The Leviathan is one of the most infamous symbols in the history of Western civilization.

It inspired Moby-Dick — the greatest American novel ever written.

It’s the namesake to The Leviathan, the magnum opus of Thomas Hobbes, which helped birth liberalism and the modern political order.

And perhaps most famously, The Leviathan is central to the Book of Job in scripture, where God invokes it to confront the problem of evil, suffering, and death itself.

But what, exactly, is the Leviathan? Where did it come from, what does it represent, and why does its image impress itself so deeply upon the human mind across history?

Believe it or not, this beast is more than a mythological figure — it’s an archetype marking the limits of human nature. It suggests that the good life requires recognizing and confronting the monsters in your life.

To understand the Leviathan is to learn the wisdom to live well. To neglect it is to spell out ruin, for not just yourself, but even society at large. Here’s why.

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Beast of the Sea

As stated, the Leviathan’s origins begin in the Book of Job.

Recall that Job was an innocent man, and God allowed Satan to torment him as a test of faith. Job loses his family and livestock, and is struck with severe illness. He maintains his faith, but after months of suffering, he cries out to God in anger, demanding an account of his affliction.

God answers Job’s questions with questions:

Where were you when I created the world? The sun? The stars? The oceans of the deep?

And it is here that God invokes Leviathan:

“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook

or tie down its tongue with a rope?

Can you put a cord through its nose

or pierce its jaw with a hook?”

Leviathan was understood as a vast, serpent-like sea beast. Its origins likely draw from a range of sources — Near Eastern mythologies, and perhaps real encounters with massive sea creatures — but its literal existence is not an essential topic here.

What matters is why God invokes Leviathan as an answer to the problem of evil.

God continues:

“Any hope of subduing it is false;

the mere sight of it is overwhelming.

No one is fierce enough to rouse it.

Who then is able to stand against me?

Who has a claim against me that I must pay?

Everything under heaven belongs to me.”

The point is that man has neither the physical power nor the intellectual capacity to master or comprehend Leviathan.

In other words, Leviathan stands as a symbol of both the forces of nature, and the realities in the universe beyond human control. Man is a finite and temporal creature, created by an infinite being who transcends the cosmos itself.

Such a creature cannot fully grasp the justice, intelligence, or goodness of the infinite. Wisdom, then, consists in recognizing these limits, and entrusting oneself to the Good beyond comprehension.

This is not only wisdom, but the ground of faith — the kind that endures suffering and affirms the grandeur of existence.

Seen in this light, Leviathan is not simply an evil beast, but a symbol of chaos that calls man to humility… but it’s also a warning.

If you do not fear the Leviathan, it will destroy you.

The War on God

If Job represents humility before Leviathan, Captain Ahab represents its opposite.

The novel Moby-Dick follows Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest to destroy Moby Dick — the great white whale who took his leg.

This novel is rife with Biblical allusions, and the whale itself represents The Leviathan.

Ahab’s reaction to his first near death experience is not gratitude, but vengeance:

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!”

Ahab doesn’t see the whale as a force of God’s creation to be respected. Instead it’s an object of hatred. His war on the whale then, is actually a war against nature, reality, and even God itself.

Narrator Ishmael has an interesting musing before Ahab’s ultimate showdown with the whale. His thoughts sound as if he were God warning Job himself about Leviathan:

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”

Just as God told Job he cannot reel in Leviathan, so does Ishmael assert that Ahab cannot slay Moby Dick.

He recognizes the limits of human nature, and learns humility for underneath God.

Captain Ahab does not. His war against Moby Dick becomes an explicit war on God:

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Ahab scoffs at God, because he wants to become his own God. Rather than find harmony in the world order, he wants to create his own world order.

And so Leviathan now emerges as a symbol of self-knowledge — the limits of human nature — which Ahab himself scoffs at. Sadly, history does not look kindly upon men who scoff at their limits, seeking to be like gods…

And yet the significance of the Leviathan does not end there.

Thomas Hobbes looked into the eyes of Leviathan and drew a radically different conclusion.

Essentially, he asked:

What if man was not meant to humble himself before chaos, but conquer it? What if man’s safety required the creation of an earthly god? What if man is not meant to seek Heaven, but create it on Earth?

These are core ideas of Hobbes’s Leviathan — a vision of politics that would redefine human nature, reshape the purpose of government, and lay the foundations of the modern political order we inhabit today.

And yet, if Hobbes is mistaken, then mankind has not tamed the Leviathan, but created a new one.

The Leviathan of old represented unmoored chaos. Hobbes’s Leviathan represents totalitarian order — centralized power and the imposition of order upon mankind.

This New Leviathan is far more dangerous than the old, and risks spelling out the ruin of civilization itself.

Here’s why, and what you can do about it.

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Reading the Great Books is one of the most important things you can do for your soul.

But how can you justify reading in a time of crisis?

How can you read Homer when the world may not last another decade?

Today, the world remains embroiled in major global conflict, trust in institutions continues to collapse, and America in appears to be tearing apart by the seams.

This language may sound alarmist, but I want to steelman the issue:

If we imagined that the threat of nuclear armageddon was around the corner, how could we possibly justify reading Homer, Plato, and Cicero? Why read Aristotle if we all might die?

Shouldn’t we solve the global crises before we turn to literature and leisure?

Such an objection is understandable, but could not be more mistaken.

The belief that the Great Books are meant for leisure, escapism, and peacetime is flat out wrong. In fact, the Great Books are one of the last resources we have at our disposal to save society from outright collapse.

But don’t take my word for it — listen to CS Lewis, who gave an entire lecture on why it’s imperative that you read in times of war.

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Learning in Wartime

CS Lewis addressed this issue in a sermon called “Learning in Wartime,” addressed to university students (but applicable to all).

He gave this speech in the middle of World War 2, at a time when Germans were dropping bombs on London.

Despite the threat of instant death, Lewis exhorted the students to continue studying:

“You will be expected to make yourselves into philosophers, scholars, critics, or historians. At first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task you have so little use of finishing?”

So how do you answer this objection to study?

Lewis first draws our attention to the fact that the “unprecedented times,” of WW2 are really not that unprecedented.

The belief that studying is solely meant for a time of peace is a false illusion due to modern comforts:

“The war creates absolutely no new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent situation…

If men had postponed the knowledge for search and beauty until they were secure, the search would have never begun.”

Lewis’ point is that — though war is tragic — it’s not unnormal. In fact, war is one of the most basic realities of existence.

• The Western Canon begins with the Iliad, a book of war.

• In scripture, Cain and Abel — the first humans of natural birth — is a story of fratricide.

Civilization then, was not built by scholars in times of peace. It was built by brave souls who sought beauty and goodness in times of war.

Yet this is only half the picture.

Not only does Lewis say you’re justified in studying in times of war, he warns that abandonment of that study leads to grave consequences.

Civilization is a Fragile Thing

Lewis next points out that culture is never neutral.

You’re either seeking goodness and beauty — and building a beautiful culture — or sliding into a worse culture by default:

“If you suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better:

If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones.

If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally.

If you reject aesthetic satisfactions, you will fall into sensual satisfactions”

To abandon culture for power is to win the war and lose the civilization. To subordinate Truth, Beauty, and Goodness beneath power is to merely mirror the brutalities of a marred, corrupted, and fallen world.

Taking the Offensive

This is not to say that Lewis wants us to ignore politics and war altogether.

This too would be an error. Rather, he stresses that the gap between “reality,” and “the intellectual life,” is a false dichotomy:

“There is no essential quarrel between the spiritual life and the human activities as such.”

His point, to be blunt, is if you were called to the front lines of war, make sure you enter those front lines with a sincere love of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness… or God.

In fact, he suggests the intellectual life is itself a form of resistance:

“To be ignorant and simple now — not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground — would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen…

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

Culture is most fragile when at war, and therefore, is in most need of literate, well-read, and virtuous souls precisely when life appears at its bleakest.

To insist on truth and beauty in such times is itself a form of spiritual resistance.

No Time Like The Present

And now, at this point, only one objection remains.

What if it’s too late for me?

What if I’m too old? What if I die next week? What difference does it make?

Lewis says, “too late,” is an illusion. The most wise thing you can do, in this moment, is begin (or persevere) in your studies:

“Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly, and works from moment to moment ‘as to the Lord.’

It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

As such, it’s your obligation to make every moment as True, Beautiful, or Good as can be done. This includes the duties you owe work, friends, and family — and the duties to be ever active in contemplation of God and his glories (including study).

Lewis’ concluding words in his sermon, then, are fitting to share here:

“The life of learning, humbly offered to God,is, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter.”

Do not be afraid to make time to study.

God may demand it, just as your soul yearns for it… and you can rest assured that such studies play their part in reshaping your culture, your soul, and the plans of Providence who rules over all.

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Real education is not what you think it is. In fact, most people have never received one.

Today we think of education as a litany of scattered disciplines that you study for careerism and social mobility.

Math is for engineers
Medicine is for doctors
Science is for biologists
Humanities are for poor people (it’s okay, I was an English Major!)

The philosophy of modern education is to pick a discipline, stay in your lane, graduate, and begin your career. But this is not what education is at all… For most of history, education was meant to set you free.

A classical education taught you the seven liberal arts so that your soul could be liberated — freed from confusion and vice, ordered toward wisdom, and capable of living a meaningful life.

So what did that education actually look like?
And how could it make you free?

Today we’ll look to recapture the wisdom of a classical education, and learn how to give ourselves the true education that we never had.

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The 7 Liberal Arts

I’ve written in depth on the 7 liberal arts before, but I’ll briefly recap below.

The seven liberal arts were divided into two groups:

The Trivium — Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric
The Quadrivium — Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy

Your education would begin with the Trivium:

Grammar teaches you how to read and speak
Logic teaches you how to think
Rhetoric teaches you how to express truth persuasively

Once you could think, speak, and articulate yourself clearly, you moved to the Quadrivium:

Arithmetic — number in itself
Geometry — number in space
Music — number in time
Astronomy — number in space and time

Why the emphasis on numbers? Because the Quadrivium is about training you to see order in reality itself. You learn that nature has an intelligent design, and that you are connected to it:

You belong in the cosmos.

Despite this outline, however, it’s not yet obvious how this education is distinct from modern education. All of these disciplines, in some form, still exist today.

