. No sin can put us outside the saving power of divine grace. I would argue the same holds true for David. We must attend to the horror of his actions because they demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no sin can place us beyond the reach of grace or thwart the power of divine mercy.

I. What Was David Thinking?

Let us begin by examining the structure of 2 Samuel 11. The chapter opens with a concise, almost clinical account of David’s affair with Bathsheba:

2 It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. 3 And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” 4 So David sent messengers, and took her; and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. 5 And the woman conceived; and she sent and told David, “I am with child.”

Once pregnancy and paternity are established, the focus shifts to a significantly longer narrative involving David and Uriah (spanning twenty verses compared to the initial four). This is clearly the author’s central interest. While we cannot comment on every verse, this entire section is worthy of a slow and careful reading; it presents a stunning contrast between Uriah’s virtue and David’s despicable opportunism. While David’s adultery is a grave sin, his premeditated murder of an innocent man is far worse. The chapter then concludes (vv. 26-27) with a brief notice of David taking Bathsheba into his house and the birth of their son.

What is most striking is that this entire sequence is narrated from a "horizontal" or secular frame; there is no reference to divine agency or judgment. This is a deliberate literary choice. David acts as though God is not watching, making his decisions without any regard for divine evaluation. Consequently, the final line of the chapter is chillingly ominous: "But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord" (v. 27). Given the “secular” character of narrative, David must have assumed that he had successfully covered his tracks—that Uriah is dead, the adultery is hidden, and he has escaped consequence.

David’s inner thoughts might very well follow the train of Psalm 10:4-6:

4 In the pride of their countenance the wicked say, “God will not seek it out”;
all their thoughts are, “There is no God.”

5 Their ways prosper at all times;
 your judgments are on high, out of their sight;
as for their foes, they scoff at them.

6 They think in their heart, “We shall not be moved;
throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity.”

Like the figure in this Psalm, David believes his deeds have gone unnoticed. Now that Uriah is dead the worries about adultery have waned. He can marry Bathsheba and no one will be the wiser. David has concluded—paraphrasing v. 4 of our Psalm—that God will not "seek out his sin.”

II. Nathan’s Rebuke and David’s Confession

Chapter 12 begins with the prophet Nathan being sent to rebuke David. He opens by recounting a parable:

1 “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. 2 The rich man had very many flocks and herds; 3 but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. 4 Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”

As many have observed, the parable does not perfectly mirror the situation. To be sure, the rich man is David, the poor man is Uriah, and the little ewe lamb is Bathsheba. However, the traveler represents no one in particular, and the rich man’s slaughtering of a lamb does not exactly square with David’s adulterous behavior.

The reason for this "ill-fit" is strategic: the parable cannot match the reality too closely, or David would catch on and refuse to recriminate himself. By being slightly off the mark, David is drawn into the story and issues his own damning indictment:

5 Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; 6 and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”

This allows Nathan to step forward and make his point with sharp precision in the very next verse: “You are the man!” (v. 7). David, for his part, accepts this verdict. In words just as succinct, he says: (v. 13) “I have sinned against the Lord.” In the original Hebrew, both Nathan's accusation and David’s confession consist of only two words each. The turning point of this entire sordid affair rests on just four words total.

However, it is crucial to understand what David is consenting to when he offers his confession. We skipped over quite a bit of text when we went from Nathan’s accusation (v. 7) to David’s response (v. 13). Let us look at Nathan’s full speech:

Nathan said to David, “You are the man. Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul; 8 and I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. 9 Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in his sight? You have smitten Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have slain him with the sword of the Ammonites. 10 Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.’ 11 Thus says the LORD, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. 12 For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.’” 13 David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” And Nathan said to David, “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die. 14 Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child that is born to you shall die.”

I would like to focus on verses 10–12, where Nathan outlines the consequences of David’s egregious behavior. The punishment matches the sin exactly. Because David used the "sword" to eliminate Uriah (v. 9), so “the sword shall never depart from [his] house” (v. 10). And as we will see in our next essay, this proves tragically true when David’s own son, Absalom, evicts him from the throne and forces him to flee for his life.

Furthermore, when Absalom rises in rebellion, he is urged by the shrewd royal counselor, Ahitophel, to take David’s wives onto the roof of the palace and lie with them there (16:22). This fulfills exactly what Nathan predicted in verse 12: “For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.”

Recognizing these penalties is essential to grasping the depth of David’s confession. When David replies, “I have sinned against the Lord,” he is not merely admitting to the act; he is accepting full responsibility for the consequences that follow. The Jewish Biblical scholar, Uriel Simon, captures this nicely when he says that David’s confession “goes far beyond his original reaction to the rich man’s sin against the poor man. His unqualified admission of his guilt before God—which obviously includes his sin toward his fellow man—is also an acceptance of his punishment.”[1]

In the wake of this humble confession, Nathan speaks words of absolution. For capital crimes such as David's, the penalty should have been death. Mercifully, it is set aside: “The Lord also has put away your sin, you shall not die” (v. 13b). Yet, David does not get off "scot-free." Beyond the long-term punishments described in verses 10–12, the immediate consequence is the death of the child (v. 14). Modern readers understandably recoil at this. What did an innocent baby do to deserve such a fate?

To understand this, we must remember that the Bible views personal identity through family units rather than "siloed" individuals.[2] We rise by the virtues of our parents and sink by their vices. Even in our modern, individualistic world, we recognize this dynamic when we speak of “Adult Children of Alcoholics.” The tragedy of alcoholism affects more than the individual him or herself; it pulls an entire family into its wake.

But we also need to appreciate the linkage between the moral and physical world for our Biblical authors. Let me explain. We would make a clear distinction between a mother who lost a child as a result of substance abuse and a mother who lost a child because she swindled the poor of their meager resources. In the first case, the penalty follows the laws of nature; no outide intervention is needed. In the second, the penalty appears somewhat arbitrary. It could only be imposed by a conscious and willing outside agent.

But here is the point. In the Bible, the laws of nature are not independent, scientific principles; rather they are dependent on the moral actions of a people. The best example of this would be the rain that is necessary for the flourishing of one’s crops. In the Bible, rain depends more on the moral stature of a people than any meterological principle. For this reason, periods of drought triggered public actions of penance such as prayer and fasting. Similarly, for the ancient mind, the passing of the child of David and Bathsheba is ultimately a “natural” consequence of an adulterous relationship. In the cultural world of the Bible, losing a child because of substance abuse would be little different from losing a child due to adultery.

Let us return to the primary point: when Nathan rebukes David, the goal is not just to secure a verbal confession, but to lead David to accept the natural consequences of his actions. This connection is fundamental to a biblical understanding of forgiveness, yet it is often missed in popular culture. To see this misconception on display, let us turn to an episode from the award-winning series, The Crown.

III. Forgiveness in The Crown

The series The Crown follows the life of Queen Elizabeth through the many decades of her reign. Our focus is Season 2, Episode 6, titled “Vergangenheit”—a German word meaning “the past.” In this episode, the intrigue surrounding the Duke of Winsor’s actions during the Second World War is woven into the story of Billy Graham’s first gospel “crusade” in the British Isles. And let me make an important aside: my interest is not historical accuracy, but rather the theological logic of the script as it stands.

It turns out that the Queen loved Billy Graham and met with him twice during his visit. The reason for the juxtaposition of these two themes becomes clear at the end of the episode. The Queen faces a difficult task: the Duke of Winsor, who had abdicated from the throne decades earlier due to an irregular marriage and was forced into exile in Paris, is seeking to return to Britian. He believes he has “served his time” and that no punishment should continue in perpetuity.

However, unbeknownst to him, archives related to his actions during the war are about to be made public. The Queen learns for the first time that the Duke had been a collaborator with Hitler and the Nazis. He had hoped to use the influence of the German military machine to assist him in his return to the throne. And that was only one of the horrors that the Queen has come to learn.

Against this background the Queen has to reshuffle her cards so to speak and think hard about the task ahead of her. Should she—or even could she—forgive the Duke? She invites Billy Graham to her home to seek his counsel. You can watch the clip here.

Queen Elizabeth: Are there any circumstances do you feel, where one can be a good Christian and yet not forgive?

Graham: Christian teaching’s very clear on this. No one is beneath forgiveness. Dying on the cross, Jesus himself asked the Lord to forgive those that killed him.

Elizabeth: Yes. But . . . we must remember his words. “They know not what they do.” That forgiveness . . . it was conditional.

Graham: True, but he still forgave. God himself forgives us all. Who are we to reject the example of God?

Elizabeth: Mere mortals?

Graham: We are all mortals, that is our fate, but we need not be un-Christian ones. [Pause, Elizabeth sighs] The solution for being unable to forgive . . . one asks for forgiveness oneself. Humbly and sincerely, and one prays for those that one cannot forgive.

(The camera then cuts to the chapel. We are looking down a long aisle toward the altar where we see Elizabeth kneeling in prayer.)

In spite of Billy Graham’s urging, the Queen choses to stay her ground and refuses to offer the Duke the reconciliation that he desires. Yet, she feels horrible about this decision, believing she had failed as a Christian. Most of us, I think, would be inclined to agree with the decision the Queen has made. But precisely for this reason, I would claim, something has gone terribly awry. Why is it so natural for her (and, by implication, us) to stand athwart what the Gospel seems to demand?

The answer, I would suggest, is that the script writers presume a definition of forgiveness that does not square with the Bible. Now to be fair, the deviancy is not catastrophic: a scene with the Queen on her knees praying for herself and her adversary is most commendable. But the Queen’s deep conviction that she has failed as a disciple of Christ cannot be right. In order to get a proper grasp on the theological dimensions of the challenge she faces, we must return to our Biblical texts.

First of all, it is striking that when the Duke is confronted by the Queen about his relationship to Hitler and the Nazis, his response mirrors Saul’s response to Samuel. Like Saul, the Duke is unaware of how much the Queen knows and dramatically understates his culpability. Clearly the Duke does not enjoy the grace of humble and sincere contrition.

