Moby-Dick has the greatest opening line of all American literature:

“Call me Ishmael.”

This three-word sentence — brief as it is — has captured the attention of critics, scholars, and the general reading public for more than 170 years now.

But what exactly is so profound about this simple sentence? Taken in isolation, it’s a mere statement of fact, as simple as an acquaintance introducing themselves… but when you understand the literary context behind this simple affirmation, and Melville’s corresponding genius, you’ll see this simple sentence is far more than a character introduction.

In totality, it becomes a meditation on the Bible, the condition of modern man, and the plight that modern man finds himself in, living in a world defined by skepticism, tension, and uncertainty.

Here’s how…

Biblical Roots

As you’d probably guess, there are several layers of meaning stacked on top of the sentence, “Call me Ishmael.”

The simplest layer is that this is the protagonist of Moby-Dick introducing himself. His name is Ishmael, and he’s planning to go on a whaling vessel in search of adventure, hoping to instill meaning into his life and cure his suicidal depression.

But the first layer behind the sentence “Call me Ishmael” reveals itself in its genealogy. “Ishmael” was the name of Abraham’s son in the book of Genesis. He was born to Hagar, Abraham’s slave woman (rather than Sarah, his wife), and was thus born outside the line of the promise, which ran through Isaac, but Ishmael shall be accounted as favored by God nonetheless, on behalf of Abraham.

Thus Ishmael goes on to become a “wild man,” who lives in the wilderness. His descendants, the Ishmaelites, will be both friends and foes to the Israelites at various times in biblical history. Therefore, Ishmael and his people inhabit this tension as wild, unmoored, morally ambiguous, yet favored by God nonetheless.

Our protagonist of Moby-Dick — named Ishmael — is donning this lineage for himself. He can’t bear living the banal life of 19th-century Manhattan, and the spiritual malaise of office work or alienating labor. He muses that the “wilderness” of the sea has an enchanting power of meaning:

“Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other, crazy to go to sea? Why did the Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity?

Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.

But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all”

Not only does he affirm the sea as a place of adventure, but he calls upon the myth of Narcissus — the man who fell in love with his own image in the water, and stared at his ungraspable image all day.

Ishmael — and modern man who shares in his misery — seeks the ocean and its wilderness waters as not just a means of escaping civilization, but uncovering his true identity. In this discovery lies hope for finding a newfound meaning and love of life.

Thus, Ishmael is both the biblical wanderer in the wilderness, detached from civilization, and the man who believes modern man’s hopes for a renewed vitality come in a return to the wrestling, chaotic, uncivilized waters of the sea.

And yet still, we have just touched the surface of the original sentence’s meaning: “Call me Ishmael.”

The Self-Made Modern Man

Where do we go from here? What more can we draw from such a sentence?

Next we have to consider the strangeness of its wording. “Call me Ishmael” is an odd way to introduce yourself.

Rarely do we say “call me X” when introducing ourselves. Oftentimes, that denotes a nickname: “My name is William, but you can call me Bill.”

The implication is that Ishmael may not be our protagonist’s birth name, but a name he gave himself to speak to his new identity as a sailor, wanderer, and sojourner.

What’s also notable — we know nothing of Ishmael’s past. The story begins in the present, with Ishmael traveling from Manhattan to Nantucket, but we never learn of his background, lineage, or upbringing, besides a few vague references to having an educated background.

The idea is that Ishmael becomes a paradigm of “modern man.” Arguably, this paradigm of modern man was made famous through Don Quixote — colloquially known as the first novel, and the first “modern” book written. Don Quixote was innovative because we know nothing of the protagonist’s past. He’s simply a Spanish hidalgo who goes crazy from reading chivalric books, claims he’s a knight named Don Quixote, and goes off on insanity-laden quests of heroic chivalry.

Don Quixote claims the title of modern novel because its character is self-invented. Whereas premodern man understood himself as a man who inherited a civilization from his fellow man, and a cosmos from God, he thus found his identity through piety to his family, country, and his creator. Modern man, by contrast, is the man of self-invention. He has no theological roots, minimal recourse to patriotism, and constructs his own meaning by forging his own path.

This parallels Ishmael — self-created, self-named, and going on an adventure at sea to forge his own life’s meaning. This sounds exciting, but it comes with a catch, namely, Ishmael is suicidal. He’s not alone; rather, this is the burden of the “self-made man.” If man must make his own meaning, then his meaning is subjective, and if it’s subjective, then it may be meaningless.

To rephrase it, the modern man of self-invented autonomy finds himself alone in a chaotic and dangerous universe, left to solve the problem of existential despair for himself.

“Make your own meaning, or perish,” is perhaps the slogan of this modern man. Ishmael takes this proposition seriously — inventing his own identity — and to his credit, it seems to be at least temporally effective, on account that he’s still alive to tell us his story.

Whether Ishmael became fulfilled, however, remains an open question.

Rediscovering the Restless Heart

The final step that makes “Call me Ishmael” a brilliant sentence is that it soon becomes apparent Ishmael’s story is not unique to himself.

There is an invitation, perhaps deliberately designed by Melville, for the reader to step into Ishmael’s shoes. We too are “modern men,” who thus inhabit the same universe — if not an even more modernized one — than Ishmael did.

This suggestion can be both triumphant and tragic, perhaps simultaneously.

On the positive side, “Call me Ishmael” becomes an invitation for us to choose our own adventure, forge our own path, and create our own destiny. Rather than be bounded by tradition, we have the opportunity to live how we shall choose, and proclaim on our deathbeds, “I did it my way!” as Frank Sinatra once sang.

On the other hand, this invitation invites us into the existential tension of our age — an age that has lost faith in theology, philosophy, and man’s place in the cosmos. We lack certainty in understanding our nature and life’s purpose. The modern instinct is to merely hide this angst with the rushes of “modern life,” and its thrills, pleasures, and demands. To rest with the uncertain skepticism of our times is to invite discomfort, fear, and perhaps existential suffering, as it did Ishmael. And yet, this is a courageous act, and perhaps the act that sets you on a life towards adventure, as it also did Ishmael.

This final idea of the opening sentence should rest on our minds as an invitation — into the world of Moby-Dick, the mind of Ishmael, the tensions of Melville, and the identity of the “modern man.”

In such an invitation comes a certain restless yearning for life, as Ishmael affirms:

“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

Such is Ishmael’s plight — a restless itching, yearning for truth and discovery in the remote areas of life, yet seemingly never satiated. This is the final tension of the modern man — liberated to do whatever he desires, but fundamentally dissatisfied and forced into a perpetual striving without rest.

That is Ishmael’s irony: he is free to do anything but rest in leisure. Free to become anything he wants, but not free to merely rest and be.

And this is Melville’s final question, which he never seemed to answer himself, namely, what is the secret to life that brings man peace?

Augustine’s famous answer was that the restless human heart remains so until it rests in God, but that was a premodern solution for premodern man. Modern man has lost his faith in God, and thus continues staring into the horizon of the sea like Ishmael, tormented by desires with no end in sight. Not strong enough to abandon his faith in life, nor strong enough to maintain his faith in God.

Perhaps this is the closing image — all men reach the same crossroads as Ishmael did, and have a choice to make. When asked of life’s meaning, they can respond in faith, or they can respond in despair, but their response is required. And the response is the most important decision that will define man’s life.