The difference of a true liberal arts education, however, is not simply what you study, but why you study it.

It’s All Connected

In a nutshell, a classical liberal arts education taught you how to find God.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be strictly religious to receive a true education, but if you make God — the Ultimate, Transcendent Good — the end point of all education, it changes everything.

If your education is grounded in God, then the entirety of your education serves the same end: Goodness itself.

In other words, your education is no longer a set of scattered, independent disciplines. Instead, it becomes a deeply interconnected moral pursuit, teaching you to be attuned with truth, beauty, and goodness.

This interconnectedness is why the 7 liberal arts are presented as a wheel.

A true education is an encyclopedia, which literally means, “a circle of learning.”

Such an education assumes three key ideas:

Knowledge is ordered toward unity
The mind must be formed to perceive that unity
Learning is a returning motion — you circle back to older ideas, seeing more deeply each time

So in totality, education is about learning to be in harmony with reality — and more than that, it’s about transforming your soul itself.

This might sound strange, but let’s turn to symbolism to explain.

Have you noticed that the symbol of the 7 liberal arts looks strikingly similar to the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals?

That’s not a coincidence. Rose windows are a symbol of Heaven. This implies reality is designed off their pattern… and this same circular pattern is the symbol of classical education in the liberal arts.

The implication is that the liberal arts liberate your soul by forming you according to the pattern of heaven itself.

Education, then, is preparation for eternity.

But how do you actually see this? How do you study in such a way that you’re not just learning knowledge, but learning to mirror the structure of Paradise itself?

Dante Alighieri answers that question in the Paradiso.

He reveals the connection between the liberal arts, the rose, and the final destiny of the human soul:

A life brought into perfect alignment with the divine, and how you can reach it yourself.

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Hemingway was the first great writer to diagnose the spiritual destruction of the Lost Generation.

As a World War I veteran himself, he knew firsthand how trench warfare murdered and traumatized millions, gutting the heart and soul of modern European civilization. The result was the abandonment of God, morality, and meaning.

Hemingway captures this bleak reality in his debut novel The Sun Also Rises. Through protagonist Jake Barnes, he reveals the spiritual malaise of modernity — and why men, in particular, have remained dejected, abandoned, and restless to this day.

Here’s what the story reveals about the Lost Generation, manhood, and what a path back to virtue might look like.

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Broken-Hearted

On the surface, the Sun Also Rises is a story of romance between Jake and his love interest Lady Brett Ashley.

They share a mutual affection, but there’s two problems hindering their romance:

1. Jake is made impotent from the war

2. Lady Brett Ashley lost her first love at war, and heartbroken, now refuses to settle with any man

The plot itself seems insignificant — it follows Jake, Brett, and their friends who aimlessly wander Europe, drinking and partying without purpose. Yet what first seems to be a superficial story of failed romance, actually becomes a brilliant social commentary on a closer read.

As “shallow” as the plot may appear, it’s not a celebration of party life. In fact, it becomes clear that every character we encounter is heartbroken, numbing an unbearable pain they do not understand.

Jake, for instance, spends most nights alone, in tears over Brett, longing for her comfort.

Brett, meanwhile, spends no nights alone — unable to bear solitude, silence, or even herself.

Yet while both Jake and Brett are miserable in solitude, we soon realize that—contrary to popular tales—romance is not the answer. They suffer from a deeper illness that not even marriage can cure.

A Reluctant Soul

Throughout Jake’s many nights of drinking, a strange motif emerges in the novel:

His lukewarm Catholicism.

There are no substantive theological discussions, but Jake often laments in passing that he’s a lousy Catholic — yet a Catholic nonetheless.

In his own words:

“The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling people. Good advice, anyway. Oh it was swell advice. [I should] try and take it sometime.”

This pattern — admiring Catholicism while failing to practice it — reveals that Jake’s true illness is not romantic loneliness, but spiritual malaise.

Jake’s physical “impotence,” which prevents his romance with Brett, is a sign of a deeper spiritual impotence — one that prevents him from a true union with God (Christians are, after all, the “bride of Christ”).

In this sense, The Sun Also Rises is a profound lie — if we take it to be a story about romance between Jake and Brett. Jake believes Brett is his path to a happy, meaningful life, but in truth, it doesn’t matter whether they marry or not:

Brett cannot make Jake happy. Jake cannot make Brett happy. Man needs more than marriage to find eternal meaning.

Jake and Brett’s misery is but the misery of modern man divorced from the divine, with no transcendent force to create true unity between man. While God lamented that “it’s not good for man to be alone,” both Jake and Brett alike are testimony to the fact that modern independence, in totality, amounts to nothing more than a living hell…

And yet, futile as Jake’s prospects for happiness remain, his misery is not the whole story.

Hemingway never fully answers the crisis of modern meaning, but he does understand the first step out. That step runs through all his great works, and is captured in one famous sentence.

Fighting the Good Fight

The aforementioned sentence appears in a separate novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Protagonist Robert Jordan, suffering in the midst of war, asserts:

“This world is a fine place and worth fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it.”

This idea underlies the heart of Hemingway’s works. In a sense, most all of his protagonists seem to suggest:

Life may be meaningless, but it is meaningful to fight and strive for meaning nonetheless.

You even see Jake Barnes himself fight for meaning, briefly, in The Sun Also Rises. His fight is spiritual — far more subtle, but poignant nonetheless.

Consider his visit to a Cathedral:

“At the end of the street I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the facade was ugly but I liked it now. I went inside. It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows. I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself…

I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think of how I would make it…

I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time.”

That final line is the most revealing — Jake lamenting that Catholicism is a grand religion, yearning to feel religious, yet unable to love God.

In a nutshell, the question becomes:

How can man fall in love with a God he has lost faith in?

This is not just Jake’s plight, but modern man’s in totality.

Jake’s Catholicism can be understood as the “old order” the Lost Generation inherited and, in many ways, rejected — Christianity itself, along with the conceptions of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness that accompany it.

The answer, traditionally speaking, begins with the fight itself.

When Hemingway says the world is a fine place and worth fighting for, Christianity reminds you that such a fight entails carrying a cross. It entails long suffering, fortitude, and humility — and such a fight precedes formation of soul. One might advise Jake Barnes:

If you wish to feel religious, you must first act religious.

His life is spent drinking, idling, and longing for Brett. Little time is given to prayer, the sacraments, or the command to love God and neighbor.

The answer for Jake, then, is the same for modern man.

The life of faith — the faith the Lost Generation rejected, yet longed for nonetheless — is not one of mere intellectual assent, but one lived through sacrifice.

Hemingway shows us what went wrong, and he teaches us how to strive, such that we don’t despair. Yet to move beyond Jake’s silent desperation requires more than fighting. It requires love, a love of the world, a love of neighbor… a love of God.

We are not called to wish the world were good, but called to love Goodness itself.

Hence the lives of modern man ought not reflect the times of modernity. He is called to reflect the Good, and if one’s life is in harmony with the Good, then in totality, all shall be good.

I offer private mentorship in the Great Books for those seeking clarity of vision and depth of soul. Inquire here.

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What does it mean to be a hero?

What first appears as a simple question is much harder to answer in reality.

From the beginnings of antiquity—and the Western literary tradition—writers have turned to heroism to ask: how do you live well in the face of death?

Given that man must die, he must learn how to live meaningfully—and heroism became the path to do so. To be a hero was to live with adventure, and ideally, to die with contentment, or at least with the hope of an immortal name.

Yet from Homer, to Virgil, Augustine of Hippo, and even up to Friedrich Nietzsche, we are given different visions of what heroism looks like.

And though there is vast disagreement, there is also a growing wisdom as this dialogue passes from thinker to thinker.

Today then, we will trace what heroism looks like through the literary tradition—to understand what it meant to be a hero in different ages, and ultimately, to discover what the apotheosis of a heroic life actually looks like.

To follow this thread is not just to learn heroism in the abstract, but to discover how you can be the hero of your own life’s story.

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Sing Muses!

The beginning of the Western literary tradition begins with Homer’s Iliad.

More interestingly, the Iliad itself begins with an exhortation to sing of the poem’s great hero:

“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,

great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,

feasts for the dogs and birds,

and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end”

Remember the Iliad is about the Trojan War, and Achilles is famous for his rage. He’s the greatest hero of the war, and also the greatest killer of men.

To modern eyes, this conception of heroism sounds bleak and brutal — and perhaps it is — but there’s deep wisdom in understanding why Achilles was celebrated.

Recall that to live in the Bronze Age of Ancient Greece was no fun time. City-states were constantly warring, and men suffered and died without explanation, with no hope for life after death.

One of the most pressing concerns then, was, how can you live meaningfully in light of such a cruel destiny?

The answer was glory. Men found meaning by seeking glory on the battlefield, hoping to have an immortal name that endured after death.

In this case, Achilles was the most glorious and most famous hero — not because he was morally exemplar — but because he gave men a reason to strive, endure, and seek meaning in a hostile world.

Yet modern readers would be fair to critique that Achilles is not a great hero by today’s standards. We need further developments in the tradition to refine what heroism looks like.

Now, we jump ahead 800 years in history.

Roman Piety

After Homer, the Roman poet Virgil takes the next great leap in explaining heroism to mankind. He does so in his poem The Aeneid, which is like a sequel to Homer’s Iliad.

The plot follows Aeneas, a survivor of the Trojan War, who escapes Troy after his city gets sacked. He’s called by the gods to travel to the distant land of his ancestors where he shall found a legendary new city (the Roman Empire).

Whereas Homer’s Achilles is celebrated for his martial prowess, Virgil’s Aeneas is celebrated for a different virtue — piety.

His nickname is “Pious Aeneas,” as he surrenders his will, destiny, and desires to the decrees of the gods.

Virgil doesn’t strictly reject Homer’s conceptions of heroism — Aeneas is still a fierce warrior like Achilles, and a longsuffering leader like Odysseus — but he adds piety as a new and more foundational virtue to his Roman hero.

In other words, Virgil’s hero is a maturation of Homer.

If Homer tells us that a hero ought to be strong, brave, and formidable like Achilles, Virgil says, “yes, but he must be pious too. He must respect the gods, his city, and his family more than his own life.”