But this is not the only part of the episode that does not do justice to the Bible. Indeed, there is a far bigger problem. The writers of this episode labor under the presumption that forgiveness is a simple matter of clearing the books and putting all parties concerned into the position of the status quo ante. The logic of the episode assumes that forgiveness requires the Duke’s return to England. But, as we saw in the story of David’s encounter with Nathan, things are not so simple.

In other words, the Queen labors under a significant misconception about the nature of forgiveness. She feels called by the Gospel to forgive the Duke but cannot fulfill that obligation because she assumes that forgiveness would require allowing the Duke to return to England. But the Duke’s sin was very grave—certainly on a par with that of David—and the notion that certain consequences would follow even after a sincere confession is very much a part of the Biblical picture. Recall what Nathan told David regarding the consequences of his sin (vv. 7-13). Confession was not the end of the matter for David, nor could it be so for the Duke.

We will return to this particular feature of forgiveness in far greater detail in our next lecture. I cannot do full justice to it here. But for now, let us make sure we have understood what made David’s confession virtuous. Unlike Saul, David’s confession was made quickly and without any attempt at self-justification. And also, unlike Saul, David not only owns up to his sinful actions, but accepts the consequences that will follow from his deeds. It is the act of accepting the consequences that needs a bit more attention and we will fulfill that obligation in our next essay.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is adapted from the third installment of the McGrath Institute's six-part Lenten Illuminating Scripture series, which you can watch in its entirety below.

Given Endo’s interest in medicine and morals, I have used his work with medical students and residents to explore the fraught moral landscape of modern healthcare. It would be a mistake, however, to limit the scope of Endo’s ethical inquiry to medical matters. Perhaps all human endeavor affords opportunities for guilt and shame, especially for those implicated in perceived moral lapses or transgressions. Such distress need not be merited or even rational, as in survivor’s guilt or extreme forms of “imposter syndrome.” Yet when life and death is literally at stake—as in war, law enforcement, medicine, and disaster triage—even conscientious persons may commit, fail to prevent, or involuntarily assist in actions they otherwise find morally repellant. In the heat of battle, it is not easy for soldiers to refuse an illegal order. Unscrupulous researchers can persuade well-intentioned professionals to bend ethical guidelines for what they believe to be good reasons. People join ICE with a broad range of motivations.

Endo uses extreme situations to shed light on the murkier corners of human action. There, good intentions and base instincts often coexist, sometimes in the same person. In these untidy outliers, clear moral edges prove scarce. Survivors often bear scars: some physical, some mental, some moral. While Endo’s medical and religious experience rendered him poorly suited for certain aspects of twentieth-century Japanese society, he transformed that marginality into a universal commentary on modern moral injury and healing. Endo’s ethical investigations assume urgent relevance when—as now—prominent individuals, corporations, and government agents excuse egregious behavior with claims to special or emergency authority; follow “protocols” in pursuit of some specious, ill-defined good; or vilify opposing voices, concerns, and cautionary tales. Accordingly, I will review salient moments in Endo’s life, consider three of his novels, and propose ways in which his work matters in these troubled times.

The Making of a Misfit

Shusaku Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923.[1] His father, a bank employee, was transferred to Dairen, a Japanese-controlled city on the Manchurian mainland when Shusaku was three. The boy’s parents separated when he was ten, and his father insisted he choose which parent to live with. Shusaku Endo went with his mother, joining his aunt in a small home in Kobe, Japan. There, he and his mother were baptized as Catholics. In a male-dominated, overwhelmingly Buddhist, and zealously militaristic Imperial Japan, Endo was ostracized and harassed by his classmates and did poorly in school.[2] He received encouragement and consolation from his mother, however, and was accepted to a private university in Tokyo when he turned twenty, as the Second World War turned against Japan. Endo’s father, who had occasionally sent money for the boy’s education, effectively disowned his son when Endo chose not to enter medical school. Choosing to study French literature instead, Endo funded his education with part time work in a munitions factory. Enduring poor working and living conditions as the Japanese Empire collapsed, he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis at age 22.

After completing what was thought at the time to be curative medical treatment, Endo appeared healthy enough to travel to France five years later as one of the first Japanese scholars to study in Europe following the war. One of three Japanese students at the University of Lyons, he avidly read French Catholic authors such as Georges Bernanos, Julien Green, and Francois Mauriac. At the same time, he suffered frequent racial slurs and social marginalization.[3] After three years abroad, Endo returned to a visibly altered postwar Japan. Dispirited, sick, and convinced that Eastern and Western sensibilities lacked a common ground for meaningful interaction, he began to write fiction contrasting Europe and Japan in a time of radical social change.

His worsening tuberculosis afforded ample time to observe the medical profession firsthand. During long hospital stays, he saw how Japanese physicians focused on treating the body, oblivious to what Endo had learned to call the soul. Efforts to achieve objective benchmarks of cure displaced the more subjective pursuit of personal healing. In Endo’s opinion, Japanese medical schools graduated technicians in pursuit of a career, ill-equipped for ethical decision-making and community responsibility.

As for Endo, the patient, both his tuberculosis and the equally debilitating treatments of the time repeatedly postponed his writing projects. He began a cycle of brutal interventional procedures, including unsedated rigid bronchoscopy (a technique in which the major airways are examined though a straight, hollow metal tube inserted through the mouth of a fully conscious patient), therapeutic pneumothorax (intentional collapse of a lung), and a sequence of operations to remove portions of his ribs.

By the time he turned 39, Endo needed an extended rehabilitation simply to recover from these primitive attempts to cure his tuberculosis. Rather than escaping his predicament through suicide, as his literary predecessors Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazai had done, Endo wrote about the spiritual life in the face of great suffering. Having come to see his adopted Christianity as, in his own words, “an ill-fitting suit,” he wrote stories about renegade priests, deeply flawed characters inspired by the life of Christ, the survival of hidden Christian communities under merciless suppression, and the possibility of reincarnation. He has a special fondness for the wise buffoon and the holy fool, bumbling outsiders who are the last to get the joke but the first to see and touch the other’s deepest wounds. Though Endo later disavowed his opinion that East and West were irreconcilable polarities,[4] having several times called Japan a “mud swamp” in which Western philosophy and religion could not take root,[5] these themes continued to develop in his fiction, often intersecting with the world of medicine as he had experienced it.

Medicine and Moral Choice

Endo’s life experiences feature significantly in his 1958 novel, The Sea and Poison, which opens with a tuberculosis patient undergoing a therapeutic pneumothorax in a dingy suburban medical office. His physician is a skilled but emotionally distant and visibly distracted man named Suguro. We soon learn that Dr. Suguro interned at a university hospital during the war, during which he participated somewhat halfheartedly in the vivisection of an American prisoner of war. The story is based on a well-documented series of experiments on eight American POWs at the Kyushu Imperial University Hospital in 1945, for which twenty-three persons, including several doctors, were convicted for war crimes. In Endo’s novel, Suguro, clinging to remnants of his compassion in a difficult time, and his fellow surgical intern, Dr. Toda, the jaded son of a wealthy physician, treat tuberculosis patients even as daily allied air raids make Japanese defeat in the war increasingly certain. A member of the surgical faculty, Dr. Hashimoto, hoping to improve his chances of becoming Dean of the Medical School, accepted a request from military medical officers to conduct experiments on living prisoners. A clear research question was presented for each experiment, questions previously unanswered because the procedure will, of necessity, kill the research subject. When the interns were asked to assist, Toda consented immediately. Suguro, unsure at first, ultimately goes along. After the experiments, a horrified Suguro asks Toda what they should do. Toda replies:

“Nothing. Just as we always do. Nothing has changed.”

“But today! Toda, doesn’t it bother you at all?”

“Bother me? What do you mean, bother me?” Toda’s tone was dry. “Was it the sort of thing that should bother somebody?”

Suguro was silent. Finally, as though to himself, he spoke in a still feebler voice. “Toda, you’re strong. As for me . . . I shut my eyes in there. I don’t know what to think. Even now. I just don’t know.”

“What is it that gets you?” Toda felt a painful constriction forming in his throat as he spoke. “Killing that prisoner? Thanks to him, we’ll now be better at curing thousands of TB patients—because we killed him. Should we have let him live, you think? The conscience of a man, is that it? It seems to vary a good deal from man to man.”[6]

So Suguro begins a lifetime of guilt and remorse that Toda neither shares nor comprehends. The bulk of The Sea and Poison moves back and forth in time, exploring the background, motivations, and internal conflicts of Suguro, Toda, and a nurse who also participated in the vivisections. There is little sense of resolution at novel’s end, only troubling unanswered questions: How can a healing professional justify participation in an atrocity? Where and how do freedom and moral responsibility intersect? How does one live with profound moral injury? Michael Gallagher, one of Endo’s English translators, speculates that Endo’s background gave him the tools to fascinate and disturb his readership, noting in an introduction to The Sea and Poison, that “Endo is the only major Japanese novelist who . . . confronted the problem of individual responsibility in wartime.”[7] In my own experience of teaching medical students and residents, this novel serves well as a preface to discussing American medical atrocities such as the Tuskegee syphilis study or the secret Cincinnati radiation experiments, both of which misled African-American patients to believe they were receiving appropriate care.[8]

Collateral Damage

Endo’s 1974 novel, When I Whistle, similarly pairs past with present and freedom with responsibility, this time in a father and son tale. Ozu, a middle-aged businessman, reminisces on his lower-class childhood in pre-war Japan, particularly his friendship with a bumbling middle school classmate who goes by his nickname, Flatfish. Foremost in Ozu’s memory is Flatfish’s earnest, if doomed, attempts to woo Aiko, who attends an elite girls’ academy. The boys are soon drafted for war duty, from which Flatfish never returns. Ozu’s recollections are filled with compassion and acute attention to the erasure of his childhood landscape by postwar construction and development. Ozu’s son, Eiichi, is a young hospital surgeon who resents his father’s humble origins and looks to advance his academic career at any cost. Along the way, he gets one rival fired and bullies another into resigning, all the while calculating which young woman he should date for maximal prestige and influence. Eiichi’s fortunes ultimately rest on the success or failure of a new cancer drug that he tests on a patient without explicit consent. The patient happens to be Aiko, who experiences severe side effects from the drug, a development that brings Ozu’s and Eiichi’s stories together in a denouement that is emotionally satisfying though once again inconclusive. Endo invites comparison to American experiences when Dr. Tahara, a fellow surgeon, confronts Eiichi:

“When you try out a new drug, it’s either got to be because another drug is no longer effective, or when we have the patient’s voluntary consent. One or the other. Do you have her consent?”

