The Tower of Babel is one of the most known (and most misunderstood), stories from the Bible. Most readers see this story as a warning against pride, which is true, but there’s far more to the narrative than meets the eye.

Babel’s rise and fall has a pattern that reveals essential truths about human nature. It explains what it means to be a “fallen man,” and the greatest temptation that scourges him… but also, it reveals fallen man’s path back to paradise.

Language is the key. The very barrier that divides mankind is ironically that which is key to unifying and returning him to God.

Here then is the hidden meaning of the Tower of Babel, and what it reveals about language, logos, and the soul’s journey home to paradise.

United in Rebellion

The Tower of Babel story takes place in Genesis 11, some time after the great flood.

Immediately, the chapter begins with an evocation to language:

“Now the whole earth had one language and few words.”

This introduction suggests unity of tongue and culture, which sounds innocent enough. Unified cultures imply peace and solidarity.

The narrative continues:

“And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another:

‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’”

It’s these lines that reveal mankind’s motives are dangerous, if not evil. They desire to build a tower to the heavens so that “they can make a name for themselves.” In other words, they desire to be “like gods,” such as the serpent whispered in the Garden of Eden.

The people’s desire to reach Heaven is not wrong in itself — in fact, God wants his people to unite with him in Heaven — but in this case, the people don’t want God. They’re a prideful people, seeking to become self-sufficient while divorced from God.

How will God react to this?

Of course, he’ll thwart their plans, but his language is very interesting…

An Artificial Unity

God naturally disapproves of the Tower of Babel, but his motive is not due to jealousy nor blind wrath.

He states:

“Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech”

It’s strange that God declares “nothing will be impossible for them.” At this point, they’ve merely built a tower — so why are they accused of omnipotence?

God does not condemn their engineering prowess as such, nor is their power a threat to God’s authority. The problem is that the people have repeated the mistake of Eden. Their Tower of Babel is a project of self-reliance in which they attempt to replace God with an idol of their own making. In this case, Babel becomes the physical embodiment of man’s self-worship. This self-worship echoes Eden: when man rejects God as the source of the Good, he inevitably claims the authority to determine good and evil for himself.

Recall that when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they didn’t acquire the power of rationality thought, but the power to redefine good and evil in their own eyes. In other words, the power to move into a post-moral society “beyond good and evil.” Thus when man abandons the Good, then his tools, technology, and power don’t become the seeds of prosperity but self destruction — for if there is no Good to serve, then there is only power used to destroy.

Stunningly then, God didn’t destroy the Tower out of jealousy, but out of mercy. He was saving mankind from the void and terror of a post-moral society, “beyond good and evil,” where anything is permitted. After all, the death of morality is but the death of man.

Yet there’s another piece to the Tower of Babel. The story doesn’t end in disunity and scattered tongues. God gave man a solution too — a means to make a true name for themselves in the Heavens for eternity.

The solution is found in Scripture, but not where you’d expect it to be…

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The Divine Comedy has a wild origin story. Dante’s legendary epic poem of an otherworldly descent through Heaven, Hell and Purgatory — often lauded as the greatest work of artistic genius ever penned — was conceived of in the least likely of places. Indeed, Dante’s genius wasn’t born in the ivory tower of the lecture hall or local church seminary, rather it takes root in adolescent love and despair. Dante was a man of strong passions, deep loves, and deep griefs.

His full story is one of heartbreak, grief, exile, homelessness, and despair. He lived in the darkest of days in Italian history, in which the wartorn in-fighting deprived him of everything and cast him off into 20 years of wandering in the wilderness. And even worse, he would live to see his beloved die when he barely entered adulthood.

And it was precisely here, as a homeless exile of heartbroken grief, that Dante penned down The Divine Comedy.

Today we’ll explore the background of Dante’s life, the misery that birthed his magnum opus, and what Dante’s story teaches us about human genius.

The Flames of Eros

Little is known of Dante’s personal life. It’s believed he was given an aristocratic upbringing and education, although his family was not wealthy. The most important element of Dante’s early life, and its relation to the Divine Comedy, is teenage romance… of all things.

Dante fell in love at nine years old when he met his first beloved — Beatrice Portinari — the same woman who would later be immortalized in the Commedia.

Yet the nature of Dante’s love is a mystery. He met her only in passing, though she left a strong impression on his 9-year-old mind. Surprisingly, this would be their only meeting for 9 years. Their second meeting was just as brief — an 18 year old Dante passed by Beatrice in the streets, and the two gave a brief greeting to each other. This would be the second, and last, known occurrence of their meeting, and yet this chance encounter smited Dante’s heart. On the spot Dante espoused a lifelong vow of love and fidelity to his beloved Beatrice. And he would make due on this promise too:

Though both went on to have arranged marriages to different partners, Dante spent the next 5 years writing love poems to her.

Yet it was at this time that Dante would meet the first of many life-changing heartbreaks.

A Grief that Seeks the Stars

Beatrice died when Dante was 25, and it plummeted him into a black grief. Dante first took to writing love poems mourning Beatrice, but was frustrated that they failed to capture her glories. He renounced the project, making a new, lifelong vow:

“I decided to write nothing more of Beatrice until such time as I could treat of her more worthily...”

This vow would follow him all his life, as it would take roughly 30 years to produce the Divine Comedy.

In the meantime, Dante was not just artistically frustrated but wallowing in a deep-rooted grief and despair. Nothing of the world could bring solace to his grieving heart… so he looked beyond the world.

Dante turned to higher studies, and encountered Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy — a book detailing the innocent Boethius on death row, turning to philosophy to console him in light of his doom. Dante describes this book as the turning point in his intellectual life. He discovered philosophy and theology, which introduced in him a love of wisdom that provided escape and solace from his worldly woes.

The next two years of his life were followed by rigorous study of philosophy and theology that soothed his heartbreak and birthed in him a newfound love for virtue, truth, and God. All the while, the memory of Beatrice burned in his heart, exhorting him to ever greater labors in honor of her memory and glory.

And though Dante was placed on a newfound path of virtue, the twists of fortune would once again lead him to ruin.

A Poet in Exile

It’s worth remembering that 13th century Italy was a brutal period in history. The nation was composed of countless factional city-states at war with one another.

Dante himself was immersed in the hot-bed of this conflict. He was a diplomat for the White Guelph political party in Florence. After years of infighting, his faction was defeated by the Black Guelphs, and Dante was stripped of his possessions and cast into exile, promising death if he returned… For the rest of his life, Dante would be a homeless wanderer in the wilderness.

Little is known of Dante’s biography during this period of exile, which would be a grueling twenty years. This silence, however, doesn’t bear well, as it implies Dante likely lived in an arduous state of survival without any certainties that come from owning property, steady income, or a community of family/friends to rely upon.

What we do know, however, is that it was precisely this twenty year period that Dante composed, drafted, revised, and finished the Divine Comedy. We also know that Beatrice remained burning in his heart. His vow was to immortalize her memory in poetry, and in totality he succeeded. Beatrice would become a primary protagonist of the Commedia, who saves Dante from certain death and guides him to Heaven. All the while, it’s believed Dante continued immersing himself in his studies of philosophy, theology, politics, mythology, history, and poetry as such. The man nurtured an indefatigable work ethic and heavenly genius for the simple love of a woman’s memory… whom he only met twice.

And despite the toil, and ever present fear of death, Dante’s labors would pay off — he finished the Commedia in 1321, just a few months before his death.

And with his story finished, one question remains:

What exactly about Beatrice birthed both his love, and the true nature of his human genius?

Eros, Agape, and Human Genius

It is mandatory to know Dante’s story to understand his genius. With this context in mind, it’s clear that what inspired Dante was far more than God-given talent or high IQ. In fact, by Dante’s own measures, his poetry was wanting and insufficient well into his adulthood — his poetic genius was nurtured rather than freely granted at birth.

And Dante’s intellectual magnitude is indeed amongst the greatest of any artists who have ever lived, and yet it seems far more understandable how he envisioned such a poem when he spent 30 years of intensive labor and study.

So the greater question then is, how exactly did Dante find the inspiration to joyfully labor for 30 years, while living through a sort of Hell on Earth?

The blunt answer is that his genius was a love borne out of suffering. Dante’s story is a masterclass in the Christian teaching of “eros aimed at agape,” that makes for human genius. It states the human eros supplies the fuel of Dante’s inspiration, and agape gave him the form and substance that created his poem.

Recall that eros is desiring love: the powerful attraction toward some perceived good that captures the heart and draws the lover toward its possession. In its most obvious form, this is romantic or sexual love. But we also speak naturally of being ‘in love’ with music, philosophy, history, art, or a particular craft.

Agape meanwhile, is a divine form of love. It’s said to be the love that is the essence of God, and is fulfilled by the golden rule of selflessly willing goodness to God or neighbor.

So Dante’s many studies were rooted under agape, to seek a unified understanding of God, the cosmos, human nature, and how all of these things are contingently grounded in and moved by love.

Dante’s genius then, is fundamentally a case in how he channeled his loves. No one can deny that Dante was impassioned for Beatrice — and passionate erotic feelings are certainly not unique to Dante — but consider how he fueled them. Rather than merely “releasing his passions,” through carnal acts that dull the mind and senses, Dante channeled them upwards. He labored selflessly for her honor. Recall that Dante made this vow after Beatrice died, meaning he had nothing to gain or no hopes of winning her heart. So it was agape, a selfless love in her honor, that gave form and substance to Dante’s writing.

Indeed, it was simply this combination of eros given form by agape that sustained Dante’s will to live for those thirty years.

So Dante’s genius then, which I reckon is a universal paradigm, was not to be primarily understood as intellectual magnitude, but a spiritual journey of self-sacrificial love. His eros for Beatrice exhorted him to sacrifice his life in pursuit of “the love that moves the sun and the stars,” and seek the face of God himself.

And though there can only ever be one Dante, every human being shares in his nature. Genius in man appears to be, in totality, a cultivation of love. In matters of the artistic, the intellectual, or even the romantic, one need not be given innate heavenly talents. The full scope of human genius is he who dares to love greatly — an erotic desire for his craft or beloved — and surrendering to agape, willing the good of thy neighbor. This is precisely the path thea leads one to the same love that Dante gazed upon at the culmination of the commedia — the love that moves not just the human soul, but the entire cosmos.

A civilization lives or dies in accordance with its ability to produce families.

This may sound absurdly dramatic to the modern ear. After all, what does the nuclear family have to do with the survival of Western civilization?

Our present age is one of unprecedented wealth, technological power, medicine, education, and social safety nets. We’ve conquered diseases that historically killed millions and have built machines capable of communicating across the globe instantaneously. Why, then, should the fate of civilization depend upon something as ordinary as a husband, a wife, and their children?

The answer is that civilization is indeed far more fragile than it appears, and it cannot be preserved by technological prowess and hegemonic dominance alone.

Civilization is ultimately sustained by human beings who are capable of transmitting a moral order from one generation to the next. And thus, before there is a citizen, there is a child; and before there is a citizenry, there is a family.

The family, in other words, is not merely a private institution, but the first institution of civilization, and the primary institution to be attacked when civilization begins to decay…

Family as Foundational

As modern Westerners today, we’re radically individualistic compared to our pre-modern predecessors. Taking cue from John Locke and the Founding Fathers, we believe that the individual is sovereign, and societies are fundamentally about protecting individual rights — because the state is but a collection of individuals who gathered in agreement to protect their rights as an escape from the bloody state of nature.

And yet, this view of the political is a sharp departure from the classical and Christian understanding of politics.

When Aristotle wrote his Politics, he said it wasn’t the individual but the household was the foundational unit of political society. He said that in politics, a foundational unit must be capable of generating life and sustaining itself, which a husband, wife and children can do, but an individual cannot.

Therefore, the household is the foundational unit of politics and is seen as a microcosm of the state. Learning to lead a family was the beginning of true statesmanship.

Just as important was the telos of politics. Aristotle said man is a political animal, meaning by nature he is social and creates civilization to practice virtue in the shared pursuit of the good. In other words, politics for Aristotle is not about protecting rights, but helping man communally perfect his nature via a shared pursuit of the good.

Christianity would later adopt Aristotle’s views. Taking a note from Scripture that, “it is not good for man to be alone,” they agreed the family is the foundational unit, and that the role of the political was a shared pursuit of Goodness of the pilgrimage to beatitude with God. The family then, grounded by a sacramental marriage, in which husband and wife become one out of selfless love for each other and their children, move in a shared pursuit and agreement of the good. The family is the microcosm of the state.

Now let’s examine where modernity took its radical departure away from this view of the family.

The Rise of the Individual

When the Founding Fathers espoused the American Dream of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, they had a mixture of Locke and Aristotle in mind.

They agreed with Locke that the individual is sovereign because he is made in the image of God, and therefore politics began because individuals wanted their rights protected and needed the advantages of trade for economic necessity.

But they synthesized Locke with Aristotle — a civilization can only survive if it has a shared account of the Good and pursues virtue. As John Adams said, “America is only fit for a religious and moral people,” meaning a people with a shared account of God, morality, and the meaning of life. Man cannot collectively pursue the Good if they disagree about the nature of the Good.

While this vision was admirable, the modern world took a dramatic departure from it in the 19th century. This departure was formalized through the philosophy of John Stuart Mill in his work On Liberty. Here, Mill argued that individual liberty ought to be preserved from the state, even the liberty to act immorally, so long as it doesn’t impede another’s liberty.

This philosophy would take hold in the West, and lead to an explicit embrace of individual sovereignty as the foundational unity of society, rather than the family.

To appreciate the difference in simpler terms:

Aristotle’s concern is, “What kind of family produces virtuous human beings and a flourishing polis?”