So Roman heroism is about loving family, civilization, and the gods. It’s about becoming a man of self-sacrificial duty for the harmony and well-being of your fellow man.

We see then, how Virgil proves a giant leap forward into heroism — including morality and religiosity as important features to becoming a hero — and yet, even now the full picture is not completed.

Some issues still remain, namely Aeneas’ life — while noble — isn’t joyous. Some critics argue his piety is too severe, and imperfect, that it destroys his own life, agency, and soul… an imperfect sacrifice.

Also, famously, this poem too ends in bloodshed that echoes the hells of the Iliad, implying that Aeneas’ heroism is not enough to conquer death and the agonies of existence…

But where can heroism go from here?

We see that Aeneas perfects duty, but not yet love.

And because of that, his heroism — however noble — still ends in death.

But in Book VI, Virgil leaves behind something unexpected:
a descent into the underworld that quietly points beyond pagan heroism altogether.

It is here that we begin to see what true, perfected heroism actually looks like.

Read more

One of the greatest warnings of the Western tradition is simply this: do not be lukewarm.

It’s the haunting warning among the closing words of the Bible itself, yet we hear this warning echoed across countless thinkers in the great literary tradition.

But what does it actually mean to be lukewarm?

How do you know whether you’re living a lukewarm life, and how do you guard against slipping into one?

Today, we’ll look at some of the most famous examples of lukewarm souls throughout the Western tradition to understand this sin, the true gravity of its crime, and what the antidote to lukewarm living looks like.

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Origins

As a reminder, the infamous warning against lukewarmness comes in Revelation 3:16:

“So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

This is the great warning to all souls in light of the judgment to come.

Instinctively, we understand lukewarmness to mean indecision — but what does that indecision actually look like?

To first give a concrete explanation:

Lukewarmness is not just indecision, but a refusal to commit oneself to the highest good.

So it’s an apathy that is an implicit — or even explicit — rebellion against the Good.

But of course, to better demonstrate this, let’s look to the greatest teachers of our literary tradition for clear examples.

Lotus Eaters

One of the clearest examples of lukewarmness, surprisingly, comes from Homer’s Odyssey.

This might seem strange — invoking pagan literature to explain a Biblical ideal — but tradition has long held that pagan myths grasp partial truths that are fully revealed in Scripture.

Here, the lukewarm appear on the island of the Lotus-Eaters.

Odysseus and his men are striving to return home to Ithaca, but they have incurred the wrath of Poseidon and must endure trial after trial.

One of those trials is the fruit of the Lotus-Eaters. Specifically, those who eat it become apathetic. In this case, Odysseus’ men who eat the fruit abandon his quest and choose instead to remain in passive forgetfulness on the island.

It’s worth noting that this is not a life of leisure, nor fear, nor even indulgence in pleasure… it’s simply passive neglect.

So in Homer, we reconcile lukewarmness as a loss of telos, but pay careful attention to how he loses it — by being softened into comfort and complacency.

They do not reject the journey, they simply lose the will to continue it.

It’s abandoning one’s purpose and potential in life in order to settle into what is easy.

So Homer exhorts you to strive, yet his warning is actually just the surface of understanding the full scope of the evils of lukewarmness.

Dante will emphasize the true gravity of such a crime, and how it threatens to ravage your soul.

Blank Banners

In Dante’s Inferno, the first souls he encounters are not actually inside Hell, but just outside of it.

These are the lukewarm sinners, who are stung by wasps for eternity, while they endlessly march and carry a blank banner. Virgil explains that even Hell rejects them for their passivity.

Dante’s point is this:

The lukewarm do not merely live in apathy, but in a form of apathy so contemptible that not even evil desires them.

C.S. Lewis shares this idea in The Screwtape Letters. In the epilogue, the demons celebrate receiving souls in record numbers, but they lament that these souls taste bland; they’re lukewarm souls, who didn’t commit great evils nor even pursue abject pleasures. Simply put, they were just checked out of life.

What Dante and Lewis reveal is this: lukewarmness is an apathy despised by both good and evil alike.

Do you notice how the gravity of this crime has developed from Homer?

Lukewarmness is no longer “living without purpose,” but living without purpose with conscious knowledge — and neglect — of the good. To recognize life is a spiritual battle between good and evil, and refusing to cast one’s hand in either direction.

Ironically, then, the lukewarm are not even granted the dignity of great sinners. Dante has them cast out “lest Hell should glory over them.”

So true lukewarmness is a moral failing that ravages the soul, and yet still, we haven’t comprehended the fullness of its perils.

That’s because the fullness of the lukewarm requires one more piece of understanding — an insight that we’ll find in one of the greatest philosophers of the modern world.

The Aesthetic Man

Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century philosopher, argued that man lives in one of three modes:

1. Aesthetic

2. Ethical

3. Religious

Put simply:

1. The aesthetic man lives for himself.

2. The ethical man lives for others.

3. The religious man lives for God.

Kierkegaard insists that only the religious life leads to true fulfillment, but observes that most men remain trapped in the aesthetic life.

This life is merely defined by pleasure, distraction, and avoidance. Man fills his life with trivialities to escape the deeper questions of death, truth, and life’s ultimate meaning.

In other words, he becomes lukewarm.

And yet, the aesthetic man is the gravest and fullest understanding of the perils of lukewarmness.

Why is that?

Because the aesthetic man intentionally deceives himself. Whereas Dante condemns the lukewarm for refusing to choose between good and evil, Kierkegaard warns that modern man — in masses — is actively hiding himself from the reality of good and evil altogether.

For Dante, the lukewarm says, “I will not choose.”

For Kierkegaard, modern man says, “What do you mean choose? Choose what?”

To make it concrete, we can consider the state of most moderns — who live for pleasure and comfort alone, with no concern for Truth, meaning, justice, or questions of eternity.

Kierkegaard stresses that all mankind feels the pressure of these obligations implicitly — but most actively refuse — living as if to eliminate a reminder that these realities exist. Tragically, it hearkens back to the lamentation of the ancient poet Hesiod, who said “most men live lives fit for cattle.”

Only worse yet, Kierkegaard might lament that “most men yearn to live like cattle.”

As such, the fullness of lukewarmness is not just living without purpose, nor moral failure, but a corruption of spirit that leads man to desire to be like the Edenic “beasts of the field,” rather than the one called to rule and subdue the Earth.

Such are the Times

If the tradition offers a severe indictment of lukewarmness, it also offers hope.

In an age marked by apathy and a lack of zeal for virtue, those who seek the Good have never had a greater opportunity to stand apart.

To live well — to love the Good — is to pursue a form of beauty that makes life itself beautiful. The pursuit of God is, in this sense, the making of one’s life into a work of art. And today, such a life shines all the more brightly against the dullness of lukewarmness.

At the same time, a love of Truth becomes the greatest rebellion against the age, and the surest path to meaning.

The real danger then, is not that we become great sinners, but that we become nothing at all. And in the end, not even Hell desires such a soul.

As Augustine reminds us: there are no good times or bad times — only how we live within them.

To reconcile our duty to live well is to make the times well, and to care for that duty is to ensure not only do we avoid the evils of lukewarmness, but become beacons for our fellow man to follow.

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Dante’s Inferno is the most famous poem of the Divine Comedy, but Purgatorio shines if you want to transform your life.

The sequel follows Dante’s escape from Hell as he climbs Mt. Purgatory in pursuit of Paradise. To do so, he must confront and conquer the seven deadly sins of his soul, scattered across seven terraces on the mountain.

The story is entertaining, but it’s also deeply pedagogical:

Dante is giving you a personal map to conquer evil, embrace virtue, and live a life so ordered that you may be deemed worthy of Paradise. Christians and classicists alike have called this book the “greatest self-help manual of all time” for its timeless wisdom.

Today, we’ll take a deep dive into the core message of Dante’s Purgatorio—to learn what it reveals about the human condition, and how to live so that your soul may ascend to Paradise.

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The 7 Deadly Sins

First, let’s recap the structure of Mount Purgatory.

The 7 terraces of the mountain actually divide onto 3 main sub-sections of Purgatory.

Here’s their order, from bottom to top:

1. Lower Purgatory, consisting of Pride, Envy, and Wrath. These are sins of perverted love.

2. Middle Purgatory, consisting of Sloth. This is the sin of deficient love.

3. Upper Purgatory, consisting of Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. These are sins of excessive love.

In each terrace, repentant sinners undergo “contrapassos,” or punishments that fit their unique crimes on Earth. These punishments are efficacious — they purge the soul of evil and teach a corresponding virtue.

For instance, in the terrace of Pride, sinners must carry heavy boulders while hunched over, which teaches them humility.

This also leads us to an important question:

Why does Mt. Purgatory begin with pride?

This is considered the deadliest sin, and the hardest one to tackle… shouldn’t it come last?

Here is where we see Dante’s genius shine.

The Burden is Light

Dante himself converses with sinners in this circle, and by the time he exists this terrace, he notices that he too is transformed:

“Teacher, as I climb I feel almost no strain!

Tell me what heavy thing I’ve been relieved of now.”

Dante’s guide, Virgil, replies:

“Your feet will be so conquered by good will,

Not only will they feel no strain—they’ll take

Delight in being urged up on the hill”

Pride is the most fundamental evil in the soul — and the hardest to conquer — but this is precisely why it must come first. If you want to live well, find redemption, and reach Paradise, it is the first battle you must fight.

In other words, it is impossible to live the good life without humility.

But it gets better. When you learn humility as Dante does, the climb gets easier. Virgil himself says you’ll find “delight,” in being urged up the hill.

In other words, a humble heart with a proper aim at The Good, or God, draws from a grace that conquers transforms suffering. Just as Purgatory’s punishments become a kind of delight to the humble, so too earthly suffering can become a source of joy as you persevere along the path of virtue and human flourishing.

What’s remarkable is, after all this wisdom, we’re still only at the first terrace!

There’s far more wisdom, and far deeper transformation, to come.

In fact, the real turning point doesn’t begin until Dante conquers the third terrace, which is wrath.

Blinded by Rage

The punishment for wrath is its inhabitants must walk in a blinding smoke. It mirrors the experience of blind rage — which can be an intoxicating pleasure (perverted love) — and forces the inhabitants to learn meekness, restraint, and desire for God.