“This is hardly the time for you to put the screws on me. In America they test out new drugs on convicts . . . .”

Tahada stared at Eiichi in surprise. Then a look of sadness washed slowly across his eyes. “Do you really believe that?”[9]

Perhaps Endo wrote that last sentence as yet unaware of the ugly truth of Eiichi’s claim, but the history of such unethical trials in the U.S. is now well-documented.[10] When I Whistle explores generational change, professional ambition, and the ethics of medical research from a non-Western perspective. There is much here to trouble us.

Healing and Curing

Endo’s final novel, Deep River, braids several of his recurring concerns into a compelling narrative that weds body to spirit and health to wholeness. The novel follows a group of Japanese tourists visiting Buddhist sites in India, with several of the travelers introduced in vignettes Endo entitles “cases.” Among these is Numada, an author who grew to love animals during his childhood in Manchuria and wishes to repay a debt to a mynah bird he believes died in his stead when he was undergoing a risky tuberculosis operation.[11] Kiguchi hopes to conduct Buddhist rites for soldiers lost on Burma’s Highway of Death in World War II, particularly an army friend, Tsukada, who found deathbed healing from devastating moral injury through the words and prayers of an awkward westerner volunteering at the hospital.[12] Special prominence is given to “The Case of Mitsuko,” a restless divorcee and onetime student of French literature, who hopes to reconnect with Otsu, a college acquaintance and sometime lover. During their toxic college relationship, Otsu’s Christian piety both fascinated and repelled Mitsuko. She has recently learned that Otsu, now a renegade Catholic priest, is caring for indigent patients in the Indian holy city of Varanasi. In finding Otsu, Mitsuko seeks to atone for her abusive behavior.[13] I will not detail Endo’s masterfully orchestrated plot here, but key themes include the need for mercy and compassion and the crucial difference between curing and healing. Yet again, the novel arrives at an ambiguous conclusion, but when Mitsuko wades at last into the sacred waters of the Ganges, her cynicism resolves into belief in:

The sight of all these people, each carrying his or her own individual burden, praying at this deep river. At some point the words Mitsuko muttered to herself were transmuted into the words of a prayer. I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away. A river of humanity. The sorrows of this deep river of humanity. And I am a part of it.[14]

Do not be put off by the exotic setting or unconventional subject matter. Some of my students found themselves less defensive discussing this meeting of two very different Asian cultures than studying cross-cultural encounters in the U.S. The novel bears indelible marks of Endo’s Catholic upbringing, but the spiritual implications of a truly moral practice of medicine—often difficult to discuss with learners of little or no religious faith—are easier to probe when the conversation is freed from the irritant nodes of dogmatic difference.

Why Endo Matters Today

Endo transforms his trials as a cultural, religious, and medical outsider into keenly observed examinations of manners and morals rather than cartoonish morality plays. His prose is consistently direct and inviting even in translation, making the emotional and spiritual experience of his characters available to the reader. As in life, his fictions leave few things neatly resolved. It would be a category error to read them as parables that illustrate a distinct and readily summarized “moral.” Great moral fiction does not so much instruct as illustrate, reminding the reader what is at stake in every encounter with the other, calling us to account.

What reminders have I stressed when teaching Endo’s fiction? First, he shows the reader how morally dubious practices implicate the good and bad along a spectrum of complicity. A zeal for justice must be tempered with mercy and practical wisdom, since knowing what to denounce is often easier than whom. In a polarized age such as ours, populist heroes propose simple solutions for complex problems, and many go along. All too often, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”[15] Yet some currently among “the worst” may yet have consciences to prick and conversions to undergo. By nature, feelings of guilt and shame are retrospective, the result of reflection on past action. Historical evils that now appear clear cut—slavery, for example—were once matters of controversy rife with ambiguities, at least to those in power. We can reasonably expect future generations to look on some of today’s moral conundrums and wonder how we, who think ourselves righteous, could have been so blind. For all its surface simplicity, the admonition to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God,” is a daunting task, indeed.[16]

Second, moral transgressions affect those involved to varying degrees. Many prominent Nazis died in unrepentant certainty. On the opposite extreme, John Newton, a longtime investor and ship’s captain in the transatlantic slave trade, eventually renounced his former life, embraced the British abolitionist movement, and penned the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” In between these polarities lie a broad range of “mixed cases,” some caught between remorse and denial, others hoping to repent and make restitution, but uncertain how to proceed. Here is where therapy, twelve-step programs, and pastoral care can be helpful. Moral injury can be crippling if never named or addressed.

Third, as the cases in Deep River illustrate, ritual or religious practices of repentance and restitution can help heal what cannot be cured. Neither thoughts nor words are sufficient. Healing is a process, a journey over time rather than the action of a moment. Past transgressions cannot be erased, but something like repair can be achieved through acts of apology and restorative justice. Much as a scar both covers and outlines a physical wound, the healing of a moral wound approximates a prior wholeness even as it retraces the extent of the injury.

Finally, it may take an outsider, free of prevailing assumptions, to see through layers of moral pretense in a flawed system and identify a heretofore invisible problem. Courageous outsiders ask impertinent questions and do not accept answers like, “that is the way we always do it.” Endo routinely asked questions about individual and corporate behavior others largely ignored, but did so with nuance and scruple, never reducing his fictions to melodrama. For anyone concerned about responsible action in our unsettled present where power and retribution displace prudence and compromise as guiding lights, there is much to be learned from this self-described misfit.

To speak of myth today requires a kind of intellectual rehabilitation. The word has been battered by centuries of polemic—used as a synonym for “falsehood,” deployed to contrast primitive superstition with enlightened science, and weaponized in contemporary political rhetoric as a dismissive term for whatever one’s opponents believe. This is a grave misunderstanding—not of language, but of human consciousness itself.

The great theorists of myth—Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, Campbell, Barthes, Lincoln—insist unanimously on a single point: myth is not error but insight. It is not pre-scientific ignorance but a sophisticated mode of truth-telling. Myth is the primary language through which cultures articulate what is ultimate: origins, identity, destiny, justice, the sacred, the meaning of suffering, the structure of reality itself.[1]

This claim deserves a closer look. For it suggests something troubling to modern sensibilities: that modernity imagines itself past myth, when in fact this very imagination is itself a myth—perhaps the deepest one we tell ourselves.

Myth as Sacred History

The Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade defines myth as “the narration of a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial time, the fabled time of the ‘beginnings.’”[2] A myth recounts something that happened in illo tempore—“in that time,” the foundational moment when gods or cultural heroes shaped the cosmos itself. For Eliade, myth is not merely a story about the past; it is a pattern—a template that structures present reality. To live within a mythic worldview is to inhabit a cosmos where the sacred continuously enters the profane, where past and present interpenetrate. By “living” the myths through ritual recitation and reenactment, one emerges from profane, chronological time and enters “a time that is of a different quality, a ‘sacred’ Time at once primordial and indefinitely recoverable.”[3]

Myth is thus not a story human beings make up; it is a story human beings return to.

Eliade’s insight reveals why even “secular” societies cannot escape myth: they simply replace divine archetypes with political, economic, or ideological ones. Revolutions reenact sacrificial purification. National commemorations become liturgical celebrations of founding moments. Technological innovators recast themselves as culture heroes. Elon Musk as a modern Prometheus; Silicon Valley as a laboratory of demiurges seeking to transcend human limitation; political movements sacralizing the nation as a chosen people; ecological activists speaking in prophetic tones of impending judgment. These are not like myths. They are myths—secular hierophanies through which contemporary culture encounters what it deems real and ultimate.

Myth as a Logical Structure

Where Eliade locates the sacred, Claude Lévi-Strauss finds structure. The French anthropologist argues that myth functions precisely like language: it has grammar, syntax, recurring motifs, and binary oppositions.[4] Myth helps cultures resolve existential contradictions they cannot solve materially—life and death, male and female, nature and culture, chaos and order.

Lévi-Strauss shows that myths respond to irresolvable tensions by holding contrary truths within a single narrative frame. This insight illuminates why Greek mythology contains such apparent contradictions: Zeus the order-bringer yet serial philanderer, Athena the goddess of wisdom yet patron of war, Prometheus both liberator and criminal. Rather than dismissing these as inconsistencies, Lévi-Strauss reveals them as the structure of mythic thought—narrative resolutions of genuine cultural contradictions. We see similar patterns in contemporary culture: techno-optimism paired with apocalyptic anxiety; celebrity culture that simultaneously idolizes and destroys its icons; social movements that unite moral absolutism with radical epistemological suspicion. These are not irrationalities but modern mythic structures—narrative forms expressing unresolved cultural tensions.

The Monomyth

Joseph Campbell brings a humanistic lens to the question.[5] Across cultures and centuries, he identifies a recurring pattern: the “hero's journey” of departure, initiation, trials, and return. The hero ventures into the unknown, undergoes transformation, gains insight or power, and returns to renew the community. Campbell’s work explains the persistent appeal of mythic structure in modern storytelling—Hollywood films, political campaigns, self-help narratives, and corporate branding all draw upon this archetypal pattern.

One could easily apply Campbell’s framework to the cultural mythology surrounding figures like Steve Jobs, whose biographical arc becomes a salvific narrative: the sage who glimpsed the future, descended to share it, and died a martyr to his vision. Or to the tech entrepreneur generally, cast as hero-explorer of digital frontiers. Campbell reveals that myth is not obsolete; it is ubiquitous—woven into the narratives we tell about success, innovation, and redemption.

Myth as Ideology

Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, treats myth as a system of signs—a way societies naturalize their values and legitimize their power structures.[6] Myth disguises ideology as common sense, making what is historically contingent appear inevitable and natural.