Hell has captured the imagination of novelists, poets, theologians, and artists for centuries. Since as early as Dante’s Divine Comedy, artists have sought to understand its nature and how it fits into the providential plan of the Christian God.

Atheists also partake in the conversation, albeit from the reverse direction, asking:

How can a good and loving God sentence his creatures to an eternity of damnation?

Believe it or not, one of the best answers comes from the 19th-century Russian novelist Dostoevsky. His work The Brothers Karamazov asks this very question through the staunch atheist Ivan Karamazov, yet provides perhaps one of the richest answers ever. The discovery is not merely that Hell is compatible with a loving God, but that without Hell, love, morality, and the meaning of life itself risk being extinguished.

Here, then, is Dostoevsky’s take on the necessity of Hell.

Introducing Ivan

Before we jump into Ivan’s argument, let’s remind ourselves of his background. He’s the middle child of the three Karamazov brothers. He’s highly intelligent, but an undecided atheist. He’s rejected God due to the “problem of evil”: he cannot reconcile wanting to spend eternity with a God who allows innocent children to suffer.

While Ivan presents strong logical arguments against the faith, he also has an artistic streak. Some of his best attacks on Christianity come through poetry and narrative fiction, like his famous “Grand Inquisitor” story, in which he argues that the Catholic Church has rejected Christ and human freedom in favor of the Satanic temptations of power, control, and totalitarian unity.

But where does his critique of Hell enter the picture?

Near the novel’s conclusion, Ivan meets the Devil himself, and the two engage in one of literature’s most famous meditations on cosmic justice.

A Date with the Devil

The conversation takes place near the novel’s end, when the Devil appears to Ivan alone in his sleeping quarters. It’s unclear whether this apparition is a hallucination or the actual demon in the flesh, but for simplicity, we’ll treat him as real.

The Devil’s goal is simple: to prevent Ivan from repenting and turning to the faith by mocking him over his disbelief.

And how does he accomplish this?

By reminding Ivan of a story he wrote as an adolescent, one that gets to the heart of his crisis of faith.

To recap, Ivan’s story goes as follows:

An atheist dies and discovers in the afterlife that God is real. The gates of Heaven open to him.

Yet he is offended by Heaven’s existence, which contradicts his deeply held convictions of atheism. In protest, he refuses to enter and lies prostrate for a quadrillion years.

Eventually, for an unexplained reason, he gets up and decides to give Heaven a try. But God says, “Not so fast.” As punishment for his defiance, he must walk a quadrillion miles in darkness, a mile for every year he protested.

The man agrees and walks the quadrillion miles, paying his debts. Upon entering Heaven, he weeps with joy and declares that two seconds of Heaven were worth the quadrillion years of darkness.

The story ends triumphantly, but remember: a young Ivan wrote this as an expression of his rejection of the faith.

The problem, as Ivan sees it, is that a world where everyone is saved makes life meaningless. All suffering, whether a minute or a million years, is ultimately abolished, and no one’s choices can change the outcome. Everyone, righteous and wicked alike, will eventually be saved.

His story makes this clear — the atheist was free to protest Heaven, but never free to reject it. Whether he waited one year or a quadrillion, his only eventual option was an eternity of paradise.

He thus asserts that a world where everyone is saved is ultimately a world of nihilism. Everyone reaches the same eternal destination, and everything that came before becomes a meaningless dream.

This is precisely what Ivan cannot justify. When he hears of a twelve-year-old boy viciously mauled by a malicious general’s hunting dogs, or parents who lock their child in an outhouse to freeze to death, he refuses to say that their suffering is meaningless or justified by Heaven.

It’s a strange paradox in which Ivan accuses God of cruelty through kindness. God’s all-encompassing mercy is too agonizing for his pained heart, which demands justice.

It’s quite a powerful attack on the faith, but a closer look reveals a fatal flaw in Ivan’s conception of the afterlife: without Hell, the very possibility of love, justice, and even human freedom collapses.

Here, then, is why Hell is necessary for God’s love to be real…

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Don Quixote was a madman who charged windmills, slaughtered sheep, and mistook prostitutes and crooks for maidens and noblemen.

400 years later, his story remains one of the greatest and most widely read novels of all time.

Why?

This novel not only revolutionized literature, but captured a fundamental revolution in human nature itself. It was written at one of the great transitional epochs of history— a time of unprecedented change, technological innovation, and discoveries of the “New World,” but also a time of profound uncertainty.

Mankind was moving out of what we now call the “medieval era” — a world unified socially, culturally, politically, and theologically by the Church — and into the “modern world.”

This change did not only bring the aforementioned technological innovations, but a great tension too. Man began to doubt his certainty about life’s meaning, his place in the cosmos, and even his understanding of his own nature.

In other words, Don Quixote shows us the birth of what it means to be a “modern man”—and how to navigate a world increasingly defined by skepticism, uncertainty, and technological innovation.

You can read this novel as both a celebration of this “new frontier,” where man can reinvent himself, and a lamentation of the old world’s decay — a decay that shatters mankind’s confidence in his ability to live a meaningful life.

Ultimately, the core essence of Don Quixote is tragedy, a lamentation at the death of the old world and the loss of wonder that accompanies it.

And yet, inside this tragedy are the seeds of how modern man might one day “return to his roots,” rediscovering the wonder, grandeur, and inherent joy of a medieval cosmology, reconciled with the progress, innovation, and material prosperity of the modern world.

Today, we’ll see how…

Delusions of Grandeur

So what can we learn from a fictional 17th century delusional knight?

Let’s start by considering why Don Quixote went insane in the first place.

We first learn that Don Quixote was a hidalgo (a poor rural nobleman) living a humble and quiet life on a farm. He’s a gentle soul and a quiet idealist who buries his face in books on medieval chivalry. Yet it appears he read a little too many books:

“Our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

He filled his imagination with everything he had read… and had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.”

Books made Quixote insane, but there was intention behind his insanity. Quixote’s madness is a spiritual rebellion. His love of chivalry was a love of greatness grounded in virtue. Knights were called to lay down their life to protect the innocent and aspire to a life of fortitude, courage, honor above all. Yet the quiet poverty of Quixote’s real life was insufficient to channel his ambitions. Rather than settling for mediocrity, he wills the medieval into existence:

For the rest of his journey, Quixote will see castles instead of inns, maidens instead of prostitutes, and monsters to be slayed in place of mundane farm life.

Yet we’re not just called to laugh at Quixote. Insane though he is, Cervantes suggests there’s a hidden wisdom in Quixote’s madness. The protagonist doesn’t evoke mockery, but pity. Don Quixote connects you to an essence of the human spirit that is pure, primal, and good.

As we will see, the purity of Don Quixote’s heart is gravely missing in the modern world.

The Dangers of Realism

Don Quixote’s squire, Sancho Panza, is the perfect foil to Quixote. Sancho is a realist in every sense of the word. He’s pragmatic and sees the world as it is. While this helps ground Sancho in reality, we also see that there is a grave shortcoming in his worldview too.

To put it simply, Sancho is small-souled when we first meet him. He lives a passive existence of silent desperation. His imagination is constrained by the immediate realities of his life, and his ambitions rarely extend beyond material comfort.

Though Don Quixote aspires to great things and fails because of his lofty vision, Sancho sadly aspires to little at all. He’s no hero because he has not yet learned to imagine himself as one. He merely accepts the drab status quo of reality, despite his unhappiness as an impoverished farmer.