Dante himself is blinded in this smoke. He’s just as lost as the repentant sinners ascending here.

In this blindness, he meets a fellow sinner named Mark the Lombard. They enter into a philosophical conversation where Dante asks Mark to explain the origins of evil in the universe. Mark will give a surprising answer, which will perhaps be Dante’s biggest breakthrough in the entire Divine Comedy:

“Living men attribute to the sky

The causes of all things, as if they moved

Ever and only by necessity.

That would destroy the freedom of your will,

Nor would it then be just to deal out joy

For doing well, or woe for doing ill…

You men lie subject to God who made

You free, a greater force, a better nature,

Who formed your minds without the planets’ aid.

Thus if this present world has gone askew,

Look to yourselves, in yourselves lies the cause”

Mark tells him that evil is to be blamed on man’s free will. This references the Fall, but more importantly, it references every individual too. If Dante is to recognize the cause of evil, he must recognize that “in yourselves lies the cause.”

Ironically, the same free will that led to the Fall is also the path to redemption and the good life.

Dante’s revelation is that the proper use of free will is the path to ascent — that the way “upward” is, in fact, a turn “inward.”

But this raises a deeper question:

How do you actually use your freedom to ascend?

The next terrace gives Dante the answer — and shows exactly how a soul begins to rise toward Paradise.

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Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is one of the most unexpected success stories in literary history.

Today we recognize it as a classic that has sold millions and launched a multi-media empire, but no one would have expected it to succeed when it was first published.

At the time, Tolkien was an obscure professor, writing fantasy in an age when fantasy had no literary merit.

Worse still, Europe had been traumatized by two world wars that ushered in modernity and the lost generation. The prevailing sentiment was that life was meaningless, and redemption was futile. As such, a story about hobbits, good vs. evil, and “happily ever afters” had no business resonating with modern audiences… yet it did.

Lord of the Rings is now one of the greatest-selling novels in human history. Its glories transcend generations, nationalities, and cultures, and has won the hearts of modern man — who struggles to believe in anything.

How did it succeed? And why has virtually no fantasy novel replicated its success since?

Tolkien shared the secret in an obscure essay titled On Fairy Stories.

The essay explains how to write good fantasy — but more importantly, why reading and writing fantasy may be among the greatest gifts you can give your soul.

Today, then, we’ll explore the key insights of On Fairy Stories — to help you appreciate fantasy, learn from Tolkien’s wisdom, and understand the truths good fantasy writing can reveal to you about your soul.

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Defining Faërie

First, Tolkien begins by defining what a fairy story is.

You’ll notice his definition is unique from most fantasy writers:

“The definition of a fairy-story—what it is, or what it should be—does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.

I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.”

So a true fairy-story transcends definition. It cannot be explained, only experienced. A fairy story must create a world, and the reader must be immersed in it. You’ll notice that Lord of the Rings does this wonderfully, creating an entire mythology and immersive world.

But how did Tolkien bring Middle Earth to life?

What did he know about humanity, storytelling, and myth-making that created such a vibrant universe?

The answer, surprisingly, has to do with his sharp and refined understanding of the human soul.

Perfecting Human Desire

Tolkien continues to explain how to cultivate “Faerie,” or the authentic nature of fantasy:

“The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time.

Another is (as will be seen) to hold communion with other living things.

A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.”

So true fairy stories don’t require magic, dragons, witches, etc. rather they must satisfy primordial human desires. A fantasy world feels authentic — as real as reality — when it satisfies universal yearnings like the desire to explore the cosmos and hold communion with nature, man, and living things.

In fact, Tolkien suggests that fairy-stories are not about escapism, rather they actually help you perceive reality more clearly:

“Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity.

On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.”

Good fantasy perfects reason. True fantasy stories cohere with rational truths about human nature and the cosmos, but are dramatized in narrative form.

Let’s give an example.

You can tell a young boy, “you must be courageous.” He might agree, but the command alone won’t turn a coward to a warrior.

However, if that young boy reads about Aragorn’s valor at the battle of Helms Deep — and spends the next day fighting imaginary orcs in his backyard — that boy has implicitly embraced courage without thought. His soul has conformed closer to the Good.

At this point, we recognize that good stories satisfy primordial human desires — that they teach yout about the world and your soul — but Tolkien says true fairy stories go even deeper.

He says they actually satisfy the deepest desire that all human beings crave from the moment they become conscious.

Here’s what it is.

Conquering Death

What is this “oldest and deepest desire?”

Tolkien continues:

“Lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit.”

Tolkien stresses that all stories, ultimately, are about death, and the human yearning to conquer it. He says fairy-stories are far better at conquering death than most other stories:

“The ‘consolation’ of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires.

Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story.

Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.”

This is one of Tolkien’s most famous inventions, the term “eucatastrophe,” or the sudden joyous turn that leads to a happy ending.

He continues:

“[Eucatastrophe] denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world…

The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’

The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): “If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.”

In other words, eucastrophe satisfies the deepest desire and most prescient Truth of the world:

That life is good, and worth fighting for, despite its sufferings and evils.

In the end, a joy can be attained that conquers death and ushers you towards everlasting life, if you handle your burdens nobly.

Tolkien concludes his essay with a nod towards Christianity — noting that it reads as a fairy story, but one that took place in real human history.

Thus, we are left with the striking conclusion that fairy stories may be more real than “real life.”

For reality itself, in its fullness, has the structure of a fairy story — one that moves toward a final eucatastrophe.

Though we remain in a valley of pain and tears, there is good news to come — and perhaps an unperishable fire blazing beyond death.

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Few men understood the Great Books of Western Civilization like Leo Strauss.

He spent a lifetime studying, lecturing, and writing about the profoundest narratives, thinkers, and ideas of our civilization. But he didn’t study from an ivory tower:

His teachings carried clear political and philosophical implications to help you know yourself, live well, and understand the world. Perhaps the greatest message of his work was this:

Civilization is in crisis because man has embraced modernity and rejected the central idea behind the Great Books.

He argues that you can trace this decline through three stages in history, which he calls “The Three Waves of Modernity.” Each wave introduced a new, “modern,” belief that further eroded the foundations of society.

Today we’ll explore these three waves of modernity, how they helped deconstruct civilization, and what the Great Books can teach us about its renewal.

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What is the Good?

Strauss outlines his warning in an essay The 3 Waves of Modernity.

From the opening lines, he describes the key idea driving civilizational rot in the West today:

“The crisis of modernity reveals itself in the fact that modern western man no longer knows what he wants-that he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.”

Agnosticism is the definitive feature of modernity — that man cannot know truth, good, or evil with certainty. For Strauss, an agnostic society is a dying society:

A civilization divorced from morality is divorced from knowledge of Truth, Good, and Evil. To put it simply, you cannot be good if you don’t know what goodness is. Such is true too for civilization — if you cannot know, nor agree upon, the Good, then mankind cannot be united.

Instead, modern agnosticism gives rise to political ideology (liberalism, communism, fascism), divisive individualism, and increasing polarization.

But if we’re to diagnose the root of modern rot, we have to go back 500 years in time, to an unexpected thinker who begins the first wave of modernity.

Machiavellian Politics

Most thinkers point to Descartes as the founder of modernity, but Strauss suggests someone else:

Machiavelli.

He points out that, prior to Machiavelli, all politics was based on the question, “What is the good life?”

Classical politics was aimed at knowledge of virtue to be in harmony with the Good. Plato says politics aim at harmony of the community through justice. Aristotle says mankind flourishes by taking virtuous action in accordance with the Good. Christian politics agrees, grounding the Good in God.

Machiavelli uproots all of this.

He divorces politics from morality, arguing man was not meant to pursue the good, but maintain power. In The Prince, he argues a prince should know both “how to be bad and how to be good.”

The enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes take Machiavelli’s philosophy a step further. Hobbes argues man only does politics to protect individual rights and security. So modern politics abandons the good and becomes about social engineering. As Strauss laments:

“The political problem becomes a technical problem”

Notice how this shift seems subtle, but drastically lowers the aim of politics.

It’s no longer a practice for building community, practicing virtue, and helping human flourishing. It’s now devolved into a “dirty,” morally ambiguous realm of chaos, power, and manipulation.

So Machiavelli ushers in the beginning of modernity, but it will be the second wave that induces dramatic change in the individual.

Interiority is King

The second wave of modernity is spearheaded by Kant and Rousseau.

Kant argued that morality is grounded in rationality. He held that moral laws are universal — but that they are known through human reason, not derived from nature or external authority.

In other words, the standard of morality is no longer embedded in nature, the cosmos, or the divine, but located in man’s rational will.

This shift away from nature as the standard plants the seeds for what will become modern agnosticism — the belief that we cannot know good or evil as something objective and given. As moderns, we speak of “living our truth,” grounding moral claims in conscience and inner conviction.

Hence, grounding morality in man, rather than in a fixed natural order as classical and Christian thinkers held, begins to dissolve our confidence in objective moral truth.

Rousseau advances this turn inward by emphasizing the primacy of inner experience over external standards. He believed man is naturally good, but corrupted by society.

In his own words:

“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.”

Where the premodern view exhorted man to cultivate virtue in accordance with a higher order, Rousseau suggests that man’s deepest aim is not toward virtue as conformity to nature, but toward freedom and self-expression. The problem is no longer vice in man’s nature, but constraint imposed from his environment.

We get the sense that Truth, and anything that constrains one’s authenticity or freedom of choice, is oppressive. Anything that is oppressive is inauthentic, and therefore, bad.

Here, we recognize the new, modern morality:

An exhortation to live one’s personal truth.

And finally, we have one last wave of modernity, which Strauss calls the deathblow that finalized the ruin of the West.

He traces it to one thinker who sent the West to ruins, but also hints at the one solution that can save civilization…

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Virgil is one of the greatest poets in human history.

Depending on who you ask, he was immortalized for his pastoral poetry, his magnum opus the Aeneid, or his famed role as the guide to Dante throughout the Divine Comedy.

In fact some say his poetry was so inspired that he even foretold the coming of Christ himself!

Today we’ll look at his first masterpiece — The Eclogues — to understand Virgil’s greatness, the wisdom of his poetry, and why his poetry may have borne the mark of divine inspiration.