Barthes illustrates this with the image of a young Black soldier on the cover of Paris-Match magazine, saluting the French flag. The surface image (denotation) is straightforward: a soldier salutes. But the mythic layer (connotation) tells a deeper story—one of universal loyalty, national greatness, and the natural rightness of France’s imperial order. The myth naturalizes what is actually a political claim. Advertising works similarly: a company promising its product will “change your life” is not offering a claim but peddling a myth of redemption. Your wardrobe becomes your identity; your consumption becomes your liberation.

Barthes reveals that myth never disappears—it only changes form. Modern secular societies are not more rational but more sophisticated in their mythmaking, disguising ideology as natural fact.

Myth as the Legitimation of Power

Bruce Lincoln sharpens this insight further: myth is “ideology in narrative form.”[7] Myth authorizes social arrangements by embedding them in a cosmic framework. When kings claim divine sanction, when nations declare themselves chosen, when corporations portray consumption as human flourishing, myth is performing its deepest work—making power appear inevitable, right, and sacred.

Lincoln’s definition is not cynical but clarifying: myth reveals what a society worships. To understand a culture’s deepest values, examine its myths. And to understand its myths is to recognize that every society, ancient and modern, sacred and supposedly secular, is fundamentally mythic in nature.

Myth as Truth

Each of these scholars highlights something essential. Together, they illuminate a profound truth: myth is not a primitive mistake but a sophisticated mode of human consciousness. Myths explain origins (Eliade), mediate contradictions (Lévi-Strauss), channel archetypal energies (Campbell), naturalize contingent realities (Barthes), and legitimate social orders (Lincoln). In sum: myth is not falsehood; myth is the deepest truth a culture knows how to express.

And modernity is no exception. The modern myths of progress, technological transcendence, individual autonomy, and limitless growth are as sacred, as foundational, and as often unexamined as the myths of ancient civilizations.

This understanding becomes critical as we turn to the ancient world’s own myths—to Greece and Mesopotamia, and finally to the radical reframing of creation itself in the Hebrew Bible.

Greek Mythology: The Truth Told Slant

If modernity is still mythic, the Greeks are our first great myth-makers in the Western tradition. Greek mythology is not a children’s storybook but a civilization's sustained attempt to interpret a world both beautiful and brutal, ordered and chaotic, meaningful and absurd.

Greek mythology emerged not from a single author but from centuries of oral tradition: Minoan rituals, Mycenaean kingship, Indo-European heroic epics, Near Eastern cosmologies, and the creative imagination of Homer and Hesiod. By the eighth century BCE, two poets fixed these fluid traditions in writing and thereby gave them authority.[8]

Homer, through the Iliad and Odyssey, created heroic epics revealing the moral psychology of honor, rage, hospitality, and cunning. These poems established the Twelve Olympians as the canonical pantheon, eclipsing older, more chaotic deities and giving them distinct personalities and complex, deeply human motivations. Homer’s gods are not abstractions but characters—capricious, feudal aristocrats with personal slights and desires that shape cosmic events.

Hesiod approached the mythic material differently. His Theogony systematizes the divine genealogies: Chaos, Gaia, Uranus, Titans, and finally the Olympians. His Works and Days reflects not on the divine realm but on the human condition—justice, labor, and the degraded present age. Where Homer gives narrative drama, Hesiod gives metaphysical order and moral reflection. Together, their monumental task was to compile, standardize, and synthesize countless local stories and divine genealogies into a coherent system all Greeks could recognize.[9]

For the ancient Greeks, religion was not abstract but profoundly local. The divine was an immediate, tangible presence woven into the physical world itself. Every feature of the landscape—a hill, a grove, a spring—possessed divine presence (numen), each associated with specific nymphs, spirits, or gods. The earth (Gaia) was not merely soil but a sacred, living force—the wellspring of all existence and divine power.

This means the Greeks inhabited a sacred geography. Their myths explained the rhythms of agrarian life, connecting natural cycles directly to divine activity. Spring’s return was Persephone emerging from Hades’ underworld. Summer’s drought reflected Apollo’s wrath. Flood and storm manifest Poseidon’s power. In short: the Greek world was a cosmos where the physical and spiritual, natural and divine, were inseparable. Myth provided the narrative that connected human existence to the divine forces animating the land itself.

Hesiod’s Vision: A World in Decline

Hesiod, the farmer-poet of Boeotia (c. 750–650 BCE), offers one of the earliest Greek reflections on the human condition. In Works and Days, he presents a cosmological pessimism bordering on despair. Humanity, he tells us, has declined through five ages—Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and finally Iron—the current age of hardship. His words are heavy with resignation:

For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and perishing by night.[10]

This is not optimism. It is a worldview of renunciation: the gods have withdrawn from human affairs; justice is weak and easily corrupted; the world is fundamentally a place of toil. We live, Hesiod tells us, in an age where “might makes right,” where justice is “armored with fists,” where honest labor brings little reward and wickedness often prospers. There is no redemption on the horizon, no promised restoration. History is decline.

And yet Hesiod is not simply pessimistic—he is perceptive. He understands that human progress in the Iron Age does not eliminate suffering; if anything, it multiplies it. Order is fragile; justice requires constant vigilance; hope is ambiguous at best. This is profoundly realistic.

The Theogonic Vision: Creation Through Conflict

Hesiod’s Theogony narrates the genealogy of the gods in visceral, violent terms. The cosmos does not emerge from love or rational design but from conflict, each divine succession marked by patricide, cannibalism, and cosmic war. From Chaos arise Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (Sky), who mate to produce the Titans. But Uranus, fearing his offspring, forces them back into Gaia’s womb. Gaia, in agony and rage, conspires with her son Kronos, who castrates his father with a sickle. From Uranus’s severed genitals, cast into the sea, Aphrodite is born—beauty emerging from violence and mutilation.

But the pattern repeats. Kronos, now ruler, devours his own children to prevent his overthrow, just as he overthrew his father. Only Zeus escapes, hidden by his mother Rhea, who tricks Kronos into swallowing a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Zeus grows to maturity, forces Kronos to regurgitate his siblings, and wages the Titanomachy—a cosmic war that culminates in the imprisonment of the Titans in Tartarus.

Order is established. But at what cost? The Olympian cosmos is built on patricide, mutilation, cannibalism, and war. Stability is purchased through violence. The universe is not a gift but a battleground. This is the foundational insight of Greek mythology: creation arises from conflict, and order is always contested. Violence is divine.

Homer’s epics echo this cosmic instability. The gods are powerful but morally ambiguous; moira (fate) is relentless; the world is shaped by honor, wrath, and contingency. As Zeus himself laments in the Odyssey: “Men blame the gods, yet they themselves are the cause.” The gods meddle in human affairs not from justice but from jealousy, favoritism, and lust. Mortals are playthings in divine games.

The Greek worldview is thus cosmically honest but existentially bleak. Humans are caught between divine strife and natural chaos. There is heroism—Achilles, Odysseus, Heracles—but even heroes are tragic figures, doomed by hubris, fate, or divine whim. The best one can hope for is kleos—glory, the memory of one’s name sung by future generations. But even that fades.

This is the world into which philosophy would be born: a world aching for order, hungry for justice, searching for a cosmos that makes sense.

Prometheus and Pandora: The Ambiguous Gift

Within this tragic cosmos, two figures stand out as both heroes and cautionary tales: Prometheus and Pandora. Their myths raise questions urgent today: What is the relationship between technology and human flourishing? Does innovation liberate or enslave?

No figure better captures the Greek understanding of human ambition than Prometheus—the “forethinker,” the trickster Titan who defied Zeus to give humanity fire.[11] According to Hesiod, Prometheus “moulded men out of water and earth and gave them also fire, which, unknown to Zeus, he had hidden in a stalk of fennel.” Fire represents more than warmth; it symbolizes technology, craft, and civilization itself. With fire, humans cook food, forge tools, shape metal, illuminate darkness. Fire is the threshold between animal existence and culture.

But Zeus had deliberately withheld fire from mortals. Why? The myth suggests that Zeus intended to keep humanity weak, dependent, incapable of rivaling the gods. Prometheus’s theft is thus an act of cosmic rebellion—a defiance of divine hierarchy in the name of human potential. For this, Zeus punishes him with exquisite cruelty: Prometheus is chained to a rock where an eagle devours his liver daily, only for it to regenerate each night, prolonging his agony indefinitely. Only centuries later does Heracles liberate him.

The myth poses uncomfortable questions. Is Prometheus a hero or a fool? Did he truly liberate humanity, or did he unleash forces we cannot control? Every technology brings unintended consequences. Fire warms but also burns. It enables metallurgy—tools and weapons, plows and swords. It allows humans to transform nature, but also to exploit and destroy it. Prometheus was said to have foreseen the deluge Zeus would send to destroy humanity, and he warned his son Deucalion to build a chest (an ark) to survive. When the flood came, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha floated for nine days before landing on Mount Parnassus. Grateful, they offered sacrifices, and Zeus allowed them to repopulate the earth by casting stones over their shoulders, which became men and women—a strange, stony second creation.

The Promethean myth anticipates our contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and transhumanism. Is innovation inherently rebellious? Does every leap forward require breaking some rule, defying some authority, crossing some threshold? And does the gift of knowledge always come with a curse? Prometheus is the mythic archetype of human ambition: noble, brilliant, and dangerous. He gives us the means to flourish—and the means to destroy ourselves. This is not distant from the contemporary tech entrepreneur, oscillating between savior narratives and apocalyptic fears.

Pandora, by contrast, introduces the ambiguity of feminine power and desire. Zeus commissions Hephaestus to craft the first woman, Pandora, “a beautiful evil,” as punishment for Prometheus’s theft. She is given as a gift to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s foolish brother (his name means “afterthought,” in contrast to his brother’s “forethought”). Pandora brings with her a jar (later mistranslated as a “box”) containing all the world’s evils: disease, suffering, toil, death. Curious, she opens it, and the evils escape, spreading across humanity. Only one thing remains inside: elpis—hope.

What are we to make of this? Is hope a consolation or a cruelty? Nietzsche famously called hope “the greatest of evils for it lengthens the ordeal of man.”[12] If the world is saturated with suffering, isn’t hope the delusion that keeps us grinding forward, believing things will improve when they never do? Is hope a divine placebo—a drug Zeus left behind to ensure humans remain enslaved by false aspiration?