Sancho also mirrors the “sanity,” of Spain in the present day. Its populace is cynical, cold, and hard-hearted. They too reject the grandiose dreamy nature that Don Quixote aspires towards.

This is precisely what Quixote rebels against in his madness. He sees a modernizing Europe gutting its spiritual soul, and he refuses to live a life of quiet passivity that would see him fade into the abyss of a meaningless life.

Quixote and Sancho’s partnership then, shows the soul of modern man divided. Quixote is all imagination, Sancho all common-sense. One man is great-souled but insane, the other a realist whose life is sparse and shallow. They need each other.

This becomes clear when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza face their greatest and most famous rival, the legendary windmills.

Defeated by Giants

As Don Quixote sets out on his quest to be a noble knight, with Sancho Panza by his side, the two encounter a valley of windmills. Don Quixote, in his insanity, however, sees something entirely different — giants are invading Spain!

“Look out Sancho! Our country is being invaded!” Don Quixote screams.

Mounted on his horse with a lance in hand, he makes a furious rush for the windmills before Sancho can stop him. Quixote gives a shout and slashes his lance through the rotating windmill, only to be tossed off his horse with a crash.

After wiping the dust off, he gets to his feet, looks at the “giant,” and gasps:

“Look Sancho! Some necromancer has turned the army of giants into windmills!”

This short exchange captures the heart of the novel. For 1,000 pages, Quixote and Sancho go on adventures that follow this framework. Quixote’s imagination misreads a situation, he fights an imaginary villain, and leaves a path of destruction in his wake, while Sancho Panza follows along powerless to stop him.

The result is a comedic story, but also a tragic one. Despite Don Quixote’s noble intentions, he fails to do good. Instead he meets strife, scorn, and mockery wherever he goes. Ironically, he often leaves the world worse than where he finds it… yet he’s still a hero.

If there’s any hope in the story, it’s in this fact here:

Cervantes insists that there is something heroic in those of a noble heart who continue striving toward the good, no matter how much they may falter. Quixote failed to save chivalry, but in daring to fight a doomed quest in the face of modern Europe, his life story was one of silent beauty. Over time, the cynicism of the world breaks him, and he dies disillusioned, but it’s in the heap of his brokenness that our pity is most evoked.

The novel ends not with a full endorsement of Quixote’s insanity, but a plea to faith. To aspire to great adventures like he did.

It’s only fitting that Quixote has a true heir on his death bed. Sancho, by his side, promises to continue the adventures in Quixote’s place. The pragmatic squire, under Quixote’s lead, learned what it means to dare, and will carry the torch from here.

The Adventure Continues?

The real warning of the story is not Don Quixote’s insanity, but Sancho Panza’s passivity. What Cervantes saw in 17th century Spain was a modernizing Europe that abandoned the spiritual ethos that was the soul of civilization. A world that replaced mythology, piety, and thumos with utility, practicality, and a hard-hearted realism.

In this sense, the real hero is also Sancho. By the story’s end, he maintains his realism but learns Quixote’s idealism. In carrying the torch, he vows to be great-souled, but one grounded in the world.

The true spiritual rebellion then, is the man who learns to see the world as it is, like Sancho, but who loves the world for what it could be, like Don Quixote.

To do this is to live a life of greatness grounded in virtue, even in a mundane world that has forgotten how to dream.

Flannery O’Connor is one of the greatest writers of the American South, and A Good Man Is Hard to Find is her masterpiece.

A staunch Christian, she wrote in the mid-twentieth century about a “Christ-haunted” South: a world where Christ was still a known name, but no longer a living faith embraced by its people.

Thus her writing embraced the grotesque — she used horror and violence to show how far the South had fallen, and hoped to remind the secular modern man of the grace he had lost.

A Good Man runs on this framework perfectly. It follows a family’s road trip from Atlanta to Florida, which ends in catastrophe as they come face to face with three escaped convicts wanted for murder.

What follows is a desperate attempt to plea for their lives, and a question of whether or not grace can crack the hardened heart of modern man…

An Unhappy Family

The family consists of the grandmother, her son Bailey, his wife, and their two children. The grandmother doesn’t want to go to Florida; she’d rather visit relatives in Tennessee. As a pretext, she warns of “the Misfit,” an escaped convict reportedly headed that way.

The opening lines show her to be selfish and manipulative. The rest of the family is no better — Bailey is sullen, the mother is apathetic, and the children undisciplined brats. This register is negative, but it’s O’Connor’s medium: spiritually impoverished men and women, embroiled in worldly affairs, and bitter for it.

We know the grandmother best, and she is vain and self-sufficient. This vanity is best expressed on the day of the road trip, in which she dresses up in her finest clothes.

Why exactly?

The narrator affirms:

“In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”

Even facing death, the grandmother’s chief concern is her appearance: to be seen as genteel, even by strangers. This is pride, the precise “spiritual illness” O’Connor saw in the South, and she believed only the grotesque and the violent could shake a man from it.

A Minor Accident…

The trip is banal and tedious. The mother sleeps, Bailey drives in bitter silence, and the grandmother rambles.

After a stop for sandwiches, the family passes near Toombsboro, where the grandmother recalls an old plantation house she wants to see again. She knows Bailey won’t oblige, so she lies again:

The house has a “secret panel” where the family silver was hidden from Sherman.

The children kick and scream at this lie, demanding to visit, until Bailey relents. He follows the Grandmother’s directions, travelling upon an obscure dirt road.

Unfortunately, a horrible thought crosses the grandmother’s mind — the house is in Tennessee, not Georgia. She jerks upright, upsets her valise, and the cat she smuggled into the car against Bailey’s wishes springs onto his shoulder. It claws into his neck, and the car crashes into a ditch…

Meet the Misfits

Everyone survives, the mother worst with a broken shoulder.

After the family gathers themselves, another car appears, approaching slowly, as if the occupants were watching all along. Upon pulling over, three armed men emerge from the car, and the grandmother recognizes the driver:

“’You’re The Misfit!’ she said. ‘I recognized you at once!’

‘Yes’m,’ the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, ‘but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.’”

Unfortunately, her vanity about “being right,” may have sealed her family’s doom. His identity is compromised, and they may have to die.

What follows next is a series of bargains from the grandmother. First, she pathetically appeals to what she values most, namely class and propriety:

“I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood.”

Just as she wants the world to recognize her as a lady, she assumes he’ll respond kindly to being called a gentleman… but he doesn’t.

Instead, the Misfit sends Bailey and his son into the woods. The once sullen Bailey leaves parting words of assurance to his mother:

“I’ll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!”

Moments later, shots ring out in the woods, and only the Misfit’s minions return.

The Grandmother’s pleas continue. After offering money, which the Misfit rejects, she appeals to faith:

“If you would pray,” she says, “Jesus would help you.”

“I don’t want no hep,” he answers. “I’m doing all right by myself.”

It’s at this moment that despair begins setting in. For perhaps the first time in the grandmother’s life, her suffering cracks through her worldly pretensions:

“Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus. Jesus,” meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.”

Surprisingly, it’s here, when the Grandmother curses the name of Jesus, that she finally breaks through to the Misfit.

A certain snarl comes over his face, and he reveals the roots of his faithlessness, his evils, and why he cannot bear the reality of the Cross…

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If you ask me, Moby Dick is THE great American novel.

Others are notable (The Great Gatsby, East of Eden, Blood Meridian), but no other work of American literature comes close to Moby Dick’s ambition, scale, and literary accomplishment.