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Pastoral, but not Peaceful

As a reminder, Virgil was a Roman poet in 1st century BC, who first rose to prominence after he published the Eclogues.

This was a set of 10 pastoral poems — or poems that idealize the tranquility of rural life amongst shepherds in nature. It often juxtaposes a contrast with the corrupting influences of the metropolis.

In a sense, you see this longing today when man romanticizes “selling everything and moving off-grid,” yet Virgil’s poetry runs far deeper than mere romanticism. It’s rife with political, spiritual, and even theological allegory.

This is because he was writing at one of the most chaotic, bloodiest, and darkest moments in history, which ironically, led to some of the greatest lights and insights mankind has ever conceived.

But what was happening in history at this time?

Chaos, War, and Beauty

Virgil published his poems around 40BC, four years after Caesar was assassinated. In the wake of his death, Rome suffered a maelstrom of civil wars that lasted well over a decade.

Violence and political chaos ran amok, disturbing the city and countryside alike.

Virgil includes this chaos in his Eclogues. We don’t find shepherds relaxing in a paradise like Tolkien’s shire, rather we find shepherds in fear, lamentation, and vice:

• Eclogue one features a shepherd lamenting his farms were stolen and gifted to the Roman army.

• Eclogue three features shepherds discussing their various crimes and immoral behaviors, while excusing their vices because “everyone is doing it.”

• Eclogue six features a vast and negative view of human history — catalogued through violent and tragic events — suggesting that chaos and heartbreak reign supreme over human existence.

We see then, a strange theme of the Eclogues:

The beauty of nature represents a human longing for peace, while mankind suffers in a hotbed of political turmoil amongst an universe dominated by anarchy, bloodshed, and heartbreak.

And it’s here where Virgil’s most famous eclogue stands out in glory.

In Eclogue four, he shares a vision never before conceived of by any poet, priest, or philosopher in history. It was so poignant, some scholars suggest it was inspired by God himself.

The Messianic Eclogue

Eclogue four is dubbed the “Messianic Eclogue.”

Contrasting with the turbulence of the other eclogues, eclogue four envisions a future golden age.

This vision contains some striking imagery. I recommend reading the full ecologue, but I’ll share excerpts here that show why the Medievals thought Virgil was inspired by God.

“Now the last age of the Cumaean prophecy begins:

the great roll-call of the centuries is born anew.

Now Virgin Justice returns, and Saturn’s reign:

now a new race descends from heaven above.”

This opening imagery shows a changing of ages — a “new race descends from Heaven,” to end the Iron Age (of evil) and restore man to a Golden Age.

“Only favour the child who is born, pure Lucina,

under whom the first race of iron shall end,

and a golden race rise up throughout the world.”

Here, Virgil says this golden age will be made manifest through a child… but not just any child:

“He will take on divine life,

and see gods mingled with heroes,

and he himself will be seen among them,

and rule a peaceful world with his father’s powers.”

So a divine son will rule the world through the authority of his father. This will lead to the defeat of evil:

“The snakes will die

And deceitful poisonous herbs will wither”

Of course the serpent evokes imagery of Eden, but that’s not all to come. In this new golden age, Virgil envisions a paradise restored, almost like a return to Eden:

“The goats will come home themselves, their udders swollen with milk,

and the cattle will have no fear of fierce lions.

Your cradle itself will pour out delightful flowers…

See the world, with its weighty dome, bowing —

earth and wide sea and deep heavens:

see how everything delights in the coming age.”

Harmony will return, and all of creation will rejoice at the redemption brought about through this divine, heavenly child.

And how exactly does this Eclogue end?

With an appeal for this newborn child to recognize its blessed mother:

“Little child, begin to recognise your mother with a smile:

ten months have brought a mother’s long labour.

Little child, begin: he on whom his parents do not smile

no god honours at his banquets, no goddess in her bed.”

And so Eclogue 4 ends with waiting for the Incarnation of the divine child to redeem man to this golden age.

According to the Christian tradition, such a child did arrive, roughly 40 years after Virgil, the pagan poet, penned these words.

A Return to Harmony

It’s worth noting that modern scholars tend to read the poem as political allegory rather than prophecy. They believe the child predicts a Roman citizen, rather than God.

Such an interpretation has merit, yet the theological interpretation shares remarkable insights and wisdom from the pre-modern mind.

The medieval mind saw Virgil as a prophet — perhaps not in the strict sense — but as an artist who wore witness towards heavenly Truth.

This suggests that even outside revelation, the human imagination yearns for redemption, as guided by Providence.

In other words, if the world is ruled by God, or a transcendent intelligence, then its workings govern all passages of life, beyond the famed miracles as recorded in scripture.

To see Virgil as divinely inspired is to see all reality ruled by this intelligible providence — that even in the days of civil war, turmoil, and despair, God is working to bring about man to redemption.

And if such was true then, such is true now, that it’s often the darkest days, and harshest times, where Providence rests closer than ever, preparing to make all things new and restore Good to a world marred by chaos.

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Odysseus is one of the greatest and most famed heroes of all Western literature.

And yet he’s burning in Hell.

While the Ancient Greek world celebrated Odysseus’ wisdom, wits, and cunning to defy his enemies, Dante Alighieri saw it differently.

He believed Odysseus was the most dangerous kind of hero:

A brilliant man who lacked humility and reverence for the divine. For this charge, Dante condemns Odysseus to the lowest pits of Hell, not far from the clutches of Satan himself!

What did Odysseus do to deserve such a fate?

According to Dante, not only did he commit a grave moral error, but made a mistake all too common even amongst men today.

Here’s Dante’s warning against Odysseus’ grave evils, how to avoid them, and what Dante’s idea of a true hero looks like.

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The Homeric Hero

As a reminder, Odysseus first appears in Homer’s poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Unlike Achilles, who’s celebrated for his might, Odysseus is celebrated for his wits and cunning nature.

He’s the mastermind behind the Trojan Horse trick that sacked Troy, and in the Odyssey, he outwits kings, gods, and beasts alike.

He’s arguably the greatest Greek Hero — even greater than Achilles — because intelligence overpowers brawn in Homer’s eyes. This perhaps explains how Homer primed the soil for the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — who exhorted man was made for moral virtue through rationality.

So in this sense, Odysseus seems heroic, and perhaps even a net positive on mankind.

How then, does he get put in Hell?

Let’s now turn to Dante’s Inferno to see where it all went wrong.

Tongues of Fire

If we recall Dante’s Inferno, Hell is made up of 9 circles. The worst sinners are found in the 8th and 9th circles.

We find Odysseus here, particularly in the 8th ditch of the 8th circle. Here are sinners of fraud who gave evil counsel.

In this circle, Dante discovers Odysseus (named “Ulysses,” in the poem) who suffers an eternity in a ball of flames.

Dante’s guide Virgil explains why Odysseus is in Hell:

“That flame tortures Odysseus and Diomedes,

And as two they meet

God’s vengeance, as they sinned and met His wrath.

They bemoan their ambush in that flame,

Their wooden horse in Troy, which was the gate

Through which the noble seed of Rome first came”

So Odysseus, with his friend Diomedes, suffer perdition because of the Trojan Horse trick, and other deceitful counsels, which led to untold evils as Troy was pillaged.

Still one might ask, why are these crimes especially evil?

Dante doesn’t just treat Odysseus as any sinner, but one who is borderline Satanic!

In fact, he’s even lower than the mass murderers like Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun!

This brings us to a stunning revelation of Dante’s Inferno, and what true evil looks like.

Sins of Malice

Dante says lying is worse than murder.

The murderers and violent are in circle 7 of Hell.

Lower Hell — circles 8 and 9 — are reserved for the fraudulent and the betrayers, like Odysseus and Judas respectively.

Why is this the case?

For Dante, fraud is worse than murder because violence corrupts the spirited part of your nature, but fraud corrupts the intellect — the rational part of your nature that separates man from beast.

Man is made in the image of God, and so to corrupt one’s intellect is to make oneself both an enemy to God, and lower than the beasts themselves.

From this angle, we understand why Dante puts Odysseus in Hell:

The Trojan Horse was a fraudulent trick, and throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus survives through deception and lies. Some scholars even argue that his crew ultimately dies because of his own cunning and selfish decisions.

But Dante isn’t finished.

In the Inferno, Odysseus reveals one final story — a tale which is not found anywhere in Homer.

And in this story, Dante exposes the root sin that led to Odysseus’ downfall.

The truth, Dante suggests, is far worse than a simple act of deceit.

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Long before the Bible was written, humanity was already wrestling with the same terrifying question:

Why must we die?

This, in fact, is the core theme of the oldest surviving work of literature in history — the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh’s influence cannot be overstated. It’s shaped the entire tradition of epic poetry, addressing the same questions and themes later asked by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and countless others… and that’s not all.

Believe it or not, Gilgamesh may have even helped shape the literary form of the Bible itself!

Today we’ll dive into the narrative of Gilgamesh, to understand its wisdom, how it shaped the literary tradition of Western Civilization, and how it may have even helped cultivate the soil for divine revelation.

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A Historic King

So first, what is the Epic of Gilgamesh?

It’s based on a historic king — Gilgamesh — of the Sumerian civilization, estimated to have lived around 2700 BC.

Gilgamesh was likely a virtuous leader, as his life inspired a litany of epic poems celebrating his deeds and valors for centuries to come. Eventually, these poems were combined into a single compendium, known today as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It’s important to understand that for primordial man, epic poetry wasn’t merely story-telling, rather it was a compendium of a civilization’s knowledge. An epic gave a civilization its identity, its understanding of nature, and understanding of self.

Therefore, the Epic of Gilgamesh was like a “Bible,” for the Sumerians.

What lessons did it teach the Sumerians exactly?

Its wisdom is ultimately based on one, timeless, universal lesson.

A Fear of Death

This story follows the literary character Gilgamesh, a noble king and demi-god, who must confront and wrestle with his own mortality.

Favored by the gods, he’s blessed with beauty and strength, and beloved by all in his kingdom.

However, tragedy strikes after he offends the goddess Ishtar — rejecting her romantic advances — and as a result his best friend Enkidu perishes.

Gilgamesh is grieved at the loss of his friend, and becomes terrified of his own mortality. There is hope, however. Legend has it that one man, Utnapishtim, was beloved by the gods and given immortal life.