Or is hope something else entirely—a spark of Promethean defiance, the one thing the gods could not take from us? In Hesiod’s Iron Age, where “might makes right” and justice is corrupted, hope might be the stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is. It might be the uniquely human capacity to imagine something better, even when all evidence suggests despair. This is not naive optimism but tragic hope—hope that persists despite the world, not because of it.

The Pandora myth also introduces a troubling gender dynamic that will echo through Western culture—woman as the origin of human misery, the bearer of fatal curiosity, the embodiment of uncontrollable desire. Yet Pandora, like Prometheus, is more than villain. She is curiosity incarnate, driven by the same impulse that fuels philosophy, science, and art. The question is not whether curiosity is good or bad, but whether it leads to wisdom or ruin.

Together, Prometheus and Pandora reveal the Greek understanding of humanity: ingenious, fragile, perpetually vulnerable to misfortune, yet somehow sustained (or deluded) by hope. The Greeks understood the brokenness of the world. Their myths express the truth of human vulnerability and cosmic instability.

A World Governed by Power, Not Goodness

A fundamental question confronts our students: Why did the Greeks worship such deeply flawed, morally ambiguous gods? This puzzle illuminates something essential about the ancient world—and, uncomfortably, about modernity as well.

The first thing to notice is that the Olympian gods are not moral exemplars. They are not worshipped because they are wise, just, or kind. Zeus may be “father of gods and men,” but his fatherhood is marked by perpetual seduction, rage, and political maneuvering. Hera’s jealousy burns with the fury of wildfire. Ares is tantrums in bronze armor. Aphrodite, beautiful and capricious, leaves a wake of broken homes. Even Athena, perhaps the most admirable, never hesitates to manipulate mortals for her own ends.

The Greeks knew their gods behaved badly. They did not expect perfection. What they expected was power—raw, elemental, unpredictable power. Greek religion was not a theology of moral goodness; it was a ritualized attempt to survive in a world ruled by forces beyond human control. The sea could swallow ships. Storms could destroy crops. Sudden illness could devastate a household. These forces required appeasement, not admiration. Sacrifice was not an expression of devotion but of negotiation.

Greek religion, in short, was transactional. The operative principle was do ut des: “I give so that you may give.” You offer a sacrifice—grain, wine, an animal—and a god might grant a favor: good harvest, safe voyage, victory in war. But even this was not guaranteed. The gods were unpredictable, easily offended, capricious. You did not pray to Zeus for moral transformation; you appeased him so he would not ruin your life. Greek religion was capitalism in togas—a divine business deal where the powerful set the terms and the weak must pay tribute for uncertain blessings.

Did the Greeks “believe” in their gods? Yes, but not as we typically understand belief today. It was belief the way we “believe” in systems—markets, algorithms, institutional power. We know they are powerful and unpredictable, so we learn their rules and try to game them. Greek piety was less like Christian faith and more like filing a claim with an inscrutable insurance company—one that might help you, ignore you, or strike you with a lightning bolt for filling out the forms incorrectly.

The point is not that the Greeks were cynical but that they were realistic. They understood that the world is governed by power, not goodness; that order is fragile; that the divine is not primarily concerned with human moral development. This is a deeply important insight—one that modernity often forgets at its peril.

The Greek did not worship gods; they negotiated with forces beyond their control. Sound familiar? We still do. We sacrifice privacy to data gods. We sacrifice sanity to productivity cults. We sacrifice community to partisan pantheons. The myths endure because they are a mirror, reflecting our endless struggle to find order, meaning, and a decent bargain in a chaotic, often unfair universe. The jars may have been upgraded to smartphones, but the game remains the same. Today, the forces are economic, technological, and political—but the logic remains recognizable. We still negotiate with powers we cannot fully understand. We still appease systems that shape our lives. We still tell stories to justify the world we inhabit.

The Ancient Near Eastern Foundation

Greek mythology did not emerge from a vacuum. Long before Homer’s epics were sung, the peoples of Mesopotamia had already given the world its earliest extensive mythologies—mythologies that would shape Greek, Hebrew, and Christian thought in ways both direct and subtle.

The Sumerian Achievement

The Sumerians, living in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates, developed the world’s first cities, writing system, and bureaucracies.[13] They were innovators not just in technology (the wheel, irrigation, cuneiform script) but in narrative itself. They created the first recorded pantheon of gods with distinct personalities, domains, and relationships—a divine bureaucracy mirroring their own city-states.

Their pantheon included Anu (the sky god, supreme but distant authority), Enlil (god of wind and air, the executive enforcer), and Inanna/Ishtar (goddess of love and war, powerful and unpredictable). The great temples—massive ziggurats dominating the cityscape—were not merely places of worship. They were economic centers controlling land, livestock, and trade. They were political hubs where the priestly class mediated between people and gods, legitimizing rulers. The deity’s statue was believed to literally inhabit the temple. Religion and power were inseparable.

The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE), humanity’s oldest surviving epic, wrestles with questions still familiar today: What does it mean to be human? Can we escape death? What is our place in the cosmos? For the Sumerians, as for the Greeks, religion was a matter of managing divine forces rather than seeking moral perfection from the gods. Humans existed to serve the divine; their toil enabled divine leisure.[14]

The Discovery of Ashurbanipal’s Library

In 1849, excavations at Nineveh in northern Mesopotamia uncovered one of history's most significant archaeological discoveries: the library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (668–631 BCE). Over 30,000 clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform writing, lay buried in the ruins.[15] Among them were the Epic of Gilgamesh (in its Akkadian version) and the Enuma Elish—the Babylonian creation epic.

This discovery was revolutionary. Here were texts older than Homer, older than Moses, preserving the intellectual and spiritual world of ancient Mesopotamia. When scholars translated the Gilgamesh flood narrative—predating the Biblical account of Noah—it revealed the profound interconnectedness of ancient Near Eastern cultures. The recovery of Ashurbanipal’s library was like discovering a lost operating system for civilization itself. It showed that the concerns of ancient Mesopotamia—mortality, meaning, chaos versus order—were fundamentally our own.

The Enuma Elish: A World Born from Chaos

The Enuma Elish (named for its opening words, “When above”) is more than a creation story. It is a cosmological and political manifesto—a myth whose violence, symbolism, and political implications disclose an entire worldview.[16]

The epic begins not with a sovereign deity but with water—undifferentiated and primordial. Apsu (the sweet freshwater abyss) and Tiamat (the saltwater sea) mingle in formless unity, timeless and undisturbed. There is no sky, no earth, no purpose or intention—only the quiet potential of existence.

Creation begins when silence is broken. The younger gods, noisy and exuberant, disturb Apsu’s rest. This disturbance sparks the first divine crisis. Apsu resolves to destroy his offspring—a chilling moment revealing the myth’s foundational assumption: the first impulse of power is not creative but destructive; order is achieved through elimination, not cultivation.

Apsu’s plan never reaches fruition. Ea, one of the young gods, hears of the plot and responds with cunning. Through an incantation, he subdues and kills Apsu. From the corpse of the primordial father, Ea constructs his sanctuary—a gesture heavy with symbolism. Order arises only from the successful exertion of power. The cosmos is built upon a cadaver. Harmony is not the natural state of things; stability is purchased through the defeat of competing forces.

Within this sanctuary, Ea fathers a son: Marduk, destined to become Babylon’s great national god. The text lingers over his brilliance, strength, and charisma. Yet the rise of Marduk provokes another crisis. Tiamat, grieving Apsu and goaded by her new consort Kingu, turns against the younger gods and fashions monstrous beings to aid her: serpents, dragons, scorpion-creatures, lion-demons—manifestations of nature’s unpredictability translated into mythic form.

Tiamat is not a villain in the modern sense. Rather, she represents the terror of the ancient Near Eastern world: storms, floods, famine, invasion—the relentless vulnerability of human life before the forces of nature. Her wrath is the mythic representation of a world experienced as hostile and unstable.

The gods, terrified, turn to Marduk for deliverance. He agrees, but only on one condition: if he wins, he will become king of all gods. The demand is telling. Salvation is indistinguishable from sovereignty. Power is legitimated by triumph; triumph requires power. Before the battle, Marduk demonstrates his command of reality by causing a garment to vanish and reappear at will—his word is effective, creative. The gods, desperate for survival, accept his terms. They crown him king before he has even engaged in combat.

The confrontation with Tiamat forms the dramatic climax. Marduk advances, armed with winds, storms, and weapons forged for cosmic conflict. The winds batter Tiamat, forcing her jaws open. He drives the tempest into her body, distending her form until she is helpless. Then he looses an arrow that pierces her heart. Chaos collapses. With Tiamat’s death, the ancient battle between order and disorder resolves into decisive, irrevocable victory.

From here, creation proceeds through dismemberment. Marduk slices Tiamat’s body in two, using one half to form the heavens and the other to fashion the earth. Her eyes become the fountains of the Tigris and Euphrates; her spittle becomes clouds and rain; her monstrous allies are bound as cosmic guardians or repurposed as parts of the natural order. The world itself is built from the carcass of chaos. Violence is not an intrusion into creation; it is its material foundation.

Once the cosmos is stabilized, the gods confront another problem: labor. Maintaining the world and its rituals is tiresome, and the gods desire rest. Their solution is straightforward: create a race of beings to do the work. Humanity is fashioned from the blood of Kingu, the defeated general of Tiamat’s forces. In a grimly brilliant detail, Kingu’s rebellion is thereby inscribed into human nature itself. The gods explain humanity’s purpose with blunt simplicity: human beings exist to “bear the yoke” of divine service; our toil enables their leisure. We are not partners, image-bearers, or stewards. We are workers—necessary, resourceful, expendable.

The epic concludes with the enthronement of Marduk. The gods proclaim fifty names for him, each a title of supremacy. Older deities are absorbed into his identity, rivals reduced to aspects of his power. The elevation of Marduk mirrors the political ascendancy of Babylon itself; the cosmic story legitimizes imperial structure. Theology becomes statecraft. The order of the heavens and the order of the empire are made one.