This work is far more than a mere nautical adventure, but a sprawling masterpiece that combines epic, tragedy, sermon, philosophy, theology, and even whaling encyclopedia.

And while the wisdom you can draw from this work is nearly limitless, the heart of this novel is moved by one of its deepest ideas:

The monomania of vengeance and self-destruction.

This monomania warns us of a terrifying reality — that the most brilliant minds can become the greatest engines of destruction when their hearts are ordered toward the wrong end.

Understanding the Hunt

This “monomania of vengeance” is found in Captain Ahab, who is arguably a protagonist, villain, or anti-hero depending on how you read him.

He’s enigmatic, and therefore dangerous, precisely because he’s a man of remarkable talents and virtues who blurs the line between traditional heroism and vigilante chaos.

Ahab’s MO is simple: he lost his leg to Moby Dick, and has made a lifelong vow of revenge.

But this isn’t just a sea creature. Ahab believes that Moby Dick is the incarnation of “original sin,” or evil itself. Hence his quest is both that of a hero seeking to conquer evil, and that of a prideful maniac trying to don the role of God — redefining good and evil on his own terms.

Thus, this novel’s great hunt for the whale is really the war of a man’s soul.

The plot asks whether or not Ahab will succeed in killing the whale, but the moral theme asks a deeper question:

What is the fate of the war within Ahab’s soul?

Will he seek to “destroy evil” in accordance with traditional Christian morality — to serve God — or will he usurp the natural moral order and don the role of God as judge, jury, and executioner?

We can glimpse the truth of Ahab’s heart in his own confession:

Ahab’s Confession

This singular line from Ahab sheds light on the truth of his heart:

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”

In other words, Ahab is not a cartoonish madman. His intellect is remarkably intact. He may be insane, but he’s not irrational. Instead, he is remarkably cruel and calculating in his obsession with vengeance.

Therefore, the danger is not Ahab’s intellect, but his heart.

What has gone fundamentally astray is his love. His greatest love is not serving goodness, but destruction in the name of defeating evil.

The whale becomes an emblem not merely of evil incarnate, but of everything that thwarts Ahab’s perception of the cosmos, fate, and even God himself.

Ahab’s war on Moby Dick risks becoming a war on God.

We witness this war through the level-headed narrator, Ishmael, who asks:

What is behind Ahab’s mask? What is his true passion?

If a man’s ruling passion determines his destiny, then nothing can save a ship, a crew, or even a nation from a captain who loves the wrong thing with total conviction — and a crew who follows him because they are loyal to his steadfast vitality.

Ultimately, Moby-Dick is Melville’s attempt to wrestle with some of the deepest questions we can ask about the human condition:

• What happens when a man makes his grievance his personal god?

• Can man learn to love the abyss of self-destruction?

• How far will a loyal crew follow a self-destructive leader?

• Can a monomaniacal man like Ahab escape the dangers of his self-destructive obsession?

• Is there room for divine meaning in Moby-Dick’s universe, or is it merely a bleak realm of chaos, despair, and death?

• What is the difference between seeking truth and being consumed by it?

Melville’s answer is a warning, and it may be more urgent now than when he wrote it.

And if you want to understand what obsession does to the human soul, there may be no better place to begin.

If you are looking for a place to put that approach into practice with others, we just crossed 60,000 readers over at the Athenaeum Book Club.

Our discussions offer a depth you can’t find anywhere else online. We don’t read books to check them off a list, but to train the soul — and Moby-Dick is one of the great trainers of the soul in the English language.

We are about to begin our read of Moby-Dick over the next six weeks, and I’ll personally be leading the discussions.

It is a demanding book, and it is far better read in company than alone.

Our first discussion, covering Chapters 1–40, is on October 13 at 12pm ET.

Please join us.

And remember: all sessions are recorded if you can’t make it live.

Note: You don’t have to have finished the book by then, but the more you’ve read, the more you’ll get out of the session.

Thanks to every one of you for being here and making it possible for us to do this work.

Join Our Book Club

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

No novel tormented Dostoevsky’s writing process more than The Idiot. In fact, halfway through he was convinced the work was an abject failure.

It was his most ambitious project to date, where he dared to capture in literature a portrait of the “positively good man.”

Specifically, he wrote:

“The main idea of the novel is to depict the positively good man. There is nothing more difficult than this in the world, especially nowadays… the task is immeasurable… there is only one positively good man in the world, and that is Christ.”

Thus the Idiot is Dostoevsky’s attempt to portray a human who draws as near to Christ as possible. He asks not only if man can be Christ-like, but whether his Christ-like nature is enough to bring him and his fellow man salvation. This is explored through protagonist Prince Myshkin.

Today, we’ll dive into Prince Myshkin’s character to understand what a “positively good man,” is — whether or not Myshkin lives up to the title — and what that reveals to us about human beings on a similar struggle to pursue the Good.

A Sickly Prince

First, how does Dostoevsky attempt to create this “positively good man,” in Prince Myshkin?

Recall that the Prince was orphaned and raised communally in villages, before spending four years in a Swiss sanatorium to treat his epilepsy. The Prince himself said his illness made him an “idiot.”

As a result of his suffering and reclusive upbringing, Myshkin is an “idiot” insofar as he cannot understand societal conventions. The modern world mocks him as a clueless man who doesn’t understand social cues, customs, or traditions.

However, Myshkin’s suffering also gave him a deep spiritual life. There was a mysterious transformation in his soul that gave him an intensified love for simply living. Though Myshkin’s transformation surpasses neat comprehension, it’s akin to a man who, “had little and suffered much,” but began to cherish his bare existence upon recovering.

And through this love of life grew a love for his fellow man that is almost heavenly in nature. We first see this love pour out in the Swiss village where Myshkin was raised, in reaction to the downfall of a peasant named Marie.

Forgiving a Fallen Woman

Marie’s story is simple and to the point:

She was a peasant seduced by a traveling salesman, eloped with him, only to be abandoned and returned to the village ashamed and sickly with consumption.

The village scorns Marie for her folly. They mock and shun her, and the children of the village cast stones at her. Only the Prince arises to comfort her.

Sharp readers will notice a connection to Scripture here — the Prince arises to save a licentious woman being stoned and punished by her broader community. But we must pay close attention to the nature of this mercy, rather than dismissing it as, “the Prince is non-judgmental and kind.”

Such a statement is technically correct, but actually dilutes the fullness of the Prince’s love and virtuous character.

First, Dostoevsky makes it clear that the village was indeed cruel in their rejection of Marie. She was humiliated, ashamed, and rejected at the lowest moment of her life. Their ceaseless mockery borders on immoral hatred.

But here’s where Dostoevsky himself complicates the story:

Neither he, nor the Prince, suggest that Marie is an, “innocent victim.” Indeed, while the village became a cruel mob towards her, and Marie herself dated a terrible man, she transgressed the agreed-upon morality of her village. To elope and surrender oneself to a stranger outside of the marital contract would be both a violation of prudence and the contemporary laws of sexual morality.

In other words, the villagers’ cruel scorn — which is excessive, and perhaps unjust in its own right — is incited by a genuine wrongdoing from Marie.

Again, this echoes Scripture’s story of Christ and the adulteress, in which the woman’s infidelity genuinely transgressed divine law. And yet, it’s this real injustice by Marie that emphasizes Myshkin’s love.