Mills’ concern is, “Why should the state interfere with whatever arrangement consenting adults choose?”

This has since become the normative view of politics in the contemporary era. The family has been replaced by the individual. The selfless willing of the good of one’s spouse and children in shared pursuit of virtue has been replaced by the exaltation of the individual to do what he wishes.

As admirable as this is, however, it opened the door for some of the most pernicious attacks on human civilization. Once the individual becomes sovereign, the family itself can soon begin to look like an oppressive obstacle to be overcome. And yet its the very dismantling of the family that risks the complete destruction of civilization as we know it.

Here’s why…

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I have a love hate relationship with Twitter/X.

It’s long been lamented (correctly) as a cesspool where all civility goes to die, and human wrath runs amok in a variety of facets like a thousand headed hydra. My mental well-being improved ten-fold when I made the executive decision to stop posting there regularly.

But I feel an immense gratitude to Twitter as well. That platform marked the beginning of my, “online career.” When I began posting in early 2024, Twitter was a far more robust platform for writers and thinkers. I found a medium where I could write a thoughtful longform post about Dostoevsky, CS Lewis, or Aristotle and garner millions of views.

Even better were the mutuals I came across. There was a niche community of accounts that shared my passions for theology, philosophy and the great books. I hosted weekly spaces (audio only livestreams) where we connected, bonded, and pontificated about the greatest minds and thinkers in Western History — and grew substantive audiences around this shared love of virtue. The point being, Twitter is a unique platform that hosts genuinely brilliant scholars and thinkers, and provides sound discourse that you won’t find anywhere else online.

And yet, this intellectual hub I so appreciate is also a double-edged sword.

Despite my praise above, there is also a disturbing trend of pseudo-intellectualism — of anonymous writers who proudly champion blatantly incorrect “hot takes,” on philosophy, theology, and literature, often at the expense and mockery of the “normies,” (normal, generally well-adjusted people). These posts go viral with acclaim despite the fact they can be debunked with a minimal effort.

The real problem, however, is not the “misinformation” of the hot take, but the pathology that develops in the pseudo-intellectual and his followers:

Namely, the cultivation of a vainglorious mind that is proudly incorrect while believing itself to be an aristocratic free thinker, superior to its fellow man.

And if this is the case, I reckon it’s a brain rot far more pernicious than even the vilest of tik-tok slop video trends.

Today then, I’m going to reflect on this trend of “Twitter brainrot,” what it looks like, how to spot it, and how to reasonably use social media without it ruining your intellect.

On the Pseudo-Intellectual

For brevity, we’ll simply define twitter’s brainrot as pseudo-intellectual brainrot.

I would define this as a hot-take that takes a legitimate intellectual authority and uses it as a credential for a provocative claim, while offering the reader the emotional thrill of possessing “hidden knowledge,” without actually requiring them to understand the underlying subject.

When you come across one of these posts, you get the emotional rush of feeling like you’re in “the inside crowd,” discovering a hot secret that the “normies,” don’t know.

Below is a prime example:

This tweet went viral with acclaim, nearing 1 million impressions and over 30k likes. The internet raved over it as a brilliant take on Machiavelli that gives you true wisdom to operate on the real world.

But there are some problems with this post:

1. Machiavelli almost certainly never said this (I would reckon at best it’s a paraphrase, of a paraphrase, of a paraphrase)

2. Even if it were a viable quote, the content itself is so vague it cannot be traced to any tangible lesson from Machiavelli

3. This post’s staccato-centric rhythm is eerily similar to AI’s writing cadence

4. This post is a word for word repost that has appeared from dozens of other accounts across platforms (a blatantly unoriginal rip off shared for virality, rather than authentic intellectual substance)

In other words, this particular post represents the trend of the current pseudo-intellectual brain rot trend on twitter:

An endless stream of fabricated, nonsensical content, that gets passed off as intellectually poignant, giving its consumers the “feeling,” of education whilst gaining nothing but a faulty perception of the actual thinker at hand.

Now I chose the above example as a blatantly obvious example of pseudo-intellectualism, but we can grant that such a post may not be all that pernicious — in this case, a couple hundred thousand people enjoyed some vague AI jargon, gave it a like, and kept it moving.

But now I want to add an example that shows where this pseudo-intellectualism can become dangerous.

The Dangers of Intellectual Vanity

I saw a recent post go viral on twitter where a user lamented the difficulty about Christ’s exhortation to “love your enemy.”

They joked that they “read 7 different translations, including the original Greek,” to make sure they understood the commandment correctly, and were frustrated by the unfortunate reality that, indeed, they must love their enemy.

Then, in true twitter form, an anonymous account quoted them and put them on blast in the public square.

I’m going to paraphrase rather than post a screenshot, as my article’s point goes far beyond this individual tweet. The main point is not the tweet itself (which is actually quite tame by Twitter standards), but the pathology behind accounts who frequently post like this:

“This guy read the original Greek, and still cannot distinguish between ‘polemios’ (public enemy) and ‘echthros’ (private enemy). Christ uses echthros you midwit.”

This gentleman, by appealing to the original Greek, pointed out that the “real meaning,” of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount is that love of enemy only refers to personal enemies, not public enemies. In practice, then, this grants a political argument that hatred of foreign enemies is actually permitted, if not celebrated, as a viable act of Christian virtue.

This post went viral with acclaim, to the mockery and shame of the original poster who got dog-piled by commenters for his innocuous tweet.

But there’s a problem with our gentleman’s ‘correction’: his argument is based on a quite fringe, if not outright incorrect, reading of Scripture.

The distinction he makes between polemios and echthros is real in classical Attic Greek, but the term polemios does not appear anywhere in the Greek New Testament. The New Testament’s primary term for “enemy” (be it personal, national, or cosmic alike) is echthros, including at Luke 1:71 and 74, where it’s used of Israel’s political deliverance from her national enemies (in reference to Psalm 106:10). In other words, contextual reading of echthros appears to collapse the distinction of personal and private, suggesting that Christ’s love of enemies is universal.

Furthermore, while I have no reason to believe this was intentional by the poster, his argument itself is a very close rehash of Carl Schmitt’s (the German jurist who became a prominent member of the Nazi Party), in his work The Concept of the Political. Schmitt tried to argue that the Bible's silence on politics permits a militant form of Realpolitik — which goes to show how high the stakes can become from confidently asserting even simple hermeneutic errors like the one above.

To be clear, it is absolutely permissible to make an error in public (Lord knows I’ve had plenty of gaffs myself), but to build a platform around arrogantly proclaiming (incorrect) hot takes at the expense of ‘normies’ becomes a far less forgivable (and far more dangerous) vice worthy of condemnation.

I consider this brand of Twitter-posting to be the most dangerous form of brainrot, because it gives followers the growing illusion of knowledge, and the pride of being an “insider,” when in actuality, they’re distorting their fundamental comprehension of literature, philosophy, and theology as such.

The danger for the poster who fits this type, and their followers alike, is not merely “misinformation,” but the risk of pathologizing an unearned, vainglorious, superiority complex that ironically makes one a fool. To reference Socrates in the dialogue Alcibiades I — the most shameful form of ignorance is to believe you know, when in fact, you don’t know.

The Tik-Toker at least doesn’t have any false pretensions to aristocratic superiority.

Now let’s talk about why this type of twitter brainrot exists, how to spot it, and how to resist it.

Deconstruction as True Wisdom

We might wonder why this genre of brain rot exists. On any given day, I can scroll my timeline and find dozens, if not hundreds, of tweets fitting the above genre.

It’s not the substance that makes them viral (these tweets can often be corrected or debunked with a simple google search), but the psychological thrill that wins this type of poster public acclaim.

Readers see a “hot take,” that is culturally subversive and scandalous. It’s packaged well enough to appear authoritative on the surface, but above all, readers get the rush of the “insider crowd.” You feel like one of the select few who can see through “the matrix.” You understand how reality actually works. You’re one step above the herd.

The sad reality is, you’ll find far more success in growing your platform by learning the genre of the “hot take,” that dunks on normies rather than providing nuanced dissertations on the subject matter at hand. On Twitter, you don’t have to be right, you just have to be provocative. Mock the normies to make your audience feel smart, and you’re now an authority.

So how exactly do you differentiate this genre of brainrot from genuinely sound posting?

The answer might be to reconsider Socrates’ wisdom from Alcibiades I.

Again, Socrates exhorts that the most shameful thing is to think you know when you do not.

Socrates helps Alcibiades grow wiser in this text, but not because he teaches him anything new. Instead, he deconstructs Alcibiades’ false pretensions to wisdom. By asking Alcibiades to explain justice and exposing his ignorance through cross-examination, Socrates leads him toward the beginning of genuine wisdom: namely, self-knowledge.

I bring up Alcibiades as a good framework for navigating the online world.

It’s first important to remember that there are genuinely brilliant thinkers online who can fundamentally enrich your life with their writings. Some of my favorite thinkers are those who run anonymous online twitter accounts. The goal of this post is not to advocate a blanket rejection of all online hot takes, but to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I’d also like to remind you this post is specified to short-form hot takes that can be digested in 30 seconds. It’s not that long-form writing is inevitably superior, but you have more room to read, digest, and make inquiry into the validity of an argument that short form doesn’t allow for.

The best practice then, in dealing with short form hot takes, is to subject them to the same scrutiny Socrates does with any idea. If a hot take personally catches my curiosity, I try my best to debunk it by all accounts. If I find that my best efforts fail, and the general audience of commenters agree with the hot take, and even the best of an online search fails, then I’ll be willing to grant the subversive idea merit.

It’s also worth emphasizing how precious these ideas are when you discover them. When you find the anonymous poster who shares provocative ideas that sound scandalous but are in fact true, you’ve found a gem of a thinker that you ought to cherish dearly. They can do wonders for your intellectual life, and in some cases, can even transform your understanding of life’s meaning itself.

However, practically speaking, no one is going to do a cross examination of any and every hot take tweet they find. Which brings me to my conclusion that short form social media hot takes from strangers should be taken with the heaviest grain of salt, if not outright disregarded. The true cure to brain rot is to cultivate the Socratic disposition to humility, to know that you know nothing at all.

This humility, married with the aforementioned healthy skepticism, not only inoculates you from the epidemic of pseudo-intellectual brain rot, but becomes one of the ultimate bastions of living a genuinely rigorous, fulfilling, and wise intellectual life.

Greek mythology is essential reading because it provides us the bare fodder and soil of our intellectual tradition.

The rich beginning of Western philosophic discourse on rational thought began with primitive stories that were archetypal of the human condition. To be familiar with these narratives is to grasp at the patterns that help explain to us the fullness of our nature.

And throughout the entire canon of Greek mythology, there is arguably no character more important than Athena, and the story of her birth.

She’s celebrated as both the goddess of heroes — who champions the greatest warriors of Greek mythology — and is the goddess of wisdom, which suggests her character is the marriage of martial prowess and intellectual prestige that makes man truly glorious.

Even more important, the story of her birth reveals a deep pattern that would inspire one of the greatest Christian poets of all time — who provided a warning of what happens when wisdom is twisted to make an evil so wrong it can only be called Luciferian.

Here then, is the story of Athena’s birth, and why it still matters today…

Chaos, Consumption, and Primordial History

For our purposes today, it’s helpful to remember that Greek myth can function as primordial history, not too dissimilar to how Genesis 1-11 functions as “history before history.”

Greek myth then, can be read as the genre of how human civilization emerged from the chaos of pre-historic times, and this is precisely why Athena’s birth is important.

This story begins, as is often the case in Greek myth, with the lustful passions of Zeus. As the newly enthroned ruler of Olympus, he grew enamored of Metis, the original goddess of wisdom. However, Metis was an older, abstracted deity, who represents something of an impersonal, nascent wisdom that is de-personified.

Nonetheless, after Zeus impregnates her, he learns of an alarming prophecy:

Metis shall birth a daughter and son, the latter of whom will overthrow Zeus to rule Olympus.

This prophecy actually represents a generational curse in Greek Mythology, of the son overthrowing the Father in endless wars of secession (Cronus overthrew Uranus, and Zeus overthrew Cronus). This familial strife then, appears to emphasize the bloody realities of pre-civilizational man marked by infighting and tribal warfare, even amongst one’s own kin.

Zeus, however, is desperate to avoid the same fate as his fathers. He swallows Metis whole, and in doing so, absorbs her essence into him, so that she permanently becomes a part of his mind.

Against all odds, this plan works:

Zeus’ absorption of Metis prevents the birth of a son, which ends the generational curse of offspring killing the father. It’s this act that allows him to rule Olympus, and bring stability to the heavens and earth. Hence Zeus is seen as the archetype of order upon chaos — the slayer of titans, monsters, and beasts that marked the primordial world before the rise of man.

But the story doesn’t end here. We’ll soon see that civilization itself will quite literally bleed out of him…

Wisdom Birthed from the Divine

Soon after consuming Metis, Zeus is plagued by unbearable headaches. He finds no cure and enlists Hephaestus to perform brain surgery on him.

Hephaestus helps split open Zeus’ head, and out emerges a dazzling, fully grown goddess — Athena herself. Strikingly, she emerges armed with armor and a spear.

Athena is immediately praised as the new goddess of wisdom, but she isn’t just “Metis 2.0.” First, one notes that she arises fully armed for war, and is a far more personalized goddes than the abstract Metis. It’s suggested then, that Athena is the consummation of Metis’ primordial intelligence absorbed into Zeus’ divine sovereignty, and its this specific union that allows Athena to emerge as wisdom made incarnate, armed, and capable of acting upon the world.

This insight leads to the most important aspect of Athena’s character — she’s the champion of heroes, including Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Diomedes, and many more.