Political and Metaphysical Implications

The Enuma Elish is a political manifesto. Marduk’s rise to supremacy justifies Babylon’s rise as the imperial power. If Marduk is king of the gods, then the King of Babylon is his divinely appointed representative on earth. The annual recitation of this myth during the Akitu festival was a ritual reaffirming the king’s power and the city’s central role in maintaining cosmic order against chaos. The myth does not merely explain how the world was made; it explains why the current social and political order is inevitable and sacred.

Conclusion

What kind of world, then, do these ancient myths describe? It is a cosmos where existence is precarious and order is never given but seized—where the gods themselves are unstable, where violence is not an intrusion into creation but its very material, and where humanity enters the stage not as partner or steward but as laborer, pawn, or afterthought. These stories were not childish fantasies but sophisticated attempts to explain why the world so often feels unjust, why power so frequently triumphs over goodness, and why human life seems suspended between aspiration and fragility. They reveal civilizations grappling honestly with chaos, suffering, and mortality—yet their solutions rarely escape the logic of domination they seek to explain. The result is a universe governed less by moral purpose than by negotiated survival, a sacred order that mirrors the volatility of empires and the anxieties of those who lived beneath them.

Yet this vision is precisely what the opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible reject—fundamentally and radically.

On all these counts, Rahner has been misunderstood, and we lament that young people are being dissuaded from reading him. When they do encounter his texts (as they do in both of our classrooms), they find in him much more, and much else, than mischaracterizations allow. They find in him a priest with a deeply Christic spirituality, which wonders at the greatness of God. They discover in Rahner, if they are permitted, a man devoted to Jesus’s mother, Mary, the God-bearer, the most fully redeemed human person (as he liked to call her). They meet in Rahner a Christian smitten by Jesus’s Sacred Heart—a devotion that suffused Rahner’s life, and which has new currency today, after Pope Francis’s publication of Dilexit Nos, which footnotes Rahner. But what strikes them most—again, if they have the right guides—is how Rahner’s spirituality and devotion lead him to discipleship: they commit him to enduring and active love for the church founded by Jesus Christ.

The vast majority of Rahner’s writings—approaching 5,000 pieces spread over sixty years—and the character of his career as a professor, teacher, and researcher, aim to serve the needs of Christ’s Church, as this Church, in turn, works to bring Christ’s life to the world. In an extensive autobiographical interview late in his life, Rahner expressed succinctly what underpinned his theology:

Ultimately my theological work was really not motivated by scholarship and erudition as such, but by pastoral concerns . . . I have always chosen, and in fact had to choose, tasks and themes that somehow dealt with the actual moment, with the questions of our day . . . A large proportion of my theological output is made up of individual essays on the most diverse subjects, prompted as they certainly were, by the concrete conditions of the time, the Church, and pastoral need.[1]

Rahner’s claim that his essays focused “on the most diverse subjects” is surely no exaggeration. In fact, his reach ranges from considering the theological implications of such “everyday things” as sitting down, laughing, and eating, to tracing the encounter with grace in the manifold stages and vicissitudes of human life—childhood and old age; the possibility of courage in the face of illness, and the call to live with “boldness” (the notion of parresia that was also central to the spirituality of Pope Francis).

While Rahner’s writing is attuned to the pilgrimage of each individual Christian disciple, it is also alert to the communal dimension of Christian faith, to the experience of the Church in the world. Whether addressing the relationship between science and faith, including the emergence of “genetic manipulation,” the contribution of art to human flourishing, or the Church’s responsibility for the “humanization” of the world, Rahner sought to articulate the dynamics of Christian hope amid the ever-present temptation to pessimism in the complexity and darkness of life in the modern world.

Our world today, as with Rahner’s world in the middle of the twentieth century, is marked by widespread violence and, this is crucial, nuclear proliferation. Whereas this phenomenon had its genesis during the years that Rahner hit his intellectual prime, in our day, we are starting to see a reinvigoration of nuclear arms races. The current U.S. administration has pledged to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Russia appears primed for nuclear rearmament, China is expanding its program, and several other countries are threatening to increase production or to begin nuclear programs. A recent commentary by a researcher at RAND argues that the Cold War is being revived. Though it may initially seem strange to support our contentions about Rahner’s spirituality and theology by publishing an essay of his on nuclear weapons, we hope that this brief statement of context makes sense of the choice.

Rahner’s essay, “Nuclear Weapons and the Christian” (1982), coauthored with his nephew Thomas Cremer, is a prime example of Rahner’s concern for the Church and the world.[2] Cremer, a medical doctor who became a prominent professor of human genetics, was involved in the peace movement in the then-West Germany and a group called “Christians Against Nuclear Armament.” Through an active correspondence and personal conversations, Cremer persuaded his uncle to closely attend to the issue of nuclear weapons and to weigh in on the issue. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was widespread debate, protest, and occasional social unrest in West Germany, as NATO, to which West Germany belonged, and the Soviet Union escalated their arms race. Since Cremer and Rahner regarded the tensions surrounding the arms race to be of vital concern to the church, they believed that it was imperative for Catholic intellectuals to respond—hence their co-authoring of this essay.

The essay first appeared in an edited volume titled Abrüstung—christlich zu vertreten? (Disarmament: Justified from a Christian Perspective?). Clearly, a reader can tell from this essay, Rahner and Cremer believe that Christian faith not only justifies disarmament, but requires it. “Nuclear Weapons and the Christian” was republished in the final volume of Rahner’s Schriften zur Theologie (Theological Investigations), the year of his death. We have recently reprinted it as part of a collection of Rahner’s spiritual writings, because we deem that it indicates the sort of peaceful discipleship that his spirituality entailed.

We have chosen to republish in Church Life Journal the central portion of the essay, in which Rahner and Cremer defend a “pacifist” position of unilateral disarmament. Two sections precede our selection. The first reexamines just war teaching in conjunction with conscience formation, which has been rendered more complicated than ever with distinctively modern threats of total war. The second considers the epistemic uncertainties involved in staking out a definite position with regard to nuclear armament.

Having acknowledged the controversies and uncertainties, Rahner and Cremer, nevertheless, take a definitive position against nuclear armament, doing so as a matter of Christian conviction. Rahner and Cremer recognize that not all Christians will be called to the “pacifist” position. They think it necessary, however, to articulate such a position, and for at least some Christians to adopt it. The message of God’s Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount requires it. So too does Jesus’s saving death on the cross.

The final two sections, after our selection, argue explicitly for unilateral disarmament, even when the prospect is high that “the other side” will not do the same. Rahner and Cremer make their case by focusing on the theme of conversion: attitudes must change, and sins be left behind. They write, “We are for disarmament in explicit conjunction with a change of consciousness among ourselves which will make us attach a higher priority to the misery of several hundred million people living in absolute poverty than to our own need of security.”[3] The burden of proof against a pacifist position lies on the powerful. How, Rahner and Cremer conclude, can powerful people justify putting millions of lives, especially those of the powerless, at risk by proliferating nuclear arms?

The key phrase from the essay is this: “our reliance is not on a God who blesses weapons.” We offer this selection from Rahner in the hope that Christians everywhere, and all people of good will, may recognize the truth of this statement. From Rahner’s Christic, Marian, Mystery-of-God-smitten spirituality, we learn that, properly speaking, we rely on a God who blesses nonviolently-secured peace.

In what follows we want to try to present the reasons for a “pacifist” position. Some of them are based on objective human considerations; others have their origin in ultimate Christian motivations. In our opinion these reasons have a right to serious consideration on the part of a really Christian conscience. Whether they move such a conscience to a concrete decision for this position or whether it decides on the basis of human and Christian motivation for the opposite course of action is something that can be decided only in the suprarational way that has been indicated above.

Rational-Humane Objection

It is our deliberate intention to present the rational-humane objection to nuclear armament in question form because we do not want to convey the impression that our argumentation is necessarily beyond all doubt. The reader who here expects fully worked out theses and answers instead of questions should also be aware that problem areas are being addressed on whose answer the survival of entire nations depends. We should not like to conceal from ourselves or others by the use of clever rhetoric the necessity of the utmost efforts of reflection or the fact that answers supported by a consensus have not yet been found.

First of all, we consider the distinction between nuclear armament and nuclear war as something that ultimately can seriously be called into question as far as real life is concerned. Do those who consider this distinction to be viable in practice allow in a sufficiently realistic way, even on their own side, for the malevolence, the craving for power, the misinterpretation of social realities as the Christian conviction of human sinfulness compels us to do? Will such nuclear armament not lead to a destruction of social equilibrium and of peace even among us, so that there will be an ever-increasing temptation (as history teaches us) to overcome the internal problems of society by waging external wars? Can this armament really be justified except by attributing to political adversaries from the outset only the bad motives of an absolute addiction to power and the will to assault their opponents? Why is it that in these controversies the adversaries always depict one another in the most diabolical light, unless this shabby and poor argumentation were necessary to justify armament?

If from the bottom of their hearts people place their hope exclusively on nuclear armament and summarily reject as unrealistic all attempts to develop conceptions for securing peace in which the use of weapons of mass destruction as an option for human action is rejected in principle, they are tacitly presuming that on the other side, and not only on the part of individuals but also of nations, at least among the power elites, they would have to expect as a matter of principle that the basest instincts, only the other side’s aggressiveness and its urge to destroy, will as a rule prevail. This is just the way to foster the mental climate in which aggressiveness leading precisely to nuclear wars will thrive, a mentality which does not really consider a nuclear war to be basically immoral but endeavors to avoid it only as long as there is no chance of waging it victoriously in its own interest. It is of course true that Christians may not assume in guileless idealism that the others are not also sinners. This is why many Christians justify nuclear armament precisely with the argument that only in this way can adversaries be made to understand “that the effort required for an attack or a blackmail attempt does not correspond in any way to the advantages they might gain from it and therefore that it does not seem advisable.”