He grants her mercy, kindness, and forgiveness despite the fact that Marie committed a real injustice. In a sense, this is an “undeserved” mercy that is the fullness of Christian love.

So Myshkin is not “Christ-like” because he’s merely non-judgmental. Rather, he forgives and extends mercy to a fallen woman who did nothing to, “earn that mercy.”

And to extend this idea further — this is what Christianity says is the state of all mankind, namely, all are fallen. And just as the dictum goes, “you must forgive if you want to be forgiven,” so too must you extend love and unearned mercy to your fellow man if you wish to receive the same.

And this is the heart of how Myshkin aspires to be a “positively good man,” in the image of Christ.

And yet, there’s one crucial flaw in Myshkin’s mercy as we’ve seen it presented thus far. This flaw, though subtle, could prove fatal — and lead to the Prince’s own undoing if he doesn’t discover it in real time.

But in order to understand what Myshkin is currently missing in his mercy, we have to take a closer look at the story of Christ and the adulteress…

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Goethe’s Faust is a masterpiece — a classic “deal with the Devil” tale about a man who sells his soul for worldly gain… but this play comes with a twist.

This isn’t your typical Christian story about resisting temptation, rather it’s best understood as an allegory of the spiritual crisis of modern man. Goethe saw a modern world skeptical of religion yet carrying a “God-shaped hole” in its heart.

His life’s mission was to show how man could live a meaningful life without traditional religion, and Faust was his grand attempt at a solution. This work is brilliant, ambitious, and intellectually rich — but ironically, it falls short.

Yet it’s the very shortcomings of Faust that make the play brilliant — it exposes the hidden temptation that has ruined the heart and soul of modern man, teaching us that it’s far easier to “sell your soul,” than you’d think.

Here’s the story, and what it reveals about the modern day devil — and the true answer to living with meaning today.

The Futility of Knowledge

The play follows Dr. Faust. He’s an educated scholar who’s grown dissatisfied with the world. He laments that though he’s studied “everything,” he remains unhappy. No amount of book learning, he concludes, can bring him peace.

In this disillusionment, he gets a visit by a devil from hell:

Mephistopheles

The Demon comes with a simple but familiar promise — sign this contract, and I’ll give you all the powers of hell to do your bidding.

But of course, there’s a catch:

If Faust ever finds true happiness, Mephistopheles will snatch his soul for eternity.

Faust, the over-ambitious, dissatisfied, and skeptical scholar, signs on the dotted line.

But why would he do this?

Faust is not as simple as he looks. He actually wants the devil to snatch his soul — for that would mean he finally found a lasting satisfaction to end human desire. Ironically then, Faust’s yearning for a lasting happiness expressly sets him on a pathway to Hell, from his own choosing!

And yet the story has just gotten started. So let’s see what awaits Faust on this proverbial “highway to Hell…”

Pleasure, Pleasure, Pleasure

With all the powers of Hell at his disposal, Faust’s first schemes are, surprisingly, pathetic.

He doesn’t inquire with Mephistopheles about divine knowledge, nor dare to see the heavenly realms of the cosmos. Instead, he rejects knowledge altogether, and instead seeks happiness in… worldly pleasure, of all things.

With Mephistopheles’ power, he enjoys riches, food, drink, and all the delights that sensual pleasure can grant him. He even begins a tragic affair with a woman named Gretchen — but impregnates and abandons her, to her shame.

The affair ends in tragedy, with Faust lamenting that neither book-knowledge, nor worldly pleasure can save him.

From here, he turns to greater ambitions, in which he’ll unlock the full potential of the demonic…

Mysticism, Power, and Beauty

Rejecting the modern world, Faust turns to mysticism.

He visits the ancient Greek mythological world and marries Helen of Troy — the embodiment of classical beauty. This marriage is not just romantic, but philosophic in nature:

Faust hopes that by marrying the woman who is “beauty incarnate,” such beauty can bring lasting satisfaction to his aching soul. In other words, his marriage asks “is beauty enough to bring eternal happiness to humanity?”

Predictably, this plot too, ends in failure. The problem is that Helen’s beauty is finite, but human desires are infinite, and no finite object can satiate infinity. As such, Faust discovers that neither philosophy, sublime beauty, nor even the grandeur of the ancient mythological world can satiate his soul.

Finally, Faust turns to his last bastion of hope — which is the embrace of power itself. Specifically, Faust takes to political life, and attempts to impose his will on reality via political and material achievement. It’s an attempt at becoming a “great man,” of history, but this too fails to bring him his long sought happiness:

Throughout his life, Faust remained unhappy and miserable…

The play’s ending has a divinely foreshadowed means of salvation — God saves Faust through an act of mercy — but the play’s genius lies not in the happy ending… this play is so masterful precisely because Faust lived, and essentially died, in despair.

Despite the Christian imagery that Goethe uses, this is not a Christian play. In fact, Goethe himself rejected orthodox Christianity and all organized religion.

And it is precisely this rejection that explains Faust’s despair. To see why, we must return to the beginning, where one crucial mistake set the course of his misery.

A Fatal Mistranslation

We first met Faust in his study, lamenting that book knowledge could not make him happy. But there’s an easy-to-miss detail.

He was translating the Bible — and mistranslated a key passage, John 1:1, which traditionally reads:

“In the beginning was the Word.”

In the original Greek, “Word” is translated as Logos — divine order, the intelligence of reality, natural law, and the guide to living a good life. Traditionally, this meant true life is found by knowing and loving the Logos.

Faust, however, renders it differently:

“In the beginning was the deed.”

That single line explains the entirety of his misery.

Faust is unhappy because he lives in a world without Logos — a world with no truth, good, nor evil — and therefore no ultimate meaning.

Instead of Logos, life becomes mere action. For Goethe, meaning is not discovered, but created through striving.

Thus Goethe suggests Faust’s life is “meaningful” only because he strove, even in unhappiness. In this view, a world without religion is a world without truth, good, or evil. There is no “good” life, only a life to be lived — filled as fully as possible through creative action.

This is the heart of Faust’s despair, and of modern man’s spiritual crisis: life reduced to meaningless action, an endless striving meant only to distract from the misery of being.

Such a worldview has dire consequences, but also hints at the true solution.

Rediscovering Logos

The dire consequences of Faust’s philosophy are clear. His life is morally gray, even condemnable, yet it cannot be called “evil,” for Goethe’s rejection of logos means that he denies evil exists.

Though he may speak of “evil,” or depict guilt in Faust, the reality is that a world without logos is a world without morality.

Thus Faust’s atrocities like ruining Gretchen, or causing the death of innocent bystanders are dismissed as “errors in judgment,” rather than acts of evil. In such a world, “anything is permitted,” and yet this unlimited freedom leaves Faust miserable.

The solution, though not offered by the play, lies in correcting Faust’s mistranslation:

“In the beginning was the deed.”

Faust must rediscover that the Word — the Logos — exists. Goethe shows that life without good, evil, and Truth collapses into despair. Like Faust, modern man may chase wealth, sex, power, or pleasure, but all roads end the same: an unsatisfied life and dread of death.

To rediscover the Logos is to embrace humility — to admit that life is not about personal happiness but about loving Truth. It means acknowledging that Truth exists, is greater than us, and demands our submission.

The paradox is that only in such submission — the forgetfulness of one’s happiness — can true happiness be found. For modern man to find himself, he must lose himself. His motto is not to embrace “the deed,” nor to “live his truth,” but to love the Truth.