But what is the significance of Athena as champions of heroes?

Well, Greek heroes represent the ordering principle of Zeus in human form. Just as Zeus brought order to the chaos of the cosmos, so too is man called to bring order to the chaos of the natural world. This is most notably seen in Heracles — whose 12 labors not only destroy monsters, but allow civilization, trade, and commerce to arise out of this destruction.

And yet Odysseus is arguably the greatest of Greek Heroes, and he most literally reflects Athena herself. He’s a formidable warlord, but ultimately revered as the clever and cunning “man of twists and turns.” His entire story of the Odyssey can be seen as the archetype of man bringing order to human civilization.

So Athena as the armed goddess of wisdom, birthed from divine sovereignty, suggests that men of the ancient world were called to strive as figures of both martial prowess and wisdom. This is how man reaches the fullness of his nature, and builds a civilization worth living.

I’d also argue Plato himself picks up on this suggestion implicitly. His magnum opus, The Republic, spends half of its entire argument imploring men and women to become formidably strong and educated in proper wisdom to learn a love of the good.

This will be the prevailing wisdom of Athena for 2,000 years, until the 17th century, when poet John Milton re-imagines this myth with a twist. Yes, he maintains his reverence for Greek mythology, but he asks whether Athena is truly the goddess of wisdom.

Through the theological lens of Christianity, Milton suggests a great warning: the birth of human wisdom may have carried within it the seeds of all human evil.

Here’s why…

Read more

Today, I want to depart from the usual cadence of breaking down a particular book or author of the Western Tradition. Every now and then it’s important to remind ourselves:

Why do we read books in the first place?

We often have a felt sense of lack in our education, that something is missing. But today I’d like to give a more positive vision of what you are looking for in life, how you can find it, and how you can transform your life.

If you count yourself among those who feel a general dissatisfaction with life — not simply with the political state of the world, but with the sense that something is deeply missing from your own life, or that the world is not how it should be — there’s a reason why.

Actually, there are many reasons why, but I reckon the main reason is that the modern world holds comfort and security as the highest goods. Climb the social ladder, get a good salary, buy the picket fence home, and retire in luxury. Yet the felt sense of this modern philosophy of safety and comfort continues crushing the soul of modern man.

This was my issue in university studying computer science. Though I had a good past and bright future by material terms, my days were accompanied by a lingering sense of dread, as if the universe were fundamentally broken. Like I was a marionette controlled by puppet strings of an invisible force to nefarious ends.

I recall confessing this despair to a professor of mine who gave me an odd suggestion:

“Read some books…”

The Count & the Philosopher

To a socially mobile careerist concerned with money, status, and material gain, nothing seemed less sensible than this advice to read. Nonetheless, when a young man is spiritually desolate and desperate, it’s often the case that he takes desperate measures.

Against all odds, I did the unthinkable and began reading books.

It was not much later that I discovered the joys of The Count of Monte Cristo — a masterpiece that unleashed a fervor and restless yearning for truth and adventure that has not left my soul 12 years later to the day.

The reason why I fell in love with Monte Cristo, and literature as such, was that for the first time in my adult life I felt known. I felt another human being revealed a truth of my soul to myself that no one else could — not even my closest family and friends.

Greek philosophers call this experience self-knowledge.

And speaking of the Greeks, Monte Cristo may have lit the spark, but it was Plato that transformed my life.

If you ever read Plato’s Apology (and everyone should read Plato’s Apology before they die) you’ll know a defiant Socrates is tried and put to death for “corrupting the youth.”

What’s most surprising about this trial, however, is that Socrates hardly seems concerned with proving himself innocent. You’d think a man whose life is in danger would be concerned with appeasing the crowd by any means, but Socrates does the opposite.

To paraphrase him, he basically tells the audience:

“The unexamined life is not worth living. I will practice philosophy until I die, and if there’s an afterlife, I’ll keep practicing philosophy there too.”

In other words, Socrates asserts Truth exists and will set you free, if you dare follow it. But you have to love Truth even more than life itself.

Christians might recognize an echo of this in Scripture:

“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

That Platonic text singlehandedly changed the trajectory of my life. It gave me the courage to quit my job, move to a new city alone, and follow the “daimonion” inside me that demanded I seek Truth and adventure.

I reasoned:

“Comfort, safety, and security are killing me. The Great Books bring me vitality. It may be insane to abandon my career and the years of study that preceded it, but my spirit is calling me…

Like Socrates, I too will pursue truth even in the face of death. And if I die, I die, but alas, even then I shall be obedient to this spirit in the afterlife.”

The good news is I did not die. Rather, for the first time in my life, I became alive.

What the Books did for me (and can do for you)

I made that pact nearly a decade ago, and while by material terms it was the hardest choice of my life, by spiritual terms it was the decision that led me on a path of lasting and substantive meaning.

I tell you this not because I count myself special (far from it) but because my story is not special at all. Much of the pre-modern Western Tradition exhorted all of mankind to do what I did — read the Great Books, implement their wisdom, and follow truth:

Reading the Great Books in pursuit of truth turns your life into an adventure.

It lets you “know yourself,” as Socrates urges, and you cannot attain the fullness of life’s joys, peace, or love whilst remaining a stranger to yourself.

Life is good indeed, my friend, if we dare have the gall to believe it.

And thus I encourage you, dear reader, to join me on this journey for Truth.

A Community of Readers

It is never too late to start reading the Great Books. In fact, there is never a better time to start than right now. Whether you’re in your 20s, figuring things out in your 40s, or settling down to a well-deserved retirement, you cannot overestimate how transformative these books can be for the nourishment of your soul and your life’s adventure.

And if you would like to personally join me and an entire community on this adventure, I highly encourage you to check out the Athenaeum Book Club.

I helped start this project a year ago, and we cannot be happier with what’s transpired:

— 45,000 total members
— 7th largest literature Substack in the world
— Nearly 300,000 followers and millions of impressions on X

In other words, there is a shift taking place in the culture. Thousands of existing members can attest to everything I’ve written here today:

The Great Books will change your life, if you dare believe in Truth, and pursue it.

We are currently reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which we will cover over this month. The next discussion, focusing on Books 5–9, is on August 18 at noon ET. Please join us — all sessions are recorded if you can’t make it live!

If you’re new here, definitely join our book club discussions if you can. They take place biweekly, and have been nothing short of electric of late. And if you can’t make it, everything is recorded!

Join Our Book Club!

East of Eden is John Steinbeck’s magnum opus, and in contention for the prestigious title of “the Great American Novel.”

And yet, many readers fundamentally misunderstand what this novel is about.

The story borrows the architecture of the book of Genesis — specifically the story of Cain and Abel — and follows three generations of a family’s lineage to make inquiries into human nature, inherited sin, generational guilt, and man’s capacity to be a moral agent in search of redemption in a fallen world.

Readers are often surprised, then, to discover that East of Eden is not actually a Christian novel. Steinbeck himself was theologically conflicted, and he conceived this novel as an argument for secular humanism, expressed through the Christian aesthetics and vocabulary of Genesis.

As such, the novel is an apotheosis of early 20th-century modernity: the grand architecture of man attempting to recover from the disillusionment of two world wars and the proverbial death of God, and attempting to consider whether man is truly free to live divorced from the divine.

And this creates a fascinating tension.

Steinbeck wants to affirm man’s freedom while rejecting the transcendent moral order that Christianity uses to define good and evil. He wants man to be free to choose, yet his greatest villain, Cathy Ames, seems to be born without the capacity to choose good at all.

Today, we’ll explore Steinbeck’s proposal for how man can live without God, why his novel is so celebrated, and the potentially fatal flaw that remains as a lingering threat to modern man’s emancipation from religion.

Steinbeck’s Philosophy

The best way to understand Steinbeck’s philosophic vision is to refer to his journal entries from The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

This was written two years after the release of his acclaimed novel The Grapes of Wrath, and part of his notes are a response to critics that his writing was too scientific and detached from the human experiment. His works were written in a disinterested perspective that refused to praise or condemn the moral actions of his characters.

Steinbeck responded by stating that this wasn’t a flaw on his part, but an artistic choice that reflects the full maturation of an artist — to write non-judgmental stories that refuse to endorse nor condemn its characters. His term for such writing was called “non-teleological thinking.”

The word telos was crucial to both Aristotelian philosophy and Christian morality. Teleological thinking says human beings have an objective end toward which human flourishing is ordered. For mankind, his purpose was to be good, resist evil, and love God. This telos therefore, informed his life story and gave him meaning.

Conversely, Steinbeck’s non-teleological writing is scientific. His narration does not treat his characters as mysterious beings with rich interior lives. Instead, they’re often introduced concretely without mystery (paraphrased):

“Cathy Ames was evil.”

“Samuel Hamilton was a good-natured man.”

“Adam Trask was naive but kind.”

Critics chastised Steinbeck by saying this attempt at objectivity was de-humanizing. Traditionally writers wrote in praise of goodness and condemnation of evil, but Steinbeck’s non-judgmental attitude seemed to permit human atrocity.

And yet, Steinbeck disagreed. His response to this charge is perhaps the most quintessential response an American could give — an appeal to human liberty.

Freedom as the Greatest Good

The positive moral vision of East of Eden is summarize by the narrator in chapter 13:

“And this I believe:

that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for:

the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”

In true American fashion, Steinbeck makes an appeal to human liberty. The “summum bonum,” of his philosophy is the free exploring mind of the individual, to be protected from coercion by any institution or outside force.

One thinks of the cliche phrase, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

Now, I think Steinbeck’s philosophy is beautifully written. I still recall the chills it gave me when I first read this in my car in my university’s parking lot, and felt like giving Steinbeck a standing ovation.

Yet, beautiful as this philosophy is, it is not the philosophy of Christianity, but liberal secular humanism. Recall Christianity says freedom is found by a love of truth — of conforming one’s mind to reality, and conducting their behavior to be virtuous, rather than vicious.

In other words, Christian freedom is found by a love of Goodness and hatred of evil.

This, however, is notably absent from Steinbeck’s philosophy. The “summum bonum,” is not a freedom of flourishing from taking virtuous actions, rather the freedom to let any man do whatever he wants, even if his desires are vicious. This is precisely why he champions writing non-judgmentally, for it is far better to seek to understand the wicked individual than to condemn them.

While this non-judgmental tolerance sounds admirable, critics have argued that Steinbeck undermines this very philosophy in his own work.

Despite Steinbeck’s insistence that human beings are free, and that their freedom is the ultimate good that ought to be protected, he introduces one infamous character who may be one of the vilest and most corrupt characters in all fiction.

Her vicious behavior is not just a blight on the narrative that makes East of Eden a thrilling read, but suggests Steinbeck’s very vision of freedom may be self-undermining and destructive to human flourishing.

Here’s why…

Read more

Most of modern man today will live and die without ever knowing themselves.

They may live a full life, a long life, a life of material prosperity, or a life of traveling the world… and yet they will never know leisure, nor themselves.

To be a modern man is to toil endlessly, and vacation to be recharged to toil longer, and even retirement itself fails to provide man a relief from his restlessness. For one cannot spend a lifetime of anxious toil, and expect to suddenly learn leisure, as leisure is an art that requires practice. And if you wait until old age to learn leisure, you may never learn it at all.

The above statements are not my mere opinion, but the very implications that conclude Joseph Pieper’s famous essay on leisure. His argument — which we’ve covered for a month now — is simple:

The world of “total work,” is threatening to enslave man to utility, toil, and anxiety, and fundamentally alienate him from his nature, his vocation, and his destiny.

We finally arrive at the conclusion, not just how to beat the world of total work, but understanding the true roots of leisure, and orienting our lives around them to restore meaning, purpose, and happiness in a modern world coercing us to rebel against our own nature.

(this is part 4 of a 4-part series on Human Leisure. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here)

Total Work, Revisited

Recall that Pieper says the modern world is overrun by the phenomena of “total work,” where man must always be busy, productive, or useful. Studies, career, and free time must all be spent doing things or striving for gain. No longer is their room for modern man to be — to enjoy “useless,” activities that are ends in themselves.

The root of this vice was the deadly sin of acedia (sloth), which is far more than laziness, but an inability for one to “joyfully affirm his own being.” In other words, both the couch potato and the strenuous worker are guilty of acedia.

The art of leisure is a rebellion found in cultivating practices that are ends in themselves — like the joy of deep study in literature, or listening to a beautiful symphony. These practices don’t help you “get ahead,” but they ground you in yourselves and connect you to the world.

We ended last week’s essay by noting, however, that a true restoration of leisure asks for more than creating cultivated individuals, but restoring leisure at scale to society via institutions.

But to make this restoration a possibility, Pieper brings us to the last chapter of his essay, where we diagnose the true roots of leisure’s origins.

Leisure in the Divine

Earlier, Pieper pointed out the festivals and celebrations are communities practicing leisure at scale — for the festival is man joyfully affirming his own being in reality.

He now reveals what celebration itself is rooted in:

“If celebration is the corse of leisure, then leisure can only be made possible on the same basis of the festival. That basis is divine worship.

The meaning of celebration is man’s affirmation of the universe and his experiencing the world in an aspect other than the everyday one. Now we cannot conceive a more intense affirmation of the world than ‘praise of God,’ the Creator of this very world.”

Pieper recognizes this statement will be a cause of discomfort to his audience, but his point stands that all festivals are tied to the divine. This was patently obvious in Greco-Roman antiquity, where all feasts and celebrations honored the Pantheon of deities. The same is true for Medieval Christendom, via Christmas, Easter, and normative feast days.

Conversely, the secular modern world has failed to create any lasting festivals of their own. There are Federal holidays, but Memorial Day is a husk of the joys felt at Christmas time.