But if we are convinced that this legitimate right may be defended by a constant readiness for total war and that it can be defended in this way, do we not run the risk of claiming every right for ourselves while in fact ascribing total blame to the opposite side? Yet as Christians we ought to be far more afraid of the enticements and temptations to evil on our own side, a fear that is singularly absent in the current widespread mentality. It is precisely for this reason that we should also fear nuclear armament on our own side as a temptation to a nuclear war that threatens to annihilate the human race, even though it was originally intended only as a means of deterrence.

Does not nuclear armament tacitly foster the conviction that we have to advance the welfare of our own nation instead of considering from the outset the well-being of the whole family of nations? Does it make sense for us to say that we must continue to increase our nuclear armaments so that we can later bring about a situation in which we can seriously and successfully negotiate a really effective disarmament? Will this not result in a permanent postponement of such a situation, because the adversary will take immediate steps to catch up with us and the stalemate will remain, only this time worse, that we wanted to overcome in order to have more successful negotiations, and in which we are forever wrangling about the meaning of advance armament and subsequent armament?

Can anyone prove that nuclear armament really prevents the frightful chaos that we are all afraid of? Are those who are for nuclear armament for the purpose of preventing a nuclear war entirely sure that they really reject this war under any and all circumstances? To make this deterrence policy “credible,” they at least have to pretend to the adversary that they are willing to embark on nuclear war, and this means that they have to dupe at least their own soldiers into believing that such a war is justified when they equip them with nuclear weapons, all the while taking pains to avoid any public discussion of the matter.

Does this not inevitably produce a frame of mind that views geographically limited nuclear wars as a real option under certain circumstances and feels that it is possible to wage such wars? Are we fully aware that the development of new and more effective nuclear weapons can be a temptation for one side to take immediate advantage of its presumably superior position in order to forestall the adversary to whom we undoubtedly impute bellicose intentions? And in this process it is obvious that the possibilities afforded by the rapidly increasing development in the field of microelectronics increase the temptation to develop first-strike technologies and even to make use of them as soon as we think that a first-strike can be successfully carried out, even without our ascribing to the present-day political leadership of a country the intention of unleashing a first strike. With this kind of armament can we really have a guarantee that a nuclear war will not break out due to technical defects and miscalculation, even though it is not fully intended? Even if we could rely on technical fail-safe measures (experts doubt this possibility), has the adversaries’ increasing fear of one another in an escalating arms race been assessed with sufficient realism, a fear that can lead to the outbreak of a total war even though neither side has actually entertained an aggressive intention?

We doubt that many of the proponents of further armament, who are convinced of their own sense of realism, are even sufficiently aware of their own fear and the fear of others. And we further doubt that this fear can be kept subject to political control in the long run. In addition to this the fixation that the tendency to this kind of armament gives rise to must necessarily lead to a neglect of the other tasks within the family of nations. Will not this preoccupation itself turn into a temptation to settle the unresolved conflicts within this family of nations by recourse to wars? In the long run, what effective means do we propose to prevent nuclear armament on the part of an ever-increasing number of countries? And finally, does not the continuation of nuclear armament lead to the loss of our possibility of preserving and developing those very values and goals whose defense we consider today to be the reason for nuclear deterrence?

The questions brought up here describe the magnitude of the danger with which nuclear armament is threatening us. Hence it is our wish that those who defend further nuclear armament under definite conditions would not present their arguments in such a way as to give the impression that they must appear as immediately evident to all persons of intelligence and good will.

When, for example, the Central Committee of German Catholics declares without a trace of scruple that the NATO double-track decision is an example of a policy that has as its aim the reduction of armaments, détente, and peace by providing a balance of military power, far be it from us to call into question the upright intentions of the Central Committee or of NATO. However, it would be advisable to temper this assertion with a bit of skepticism which would allow for a more open-minded evaluation of the different views current even on the side of the West concerning the criteria to be employed in judging the other side’s willingness for détente and peace, and concerning the nature and the extent of the armaments that are required. In view of the way that the Central Committee formulates its case, can there be any room left to agree with Cardinal Höffner’s declaration that Christians of equal conscientiousness can arrive at different decisions about how to secure peace?

When expressing judgments of our own about how peace is to be secured, our formulations should make it clear that we acknowledge equal conscientiousness on the part of Christians who have come to an opposite judgment. Beyond this it will hardly be possible to demonstrate which side possesses the greater intelligence and expertise, because an analysis of this kind and the results it yields will still encounter the same differences of opinion.

The Message of God’s Kingdom

For those of us who are trying to be Christians there is a further horizon that impels us to oppose nuclear armament. It would be well both for our partners and our adversaries to pay close heed to the arguments that originate from this horizon too. The message of the cross, the resurrection, and the advent of God’s kingdom moves on a level that is different from the level of ordinary moral activity. In their private as well as their public lives Christians have to deal not only with “commandments” and “norms” which they acknowledge as reasonable and justified and which they can make clear to a certain degree even to non-Christians. They are also aware of other criteria and motivations, “appeals” and “calls” through which God makes particularly urgent demands on them. This means that their decisions will be formed on a totally different horizon. What takes place on this level is described by Scripture with the words, “He that can take it, let him take it.”

When called upon to make decisions involving the whole of their being, non-Christians also find themselves propelled by a force which likewise bursts the bonds of the reality that is subject to rational analysis. Even though the reasons they give for it are different, both Christians and non-Christians can come to the same decision of conscience, one for which neither they themselves nor others can give a completely adequate rational explanation. When this happens, Christians will rejoice in the knowledge that their own decision is being confirmed from another quarter. Just as they hope for themselves that God’s grace is at work in their own decision, so, too, they quite naturally see this same grace at work in their non-Christian contemporaries drawing them, too, beyond the bounds of objective knowledge.

In their decisions Christians and non-Christians alike must adhere to their conscience. Both, however, must also be cautious in assessing their own motivation because the ultimate and real wellsprings of the motivation from which their decisions actually flow themselves defy transparent reflexive analysis. Christians are of the belief that they must leave it to God to pass judgment on what their real motivation is. In this world there is no final word about themselves or others.

The decision of Christians must ultimately be made before the cross of Christ. This is their salvation; this is where the true meaning of their existence shines forth in clear light. But, as Saint Paul says, it is in the cross that God is victorious through the powerlessness and folly of him who dies upon it, even though he was unshakably convinced that with him God’s kingdom had come. Christians’ decisions must conform to the proclamation of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. They must accept the folly of the cross which lays claim to Christians as their true wisdom. Saint Paul says that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of human beings, that what is lowly and rejected has been chosen by God that no flesh may glory in his sight and that the Scripture might be fulfilled which says that God’s strength fulfills itself in weakness. This sentence sounds unworldly, indeed even pathetic and silly to those who wish to make God an immanent element of human history whose job it is to see to it that this history can always be understood and calculated and be brought to an outcome satisfactory to us. However, our reliance is not on a God who blesses weapons and guarantees success in this world. We try to believe in the incomprehensible God to whom we entrust ourselves precisely in view of the folly of the cross.

The horizon on which Christians have to make their decisions and which we have not described with anything even remotely approaching the full treatment it deserves is valid, of course, not only for the conduct of private life. The Sermon on the Mount has political significance too. It is also a touchstone for public activity. It may not simply be relegated to the private sphere because it is the constitution of God’s kingdom, and this kingdom extends to the peoples of the earth and is striving to manifest itself in concrete history. To be sure, the particular, objective individual norms governing public life and politics are different from those of the personal and private sphere and those used to shape the lifestyle of individuals for the simple reason that the realities that these norms are meant to regulate are different. When the plain and simple business of living obviously requires a definite way of acting, no one will hesitate to agree that there is no need whatever to appeal to the Sermon on the Mount and one can refrain from invoking the folly of the cross.

Anyone who is considering the construction of a bridge even as a form of moral achievement certainly need not bother about a blueprint that contradicts the most elementary rules of statics. But when we are dealing with questions of what it means to be a human being in the fullest sense of the term, with questions of a complexity that is beyond measure and that defies total analysis, with questions that do not admit of a universally accepted solution through the application of immediately evident objective norms, Christians have the right and the duty to appeal to the Sermon on the Mount and to make their decisions under the cross, under its folly and its powerlessness. Christian politicians must also make their decisions on this horizon. They are not permitted to be merely representatives of a lifestyle which in its understandable bourgeois character is first and foremost in possessione. Christianity is, after all, not a preservative, to be used as sparingly as possible, for the purpose of safeguarding a humane, rational, bourgeois lifestyle from excesses that also threaten it. However much the bearers of political power in a democratic society depend on the voters for their mandate and have to submit their power to the controls of constitutionally established institutions and not least of all to the cross fire of public opinion, they nonetheless still may not pass off their personal responsibility to others for what they do or fail to do.

The question of a truly Christian moral theology, precisely how the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount is to be interpreted, how its “appeals” and “calls” can be validated in the political arena, has of course not been answered in a complete and precise way in the few indications we have given here. What concrete chances the Sermon on the Mount actually has of becoming an element that helps to determine history and politics is of course also an open question. It is sufficient here to avow that for Christians the Sermon on the Mount does have a part to play in political decision-making. Even our secular and political life will go astray if we fail to take into account the folly of the cross and the hope of eternal life in God.

If we now put the question of nuclear armament in this framework of the Christian horizon of decision and of specific Christian motivation, our conviction is that we must say no to nuclear armament. If precisely on the question of war and peace in the nuclear age, on such a radical and comprehensive question, we disallow this horizon of decision, how could we possibly continue to convince ourselves that the Sermon on the Mount and the folly of the cross still have a really radical meaning in our lives? If someone should reproach us with the fact that the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and of the folly of the cross are not otherwise tangibly evident in our lives either, we could still not accept this as a reason for not letting them have an effect in the question of nuclear armament.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay, written in 1982, was co-authored by Rahner's nephew Thomas Cremer. It is an excerpt from Karl Rahner: Spiritual Theology (Paulist Press, 2025). All rights reserved.

My essay will break into four parts. Each section will begin with a block quote from chapter 15 followed by a detailed exposition. However, before diving into the first section, we must address a challenge found in the opening verses.