This love is stubbornly ancient, yet it alone promises not just happiness, but a hopeful, meaningful future.

Abraham is one of the most foundational characters of the Biblical narrative, praised as a model of near perfect faith.

He enacts the beginning of God’s “rescue plan,” to save man from the Fall.

And this mission begins with his famous call, to a walk of Faith with God, to become a “Father of Nations.” His story then, is not just foundational to understanding the Biblical narrative, but to understand the universal wisdom behind what constitutes true faith, and also true civilization.

The suggestion is that the ability to walk with God and the ability to found a successful familial dynasty predicated upon virtue are fundamentally intertwined.

Today then, we’ll dive deep into Abraham’s story to understand the vision of what constitutes true faith, and how this helps man build a dynasty that lasts…

The Call to Faith

As a recap, Abraham’s story begins in Genesis 12, which marks a shift in literary genre. Genesis 1-11 is the genre of “primeval history.” It recalls literal events, dramatized through a poetic medium to give a “larger than life,” feel that’s almost mythological in nature — the 7 days creation story, the Fall of Man, the Flood etc.

The underlying message of Genesis 1-11 is “man is fallen, and if left to his own devices, will freely embrace evil, vice, and self-destruction [Cain & his descendants, the Flood, tower of Babel]”

Genesis 12 marks the beginning of the more explicitly historical aspect of scripture —meaning that from Abraham onward, Scripture situates its characters within recognizable peoples, cities, customs, and events of the ancient world. Thus Abraham’s story is suspected to have taken place around 2000-1800 BC, in the Middle Bronze Age.

Gen 12 is also the beginning of God’s “rescue plan,” to save man from death.

The beginning of Abraham’s story is simple but profound:

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”

So the call is quite clear — leave your father’s house, to a foreign land I’ll show you. But a closer look shows this is no mere call at all.

In hindsight, you might think it’s simple to say, “oh, God is calling me. Who am I to say no?” but in reality, this simple call is historically unprecedented, and marks the beginning of man’s understanding of faith.

A Stranger and Sojourner

Lets give further context to what God called Abraham to do.

Recall that Abraham was originally from the city of Ur. This was a city in the fertile lands of Mesopotamia, and was one of the major metropolitan hubs of the known world — a land of high civilization, culture, literacy, architecture.

Abraham’s family leaves Ur for Haran, another metropolis that was a major trade center and hotbed of commerce. It’s here where Abraham’s father dies, when God calls upon him to leave his “father’s house,” for the land of Canaan to become a nomad.

This vocation is not an easy call. Whereas city life gave you a modicum of stability, security, and social safety nets, nomadic life was wild and precarious. You had no fixed identity, job, income, nor protection. Instead, you adopted the life of a “stranger and sojourner,” who adapted to the demands of nearby civilizations in one’s travels.

This work could vary from overseeing cattle, to trade crops in times of drought, or mercenary work in raiding/defense from warring cities. And of course, living in the plains meant you had no protection from bandits and raiders.

To summarize then, Abraham’s answering the call to “leave his father’s house,” in Haran is the cultural equivalent of a Wall Street banker moving to Africa to become a pig farmer and mercenary.

Interestingly as well, the name Haran etymologically means “intersecting roads.” In other words, God calls Abraham at the crossroads of his existence. Abraham can either answer the call — to venture into a life of faith in the wilderness — or he can ignore the call to remain in the familiar, the mundane, and the human.

Why is this significant?

It emphasizes that, for one, the call of a faithful life is not about safety and security, but has plenty of dangers. More importantly, Abraham’s nomadic life emphasizes that faith is predicated upon total surrender and dependency on God.

And of course, Abraham’s call to faith is archetypal — if any man wants to meet providence, it must be done via sacrifice in the wilderness, by renouncing worldly security in favor of providential faith.

Furthermore, the Bible actually ascribes a title for the man who answers the Abrahamic call to faith. Those who answer God’s call are given the title of “stranger and sojourner.” This is not only how Abraham introduces himself, but becomes the running label of many later Biblical descendants called upon by God, including David (Psalm 39:12), Peter (1 Peter 2:11), and Hebrews commenting on the entire Patriarch lineage (Heb 11:13-16).

The Biblical model of faith is to become a stranger and sojourner, thoroughly dependent upon God… but answering the call is just the beginning.

What Abraham is actually called to do in the wilderness of nomadic life is even more strange. And yet, when we inquire into Abraham’s actions, we discover exactly what makes him a “Father of Nations” — and what it means to become a true builder of a providential dynasty…

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Why are we ashamed at being naked?

This topic is both strange, taboo, and also laughingly common sensical. It’s one of those facts so basic that no one questions it.

And yet, to understand human shame in regards to the body is to understand a key facet of your own nature. Indeed, as strange as it sounds, understanding the fear and shame associated with the human body actually leads to a truly felt sense of self knowledge.

This comes from none other than St. Augustine himself, who argued in The City of God that shame teaches you the roots of your origins, the truth of your nature, and — oddly enough — what it means to fulfill that very nature.

Today then, we’ll see how…

Their Eyes Were Opened…

Augustine says man’s sense of shame is tied to the Fall of man. The narrative makes clear that Adam and Eve, in pre-fallen paradise, enjoyed a heavenly bliss on Earth, and felt no sense of shame at their nakedness.

Yet, after the fall, the first thing they do is cover up and hide.

Specifically:

“She took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons”

Their eyes being opened isn’t meant to be literal, as if they were sewn shut earlier. Their opened eyes are understood as an expansion of their consciousness — they’ve grown aware of good and evil. Thus, they understand the nature of evil, and how others can be harmed, and even worse, how they can be harmed.

They are vulnerable and know it; they are naked…

The Scourge of Lust

So one can appreciate how the fall of man leads to a proverbial nakedness — a fear of realizing one’s vulnerability — but why exactly do we cover our bodies?

Augustine notes how man feels shamed at human genitalia specifically. A man might be comfortable on the beach with his shirt off, but would be horrified to walk around in a t-shirt without his swim trunks.

Why is this so?

Augustine makes it clear:

“[Man is] embarrassed by the insubordination of their flesh, the punishment which was a kind of evidence of their disobedience…

Thus modesty, from a sense of shame, covered what was excited to disobedience by lust, in defiance of a will which had been condemned for the guilt of disobedience; and from then onwards the practice of concealing the pudenda [nakedness] has become a deep-rooted habit of all peoples, since they are all derived from the same stock”

So man is ashamed of one’s genitals because they’re a part of the body that is solely moved by lust, rather than reason. In other words, human arousal is a state in which the bestial part of man rules and his reason is dulled — its thus a shame-induced state that echoes the fall, in which man’s body, urges, and temptations act against his reason, desire, and best wishes. This is made nowhere more clear than the human being aroused against his will.

Augustine is very bleak about this. He says our nature is so marred that shame will follow us for life, and has fundamentally distorted our nature. On human sexuality specifically, he’ll even go so far as to call the lawful union of husband and wife tainted with sin.

Ultimately, the broader tradition agrees with Augustine’s core message. Shame is a clear byproduct of the fall. Yet, believe it or not, the tradition affirms that the full understanding of shame is actually even broader and more complex than merely the agonies of lust.

The full understanding of shame, believe or not, actually reveals the deepest needs and desires of the human condition.