The French Revolution, Pieper notes, also attempted to manufacture secular festival days, like “Brutus day,” but these attempts failed as well. Indeed, a good festival is a spiritually grounded, communal affirmation of joy at the beneficence of life itself, and such a spiritual experience must be grounded in a transcendental reality above man that unites him. In other words, man cannot properly celebrate his existence without piety to the divine.

Finding the Fullness of Time

It’s here where we see Pieper unapologetically announce his conclusion of restoring true and lasting leisure to mankind:

“Culture lives on religion through divine worship. And when culture itself is endangered, and leisure is called into question, there is only one thing to be done: to go back to the first and original source…

Leisure cannot be achieved at all as a means to an end, even though that end be “the salvation of Western Civilization.” Celebration of God in worship cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake.

That most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole is the fountainhead of leisure.”

So divine worship is the key to learning leisure, but such worship is futile if your goal is to “learn leisure.” In other words, leisure is not something you learn or pursue, rather its the byproduct of a harmonious orientation to God, which brings order and grace to your soul and allows love to flow outward to your neighbor and the world as such.

Recall also the implication of divine worship. Pieper, as a Catholic, likely has the mass in mind. In Catholicism, the mass is not considered an hour of praise, but a propitiatory sacrifice — a worship of active participation in which the congregation unites as one body in communion with Christ in memory and participation of his passion, death, crucifixion, and resurrection. In other words, divine worship of the mass is a celebration of mankind united in the fullness of time.

It’s a cosmological affirmation of triumph and the sanctity of life in past, present, and eternity. It’s not enough for man to recognize he’s a spiritual individual who ought to become cultured, well-read, and cultivated in the arts. Not even personal piety is enough.

Man is made for communion. Man’s fullness of nature is realized in harmony with both the divine and his neighbor. The Christian institution of the Sabbath is that which makes man most truly himself, for only in a charity of adoration to the Creator, and well-being to neighbor, does man forget himself and find a true, lasting sense of leisure. And in such a leisure if a peace that surpasses understanding, man rediscovering who he is and grasping the light that cannot diminish even amongst the chaos and confusion of the modern world. The piety of heavenly worship and neighborly love is but the path to true and lasting leisure.

The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. It’s often hailed as the greatest of his four great novels, and in my opinion, is the greatest novel ever written.

It’s almost impossible to properly describe what this novel is about. It spans 260,000 words (double the length of The Iliad), and covers countless themes like theodicy, nihilism, faith, utopianism, existential despair, and far more.

The scope of today’s article, however, is far humbler. Rather than addressing the book’s ultimate themes, I’ll give a simple introduction to the four main characters, and the overlooked genius as to why these four characters make this novel a “timeless masterpiece,” rather than a story of mere family drama.

The Karamazov family, properly understood, represent an allegory of the fractured human soul, struggling to make itself whole.

When you immerse yourself into this family drama, you’ll find the family becomes a universal bearer of human nature, and a conduit for teaching you the greatest truths of your own nature and how to become an integrated, happy human being.

The Tri-Partite Soul

Before we get to the brothers specifically, we must briefly address Plato.

Long term readers of my publication may laugh at this suggestion, as Plato tends to be invoked on a weekly basis. However, Plato’s influence looms over the philosophical foundation of Brothers. Indeed, CS Lewis was correct in Narnia when he wrote:

“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato. Bless me, what do they teach at these schools?”

Now, let’s specifically recall Plato’s theory of the tri-partite soul, in his work The Republic.

He says the soul is divided by three parts:

1. The intellect/reason

2. The spirit/passions

3. The appetite

He said a happy soul is one who embraces the cardinal virtues of courage, justice, moderation, and prudence.

Specifically:

1. Your intellect loves wisdom

2. Your spirit loves courage

3. Your appetites are moderate

4. And as a result of the above virtues, your soul will be harmonious and just

But what does Plato have to do with Dostoevsky?

Well Dostoevsky was well read in Plato, and a common strand of scholarship on the Brother’s Karamazov suggests the four family members map onto Plato’s conception of the human soul itself.

Now, let’s meet the Karamazovs, and see how they fit this mapping.

Meeting the Karamazov’s

Here’s the quick rundown of the Karamazov family:

• Fyodor — the patriarch and sensual man

• Dimitri — the eldest brother, passionate but hot-tempered

• Ivan — middle child, cold and intelligent

• Alyosha — the youngest, noble but timid

Now on the surface, much of the story is a family drama.

Ultimately, the family is at war with one another. Fyodor is a senseless hedonist who shames his family. Dmitri’s wrath is uncontrolled, and his public outbursts bring scandal. Ivan is sullen and jaded. He “loves humanity,” but feels no affection for individuals. Alyosha is good natured, but weak, timid, and fearful. He desires to hide from the world in a monastery under the paternal guidance of Father Zosima.

One way of reading this family war, then, is understanding it as the human soul at war with itself. Each of these characters, at least in their early form, represent the corrupted soul filled with vice. Let’s visit them one by one, and see why the soul of this family is made sick.

Fyodor

Fyodor as the sensualist represents the appetitive part of the soul, without moderation. His unrestrained hedonism and greed makes him shameless and contemptible in the eyes of all.

Though he’s pathetic and hated, he is arguably the most harmless of the family (sans Alyosha). This is because corruption of the appetite is embarrassing, but mild compared to corruption of the greater parts of one’s soul like the intellect or the spirit.

Dmitri

Dmitri represents the spirited part of the human soul. Whereas Plato says the spirit must be courageous, however, Dmitri represents the excess of courage, which is the vice of reckless anger. Yet readers tend to love him, for even good-natured but misguided wrath is charismatic, if not forgivable in the eyes of the public.

Nonetheless, Dmitri cannot be seen as virtuous, for he is quick to incite conflict and scandal, in both public and private alike. His tendency to escalate fights draws more than mere shame, as opens himself and his family to genuine legal risks and repercussions. Indeed, crimes of wrath may be more charismatic than gluttony, but also risk graver evils by way of violence and self-destruction.

Ivan

Ivan is the story’s anti-hero. He draws the line between antagonist and villain in search of redemption, and specifically represents the intellect of the human soul.

As such, he’s a man with a razor sharp intellect, but a heart of stone. He cannot bear to love his neighbor, for his soul has been numbed with human suffering. He’s both the most powerful and capable of the Karamazovs, but also the most dangerous. He could just as easily incite his neighbors to acts of vandalism, destruction, and murder, as he could exhort them to become Saints. His tale is the cautionary one of the intellect wavering between wisdom and vainglorious worship of self…

The Story’s Hero?

Thus far, we have located three of the four faces of the human soul. Fyodor represents the appetites left undisciplined, Dmitri the passions left uncontrolled, and Ivan the intellect separated from love.

The problem, however, is that this is the picture of a vicious soul at war with itself. The Karamazovs, left to their own devices, are doomed to damn themselves, and perhaps their neighbors, to a litany of vices, temptations, and corruptions that contort the well being of the larger populace.

Again, the Karamazov story represents the human soul itself on trial. Dostoevsky recognizes that man, left to his own devices, will inevitably descend into a path of death, decay, and self-annihilation.

So the deeper question becomes:

Can the human soul be saved from self-destruction, especially in a world filled with suffering, vices, and immoral humans like the Karamazovs?

The answer lies in the final member of the Karamazov family — the last, the least, and the youngest brother:

Alyosha…

Read more

Modern man has lost himself in the world of total work.

His modern spiritual malaise is due to acedia — a refusal to accept one’s nature. This has been espoused through a modern culture that celebrates the extremes, whether it’s a “self-help,” culture that affirms laziness is an acceptable way of being, or worships “work as a way of life,” where happiness is found by getting ahead by any means.

Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, is the famous 20th century essay that diagnoses and attempts to solve this problem. Modern man has worshipped the culture of work and productivity to such an extreme that he has forgotten his own fundamental nature. As such, we find ourselves living in a technologically prosperous society of spiritually impoverished, miserable, individuals.

This week, we continue our journey through Pieper’s essay, to further understand our culture’s unhealthy obsession with work, why leisure is the true solution, and how we can begin to reimplement it into society at large…

(this is part 3 of a 4-part series on Human Leisure. You can find part 1 here, and part 2 here).

Dehumanizing Labor

Pieper does not mince words about the disastrous state of affairs modern man’s spiritual life is in under the “world of total work.”

In his own words:

“The world of the ‘worker,’ is taking shape with dynamic force—with such a velocity that, rightly or wrongly, one is tempted to speak of demonic force in history.”

Recall that he blames the disastrous rise of the world of total work with a failure in education. Traditionally, schools taught the liberal arts, whose goals were to make humans virtuous and “liberate them.” Now, however, modern education has been overrun with a celebration of functionality and productivity.

The purpose of school is not to be virtuous, but to get a job.

Now, the problem may be education, but the solution goes beyond education. Pieper rejects secular humanism — the attempt to rediscover the great books and tradition — as a solution. Even the great books are no help without a guiding philosophy. Their thinkers disagree with each other, and only encourage nihilism in students not properly trained.

Pieper says instead, the main problem to be solved is the problem of “mass proletarianization.”

The Problem of the Proletariat

In the world of total work, Pieper defines a proletarian as:

“The man who is fettered to the ‘process of work,’… the all embracing process in which things are used for the sake of the public need.”

Remember, Pieper says proletarians are not just confined to blue collar labor, but even scholars and professors. A scholar who only studies literature as a trade to pay bills, or for status, or professional opportunities — basically any labor as means to an end — is a proletarian.

Society is amassed with proletarians then, for we’ve lost the art of leisure, or enjoying virtuous activities as ends in themselves.

This might sound like a “high-brow,” critique against common enjoyments, but Pieper warns there’s serious political risks if we don’t rediscover the art of leisure. Namely, an embracement of proletarianism is what fuels tyranny and civilizational downfall:

“[in the totalitarian state], everyone is a proletarian because he is bound by the orders of others, ‘to the necessities of an absolute economic process of production,’ by outside forces, which means that he is entirely subject to economic forces, entirely proletarian…

The ‘total work,’ State needs the spiritually impoverished, one-track mind of the functionary… In that case, spiritual immunization against the seductive appeal and the power of totalitarian forms must be sought for at a much deeper level of thought than on the level of purely political considerations”

This spiritual impoverishment is made clear in the great books of dystopian literature, like the “proles,” of 1984, or the mindless, hedonistic masses of Brave New World.

So civilizational collapse, and the rise of modern totalitarian states, is a byproduct of ensuring the soul of a nation becomes spiritually malnourished and empty. If the tyrant reduces mankind to cogs, mechanisms, and springs, then he’s constructed a self-serving machine of dehumanized labor.

For Pieper, society lives or dies in accordance with our ability to rediscover true leisure and contemplation.

The End of Proletarianization

Pieper’s solution calls for a general “deproletarianization,” of human society. But what does that look like?

In politics, the common solutions tend to be economically related:

• Higher wages

• Cheaper houses

• Affordable social programs

This solution presupposes that poverty has made man spiritually impoverished, and that with enough wealth for all, our problems would be solved.

Pieper, however, rejects this view. Yes, poverty ought to be absolved, but it’s not a solution to the spiritual crisis:

“Genuine deproletarianization, which must not be confounded with the struggle against poverty, assumes that the distinction between the artes liberales and the artes serviles is a meaningful one…

The liberal arts which cannot be put at the disposal of useful ends”

We need a return to a “useless,” education. A true liberal arts education where knowledge is an end in itself, because it teaches mankind the fullness of his nature, and how to flourish. Indeed, as Aristotle asserts, the end of all human activity is happiness, but such a project is impossible if man does not know who he is.

But if leisure is the solution to proletarianization, then a proper saving of civilization goes beyond mere individual contemplation. Society itself must make room for an entire field of contemplation, that currently does not exist:

“If the essence of ‘proletarian,’ is the fact of being fettered to the process of work, then the central problem of liberating men from this condition lies in making a whole field of significant activity available and open to the working man—of activity which is not ‘work’; in other words: in making the sphere of real leisure available to him”

Now this is far easier said than done. Surely, dear reader, you and I can take Pieper’s advice seriously, and learn a proper rediscovery of contemplation, philosophy, and liberal arts education — of loving truth, beauty, and goodness for its own sake — but how can we hope to effect change at scale?

This question is now approaching Pieper’s final arc of his full argument.

Institutional Leisure

Pieper himself is cautious to offer a concrete solution to the problem of proletarianization, but he does gesture at one.

He points out that philosophy is good in itself for the individual, but you cannot hope to reasonably train an entire country of philosopher kings through rigorous educational study.

One wonders if there is perhaps an institution that could teach a country the art of contemplation in mass?

Pieper thinks so:

“Whereas the ‘total work,’ State declares all un-useful work ‘undesirable,’ and even expropriates free time in the service of work, there is one Institution in the world which forbids useful activity, and servile work, on particular days, and in this way prepares, as it were, a sphere for a non-proletarian existence”

Pieper leaves the gesture here, but it’s an obvious reference to the institution of the Christian Church and its practice of the Sabbath.

Historically speaking, the Church allowed six days of labor, and a mandatory day of leisure to contemplate God (who himself rested on the 7th day of creation).

Whereas today, this “day of rest,” sounds like an optional luxury for those who have the time, in history it was considered a grave matter if you violated the Sabbath. For instance:

• In Roman Catholicism, skipping mass without reason is a mortal sin

• In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, willingly skipping mass is a grave sin (and in antiquity, could even warrant excommunication)

• In Pre-Christian Judaism, violating the sabbath could warrant the death penalty

Christianity recognizes that the fullness of human nature is realized in leisure. It suggests that a life without leisure is a life separated from God. Remember that leisure is not merely “resting,” so that you can return to work recharged, rather leisure is the state of “joyfully affirming one’s being.”