Gilgamesh seeks him out on a perilous journey. He travels to the end of the world, where Utnapishtim warmly receives him.

Gilgamesh asks for the secret to immortality, and in response, Utnapishtim gives him a story never before revealed to mankind.

A Cataclysmic Flood

What is the story?

Utnapishtim tells of a cataclysmic flood, caused by the vengeance of the gods who sought to exterminate man. Utnapishtim and his wife alone survived, building a boat after advance warning from the gods. They were marked as righteous amongst the many, and worthy of immortality.

So Utnapishtim reveals that his immortal life was a gift from the gods, but he tells Gilgamesh despair not, for there is one more hope to attain immortality:

At the bottom of the sea lies a plant of immortal life for whoever eats of it.

Gilgamesh retrieves it with joy, vowing to bring the plant home with him, to save mankind from the horror of death. Yet to his despair, a serpent arrives and eats the plant on the voyage home.

The epic ends shortly after, recounting Gilgamesh’s death, and a lamentation that his fate is the natural and necessary end to mortal man.

And yet, Gilgamesh’s story may end here, but the story of mankind, divine revelation, and perhaps true everlasting life, was just getting started.

Gilgamesh and Genesis

By now, shrewd readers will have noticed that this epic is filled with imagery and narrative structure that will appear in the writings of Genesis, which was written ~1,500 years after the life of the historic Gilgamesh.

The more notable influences include a flood story with a righteous family spared, and man divorced from the plant (tree) of immortal life through the wiles of a serpent.

How are we to understand the literary connection of Gilgamesh and Genesis?

It’s of course inaccurate to say that Gilgamesh “debunks,” Genesis, but it would also be foolish to dismiss Gilgamesh as a mere pagan myth devoid of value.

If we recall Tolkien’s “true myth,” argument, he asserts that all myths are vehicles of wisdom aiming at the same truth, and that truth is the “myth,” of Christ who was made flesh in human history — a “true myth.”

In other words, to read Gilgamesh is to deepen one’s appreciation of both pagan myth and the theological grandeur of the book of Genesis.

To see this more clearly, we need to examine what makes Genesis both similar to, and radically different from, the myths that preceded it.

I Am Who Am

Genesis makes itself distinct from all pagan stories with its opening line:

“In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and Earth.”

Whereas pagan myths feature polytheistic nature gods, Genesis is predicated on a monotheistic God, transcendent of nature. In this sense, Genesis is a work of cosmological theology, fundamentally distinct from Gilgamesh and all corresponding myths.

Yet how do we account for the narrative similarities between Genesis and Gilgamesh?

The writers of Genesis wrote within the same ancient Near Eastern narrative world in which stories like Gilgamesh circulated.

Christian orthodoxy would say Gilgamesh’s flood is an imperfect remembering of an actual cataclysmic event. Genesis adopts this mythological substrata, “perfects it,” via revelation, yet dramatizes it through the mythological archetype of the flood.

Thus Genesis’ theological grandeur is understood as revelation of literal theological truths, conveyed through the allegorical medium of mythological narratives, which reveal spiritual wisdom about the human condition.

Or in layman’s terms, Genesis uses stories to convey inexpressible, heavenly truths.

This also gives recourse to the teachings of Christ, who spoke in parables rather than prosaic language.

The True Myth

We now arrive full circle back to the question of why read Gilgamesh? What does it teach us?

As a stand alone story, Gilgamesh reveals the heart of ancient, primordial man, wrestling with mortality in a world with no hope after death.

We are left with the impression that man ought not to strive for unnatural immortality, rather content himself with worldly pleasure and striving after earthly glory — means to living a temporal but thrilling existence.

And yet, immersing our imagination into this primordial mythological landscape cannot help but deepen our appreciation for the eternal, and transcendent.

Consider the example of CS Lewis, who abandoned 20+ years of atheism after listening to Tolkien’s “true myth,” argument:

“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this:

that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels.

The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

Indeed, such writings were the beginnings of the famed career of the 20th century’s most famous christian apologist.

Whether or not you have theological inclinations is secondary to the point of this discussion. The assertion is, authentic engagement with myth-making and tales of primeval history do wonders for the human spirit.

If you want to awaken in your soul a desire for heavenly truth, or a spirited pursuit of meaningful, vital life, immerse yourself in the tales of myth, and read the book of Genesis. You may just find yourself being made anew.

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Few stories offer a richer meditation on death and life’s meaning than Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

It tells the tale of Ivan Ilyich, an ambitious court official driven to succeed by any means necessary.

He follows the exact playbook society tells him to follow — works hard, succeeds in school, gets a good job, and a trophy wife. But it’s at the height of his career, midway through life, when he falls ill.

Not only does Ivan realize he’s going to die, he uncovers a greater spiritual horror awaiting him behind his sickness. He questions if his entire life was nothing but a lie.

And yet, it’s in the very clutches of death where Ivan, for the first time, discovers what it truly means to live.

What exactly did he discover?

Today, we’ll uncover just that.

Here’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Tolstoy’s wisdom about finding life’s meaning in the face of death.

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A Man of the World

So first, who exactly was Ivan Ilyich?

Aside from his ambitions, Tolstoy writes:

“He was a capable man, cheerful and kind, sociable and convinced of the need to follow the path of duty — duty being anything so designated by higher authority.”

This simple sentence is the creed Ivan lives by. He orients his life and manners around the “higher authorities,” of his world. With each new job he takes, or city he visits, he seeks out the affluent, learns their ways, and joins their company.

By his 40s, he’s wealthy with a wife and two children. His marriage was not based on love, but status. He and his wife tolerated each other, and their lives were comfortable.

Yet soon, he’d discover this very “happiness” was doomed to crash down.

A Fall from Grace

One day Ivan’s hanging upholstery in his dining room, when he slips and slams his torso into a piece of furniture.

The fall wasn’t terrible, but the pain lingered in his ribs.

Worse yet, the pain grew. Ivan consulted doctors, but their medications didn’t help. The pain worsened, Ivan grew feeble, and eventually bed ridden.

Finally, one evening, the inevitable dawns on him:

“‘Oh God! Oh God!’ he muttered, ‘It’s not going away…

My life is steadily going away and I can’t stop it. No. There’s no point in fooling myself. Can’t they all see — everybody but me — that I’m dying?’”

These words mark the beginning of a spiritual crisis that will haunt Ivan to the last minutes of his life.

But there’s a long road of despair to travel first, before Ivan can be granted a death he so despises.

Ivan against the World

As Ivan wastes away in his bed, he begins to despise mankind.

Why?

No one else acknowledges that he’s dying.

His wife tells him to trust in doctors and stop worrying. The doctors themselves are impersonal and indifferent. His friends don’t inquire — at best they show disdain when his illness inconveniences their games of cards.

So Ivan hates them for their willful ignorance, yes, but there’s a deeper reason too:

He hates the hollow superficial nature of their souls. And yet, this leads him to an even deeper epiphany:

He hates the world, yet he realizes that the world is but a mirror held up to himself. In other words, the very people he hates are but a reflection of the very person he became — someone solely concerned with trivial matters of status, wealth, and fame.

In despair, he fears his life was but a lie.

He succumbs to a massive bout of physical and spiritual suffering. For three days and nights, he will writhe and scream in delirious pain, and he won’t escape this fit alive.

And yet, in these final moments of despair, Ivan finally discerns the one true Light that had ruled over his life all along.

Here is what Ivan sees at the very end.

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On the path to living a life of virtue, friendship is far more important than you think.

Aristotle said it’s a requirement for human flourishing, and that you cannot reach your life’s potential without sound allies in your corner. He even posits that politics, justice, and human civilization all fundamentally depend on friendship. Augustine will echo this same claim, yet take it a step further:

The only true friendship is rooted in God himself.

So does this mean finding the good is just a matter of finding friends?

Not quite.

Aristotle and Augustine agree that not all friendships are equal. Some are better than others, and some friendships are even bad for you.

Today, we’ll cover Aristotle and Augustine’s musings on friendship, to learn the art of friend-making, and using that as a pathway to living a good and meaningful life.

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The Three Friendships

Aristotle discusses friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics.

First, he defines friendship as those who have, “goodwill toward each other.”

Yet it’s more complex than a matter of mutual goodwill. Aristotle then explains that there are three types of human friendship:

Utility — a friendship in which there is mutual gain/benefit to both parties. Think of business partners who become friends because they enrich each other

Pleasure — a friendship of mutual affection. Think of drinking buddies at the bar, or the friend on your local softball team.

Virtuous — a friendship grounded in mutual love of moral excellence. These friends wish selfless goodness onto each other, and pursue virtue together.

Of course, all three of these friendships are fine themselves, but predictably, Aristotle says the virtuous friendship is far superior. In fact, he says it’s this friendship which can determine how meaningful and just (or miserable and wicked), your life becomes.

Here’s why.

Why Virtue?

Aristotle points out that utility and pleasure based friendships have limitations. Both are “conditional,” friendships.

For the friendship of utility, or mutual gain, that friendship only endures so long as both parties benefit. If we take the business partner example — if the business goes bankrupt, and neither makes money, then neither partner has any remaining substance to their friendship.

Friendships of pleasure are also limited in scope. Your drinking buddy at the bar may give you a lot of laughs, but you don’t turn to him in times of trouble, suffering, or despair.

So what distinguishes the friendship of virtue?

Aristotle continues:

“The complete friendship is the friendship of those who are good and alike in point of virtue. For such people wish in similar fashion for the good things for each other insofar as they are good, and they are good in themselves”

So Aristotle says that virtuous friendship is more stable, because it unconditionally wishes well-being onto the other. Yet there’s more:

“In this complete friendship, all that has been spoken of [in the lesser friendships] is present in the friends themselves”

So virtuous friendships aren’t just about selfless care, but also contain all the benefits of pleasure and utility friendships. You genuinely enjoy spending time with virtuous friends, and benefit by growing in moral excellence.

Aristotle’s key idea is that friendship is perfected by a united love of virtue, which instantiates the soul with virtue, pleasure, and utility at once. These are the friends, Aristotle says, that protect you from slander and injustice, support you in times of need, and lead to harmonious civilizations.

And though Aristotle ends his musings on friendship here, Augustine takes this reasoning one step further.