Shame as Protection

This expanded understanding of shame, sexuality, and the human body comes from John Paul II. He gave a series of weekly speeches for roughly a decade called The Theology of the Body, which revisits these same ideas Augustine discussed.

JP2 agrees with Augustine that shame of “nakedness,” is a byproduct of the Fall, but for him it’s not strictly due to lust alone. He asserts that shame is actually defensive and relational — it speaks not just to sexual shame, but an implicit realization of how the entirety of your being is fallen and thus vulnerable to evil.

For instance, the naked body can be subject to a lustful gaze — in which our human person is reduced to an object — but we can also be mocked, disgraced, shunned, or rejected. He considers the naked body the fullness of man’s soul laid bare, and nothing could be more humiliating than to have the “fullness,” of your soul known, rejected, and mocked.

Consider for example, if a stranger in the street stopped you, pointed, and laughed at you. This might be unsettling, but you’d probably think them unwell before you took heartfelt offense.

Now, however, imagine you were naked in public, and that same stranger pointed and laughed at you. This is understood as a universal nightmare for everyone. It’s a classic “bad dream,” to imagine yourself naked “on stage,” and mocked.

This is the shame of the Fall. The notion is not just that your literal nakedness is amusing, but that the most intimate aspects of your being are rejected.

If we are fallen creatures, made in the image of love, and thus yearning for love, then to be rejected or objectified is amongst the greatest affronts to our being. Indeed, the deepest of human fears are rejection, or public humiliation — with perhaps the worst fear being publicly humiliated while naked.

We can appreciate this expansion of Augustininan logic, but one hitch remains. Remember that Augustine said the Fall was so drastic that it permanently marred human sexuality with sin. Even a lawful marital embrace was “tainted,” in his eyes.

This was one of the rare moments when Augustine went too far, and the Church had to “rescue,” human sexuality as an inherent good.

Here’s how…

The Rescue of Eros

JP2’s correction is simple but substantive. He said to understand the virtuous nature of the conjugal embrace, man must understand the full nature of his body.

“The human body, with its sex, and its masculinity and femininity seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and procreation…

It includes right from the beginning the nuptial attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift and—by means of this gift—fulfills the meaning of his being and existence.”

In other words, he asserts that the lawful union of husband and wife — grounded in charity — is the fulfillment of man’s nature. The conjugal act is not just an “experiential thrill,” but precisely what makes man attain a temporal sense of completion.

Consider how, in a loving marriage, one’s sense of shame at nakedness disappears in front of one’s spouse.

Why is this the case?

Well, if marriage is a bond of love as “mutual self-gift,” where both spouses have “given themselves,” to each other, then it’s natural for man to be “naked,” with their spouse. This is not merely literal, but emotionally and spiritually as well. If two are united in a bond of love in which both desire the good for each other, the shame of nakedness in all facets disappears, for trust is established and one need not feel vulnerable.

In other words then, shame is a protective barrier guarding one’s vulnerability — one that doesn’t scorn the conjugal act, but protects human eros as the most treasured aspect of man’s nature, fulfilling his being in the grounds of marital embrace. Shame then, is not an evil, but a protective grounds for a fallen man in a fallen world. It is the safeguard of human desires, the greatest of which is love, fulfilled in the marital act, which affirms nothing short of the simple but profound declaration that life was created good, and is indeed worth living.

Hans Holbein’s The Dead Body of Christ in the Tomb, is a haunting and grotesque painting. Dostoevsky himself, upon seeing it, remarked “it has the power to make its viewer lose faith.”

In fact, Dostoevsky felt so strongly about this painting that it became central to one of his more underappreciated masterpieces, The Idiot. The novel is a story of paradoxes, of a Christlike hero who is marred by an unchristlike world. Its men of faith gradually lose theirs, while its characters of sinners yearn for an absolution they do not have.

And it’s in this novel that Dostoevsky writes his famous line “beauty will save the world.”

But what does that mean exactly?

Believe it or not, the full meaning of that phrase can be understood by meditating on this very grotesque painting above. To understand what about this painting both disturbed, but inspired, Dostoevsky’s masterpiece is to understand what it takes to have a real, substantive faith in life, God, and goodness, and beauty’s key role in helping make that faith a reality…

An Innocent Prince

To summarize the core story of the Idiot, the novel asks whether Christ-like innocence can be found in a vicious, secular modern world.

The story follows protagonist Prince Myshkin, who is meek, humble, and saintly. His virtues are a striking contrast to the grim world of late 19th century Russia. He is both beloved and hated by the world for the very virtues of his soul. Characters are attracted to the goodness in his being — as if it reminds them of their once possessed innocence of youth that they’ve now lost — but these same characters just as quickly punish Myshkin for reminding them of their fallen state.

As such, Myshkin’s goodness kindles the good in those around him, even as that same goodness torments them by reminding themselves of the innocence they have lost. It’s a strange story in which a man is beaten, berated, and punished expressly for the goodness of his being.

But what does this have to do with beauty, faith, and the disturbing painting above?

Beauty and the Grotesque

Again, Dostoevsky will project his real life experience with Holbein’s painting onto Myshkin.

Myshkin will come across this painting and remark it’s ghastly enough to make a man lose his faith.

Why would Dostoevsky — a devout orthodox Christian — obsess over this very portrait that threatens that which he most loves?

Well we might remember that anytime Dostoevsky attempts to defend Christianity, he attempts to do so by attempting to destroy it. In layman’s terms, if Christianity is the way, the truth, and the light, then it must be able to withstand darkness. Dostoevsky’s novels then, are not positive praises of Christianity so much as they are illustrated attempts at destroying the faith through explorations into depravity, suffering, evil, suicide, psychological illness, and more… and he asks “can Christian faith truly survive this?”

In effect then, this Holbein painting becomes the perfect representation of Dostoevsky’s literary genius. Dostoevsky defends the resurrection by obsession over the passion, humiliation, and crucifixion. He believes if a faith is to promise man eternal life, it must endure and survive total damnation.

This is precisely why classical art itself often dons the grotesque in the name of beauty, like in the beheading of St. John the Baptist, or the countless paintings of the crucifixion, or the disturbing works of Caravaggio.

True beauty contains the sublime, which means it just as much shocks, terrifies, and disturbs as it does inspire. Beauty as such is meant to “rock your world.” Beauty is a pale of water splashed upon your snoozing body, awaking you from the drowsiness of mundane life to gape in awe at the miracle of Being.

And it is precisely because beauty can disturb us that it can lead us toward salvation. It awakens us from our comfortable assumptions, illusions, and narratives of life, and confronts us with the reality of our own smallness and helplessness. It lifts the veil of familiarity from the world and allows us to see reality as it truly is: terrible, glorious, mysterious, and full of Being.

And that’s because Beauty wakes us up to one key truth that truly brings about faith — one salvific for both your immortal human soul, and the cosmos at large…

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Tolstoy is a master at exposing the ways we mistake material prosperity for human flourishing

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than his masterful short story How Much Land Does a Man Need?

This work can be read in twenty minutes, but can follow you for a lifetime if you give it due consideration. It follows a peasant farmer in 19th century Russia who boasts that if he were a mere landowner, not even the devil himself could bring him to ruin.

Little did our protagonist know, however, that the devil was within earshot of this very boast. What follows was an unfortunate story and moral lesson on the nature of pride, greed, and how even noble pursuits of wealth can lead a man to ruin.