As we’ve previously discussed, this joy can be found through philosophic contemplation, religious worship, or a detached joy in beautiful things for their own sake. In other words, a cultivation of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Pieper then, has made due on his promise in the beginning of his essay, when he stated that a full scope into understanding leisure and the problem of total work requires, “digging down to the roots and basing our conclusion on a philosophical and theological conception of man.”

The art of leisure is discovering the fullness of our nature, by an embracement of philosophy and theology that reminds us we’re ultimately religious beings as such, whose full identity is felt in celebrations of life with our fellow man, whether that’s the town festival, the neighborhood block party, or the Sunday service.

We’ll conclude our discussion on leisure next week, by examining Pieper’s arguments about leisure’s true roots in theology itself, and how leisure becomes not just a means of rediscovering one’s humanity, but restoring vitality to civilization at large.

The Ring of Gyges is one of the most influential myths ever written.

It’s a short excerpt found in Plato’s magnum opus The Republic. It’s a story about a man who finds a ring that turns him invisible, and permits him to commit any crime without consequence.

The context of this story is even more disturbing:

Socrates is tasked with using it to defend justice. The story suggests that men are only just because they fear punishment, but if they knew they could get away with injustice, then it would be superior to do so.

In other words, the story asks:

“Does justice exist, or is it a human construct masking the chaos of a nihilistic universe?”

It goes as no surprise that this story — and Socrates’ genius answer — has continued to inspire the greatest minds of civilization some 2,500 years later (perhaps influencing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings itself).

Here then, is Socrates’ answer to the Ring of Gyges, his defense of justice, and why the human soul cannot survive without it.

The Ring of Power

The Ring of Gyges is a “story in a story,” or an interlude told in Plato’s Republic.

The ultimate question of The Republic is “what is justice?” Socrates gives an initial defense of justice, claiming that it’s intrinsically good and necessary to live a happy life.

Glaucon, however, is not convinced. He attempts to steel-man the opposite position:

Justice is just a convention, and not a virtue.

To do so, he tells the Ring of Gyges like this (paraphrased):

“One day a shepherd named Gyges was in the field, when lightning struck, opening a crater.

Gyges descended, and found a hollow bronze horse. Inside the horse was a ring that gave him the power to be invisible whenever he wore it.

Gyges used the ring to murder the king of Lydia, seize his wife, and take the throne.

He lived as a king who pretended to be virtuous in public, but was secretly vicious. Thus, he was beloved by all, and had every desire satisfied, all accomplished through his injustice.”

Glaucon then contrasts this with a just man who is impoverished and wrongfully hated, falsely believed to be unjust:

“He’ll be whipped, stretched on a rack, chained, blinded with fire… and impaled”

The argument then, can be summarized as such (paraphrased):

“Imagine an unjust man who has all his desires satisfied, and is beloved by all. Now imagine a just man who is wrongfully hated, tortured, and murdered. Prove that it’s still superior to be just than unjust”

Socrates is uncertain whether or not he can answer the challenge, but attempts to do his best.

Building the Perfect City

Socrates says to explain what justice is, they should build an imaginary city.

Why?

Because a city is a collection of many souls. Therefore, the justice found in the human soul will be far easier understood by studying a city at scale.

This is a classically Greek idea: your city is an extension, or map, of your soul.

Starting from scratch, Socrates muses that humans living in a state of nature form tribes for personal advantage; 10 souls working together is superior to individual labor.

Eventually they’ll grow and become wealthy. The growing demand breeds war. Necessity requires them to attack other cities, while other cities will want to attack them.

Therefore, the city of merchants now needs a second class, namely auxiliaries (warriors).

But this introduces a problem, namely, “who’s going to police the police?”

This simple question is the implicit beginning of all political discourse, whether you know it or not. Force is the most fundamental law of nature, and justice cannot prevail if force is dominated by tyrannical men.

But how can we ensure the auxiliaries of the imagined city don’t become tyrants?

The answer is through education. Socrates says poetry and gymnastics will do the trick:

They are to hear (censored) poems that celebrate glory, virtue, and moral excellence. This will make them morally virtuous. Additionally, they are to undergo rigorous physical training.

The result is auxiliaries will be like loyal dogs: gentle to their fellow citizens, but vicious to strangers.

This solves the problem of force, but the picture is not yet complete. The city still needs rulers and statesmen. These will be selected by the noblest of the auxiliaries.

They’ll have unprecedented rule over the masses, but will not be allowed to accumulate wealth, property, nor have a wife. Socrates says they’ll be happy, however, for their salaries prevent any fear of material privation, and they’ll have endless leisure to contemplate, share, and proclaim Truth and Goodness to their fellow man.

This is the creation of the city, and a fairly sound one if taken hypothetically. But there’s a problem:

Justice has still not been defined.

We have discovered how a city can become virtuous, but we have not yet answered the deeper question: what makes a human soul just?

Until this question is answered, the Ring of Gyges argument still stands. Perhaps justice is merely a human invention — a mask we wear to hide the brutal realities of an uncaring universe.

Yet this is precisely where Socrates reveals the final and most important leg of his argument. He will not only explain what justice is, but why the unjust life is ultimately a form of self-destruction...

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Sloth is the most misunderstood of the seven deadly sins.

Recall that the deadly sins are the capital vices that form the roots of all human evil. To let even one of these vices rule you is to expose your spiritual and moral life to a litany of temptations, distractions, or even corruptions.

As such, it’s paramount that we understand these vices, for nothing can be conquered that is not first understood.

But why is Sloth the most misunderstood of the deadly sins? Isn’t it obvious that laziness is bad?

The problem is, sloth is not just laziness. In totality, its roots run much deeper and encompass far greater temptations than that of the couch-potato.

Josef Pieper understood this better than almost anyone else. His essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture, diagnoses why modern man is spiritually drained, overworked, and fundamentally unhappy with his existence.

He notes the cause of this unhappiness is our embracement of a “total work culture,” but this culture, surprisingly, takes its roots in the sin of Sloth itself.

Here then, is Pieper’s breakdown of the full evils of Sloth, and how to conquer them...

(This is part 2 of a 4-part series on rediscovering human leisure. You can find part 1 here).

The Real Meaning of Acedia

First, we’re now going to start referring to sloth by its earlier, traditional name, which is acedia.

Pieper gives us the full, historical definition of acedia, which is far more than laziness, idleness, or sloth:

“Acedia does not signify the ‘idleness,’ we envisage when we speak of idleness as ‘the root of all vice.’

Idleness, in the medieval view, means that a man renounces the claim implicit in his dignity. In a word, he does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means that he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is.”

So acedia is not merely laziness, but a fundamental rejection of your true nature. That means that laziness is a type of acedia, as the man who spends his free time binging television and doom-scrolling rejects his potential.

But surprisingly, hard work is not the answer to acedia:

“The contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one’s living;

it is man’s happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God — which is to say love.”

Excessive work is just as spiritually destructive as laziness. You can work 70 hours a week, have six-pack abs, and run a fortune-500 company, and suffer just as much from acedia as the lazy man with a pot-belly.

Now that we’ve defined acedia, we can begin to discern that its evils run far deeper than what “sloth,” implies…

Embracing the Extremes

Let’s now consider the phrase, “the greatest trick the devil he ever played was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.”

The means you are most vulnerable to the evils you have no awareness of. And as we discussed in last week’s article, today’s world is a functional culture that celebrates total work by all means. Consider the messaging of the modern world:

• If you’re truly lazy, modern “therapy-culture,” says you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Just accept yourself!

• Red pill ideology tells men happiness is found by ceaseless striving — six figures, six pack abs, six feet tall (looksmaxxing)

• Feminism exhorts women to become a business executive, the leader of the home, and perhaps a mother, all at once

The tragic reality is not just that we’ve grown ignorant about the true roots of acedia, rather acedia itself has become the object of celebration! The world exhorts us to embrace the extremes that fundamentally oppose the nature of who we are as human beings.

Recall that Pieper defined the opposite of acedia as, “man’s cheerful and happy affirmation of his own being.”

The question now remains, what exactly does it mean for man to affirm his being?

Leisure and the Roots of Despair

Next, Pieper points out how modern man’s sense of spiritual despair traces explicitly to acedia:

“[Acedia is the source] of that deep-seated lack of calm which makes leisure impossible…

One of the children of acedia is despair, which amounts to saying that despair and the incapacity for leisure are twins”

So leisure is the answer to acedia and modern man’s sense of despair. Leisure is that which conquers nihilism and fuels our lives with meaning.

Recall that Pieper says leisure begins with contemplation — that state of passive receptivity when we cease to strain ourselves, and open our minds up to the beauty of being. This is done by pondering philosophic truth, religious worship, or beauty, like the sudden calm at the sight of a sunset.

In Pieper’s own words:

“Leisure is not the attitude of mind of those who actively intervene, but those who are open to everything.”

This sounds nice, but how do we become open to everything? We can’t force calmness into our being at will. Is there an art then, to practice leisure?

The answer, implicitly, appears to be yes. And you can appreciate this art by understanding the meaning of the festival:

“In leisure, man too celebrates the end of his work by allowing his inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of the Creation. He looks and he affirms; it is good.

Now the highest form of affirmation is the festival… To hold a celebration means to affirm the basic meaningfulness of the universe and a sense of oneness with it, of inclusion within it.”

In other words, every party is mankind making an implicit, cosmological affirmation: life is good.

Note then that the festival, and leisure itself, distinguishes itself as more than a mere a break from work. You could spend a month on vacation in Hawaii and still live in the “world of work,” in which your mind is strained by anxiety, restlessness, and an inability to enjoy Being itself.

True leisure is not a rest from work, so that you can be refreshed for more work, rather it’s about connecting with the fullness of your nature, and appreciating your nature’s connection with the cosmos:

“The power to know leisure is the power to overstep the boundaries of the workaday world and reach out to superhuman, life giving existential forces that refresh and renew us before we turn back to our daily work.”

True leisure then, is relational. It’s the rest and joy that affirms life is good, and is about rediscovering who you are. And this self-knowledge is realizing that you share a connection to your fellow man, the natural world, and the divine. True leisure then, is the art of contemplation, the self-knowledge of perfecting these relationships, which results in a peace that surpasses understanding.

This is why festival and contemplation are the direct antidote to acedia: whereas sloth is the refusal of the gift of one’s own being, leisure is the process of receiving the gift of one’s true self.

Next week, we’ll continue this journey by looking at how to not only master this art of leisure, but work to restore its proper place in a self-destructive civilization of work, productivity, and total functionality.

Is Hell locked from the inside?

This is the question of CS Lewis’ novel The Great Divorce. It follows CS Lewis as the book’s protagonist, as he and a group of passengers on a bus ride from “the Grey Town,” (Hell), on a journey to Heaven.

It sounds like a strange idea, perhaps even heretical, that Heaven would allow souls of the damned entrance into beatitude after their judgment. Yet even stranger is this — the gates of Heaven remain wide open, but no one chooses to stay.

Almost all the souls of Hell prefer an eternity of damnation than paradise. Jarring as this sounds, a careful inquiry into this novel shows it’s far more human than you would expect. The souls of the damned are strikingly human, and some will even sound like people you know.

The Great Divorce then, is best understood not as a work of dogmatic theology, but a masterful meditation on the desires of the human heart: both what the soul of a saint looks like, and the countless ways in which man could go astray on the path to perdition.

To appreciate The Great Divorce then, is to mature in discovering what a truly blessed existence looks like, both in this life, and perhaps for all eternity.

A Bus Ride to Heaven

As stated, Lewis himself is the story’s narrator who finds himself in “the Grey Town.”

He and a group of inhabitants board a bus and begin a commute to an unnamed destination. To the Lewis’ shock, however, he soon finds that the bus is flying — ascending up to the Heavens.

While on the bus, fellow inhabitants explain the nature of “the Grey Town,” (Hell) which they left.

We discover many interesting things about Hell, such as

• Endless expansion — the town grows bigger everyday. This is because its inhabitants despise each other, and continue to build on the outskirts to avoid one another

• Endless desires — man can satisfy any craving. He can construct a real life mansion in moments through his mind, or can indulge in any pleasures of the flesh he desires

• The eternal abyss — the inhabitants fear a rumor that one day, the twilight of the grey town will be replaced by an eternal, unending darkness

What’s fascinating about this account of Hell is how human it is. Effectively, Hell’s inhabitants live in an eternity where all their desires are satisfied without privation.

How on Earth is this just?

This is Lewis’ first lesson about human desire. Natural desires and pleasures of the flesh may be pleasant, but they’re insufficient without the divine. Hell is the disillusionment of all your dreams and desires coming true. As the narrator puts it:

“The trouble is they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) just by imagining it… In other words, there’s no proper economic basis for any community life.”

Notice also there is no friendship in Hell. Man knows no harmony, nor strife. When we recall the wisdom of Aristotle, citing man as a “political animal,” or Dostoevsky, who laments that “Hell is the inability to love,” then an eternity divorced of love, friendship, and harmony is an eternity cut off from the most fundamental nature of yourself.

Hell is an eternity divorced from God, and the fullness of your being.

The Gates of Paradise

Eventually, the bus reaches Heaven, and Lewis and its inhabitants step outside.

Their eyes are blinded by the brightness of Heaven, and their feet cannot bear to stand on the grass. Surprisingly, though their bodies are of Earthly flesh, they appear as mere shadows in comparison to the fullness of Heaven’s glory.