Friendship and the Divine

St. Augustine writes poignantly on friendship in Confessions.

It may sound strange to jump from pagan philosophy to medieval christian musings, but you’ll notice that Augustine eerily synthesizes Aristotle’s ideas in the passages below.

As a reminder, Confessions was Augustine’s autobiography of his path from sin to sainthood.

Early on, he laments that he was wicked, and part of this was due to his friends. They live amoral lives of vice. Yet, when a dear friend of Augustine’s dies, he doesn’t mince words:

“I had spilt out my soul upon the sand, in loving a mortal man as if he were never to die…

It was all one huge fable, one long lie; and by its adulterous caressing, my soul, which lay itching in my ears, was utterly corrupted. For my folly did not die whenever one of my friends did.”

Augustine calls this friendship a lie because he had loved a mortal man as if he were ultimate. His love was intense, but disordered, because it was rooted in a creature rather than in God.

In Aristotelian terms, we might call it a friendship of pleasure — emotionally powerful, yet lacking a deep, solid, and true foundation. Hence when his friend died, Augustine felt as if he too died, and despaired that life was worthless.

So what does Augustine call a true friendship?

He concludes:

“There is no true friendship unless You weld it between souls that clear together through that charity which is shed in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us.”

Whereas Aristotle says true friendship arises when good men love each other because of their virtue, Augustine says true friendship exists when souls are united in love of God.

For Aristotle, true friends selflessly wish the Good onto each other.

For Augustine, true friends selflessly love each other. And love in the Christian tradition is defined as “willing the Good onto each other.”

We see further light on the claim that Aristotle/post Socratic Greek thinking was oddly prophetic in anticipating Christianity.

Aristotle said true friends love good. Augustine said true friends love God.

What then, might we conclude?

The unifying factor between the classical and Christian tradition is that love of Truth precedes all friendship, harmony, meaning, and justice in life.

The classical philosophers discovered that human beings cannot flourish alone, and friendship is thus essential to the good life.

Aristotle showed that the highest friendships are those rooted in virtue, where each friend wishes the good for the other’s sake. Augustine then revealed the deeper foundation of that truth: virtue itself must ultimately be rooted in God, the highest Good.

True friendship, then, is more than companionship. It is the mutual pursuit of the Good — and ultimately, the pursuit of none other than God Himself.

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Modern man may be skeptical about objective value, morality, and even meaning itself, but there remains one bastion he refuses to question:

Love is a universal human need.

And yet, despite our confidence in love, we remain more confused, lonely, and jaded about it than ever before. Dating is down, divorce is up, and there is widespread discord between man and woman.

Take a trip into the discourse of today’s dating shows, and you’ll hear charged rhetoric such as “women are selfish and entitled,” and “men are pathetic and incapable of commitment.”

Such is the irony of the sexual revolution, which promised liberation through “free love,” yet has resulted in the dissolution of love in every sense of the word.

What went wrong?

C. S. Lewis saw the problem clearly.

In The Four Loves, he argues that modern man has forgotten what love actually is. Under the slogan “love is love,” all distinctions have been flattened, and through said flattening, love itself has been dissolved.

The remedy, Lewis suggests, is to recover the classical structure and understanding of love. We must remember there are degrees of love, and these degrees must be properly ordered in the human soul.

And when you understand it, you have the capacity to reorder and “re-form,” your life in accordance with the love that governs the universe, or in other words, live a life of true love.

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What is Love?

Lewis first laments that in modern English we only have one word for love, which is… “love.”

He compares this with Ancient Greece, which had many terms for many different variations of love.

He then lists the four most important loves to track…

Affection

Lewis calls affection the most natural of human loves, and is sufficient for “9/10s of human happiness.”

This is the natural bond that one feels between one’s kin, most notably a parent’s love for their child.

The key nature of affection is that it’s fostered by familiarity and closeness, leading to an undiscriminating sort of love. It’s unconditional, but can become a vice because it loves without any reference to virtue, like a spoiled child whose vices are affirmed by an overly affectionate mother.

Friendship

Lewis calls friendship the least natural of human loves. It doesn’t arise as affection does, nor is it necessary for posterity.

And yet, Lewis reveres friendship deeply, while mourning that it’s a lost art in modern society.

Ancient philosophers like Aristotle said friendship was a necessity for one to reach their life’s purpose of flourishing in accordance with virtue. Medievalists celebrated the close bond of virtuous friends as necessary models of heroism and sanctity.

Moderns, by contrast, tend to associate friendship as nothing more than your neighborhood drinking buddy. Any examples of close friendship, especially among males, is not a sign of mutual virtue. In fact, close male friendship is often accused of repressed sexuality. The world would sooner believe that men are dominated by their carnal desires, rather than honing a selfless capacity of care for a friend’s soul.

Eros

Eros, or erotic love, is the strongest felt of all the loves. It’s not mere sexual desire, but the all-encompassing passion one feels for a newly beloved object of desire. Think of the proverbial “honey-moon phase,” of a new relationship.

This form of love is perhaps the most celebrated of the modern era, and for good reason — for there are fewer strong feelings of bliss than an impassioned experience of eros.

And yet, eros becomes the most dangerous, because it drives one to ruin when worshipped. Such worship, of being “in love with love,” leads to jealousy, neediness, distrust, and even infidelity.

Indeed, the heart of some of the greatest tragedies in literature come at the hands of eros, such as Romeo and Juliet’s suicides, or the plights of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.

Natural Loves

And so we find this strange paradox. Love is a universal human need, and yet every single natural human love that Lewis identifies proves itself insufficient.

What is the solution to this conundrum?

There is still one love left — charity — and it’s far more than a natural affection:

It reorders the natural loves in your soul. It’s the difference between a life of harmony, or misery. And it shows you where you need to change if you find yourself falling short of true love.

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St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about everything under the sun. The Dominican friar spent his entire life praying, studying, and philosophizing about the nature of God, the cosmos, and the human condition.

His aim was to teach souls to seek Truth, grounded in God, so that mankind could live meaningful lives and seek the beatific vision. While his body of work spans tens of thousands of pages, his thoughts on beauty are of particular interest.

Beauty is perhaps the most adored, yet least understood, of the three transcendentals. When rightly understood, it does more than provide an “aesthetic experience,” but can transform your conception of reality.

Aquinas’ teachings on beauty can help us do just that. He said beauty is comprised of three main elements, and once understood, you can use beauty as a doorway to finding the divine.

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Defining Beauty

Aquinas gives a simple definition of beauty:

“beautiful things are those which please when seen”

He identifies the three elements of beauty below:

1. Integrity — the object is complete and, lacking nothing required for its nature, is not deficient.

2. Harmony — the proper, harmonious, and balanced relationship between the parts of an object, as well as to its purpose

3. Clarity — refers to brightness and luminosity. Beautiful things are bright and illuminating, hearkening back to the essence of God himself: “let there be Light”

These elements are seen most clearly in the gothic architecture of churches. Consider for instance, the Sainte Chappelle:

This building has integrity — it’s structurally sound, standing for 800 years

This building has harmony — its arches, windows, and walls abide by sound geometrical proportions

This building has clarity — its stained glass windows evoke a bright, otherworldly luminosity

The result is a transcendent, timeless beauty that attracts millions of souls annually for nearly a millenium.

But beauty is far more than a set of descriptive qualities. Aquinas gives us the three elements of beauty, yet he stresses beauty has a far greater purpose than to grant us an “aesthetic experience.”

Beauty is Goodness

Next, Aquinas stresses that beauty has a moral element to it:

“Beauty and goodness in a thing are fundamentally identical”

So beauty is good, and goodness is beauty.

A love of beautiful things teaches you a love of goodness.

Engaging with beauty is not a passive experience, rather dynamic and pedagogical. It should move you, unnerve you, inspire you, and above all, train the sensibilities of the heart.

Given that we love beauty, and beauty is goodness, a love of beauty leads to a love of goodness.

And yet, this transformation goes even deeper than training sentiments. It points to a fundamental reordering of one’s soul.

To understand, we need to focus on the third element of beauty — clarity (luminosity).

According to Aquinas, luminosity points to a greater, ethereal light, that is but the essence of God himself:

“created light is necessary to see the essence of God, not in order to make the essence of God intelligible… but in order to enable the intellect to understand…

[light] is required as a perfection of the intellect, strengthening it to see God”

Aquinas speaks here of the supernatural light granted in the beatific vision, but the analogy holds:

beauty strengthens the intellect by habituating it to receive light.

So beauty is a perfection of, or an awakening of, one’s intellect to heavenly reality.

Yet this is still theoretical. Let’s now give a concrete example, and perhaps no greater example of beauty, than the Ely Cathedral.

Eternity in Time

The Ely Cathedral has stood for over 1,200 years.

As a gothic cathedral, it follows the aim of Abbott Suger, who said the cathedral was to be a lux nova, or “new light.”

This new light was not just about luminosity via stained glass, but an earthly radiance that points to a heavenly light that is the essence of God.

From the exterior, you can note not just harmony/geometrical symmetry, but the spires all point upwards. The building itself guides your attention upwards towards the cosmos.

The nave on the interior below continues this trend:

Notice how even though the space is materially constrained, one feels as if they’ve entered a domain that is larger than life. That’s the paradox of beauty — constraint is the artist’s best friend. Limitations lead to larger than life beauty.

And given that beauty is goodness, then the same is true about morality.

Goodness is a constraint on our free will, yet constraining our free will to the Good grants us authentic freedom and flourishing.

Constraint then, in harmony with goodness and beauty, points to everlasting grandeur.

If we continue our exploration through Ely Cathedral, below is the Lady Chapel, with another perfect example of clarity/luminosity.

Notice how the windows of the Lady Chapel transform natural daylight into a glimpse of heaven. Materially, this room is but sunlight, stone, and marble — yet the structural integrity, harmony, and flooding of light makes raw material imitate eternity.

Finally, my personal favorite shot is below, featuring the nave and lantern

Here you see all three features on display in magnificence:

Structural integrity, harmony, and luminosity. Such a building is indeed beautiful, and is a lux nova — a new light pointing us to the heavenly light undergirding reality.

Beginning your Pilgrimage

As such, beauty is not about mere pleasure, but is indeed meant to be a pedagogical experience of transformation, pointing us to God.