And Samuel said to Saul, “The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore hearken to the words of the Lord. 2 Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’”

These verses have caused considerable consternation for nearly all readers. Samuel announces that the Lord is going to “utterly destroy”[1] the Amalekites, a command that entails slaying everyone in their camp, “man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” While I cannot address the broader problem of “holy war “in the Old Testament at length here, a few points are necessary. The command to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites is largely concentrated in the books of Joshua and Judges; it is essentially a one-time affair rather than a permanent definition of how Israel is to fight her enemies.

The Amalekites, however, represent a unique exception due to their deep, irrational, and persistent animosity toward the people of Israel. This hostility began the moment after they departed from slavery in Egypt.

Then came Amalek and fought with Israel at Rephidim. 9 And Moses said to Joshua, “Choose for us men, and go out, fight with Amalek; tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand.” 10 So Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Amalek; and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. 11 Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. 12 But Moses’ hands grew weary; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat upon it, and Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; so his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. 13 And Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. 14 And the LORD said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” (Exodus 17:8-14).

And this irrational hatred continues until the end of the Biblical period. In the Book of Esther, we encounter Haman’s attempt to liquidate the Jews living in Persia.

After these things King Ahasuerus promoted Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, and advanced him and set his seat above all the princes who were with him. 2 And all the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate bowed down and did obeisance to Haman; for the king had so commanded concerning him. But Mordecai did not bow down or do obeisance. 3 Then the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate said to Mordecai, “Why do you transgress the king’s command?” 4 And when they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them, they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordecai’s words would avail; for he had told them that he was a Jew. 5 And when Haman saw that Mordecai did not bow down or do obeisance to him, Haman was filled with fury. 6 . . . Haman sought to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus (Esther 3:1-6).

Crucially, Esther 2:5 had identified Mordecai as a “son of Kish, a Benjaminite.” This framing reveals a second confrontation between an Agagite (Haman, a descendant of the king Saul spared) and a Benjaminite (Mordecai, of Saul’s own lineage). The author of Esther presumes that had Saul fulfilled his duty back in the days of Samuel, this threat of genocide would never have materialized.

Consequently, the animosity of the Amalekites was no ordinary national rivalry. We can understand why Jewish interpreters would come to identify the Amalekites with Evil itself. Perhaps the best way to approach this chapter is to follow the lead of the Church Father Origen and look beyond the literal sense to the spiritual. In this view, the command to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek under heaven,” is a demand for the total eradication of evil, root and branch. To use a modern analogy, we might imagine the Amalekites as being less like an ordinary neighboring nation and more like Sauron’s kingdom of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings—a force of pure, corrosive opposition to the good.

I. Saul Receives and Disobeys a Command

Let us now return to the matter at hand. What is important to see in the opening section of 1 Samuel 15 is the clear command that Saul receives,

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass (v. 3)

and his failure to comply with it:

[Saul] took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. 9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed (vv. 8-9).

To understand the weight of this failure, we must bear in mind the nature of ancient warfare. Soldiers did not receive a steady salary; compensation typically consisted of booty taken in battle. Captives were sold into slavery, and livestock was added to one’s own herds. What made the command to “utterly destroy” the enemy “sacrificial” was the fact that the soldiers could not profit from their martial efforts. In essence, they were being asked to risk their lives for free.

Naturally, there would be great resistance to destroying valuable loot. We can see this tension expressed at the end of v. 9: “they spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen . . . and all that was good,” but “all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed.” Notably, these decisions were made collectively. The grammatical subject of v. 9—“Saul and the people”—indicates a shared culpability.

II. God and Samuel Confer

At this point, God reveals his displeasure to Samuel.

The word of the Lord came to Samuel: 11 “I repent that I have made Saul king; for he has turned back from following me, and has not performed my commandments.” And Samuel was [upset][2]; and he cried to the Lord all night. 12 And Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning; and it was told Samuel, “Saul came to Carmel, and behold, he set up a monument for himself and turned, and passed on, and went down to Gilgal” (15:10-12).

It is crucial to realize that God’s juridical decisions often follow a period of consultation with a prophet. A classic example of this can be found in the story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:1-14). Just after Israel has received the Ten Commandments, she violates their letter and spirit by fashioning and worshipping a molten image. God, in his anger, threatens to destroy the entire nation.

I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation (vv. 9-10).

Thankfully, Moses steps into the breach and goes “toe to toe” with God.

O Lord, why does thy wrath burn hot against thy people, whom thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? . . . Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou didst swear by thine own self, and didst say to them, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever” (vv. 11-13).

Moses succeeds in overturning this decree: “The Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people” (v. 14). Later, in the book of Jeremiah, when God’s patience has finally reached its limit, he informs the prophet that “even if Moses and Samuel were standing before me, my heart would not turn toward this people” (15:1). While God does not relent in that instance, his statement confirms the rule: under normal circumstances, the prayers of Moses and Samuel would have been effective.

Returning to our text, I contend that God’s decision to consult with Samuel presumes Samuel’s power as an intercessor. God has announced his initial verdict, but Samuel, visibly upset, steps forward to contest it (“he cried to the Lord all night”). Yet no final decision is immediately recorded. There is a conspicuous silence between vv. 11 and 12 (“He cried to the Lord all night.12 And Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning”). The matter is not yet closed; should Saul demonstrate genuine contrition, the penalty may be softened or voided.[3] This is the tension that hovers in the background as the story moves forward.

III. Saul is Tested and Found Wanting

The episode that follows is the most important part of our chapter.

And Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, “Blessed be you to the Lord; I have performed the commandment of the Lord.” 14 And Samuel said, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?” 15 Saul said, “They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice to the Lord your God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed.”

16 Then Samuel said to Saul, “Stop! I will tell you what the Lord said to me this night.” And he said to him, “Say on.” 17 And Samuel said, “Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. 18 And the Lord sent you on a mission, and said, ‘Go, utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.’ 19 Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you swoop on the spoil, and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?”

20 And Saul said to Samuel, “I have obeyed the voice of the Lord, I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me, I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. 21 But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.”

22 And Samuel said, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. 23 For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.” (1 Sam 15:12-23)

When Samuel reaches Saul, the king’s opening words are a patent untruth: “Blessed be you to the Lord; I have performed the commandment of the Lord” (v. 13). Samuel, rather than arguing, adopts a calculated naiveté. He asks, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?” (v. 14). The purpose of this naiveté is strategic. He is providing a space for Saul’s confession. (Recall the “gap” between vv. 11 and 12.) Samuel clearly hopes that a display of repentance might yet overturn God’s threatened verdict.

But Saul remains unbowed. Instead of confessing, he deflects the blame onto his troops. When addressing the failure of the mission, Saul uses the third person: “They have brought them from the Amalekites . . . ” Yet when speaking of the successful destruction of the worthless items, he pivots to the first person: “. . . the rest we have utterly destroyed” (v. 15). The choice of pronouns says it all: the people violated the command, but the king claims credit for what was done correctly.

At this point, Samuel’s patience grows thin. He reveals that God has already informed him of the events (v. 16), and issues a pointed accusation: “Why did you swoop on the spoil?” (v. 19). Notice that there is no division of agency in Samuel’s words (“Why did you swoop on the spoil,” in comparison to Saul’s claim, “They have brought them . . .”). It was Saul who received the command from God and it was his responsibility to make sure his soldiers carried it out.

Shockingly, however, Saul continues to protest his innocence, doubling down on his claim of obedience while scapegoating the people (“I have obeyed the voice of the Lord, I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me, I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. 21 But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal”). With this display of persistent denial, the period of adjudication ends. Samuel has offered Saul every opportunity for contrition, but Saul’s stubbornness has solidified the verdict. Samuel’s famous reply—that obedience is better than sacrifice—strips away the king’s various excuses, leading to the final sentence: “Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king” (23b).

IV. Saul’s Forced Confession

Only after this stern rejection, does Saul finally relent and confess his sin.

And Saul said to Samuel, “I have sinned; for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. 25 Now therefore, I pray, pardon my sin, and return with me, that I may worship the Lord.”

26 And Samuel said to Saul, “I will not return with you; for you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel.”

27 As Samuel turned to go away, Saul laid hold upon the skirt of his robe, and it tore. 28 And Samuel said to him, “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you. 29 And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent” (vv. 24-29).

But even now, Saul’s confession is incomplete. By explaining that he “feared the people” (v. 24), he hopes to mitigate his guilt in hopes of recovering his office as Israel’s one and only king.

But Samuel’s refusal is absolute: “I will not return with you; for you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel” (v. 26). At this point, Saul loses his composure and begins to act in a desperate fashion. Rather than accepting his just deserts, he clutches the edge of Samuel’s elegant robe in order to hold him in place. In so doing, a portion of the garment is accidentally torn off—a physical manifestation of the spiritual reality that Samuel immediately names: the kingdom has been “torn” away from him.

Samuel, obviously in shock over this display of weakness, restates the terms of the verdict: “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you. And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent” (vv. 28-29). Commentators often struggle with the apparent contradiction between the claim that God “cannot repent” of a decree in v. 29 with God’s earlier repentance over his choice of Saul as king in v. 11. But here it is worth recalling what we said earlier about prophetic intercession. In v. 11 this statement by God is addressed to a prophet who can step forward to contest it (much like Moses after the Golden Calf). But in vv. 28-29 the window for intercession and mitigation of the divine decree has closed. The verdict is no longer a proposal; it is a final judgment.

It is time to bring this discussion to a preliminary conclusion. As I said at the very beginning of this essay, the true significance of the interaction between Samuel and Saul will only become clear when we compare it to that of Nathan and David. What we should emphasize before closing, however, is the fact that Saul received a clear command from God (v. 3), which he failed to keep (v. 9). This prompted God to threaten the removal of Saul from his role as king (vv. 10-11). Samuel did his best to stay God’s hand, and for a moment, no final verdict was rendered. The dialogue between prophet and king was intended to be the occasion for a repentance that might rescind that judgment. Because Saul proved unable to display such contrition, the initial verdict was not only reiterated but declared irrevocable (v. 29). Saul’s reign as Israel’s sole king is over; in the very next chapter David will be anointed to take his place.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is adapted from the second installment of the McGrath Institute's six-part Lenten Illuminating Scripture series, which you can watch in its entirety below.