Eventually, the group gets greeted by a host of angels. Each angel is a guardian specifically tasked to help a particular individual make the pilgrimage across the meadows to “the mountains,” where Heaven resides.

Surprisingly, however, all the souls waver. One by one, each soul starts to complain. They have dialogues with their angels, and despite the encouragement of the latter, every soul of the damned starts to board the bus back to Hell of their own accord.

Some example conversations:

• The unruly boss too prideful to apologize to his old employee

• The overbearing mother who cannot “forgive,” God for her son’s death

• The Bishop who’d rather speculate about God in Hell than meet him face to face

Each conversation reveals the ultimate desire of the human heart, and how it went astray:

• The boss preferred being “right,” in Hell, than “humbled,” in Heaven

• The mother loved her son more than God (and as such, she made her son a worldly idol which corrupted her love)

• The professor loved philosophy itself, but lost his love for God

Therefore, this book becomes a meditation in misguided desire. Each of these souls we meet are archetypes for the greatest desires of the human heart as such. In other words, a careful inquiry suggests you might find yourself in some of the souls of perdition.

This is not cause for despair, but self-knowledge — an opportunity to correct your love to grow in sanctity, virtue, and blessedness.

Unfortunately, our narrator grows discouraged. He witnesses one soul after another turn away from God, and begins to wonder whether there is any hope for the inhabitants of the Grey Town.

If Hell is locked from the inside, can anyone ever choose to leave?

But in his lowest moment, Lewis encounters his own guide. It’s a dear friend who helped inspire Lewis himself to become a Christian.

He arrives to reveal the true nature of Heaven, the mystery of salvation, and what it truly takes for a pilgrim to complete his journey to beatitude with God...

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It’s no secret that the modern western man is anxious, restless, and discontent. Compared to earlier generations, he finds himself far lonelier, more heavily medicated, and spiritually malnourished.

Even the most well-adjusted of individuals suffer from a sense of malaise and silent desperation — an unspoken feeling as if life is not what it should be, or something is missing, or that one is unwell in a manner that defies understanding.

Indeed, whether one is impoverished, or a high level executive, or a run of the mill family man: a lingering sense of unease seems to follow him, making him “modern.”

But why is this so?

Why is modern man, by far the most materially prosperous of any generation, so fundamentally unwell?

Josef Pieper understood the source of modern man’s dread. He wrote a famous essay, Leisure the Basis of Culture, explaining why man is so spiritually unhappy, what’s missing from his life, and how he can recapture his lost sense of humanity.

Today’s article will be the first in a four part series on Pieper’s theme of leisure: what it is, why we’ve lost it, and how we can recapture it. To understand the fullness of leisure, is to understand the fullness of human nature, what’s missing from our souls today as moderns, and how we can recapture it to live well.

But to properly understand leisure, we must first understand where we are as a civilization today, and how everything went wrong…

The New Modern Man

Well how did everything go wrong?

For this, we must look to German philosopher Ernst Junger. He was one of the earliest minds to diagnose the revolutionary changes of “modern society,” that created, “modern man.”

Junger came to this realization as a veteran of World War I.

He, like many others, noted the absurdity of the war — not just from a political view, but on the frontlines itself. There was no human dignity to be found, no “honor,” to be won, nor opportunity for valor. Instead, war felt like a factory: soldiers as cogs in a machine sent to slaughter.

More interesting, however, was his return home.

In a strange sense, he felt this “factory,” sensation back in Germany during peacetime. Industrialization paved ways for massive factories and, and workers were more literally cogs in a machine.

In other words, modern society distinguished itself via “total mobilization.” Both war and peace were sapped of human dignity, in favor of an all-encompassing embrace of work, functionality, and productivity.

Junger makes this clear in his work Der Arbeiter, where he describes the Arbeiter (the Worker) as a new Gestalt, a totalizing form that’s remaking man, technology, and the state into a single integrated whole. In other words, the modern world is reshaping the soul of human nature by reducing him into a worker. No longer is he an ensouled being with dignity, but a mere piece of State-machinery.

Strangely, Junger almost seems to celebrate this change, but Pieper differs. He thought Junger’s diagnosis was brilliant, yet claimed nothing could be worse than man’s nature reducing itself to merely work and productivity.

If man is but a worker, then he becomes expendable. It’s only by reducing him to a “worker,” that the trenches of WWI, or the dehumanizing conditions of factory life, or the agonies of life in the mines, could ever be justified.

Pieper’s answer to Junger is far simpler: rediscover leisure.

The Total World of Total Work

Pieper introduces his essay with a simple claim, “leisure is one of the foundations of western culture.”

This draws back to Plato and Aristotle, who said the final aim of our labors is leisure. It’s also mandated in Scripture — work six days, so that you may rest on the seventh.

Yet Pieper says modern culture today has explicitly inverted this, quoting Max Weber:

“One does not work to live; one lives to work.”

It’s eerie how natural this sounds to modern ears. The common man could say the same thing at a local bar, and all listeners would nod their heads in lamentation.

Now Pieper’s critique of modern culture isn’t simply over the 40 hour work week, nor an economic argument about fair wages for the common man. Strikingly, he says all classes suffer from a lack of leisure and embrace of total work:

“Like the wage-earner, the manual worker, and the proletarian, the educated man, the scholar, too, is a worker… he too is harnessed to the social system and takes his place in the division of labor.”

But how is the scholar a worker? Shouldn’t the “ivory-tower,” professor be the peak of leisure?

Pieper says no. Leisure does not just mean reading books, nor even abstaining from work. Leisure is about rediscovering what a true education looks like.

A Servile Education

At the risk of redundancy — the loss of leisure in modernity has been replaced by the cult of productivity and embracement of total work.

All human behavior must be oriented to utilitarian ends, the “common need,” or some economic purpose. You must be useful.

Pieper laments that this belief system has engrained itself in modern education systems too:

“The worker’s world, as Ernst Junger puts it, is ‘the denial of free scholarship and inquiry.’ In a consistently planned “worker,” State there is no room for philosophy because philosophy cannot serve other ends than its own or it ceases to be philosophy…

The ancients, however, maintained that there was a legitimate place for non-utilitarian modes of human activity, in other words, the liberal arts”

We can understand this easily. Growing up, it was far more likely you were told education was for “getting a real job,” than it was, “learning virtue to liberate your soul,” which was the traditional view of education.

To put it simply then, the problem of modern man’s spiritual malaise is due to the cult of work and productivity, which has engrained itself into every fiber of the public domain.

We’re technologically prosperous, and spiritually impoverished. We have smart phones, cars, and climate controlled homes, and spend nights binging tv shows and hedonistic pursuits to numb the pain of being strangers in our own bodies.

Of course then, the problem is not just education — we have no issue teaching mathematics, science, or music as such.

The problem is a philosophic and theological issue:

“[we must] dig down to the roots of the problem and so base our conclusions on a philosophical and theological conception of man.”

And so the problem of leisure is the problem of human nature:

What kind of beings are we? What part of our humanity has been lost, and how do we rediscover who we actually are?

The Usefulness of “Uselessness”

Thus far, we’ve been stressing the “problem,” of modernity. We’ve been painting a coherent picture as to why modern man is anxious, unhappy, overworked, and struggling with the existential despair of an existence that feels meaningless.

We must understand and properly diagnose the problem before we can fix it.

Pieper now introduces a solution by invoking a contrast between observation and contemplation:

“Observation is a tense activity; which is what Ernst Junger meant when he called seeing an ‘act of aggression.’

To contemplate, on the other hand, to “look,” in this sense, means to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s vision, and the things seen enter into us, so to speak, without calling for effort or strain on our part to possess them.”

Pieper says modern man is stuck in the strenuous activity of observation, and has forgotten how to contemplate reality.

He then invokes the middle ages, who distincted between ratio and intellectus:

• Ratio is the discursive mind at work (searching, comparison, abstracting, etc.) It’s effortful by nature.

• Intellectus, by contrast, is the mind’s capacity for simple, receptive beholding. It’s what Aquinas called simplex intuitus, a simple gaze that takes in truth the way the eye takes in light, without labor.

Pieper’s argument is that human knowing has always involved both — but modernity has effectively forgotten intellectus exists at all, collapsing all knowing into ratio, into work. To know something, in the modern view, is to have earned it through effort. The idea that truth might simply give itself to a receptive mind sounds, to modern ears, like mysticism at best or laziness at worst.

So the first path to leisure then (and escaping the modern trap of total labor) is to rediscover the lost art of contemplation (intellectus). Such is the practice that places man back into harmony with his own being, and restores his relationship to reality at large.

Next week, we’ll continue this diagnosis by observing the deadly vice of acedia (the key driver of the “modern worker mentality,”) and how we can conquer this vice to make contemplation a norm in our daily lives.

An honest appreciation of the Western intellectual tradition requires a careful inquiry into Church history.

Whether you’re of the faith or not, the Church was the dominant philosophic and theological paradigm of Western Civilization for well over a millennium.

And the best way to understand Church teaching and its influence on civilization is through a careful inquiry into the “Doctors” — the teachers the Church holds up as authoritative.

Here, you’ll find intellectual giants like St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas — whose treatises are among the most influential accounts of God, the human soul, and life’s meaning ever written.

And yet, there’s one particular doctor whose inclusion is surprising at first glance. It was an illiterate, uneducated woman, who strove to live a quiet life of prayer and seclusion.

Instead, she was thrust into the public domain of political life, provided aid to countless souls during the Black Plague, became world-famous for her piety, and even had a personal meeting with Pope Gregory XI — where she helped convince him to relocate the Papal office back to Rome.

This woman was St. Catherine of Siena.

But why was this illiterate woman so celebrated? Why is she venerated by the Church as an equal to the greatest intellectual minds who ever lived?

In short, she understood a truth of the human condition that goes beyond intellectual grandeur. Her life was a living embodiment of spiritual surrender that helps the human soul become what it most truly is — to live a near-perfect life of self-forgetfulness that leads you to find your truest self, and live in harmonious communion with the divine.

Here’s what St. Catherine of Siena taught about the human soul, and how to perfect its orientation to God.

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The Makings of a Saint

St. Catherine was born in 1347, and distinguished herself early by a deep devotion to God and a rich interiority of spirit.

To her parents’ chagrin, she rejected marital arrangements and devoted her life to Christ at 7 years old, following the ways of a lay Dominican.

Her early life followed a strict asceticism of prayer, fasting, and charity. She liked to envision her father as Christ, her mother as Mary, and her brothers as the apostles — humbly serving them — and was quick to give the poor what little food or clothing she had.

Accompanying her piety were frequent visions of Christ which enthralled her into ecstasy. These visions were a constant throughout her life, though Catherine never renounced her worldly affairs, affirming that even an unhealthy attachment to spiritual ecstasy could corrupt the purity of a soul devoted to love.

Contemporaries described her in these states as almost unrecognizable, rigid, radiant, sometimes bearing wounds no one could explain. It’s a strange kind of testimony in which those closest to her didn’t just hear her wisdom, but watched her body strain toward something beyond it.

To the skeptic, this mysticism sounds off-putting, but Catherine’s defenders point to the fruits of her life. She did not appear an unstable mystic; her spirit imbued a peaceful joy that attracted all in her presence. She grew a group of followers devoted to her ministry, who faithfully called her “mama,” for her maternal devotion.

The more Catherine humbled herself, the more the world demanded her counsel:

She indefatigably provided aid amid the Black Plague. She advised the Pope to relocate the papacy from Avignon to Rome. She helped negotiate peace in a war-torn, tumultuous Florentine Republic.

This article isn’t meant to stress the significance of her worldly affairs, but to answer why the leading political and spiritual authorities of her day venerated her as a genuine authority.

What exactly did this illiterate woman know of the human spirit, that even the greatest powers of the day bowed to her wisdom?

The Bridge to God

To appreciate Catherine’s teachings, we have to look at her work.

First, recall that her writings were not systematic like Aquinas. They were dictated to a scribe, and read as affective and experiential: closer to an intense love letter than a logical treatise.

Perhaps the most important metaphor Catherine used to describe her teaching is Christ as the Bridge.

She likens the fallen world to mankind drowning in a river of sin, saved by Christ, who was sent by the Father to be a bridge to beatitude.

The bridge tracks the soul’s ascent to God, and follows 3 steps:

“The feet of the soul, signifying her affection, are the first step, for the feet carry the body as the affection carries the soul…

[The second step] manifests to you the secret of His Heart, because the soul, rising on the steps of her affection, commences to taste the love of His Heart, gazing into that open Heart of My Son, with the eye of the intellect, and finds It consumed with ineffable love…

[Finally] the soul reaches out to the third—that is—to the Mouth, where she finds peace from the terrible war she has been waging with her sin”

Nominally, the 3 steps of the bridge are titled:

1. the feet

2. the side/heart

3. the mouth

But what is the point of this abstract language?

It’s made more clear when we recall St. Catherine’s assertion of the 3 powers of the soul: will, understanding, and memory.

In other words, the bridge can be restated as such:

• The Feet = the human will learning to long for God

• The Side = the maturation of intellect via contemplation of God

• The Mouth = perfection of love by remembering life is a gift freely given by Him

The bridge then, is but the map of the ascent to God via maturation of the three powers of the human soul, perfected by charity.

As she succinctly concludes:

“On the first step, then, lifting her feet from the affections of the earth, the soul strips herself of vice; on the second she fills herself with love and virtue; and on the third she tastes peace”

Most importantly, the bridge is held together by Christ’s blood.

For Catherine, the blood shed on the crucifixion is the pinnacle of charity — a selfless gift for the good of man — and to meditate upon it is to give the soul courage to suffer.

Catherine believed this so fervently that her reported last words were “sangue, sangue” (blood, blood).