CS Lewis says as much about beauty:

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them;

it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”

The same is true for beautiful literature as it does architecture, sculpture, and paint — all beauty is beautiful so long as we allow it to guide us beyond them. Beauty points not to themselves, but to a higher reality.

• Beatrice’s beauty pointed Dante to Paradise.

• The beauty of literature guided Lewis to Christ.

• The beauty of the cathedral points to the celestial city.

In all things, beauty is found not just in the creation, but what the creation points to.

Learn to love beauty as a guide upward, and you may well find yourself ascending to sights you thought unseeable.

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How do you turn a sheltered, cowardly boy into a man?

This is the question of Hemingway’s short story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

It follows the coming of age story of a 35 year old man deficient in fortitude, courage, and self-control.

And while Hemingway executes on this premise, we find the story is far more than a meditation on manhood. We also learn how dangerous a strong man can be. At the story’s heart, we find a tragic tale of betrayal which gives us insight into the cruel, fallen nature of man.

Specifically, Hemingway warns against the poisons of resentment, that can lead one to commit evils worse than they ever imagined.

Here’s the story, and Hemingway’s meditations on manhood, resentment, and how to find virtue in a fallen world.

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An Unhappy Marriage

The story follows three key figures — Francis Macomber, his wife Margot, and a professional hunter named Robert Wilson.

The Macombers hired Wilson to lead them on a big game hunting safari in Somalia. Hemingway reveals sparse details about the brokenness of the Macomber marriage:

“His wife had been through with him before but it never lasted. He was very wealthy, and would be much wealthier, and he knew she would not leave him ever now…

His wife had been a great beauty and she was still a great beauty in Africa, but she was not a great enough beauty any more at home to be able to leave him and better herself and she knew it and he knew it. She had missed the chance to leave him and he knew it.

If he had been better with women she would probably have started to worry about him getting another new, beautiful wife; but she knew too much about him to worry about him either.”

So Margot married Francis for his money, Francis married Margot for her beauty. Yet neither loved each other. In fact, they fought often, and it’s implied that Margot has been unfaithful to Francis in marriage. Yet neither leave, because neither believe they can do better.

Why does Margot dislike Francis?

We get a hint from Robert Wilson, the masculine hunter. He has an internal monologue, sharing his thoughts about the 35 year old Francis and his boyish nature:

“Look at the beggar now, Wilson thought. It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they’re fifty. The great American boy-men.”

Francis has a boyish countenance, and we discover the outward points to the inward — he is soft-souled and cowardly.

This had been proven on the safari — at the first sight of a charging lion, Francis dropped his gun and ran away in fear, forcing Robert to take down the lion and rescue him.

It’s an understandable act of fear, but Wilson and Margot both are disgusted in their cowardice. And it’s this very disgust that leads to a grave betrayal.

Betrayal and Wrath

That very night, Margot sleeps with Wilson to spite her husband, who catches her in the act. She’s unapologetic, yet Francis is too weak to condemn her. He begrudgingly accepts her betrayal.

The next day, he’s fuming with rage as they hunt buffalo. Wilson himself notes the change, noting that Francis’ wrath has made him dangerous.

A now fearless, or reckless, Francis leads the charge on three buffalo:

“he had no fear, only hatred of Wilson, while the brakes clamped on and the car skidded, plowing sideways to an almost stop and Wilson was out on one side and he on the other, stumbling as his feet hit the still speeding-by of the earth, and then he was shooting at the bull as he moved away, hearing the bullets whunk into him, emptying his riffle at him as he moved steadily away, finally remembering to get his shots forward into the shoulder, and as he fumbled to reload, he saw the bull was down.”

Francis succeeds in dropping all three buffalo, and is ecstatic. Wilson notes it’s not just the thrill of the hunt. A change has transpired over Francis — for the first time in his life, he showed true courage, and discovered his manhood. Even his complexion seems to change, a fire in his eyes, a broadness to his shoulders, and a renewed vitality to his soul.

Wilson and Francis even share a brotherly comradery over this victory, yet Margot stares at her husband with sullen resentment, unbeknownst to the men.

A White Hot Light

The celebration is short lived, however, as the men discover one of the buffalos is alive, and dragged itself into some tall grass. The men gather their rifles and approach the grass to finish it off, leaving Margot behind them with her own rifle for protection.

As Wilson and Francis close in, the buffalo charges from the grass. The men take aim, while the bull locks in on Francis.

At once, three shots ring out:

• Francis fired, and his bullet ricocheted off the Bull’s horns.

• Wilson fired, and his bullet killed the bull dead.

• Margot fired, and landed a clean round in the back of her husband’s head…

Margot collapses into hysterics over her husband’s body, but Wilson does not indulge her performance.

In a flat, toneless voice, he says:

“You murdered him.”

She tells him to stop… but she cannot deny it.

Here’s why.

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Imagine you’re a fierce, hot-blooded Ancient Greek warrior. You’re a 10-year veteran of the Trojan War, and you will spend the next 10 years on a return voyage from hell.

On the way, you’ve fought sea beasts, cyclopes, witches, and the wrath of the Olympian gods. All your crew members are dead. You’re shipwrecked, starving, and taken captive by an immortal nymph.

Such was the plight of Odysseus when he was detained by the goddess Calypso.

She forced him to become her lover, then offered him the opportunity of a lifetime:

Immortality.

To state it plainly, Odysseus was offered eternal youth, sex, and pleasure on Calypso’s island, free from suffering.

The alternative?

Return to the sea, endure more suffering, and hope to reach home before dying.

This is perhaps the most famous ultimatum in Greek mythology, and Odysseus proves himself the cleverest of Greek heroes in his response. Here’s how he answers the offer of eternal life, and what it teaches you about the human condition.

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Teary-eyed and Broken

Odysseus’ introduction is jarring. We remember him as the mastermind of the Trojan Horse, and expect to find a great-souled hero.

Instead, we find him weeping on a beach.

Homer writes:

“Calypso found Odysseus sitting upon the beach with his eyes ever filled with tears, and dying of sheer home sickness; for he had got tired of Calypso, and though he was forced to sleep with her in the cave by night, it was she, not he, that would have it so.

As for the day time, he spent it on the rocks and on the sea shore, weeping, crying aloud for his despair, and always looking out upon the sea.”

For seven years, Odysseus has lived in utopian pleasure with the beautiful goddess Calypso. His desires are satisfied, and he is safe from Poseidon’s wrath… and yet he is devastated.

He longs for home and his family.

Zeus decrees he must be released. Calypso relents, but offers one final temptation before he leaves.

The Offer of a Lifetime

Calypso says:

“Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, so you would start home to your own land at once?

Good luck go with you, but if you could only know how much suffering is in store for you before you get back to your own country, you would stay where you are, keep house along with me, and let me make you immortal,

no matter how anxious you may be to see this wife of yours, of whom you are thinking all the time day after day;

yet I flatter myself that I am no whit less tall or well-looking than she is, for it is not to be expected that a mortal woman should compare in beauty with an immortal.”

Odysseus must be tactful here. To offend the gods is a capital offense that risks death — as Poseidon has always proven.

Odysseus’ response:

“Do not be angry with me about this. I am quite aware that my wife Penelope is nothing like so tall or so beautiful as yourself. She is only a woman, whereas you are an immortal.

Nevertheless, I want to get home, and can think of nothing else. If some god wrecks me when I am on the sea, I will bear it and make the best of it. I have had infinite trouble both by land and sea already, so let this go with the rest.’”

Odysseus affirms Calypso’s beauty and virtue, but insists on returning home, even though it promises suffering, pain, and death.

In short, he values a short, suffering-filled life, over an everlasting life of pleasure.

Why would he turn down Heaven on Earth?

Yes, he misses his family, but there’s a deeper layer.

Odysseus discovered something worth dying for — and in doing so, revealed that the meaning of life is grounded in something greater than mere self-preservation.

From that realization emerged a truth that has become one of the bedrock principles of Western civilization: a good and meaningful life is found not in clinging to existence alone, but in orienting oneself toward that which is worth sacrifice.

The Curse of Immortality

How does this revelation play out in the narrative?

We must recognize Odysseus was not just homesick for his family. His wife and kid are going to die, and Odysseus too, shall die. And there’s no hope for a good life after death.

The emphasis is not that Odysseus chooses his family, but that he rejects immortality itself.

Odysseus recognized the ancient wisdom that immortality is a curse for mortal man.

How can we know?

Homer gives us a hint at the beginning of the chapter:

“And now, as Dawn rose from her couch beside Tithonus—harbinger of light alike to mortals and immortals…”

Homer evokes the myth of Dawn and Tithonus. In this myth, Tithonus was granted immortal life but not immortal youth. He aged endlessly and shriveled to a husk.

The same thing is happening to Odysseus in real time!

Even if Odysseus was granted eternal youth, his soul would still shrivel all the same… and as such, Odysseus recognized that man was not made for immortal life.

The paradox is, Odysseus found life by choosing death, because the dangers of the high seas restored adventure, virtue, and meaning to his soul.

Life then, is not about endless pleasure, or an end to suffering, but a perseverance in virtue over suffering. Such a life leads to adventure… an adventure that bears life to your soul, and leads you to a true and natural mortality… a mortality which affirms the grandeur of life itself.

Homer reveals all in the story’s conclusion.

A True Immortality

Odysseus does make it home. He endures many more trials and tribulations, and suffers immensely.

This is evoked in Odysseus’s very name, which loosely translates as “he who suffers much.”

We see that the man who suffers greatly, in the name of virtue, leads a meaningful life. And we see a natural answer to immortality when he reunites with his son, Telemachus.

Together, the father and son return order and justice to their home and kingdom. Telemachus grows in virtue, and becomes the noble successor to Odysseus. He shall rule wisely ever after, and the kingdom of Ithaca shall prosper.

As such, true immortality lies within posterity, and the virtue one passes down to the next generation.

Man was not made for endless pleasure, nor was he made to live forever. He was made to live meaningfully, nobly, and virtuously within time:

He who lives briefly but well, lives better than he who has been granted endless days in mindless pleasure.

Such is Homer’s enduring insight — a theme that has since sounded off through 2,500 years of Western storytelling, and man’s search for meaning.

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