The point of the metaphor, it seems, is that the soul ascends to God by persevering in pain and heartbreak for the sake of charity, and that the courage to do so comes from meditating on Christ’s own suffering. Such meditation gives the soul a strength that surpasses understanding, as testified by Catherine’s own life.

The Cell of Self-Knowledge

If the bridge of Christ is the map of ascent, then the Cell of Self Knowledge is Catherine’s tool to perfect the soul’s relationship to the divine.

Surprisingly, it reads as an unwitting maturation of a lesson from Socrates.

Socrates, the wisest man to have ever lived, famously “knew that he knew nothing at all,” and took seriously the Delphic maxim to “know thyself.” Later, in Plato’s Alcibiades I, he asserts that you come to know yourself through knowledge of the soul, and that this is facilitated by gazing into the eyes of a Platonic lover — usually a teacher who selflessly cares for his student.

In other words, self-knowledge in philosophy was reached through a selfless love of two souls united in shared desire for the Good.

Catherine said the same: self-knowledge comes from love.

Here’s the breakdown of her Cell of Self-Knowledge:

1. You cannot love your neighbor until you know yourself, and you cannot know yourself until you look into the mirror of God. When you look at God, you realize you are nothing, and God is everything. God is said to have told her: “I am He Who Is; you are she who is not.”

2. God doesn’t need your love, and so demands you share it with your neighbor instead — as he told Catherine: “I require that you love me with the same love with which I love you. This you cannot do to me... you must give it to your neighbor.”

Notice how self-knowledge again requires gazing into the eyes of a lover. But for Catherine, the true lover is God, and only God’s love gives you true self-knowledge — and only this knowledge of self allows you to fully share love with your neighbor.

This is why the great saints, even humble souls like Mother Teresa, had an indefatigable capacity to love others.

They were not great-souled by their own nature, but through their love of God; their souls overflowed in charity because they sought first the presence of the divine.

As Mother Teresa put it:

“If I didn’t pray to God each day, then my soul would be too poor to help the poor.”

Embodying Sainthood

St. Catherine’s mysticism often sounds off-putting to moderns. We tend to be skeptical of the spiritual life, let alone ecstatic visions of higher realities.

Yet this is precisely why her teaching is valuable to us today. One need not be a believer to discern real truths about the human soul through St. Catherine. She is a living testimony that man cannot live off bread alone.

Not only did she literally abstain from food in her fasting — she nourished her soul with a charity that was desired by all who came into contact with her. Her teachings, then, are not meant to be studied, but practiced.

To begin an active prayer life, and an active service of selfless charity, is to begin contemplating like St. Catherine, to reach a humility so gentle it can move mountains, if not papal offices.

And go check out this amazing project to bring St. Catherine to life in a newly commissioned, life-sized portrait!

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If you want to fully appreciate the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s literary genius, then the Fall of Numenor is a must-read.

The work appears in The Silmarillion, following the collapse of the greatest human civilization to ever appear in Middle Earth. This story not only provides you with the rich history of Middle Earth, but functions as a meditation on human nature, politics, and empire.

In the collapse of Numenor is a warning of how all great civilizations begin to die and collapse, and it’s not for the primary reasons you’d suspect.

Tolkien suggests that civilizations rarely collapse because they become hegemonically weak. More often, they collapse after becoming so powerful that they forget who they are — and begin striving to attain that which man by nature was never meant to possess.

So the Fall of Numenor becomes an invaluable story to grasp the rise and fall of human empire, the nature of man, and how the fate of civilizations ultimately depends upon the souls of the men who lead them.

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A Gift from the Divine

Numenor’s history begins thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings takes place.

In the height of the second age, the Valar (angels) gifted the island kingdom of Numenor to the descendants of men who fought nobly against the Dark Lord Morgoth. It proved to be a prosperous kingdom, benefiting from its fertile land, merchants, and ample trade routes.

Through commerce and maritime technology, it became a powerful empire, its people beloved by God and the Valar. There was only one rule placed on their kingdom — they could never sail west to the Undying Lands of immortality.

At first glance, the command seems almost arbitrary. Why would the Valar deny such a blessed people an even greater blessing?

Through this command, Tolkien is highlighting a classic piece of wisdom in antiquity: every created being has its proper limits. One of the greatest temptations mankind must conquer is the temptation to reject his nature and strive beyond divinely ordained limitations (think the Garden of Eden).

Nonetheless, the Numenorians seem to have a good deal — a rich kingdom that enjoys peace, long life, and ample prosperity beyond all desire… but unfortunately, human desire proves insatiable.

As generations passed, the Numenorians grew forgetful of their favor with the Valar. They began to resent their inability to sail West, wondering why they need be inferior to the divine.

This becomes the first crack in civilizational collapse — a cultural amnesia that results in impiety and ignorance of one’s roots. A civilization begins to decay the moment its people forget that their greatest blessings were first received as gifts.

For the now restless Numenorians, they adopt a new strategy to console their discontent — endless expansion.

The Rise of Empire

Rather than sail West, the Numenorians expanded East into Middle Earth.

They became a maritime empire, and amassed their army to colonize other peoples under their rule. In fact, they were so powerful that the Dark Lord Sauron himself, upon seeing the Numenorian army, surrendered without conflict.

This could have been the Numenorian’s crowning glory — to permanently defeat the evil war lord who later became the main antagonist of LOTR. Instead, however, the Numenorians committed a grave folly:

They brought Sauron back to their empire as a prisoner.

This might sound merciful at first, but strange things started happening. Reportedly, King Ar-Pharazon began having dialogues with Sauron. Not much later, Sauron was allowed reprieve from his prison cell — touring the castle on house arrest. In due time, he became the King’s primary advisor.

Why did Sauron become so valuable?

He knew the King’s greatest fears — and the fears of the Numenorian people — that they were going to die. He discovered their desires to sail west to the undying lands of Valinor, where immortal life could be grasped.

Notice then that Sauron’s most devilish vice was not raw power, but deceit. He was able to corrupt his listeners by twisting natural fears or desires, while tempting mankind with transgressive counsel that validated their vicious desires.

In fact, Sauron promised that all their desires could be satiated, including immortality, if they did but one practice:

Worship the Dark Lord Morgoth.

A temple was then constructed in his name. The old religious order — faithful to Eru (God) and the Valar — was persecuted. Traditional temples, rites, and relics were shattered. Morbid new religious practices were put in place. It’s said that even human sacrifice became a norm in the temple of Morgoth.

At first glance, this appears like the moment Númenor falls. It reasonably cannot get worse than blasphemy, idolatry, devil worship, and human sacrifice.

Yet Tolkien reconciles this idolatry as a symptom of Numenor’s ills, rather than a root cause. Long before the devil worship changed, the hearts of the people had already grown rebellious in spirit, yearning for power, longevity, and even immortality.

As such, the worst of their evils has yet to come.

Sauron would trick Ar-Pharazon into committing the one unforgivable transgression against the divine. A crime that would result in not just the destruction of Numenor, but a permanent cataclysm that would forever mar the lands of Middle Earth.

Here’s what happened…

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Of all the great thinkers in the Western Canon, the ancient historian Thucydides is perhaps the most wrongfully overlooked.

It’s understandable why. He’s considered a founder of political realism — the “Machiavelli” of Ancient Greece — with a relentlessly pessimistic account of human nature. For Thucydides, war is the great revealer of mankind, stripping away the comforts of peace and exposing what men become when fear, honor, and self-interest rule.

And nowhere is this assertion made more clear than in the infamous Melian Dialogue.

It’s one of the most brutal episodes in all of ancient history, in which a small Greek colony begs for its life against a colonizing empire. Yet this dialogue’s value lies precisely in its darkness. To understand the Melian Dialogue is to confront the greatest tragedies of a fallen world, and to ask whether your own beliefs about justice, morality, and God can withstand them.

For that reason, Thucydides’s value transcends that of an ordinary historian. He’s the ultimate moral testing ground. Any philosophy or religion that claims to explain the human condition must first survive contact with him.

Here, then, is the dark account of the Melian Dialogue, and the timeless truths it reveals about the human condition.

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A Possession for All Time

The Melian dialogue is recorded in Thucydides’ Histories (Inquiries) into the Peloponnesian War.

Before we get to the dialogue itself, let’s recap some of the key arguments Thucydides asserts in his work.

First off, he has a concise account of human nature, positing that mankind is motivated by three forces:

1. Fear

2. Honor

3. Self-interest

He says the most honest account of human nature is to analyze what scares him, what feeds his ability to be honored and celebrated, and what practically motivates him for gain. When compared to the tradition of natural law, this is arguably a reductive account of human nature — but its simplicity is crucial to understanding Thucydides’ genius.

That’s because his next claim is easily as powerful as it is controversial:

“War is a rough teacher that brings most men’s characters down to the level of their fortunes.”

He claims this is a universal truth of the human condition. Namely, wartime reveals the human condition most clearly, because it strips away the excesses and decadence of civilized man in times of peace, and shows you what remains in life or death situations.

And the grim reality of what remains is made most clear in the Melian dialogue itself.

A Dark Debate

The Melian dialogue takes place between Melos and Athens. The former is a small civilization — allied with Sparta, but who wants to remain neutral in the war.

Athens is a superpower who demands Melian loyalty. They approach the small colony with a simple ultimatum:

“Ally with us, or die.”

Athens asserts neutrality is not an option, for they cannot risk appearing weak to their allies whose loyalty they rely on. They reason that peace is mutually beneficial:

Athens gets a tax-paying ally

Melos maintains its livelihood

Nonetheless, the Melians sue for peace. They refuse to ally, but appeal to argument and reason to avoid war. Their arguments can be summed up in four points:

1. You can’t sack us, for that would be unjust in the eyes of man

2. You can’t sack us, for that would be unjust in the eyes of the gods

3. Imagine what the world would think of your atrocities?

4. Sparta is our ally, they’ll save us

Athens’ rebuttals to these points are simple. They infamously assert:

“The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.”

In other words, Athens is free to sack Melos on the account of their strength, because this is how the world works. The human sense of justice is meaningless in the face of force. The opinions of the world don’t matter either — for they are powerless to stop Athens. Sparta won’t come to save Melos either, for it’s not in their self-interest to do so.

And to give the Athenians credit, they were proven correct on all accounts above. Yet their most chilling rebuttal is their account of divine justice:

“Neither our pretensions nor our conduct are in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.

And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.”

The Athenians assert it’s moral to sack Melos if they choose to, for they’re merely following the behavior of the gods, who rule as the strong do. In other words, the Athenians state that war reveals what justice truly is — not a virtue ensuring equality and protection to humans, but the normative right of all beings to assert dominance and take what they wish by force.

It’s not too dissimilar to the account of nature as that espoused by Hobbes — that the natural world is ultimately a war of “all against all.”

This final assertion effectively ends the debate of the Melian dialogue.

Melos chooses to fight rather than surrender, and Athens obliges.

What follows is the darkest episode in Thucydides’ writings — but also the reason the Melian Dialogue has endured for over two thousand years. To confront its conclusion is to learn how to stare into the abyss of human evil without surrendering your own humanity…

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Homeric vengeance is the biggest obstacle modern readers face in truly understanding Homer. The Iliad gets written off as antiquated slaughter from immature warriors; the Odyssey, as a poem glorifying “eye for an eye” bloodshed.

It’s understandable — the violence is jarring. But the uncomfortable reality is that it’s precisely Homer’s moments of vengeance that have offered humanity its greatest wisdom: what it means to be civilized, and how to move beyond bloodshed to actually preserve civilization.

This is because Homer’s moments of slaughter are rarely aimless, rather they’re often pedagogical and teach us a greater truth.

This is perhaps made nowhere more clear than in Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors. His epic killing spree goes far beyond personal vengeance, rather it’s Homer’s ultimate meditation on the genealogy of legitimate authority.

To say it more bluntly — to fully appreciate why Odysseus slaughters the suitors is to understand the framework that makes human civilization possible itself in the first place. In fact, you can even argue that Odysseus himself is the mythic archetype for the virtuous statesmanship that builds and maintains civilization.

Here’s how…

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An Unhappy Homecoming

When most readers think of the Odyssey, they imagine the famous beasts, islands, and adventures at sea, as Odysseus makes his way home.

In reality though, this poem isn’t so much about “returning home,” as it is “returning order to home.”

In fact, almost the entire second half of the poem follows Odysseus’ trials on Ithaca, as he attempts to overthrow the suitors.

Recall that the suitors — 108 young men — have been betraying the divine law of xenia (guest-host friendship) to plunder Odysseus’ wealth and attempt to marry his wife.

Thus there’s 3 levels of interpreting the Odyssey’s meaning:

1. A revenge story against suitors

2. Odysseus as protector of xenia — a man preserving the divinely sanctioned order of human affairs

3. Odysseus as the mythic archetype of judge and lawgiver, who builds civilization itself

It’s this third layer that asks our focus today.

Restoring Order to Home

Now before we get to the slaughter, let’s remind ourselves of the need for the slaughter.

The earliest books of the Odyssey showcase the suitors abusing Odysseus’ household, while his son Telemachus denounces them in vain.

How did such tyrannical young men overrun the household of their king?

Recall that Ithaca actually had laws, an assembly, and democratic-esque forms of structure in place. The problem is — there were no strong men to enforce these laws. All the strong men went off to fight at Troy. After 20 years of their absence, what remained were the now full grown suitors, and old men too weak to stop them.

This is the core truth of all politics — that force is the fundamental law of nature that precedes even justice itself. A set of perfectly just laws cannot stand a tyranny of unjust men. Thus, though justice is greater than force, the problem of force must be answered before justice can be established.

This later becomes Plato’s greatest concern. He recognizes that justice is far superior to force, and explicitly rejects the notion that “might makes right,” but he still has to address the problem of force.

For instance, The Republic asks “what is justice?” but in Book 2, before he even attempts a definition, he asks an even earlier question:

“Who’s going to police the police?”

All civilizations need strong men to protect them from invaders, but the polis must also protect themselves against these men who monopolize force.

This is the first step that makes Odysseus an ideal statesman — his return makes him the first threat to tyranny, because he’s an actual threat.

However, we’ll see it takes far more than brawn to save a household, let alone a kingdom…

Mending the Soul

Right now, it’s still not obvious how Odysseus dons the role of a mythic statesman.

After all, on the surface, all he does is come home and murder a bunch of criminals. Maybe the slaughter is justified, but it still appears barbaric.

The first detail we need to remember, then, is that Odysseus’ slaughter brings order to his household:

He reunites his family, purges the immoral, and rewards the loyal. A quick reminder of Aristotle’s politics helps us appreciate the significance of, “getting your house in order,”:

In his Politics, Aristotle explicitly argues that the household (Oikos) is the foundational microcosm of the city (Polis).

Odysseus is King of Ithaca, and yet true statesmanship begins with ordering his household right. The idea is, if you want to rule a kingdom, first rule your house.

And yet, Homer’s wisdom goes even deeper:

The first half of the poem — Odysseus’ journey home — requires him to first bring order to his soul.

When he left Troy, he was proud and arrogant. Though already wealthy from the war, he took to pirating and plundering neighboring islands. His faceoff with the cyclops also revealed his imprudence and pride — when he shouted his name in victory, which brought Poseidon’s wrath on Odysseus’ voyage.

In short, for the hero to come home, his soul had to be properly ordered. This doesn’t happen until Book 11 — when the gods call him to the House of the Dead. Here, he sees his deceased mother, brothers in arms, and all the past heroes of Greek mythology. It’s this disillusionment that makes Odysseus virtuous — allowing him to shirk his excessive love of glory and earnestly yearn to return home.

Thus, his 10 years of toil, heartbreak, and long suffering at sea gave him a wisdom and self-restraint that later proved necessary to conquering the suitors.

So to return order to Ithaca, Odysseus had to return order to his house, and to return order to his house he had to impose order on his soul.

This detail becomes the running theme of classical statesmanship — you cannot rule a kingdom, or even a family, well until you learn to rule yourself.

Pious Odysseus

The final piece of Odysseus’ statesmanship is his piety.

His slaughter isn’t just a personal vengeance, but the will of the gods. Recall that Athena is his protector, and primary helper in the slaughter, and that Zeus himself gives a divinely sanctioned sign right before the slaughter takes place.

The point is that Odysseus was not just strong, nor wise in his own eyes, but an executor of divine justice. His vengeance was truly just because it was not rooted in his opinion, but the authoritative decree of the divine.

This last point is not merely mythic, but necessary in history:

• Minos, the legendary lawgiver of Crete, reportedly sought Zeus for his laws

• Lycurgus, the historic lawgiver of Sparta, first sought the Oracle of Delphi

• Plato, in his laws, says the lawgiver’s laws reflect divine realities (and said atheism is a crime against human civilization as such)

Odysseus’ slaughter then, was ultimately venerated because he was protecting the divine law of xenia — making himself a friend of the gods who imposed order on reality.

The Mythic Statesman

The running theme of all these great thinkers and statesmen — from Homer, to Lycurgus, to Aristotle — is that the true statesmen is called to be a “conduit of Zeus.”

Odysseus himself is the mythic story that dramatizes the process.

The Trojan War made him virtuous in brawn, but it was his long suffering that ordered his soul to wisdom. The wise and shifty mind of Odysseus, complimented by his sheer strength, allowed a slaughter that was not so much blind vengeance as a protector of divine law (xenia) that restored order to his house and kingdom.

So too are all called to follow in his path — whether that’s restoring order to a kingdom or household alike. True statesmanship is not made possible through brute strength, or masterminding the perfect system of rationally constructed laws, but is made possible through a life long pursuit of virtue.

A well ordered soul can bring goodness out of a tyranny (Odysseus is proof), but a tyrant can only bring destruction to even the most prosperous of kingdoms. The art of statesmanship then, is but the art of living — for you cannot rule others well if you cannot rule yourself — and one who lives enslaved to their passions is anything but free.

The life of true rule then, is but the life of virtue.

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Pericles’ Funeral Oration is amongst the greatest, and perhaps most overlooked, speeches in human history.

It was delivered on the eve of the Peloppensian War — right before Athens and Sparta would engage in a grueling, bloody, decades long conflict for dominance over the Mediterranean.

But this speech’s relevance amounts to much more than a mere motivating war cry. In totality, it’s a revolutionary dialogue that reveals an important truth about human nature, and what happens when mankind tries to deify politics in place of the divine.

In short, what happens to mankind when politics becomes the new religion?

What follows, then, is a timeless warning: that the worship of the state leads ultimately to the destruction of the polis, and that Pericles’ speech even gestures toward an ancient warning first found in Scripture itself.

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In Praise of Greatness

Pericles’ Funeral Oration is distinct in that he gives an emphatic praise of the city of Athens itself.

Recall first, that the Athenian culture is in stark contrast to Sparta. The Spartans were a militant, pious, traditional people who celebrated action, warfare, and courage above all. The Athenians, by contrast, were democratic, cultured, and philosophic.

In a sense, this war was a conflict of word (logos) vs deed (ergon). The mindful Athenians vs the muscular Spartans.

Pericles then, praises Athens’ brilliance in mind:

“Our strength lies… in that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection.”

This “mind,” is not just a reference to philosophy, education, and culture — but technology too. Athens had a dominant navy and scientific culture. Their technical mastery is what enabled them to have a strong navy, become a maritime powerhouse, and expand their empire throughout the Mediterranean.

In fact, Pericles even goes on to call Athens the “school of Hellas,” or the cultural, intellectual hub of all Greece. And if you think that sounds prideful, it’s just the beginning.

Pericles’ most jarring claim is what follows:

“We shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valor, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity.”

This rejection of Homer could not be more radical. Recall that in Athens, for centuries, Homer was the poet who grounded all education. The meaning of life in Ancient Greece was about seeking immortal glory (kleos) through honorable deeds in which poets could deify your name.

Now Pericles says, “we don’t need Homer anymore, Athens shall be our immortal glory.”

In other words, he has deified the polis. Politics is the new religion, for Athenians can be assured of immortality by expansion, servitude, and exaltation of their empire.

And believe it or not, Pericles was proven correct.

The Athenian Golden Age

This might sound strange at first — the oldest warning in literature is do not worship earthly things. Piety is giving due reverence to the gods, and the worship of worldly things is idolatry.

Yet, one has to give Pericles his due:

Athens was amongst the highest, greatest, and most cultivated civilizations in human history at the time, and it came precisely due to civic pride in their own polis.

Recall Pericles’ days were the historic golden age of Athens. It was this precise era of polis worship that birthed the likes of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, along with the legendary tragedians of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comic playwright Aristophanes.

Beyond the arts — science and mathematics saw expansion through the likes of the Pythagoreans and later Aristotle — and Athens was made incredibly wealthy through its navy and expansion.

In other words, one of the greatest, most beautiful, and intellectually sophisticated civilizations to have ever existed in history, was a civilization birthed out of a civic pride that deified its own political and empire-centric ambitions.

And yet, Athens’ history is more than a two-dimensional celebration of glory.

Its greatness carried within it the principle of its own undoing. The city did not fall by chance, but according to a pattern older than history itself — a pattern first articulated in the opening pages of Scripture.

What follows is that pattern, and how it came to be fulfilled in the fall of the greatest civilization of early antiquity.

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The greatest disaster to befall Modern Civilization was the persecution of the common man.

Chesterton articulates this in his essay aptly titled… The Common Man.

He laments the worst feature of modernity is not its tendencies to chastise tradition, celebrate taboos, or embrace libertine freedom — rather he says it’s our contempt for the ordinary.

Specifically, we’ve not just become apathetic to truth, beauty, and tradition, but we’ve learned a direct contempt for the smallest, ordinary citizens of our country — the common man.

Today then, we’ll see what makes someone a “common man,” why that common man is under attack, and why the common man lifestyle ought to be protected at all costs.

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Uncommon Emancipation

Chesterton begins his essay with commentary on modern emancipation — or freedom from traditional morals and norms.

His thesis is blunt:

“Modern emancipation has really been a new persecution of the Common Man. If it has emancipated anybody, it has in rather special and narrow ways emancipated the Uncommon Man. It has given an eccentric sort of liberty to some of the hobbies of the wealthy, and occasionally to some of the more humane lunacies of the cultured. The only thing that it has forbidden is common sense, as it would have been understood by the common people.”

In short — modern emancipation oppresses the common man.

Before we explain his reasoning, let’s briefly define the common man.

Chesterton says he’s your average working class citizen with normative desires:

• Work an honest job

• Enjoy leisure with friends

• Get married and start a family

Conversely, modern emancipation is not about maximizing the freedom of the common man, rather a celebration of the transgressive and taboo. This traces back to the logic of classical liberalism — which states that the individual is the ultimate reality, and the highest good in life is autonomy.

The golden rule of liberalism as practiced today is, “don’t impede my freedom, and I won’t impede yours.”

This sounds fine on the surface — but how exactly does this oppress the common man?

Well, if autonomy is the highest good, then modernity rejects any values that constrain it — like classical conceptions of morality, truth, and justice.

If the pre-modern view said man is a social animal who is happiest when he has a family — and is both a valued and valuable member of a society — the modern view says such ideas were falsehoods. True happiness is simply the authenticity of embracing your passions and whims — whatever they may be.

We can now further appreciate Chesterton’s defense of the common man:

The problem is not that modern civilization has abolished the common man’s life. The problem is that modernity has abolished all the cultural honor from it. The ordinary desires of the common man — work, marriage, children, friendship, stable community — are no longer the central paradigm for a happy life. Instead, we celebrate the taboo, the transgressive, and the new… anything that exalts the expression of the individual.

Now, we need to get a deeper understanding of the war on the common man.

Freedom No One Asked For

Chesterton goes on to express how modern emancipation persecutes the common man. He lists off 3 examples of oppressive modern freedoms:

“if we begin with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find that a man really has become more free to found a sect. But the Common Man does not in the least want to found a sect. He is much more likely, for instance, to want to found a family.”

“[today] the form of freedom mostly claimed is the freedom of the Press… Modern emancipation means this: that anybody who can afford it can publish a newspaper. But the Common Man would not want to publish a newspaper, even if he could afford it. He might want, for instance, to go on talking politics in a pothouse or the parlour of an inn.”

“it is the boast of recent emancipated ethics and politics not to put any great restraints upon anybody who wants to publish a book… Yet there is a great deal to be said for song, or even speech, of the old ribald sort, as compared with writing of the new sort”

To summarize:

1. Man is free to found a sect, but would rather found a family (discouraged today via Malthusianism/anti-natalist rhetoric)

2. Man is free to publish a newspaper, but would rather talk politics at the inn (discouraged by “old democracies,” and “new dictatorships…” or hate speech laws as we know them today)

3. Man is free to write a coarse book, but can be arrested for singing a coarse song

The trend is simple — freedoms that nobody wants are imposed on the Common Man, while freedoms the ordinary people want are restricted.

Thus we see that the Common Man is actually under attack by the Uncommon Man.

And that’s because there’s a malicious force at work against him…

In Defense of the Ordinary

If a single word defined the Uncommon Man, it would be contempt:

“It is quite certain that many modern thinkers and writers honestly feel a contempt for the Common Man; it is also quite certain that I myself feel a contempt for those who feel this contempt”

Out of this contempt for the common man arises globalism, and a growing desire for a strong centralized government to rule the masses. The common belief is the experts, the educated, and the elites know better than the common man.

Yet Chesterton muses that this ideology is disastrous:

“It is easy enough to say the cultured man should be the crowd’s guide, philosopher and friend. Unfortunately, he has nearly always been a misguiding guide, a false friend and a very shallow philosopher. And the actual catastrophes we have suffered… are almost invariably due to the highly theoretical people who knew that they knew everything.

The world may learn by its mistakes; but they are mostly the mistakes of the learned.”

What’s implied by Chesterton is this love of autonomy runs breeds a corresponding hatred of classical freedom — the flourishing that arises from loving truth. The celebration of autonomy is the condemnation of virtue. The embracement of tolerance is the intolerance to the orthodox:

Man is free to be anything but a Common Man.

And yet, Chesterton maintains a firm admiration for the Common Man:

“I do not adore him, but I do believe in him; at least I believe in him much more than I believe in them.”

This belief is not an all-out celebration of the Common Man. It’s not that ordinary citizens are bastions of virtue, or the heroes against the “evil, high-cultured,” Uncommon Elites. He simply recognizes that the simplicity of the Common Man makes them the guard rails of human nature.

Whereas modern emancipation seems eager to embrace a progress that emancipates us from our human nature itself, the simplicity of the Common Man’s desires becomes the torch bearer of humanity — that man is a social animal whose nature is perfected via communion, civic duty, faith, and familial love.

For indeed, “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

Perhaps, then, the Common Man is civilization's last and best defense — not because he’s virtuous by default, but because he still wants the ordinary things that are actually worth wanting. To honor him then, does not require a grand political project (as espoused by our Uncommon ideals of today).

Instead, the proper honor is done through simplicity:

The simplicity of choosing the honest job, the family dinner, the Sunday at church, and the contented satisfaction of wanting nothing more.

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