A Devilish Boast

Our story follows protagonist Pahom, who is a peasant farmer who overhears his wife arguing with a friend about the merits of city life versus country life. Pahom agrees with his wife that it’s far superior to live in the country — it’s a simpler existence without the vice, rush or temptations of giant metropolitans.

Indeed Pahom appears wise here. He recognizes correctly that man is happiest by denying the extremes of life, for even too much of a good thing like money or pleasure can become a vice.

However, he lets off an ill-fated boast about how little he’d need for true happiness:

“Our only trouble is that we haven’t land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself!”

While this sounds like an innocuous boast, Tolstoy writes that the Devil was in ear shot, and happy to take up Pahom on his boast:

“I’ll give you land enough: and by means of that land I will get you into my power.”

And thus, the devil promises that the very “good,” that Pahom most desires will be his own undoing…

A Homeless Landowner

Soon after this promise, it’s revealed that Pahom’s landlady plans to sell off the farmland she owns.

Pahom and his neighbors decided to pool their money together to buy it — each will put forth what he can afford, and be given his respective due.

Pahom is eager for land, but distraught by his meager finances. He and his wife decide to go into debt to buy more land. This excites Pahom, who reasons that he’s buying his freedom, and yet he’s made himself indebted with interest. Of course, there are plenty of warnings about taking on unsound financial debt — but there’s a greater danger for Pahom than financial ruin.

He feels pressure to produce, and possessive over his land. As such, he grows territorial any time a neighbor trespasses or accidentally plots on his land. Soon enough, he takes his neighbors to court, loses his cases, and cusses out the judges. This goes on for so long until the peasants consider burning down his house.

In other words, the unsound pursuit of land/wealth has not just made Pahom indebted and greedy, but sown discord with him and his community. He quickly finds himself a friendless outcast, an exile in his own land.

It’s a strange paradox that the landowner becomes homeless in his hometown.

He believed owning land would make him free, but instead he was made increasingly dependent upon the very thing he owns. He must defend, monitor, expand and protect his land from his neighbors. Hence the irony is the “freedom,” his land promised ended up demanding his constant attention, crushing his friendships, and isolating him from his community.

And yet, this is just the beginning. Tolstoy’s masterstroke of greed’s self-destructive nature comes in the closing chapters.

Some Land To Die For

Eventually Pahom perseveres and sees some financial success — at the continued alienation of his neighbors.

Soon, he hears about a deal of a lifetime. An associate tips him off about the land of the Bashkirs — where a man can reportedly buy any parcel of land for a flat rate of 1,000 roubles. Pahom is skeptical, but travels to the Bashkirs nonetheless.

Upon arriving, he’s greeted by a fair and simple people with an abundance of land for sale. Pahom exchanges gifts and is warmly accepted by the Bashkirs. To his surprise, the deal he heard of is true — he can have any amount of land for 1,000 roubles. But there’s a catch.

He can mark out as much land as he wants with a shovel, but he must return to where he started before sundown, or else he loses the land and his money is forfeit.

Pahom is ecstatic, as he can earn far more ground than 1,000 roubles goes for.

The next morning he takes off at dawn, marking his turf with a shovel. He figures he can cover 35 miles in a day, and aims to push this to his very limits. Predictably, however, he takes this logic too far and overestimates his ability.

As the sun begins to set, he realizes he’s far too far away to make it back in time. Fear overwhelms him as he begins sprinting back.

Tolstoy writes:

“This fear made him still more breathless. Pahom went on running, his soaking shirt and trousers stuck to him and his mouth was parched. His breast was working like a blacksmith’s bellows, his heart was beating like a hammer, and his legs were giving way as if they did not belong to him. Pahom was seized with terror lest he should die of the strain.

‘There is plenty of land,’ thought he, ‘but will God let me live on it? I have lost my life, I have lost my life! I shall never reach that spot!’”

Notice he says he lost his life because he won’t make it back in time. This may sound strange, as he’s merely out 1,000 roubles, but this shows how far gone Pahom’s spirit has been corrupted. For him, a profit/loss statement has now become a matter of life and death. He’s so attached to his land, wealth, and independence that he may as well die if he’s to be parted from it.

And ironically, this is precisely what happens.

Pahom exerts himself with inhuman efforts, and returns to the Bashkirs with moments before sundown. His triumph is short lived, however, as he passes out from exhaustion, and dies.

Tolstoy closes with these haunting words:

“His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.”

This final line answers the story’s question with bleak humor. It turns out, man needs no more land than six feet to be buried.

This is not to give a total renunciation of all worldly endeavors and finances (although Tolstoy’s radical spirituality may have exhorted that) rather it’s to emphasize that if man is at nature an ensouled being, than his ultimate needs are not satiated by Earth, rather the spiritual.

The tale is not so much a criticism of Pahom — who’s essentially a man of the times — but rather an indictment on the generation of 19th century Russia as such. The fact that Pahom is all too human, and relatable, goes to show the state of 19th century Russia, and perhaps 21st century Western Civilization too (given Pahom’s story still resonates with audiences today).

Indeed, an excessive love of the Earth risks making man impoverished in the spiritual. To make wealth one’s summum bonum is to be an exile in one’s own land, a foreigner to one’s neighbors, and a man who lives and dies by the land. Perhaps Tolstoy is correct, man need no more land than that which can house him — in this life, and the next.

While the Bible claims to be the Word of God, filled with truths accessible to all mankind, the proper understanding of its teachings can be quite difficult to capture.

The Old Testament itself is particularly elusive, filled with strange rituals and principles that can appear archaic, superstitious, or even nonsensical to modern eyes. Amongst these strange rituals, perhaps most striking is the Bible’s insistence on animal sacrifice.

Now sacrifice is not distinct to the Bible — nearly all ancient pagan religions offered various forms of sacrifice — but those pagan religions have since been understood to be untrue religions, carried out by the superstitious man of antiquity.

Is Biblical sacrifice to be read the same way? Ancient superstition that was a product of its time, but ultimately meaningless?

This does not appear to be the case. But to see why, you have to see what sacrifice is actually doing in the narrative, and how it plays a crucial role in teaching man his nature, his relationship to the divine, and how to navigate a fallen world of vice.

In short, once you understand sacrifice, a single thread runs from the Garden of Eden all the way to the cross: death is the fruit of the fall, and nearly everything the Old Testament calls sacrifice is a temporal stand-in for the death man himself owes — until one sacrifice stops standing in for the debt, and pays it.

Here, then, is how to understand the strange insistence on animal sacrifice, and what it teaches you about yourself.

Sacrifice Since the Fall

It’s easy to think of the Mosaic law and its insistence on sacrifice as inscribed later in Israel’s history. But sacrifice actually appears far earlier than Sinai.

Animal sacrifice first appears in Genesis 3, at the Fall itself. Right after Adam and Eve sin, God pronounces the curses upon man:

Eve is subordinate to her husband and burdened in childbirth, while Adam is condemned to toil against thorns as discord is set loose between the sexes. Most notably, death itself accompanies their plight — “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Yet notice what happens immediately after:

“And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.” (Gen 3:21)

An animal is sacrificed so that Adam and Eve can be covered and stand before God again. It’s striking that this is God’s first action after the fall, and this sets the precedent for how man is to navigate a fallen world:

Death is the price of the crime, and from this point onward, a life offered up becomes death’s temporal stand in. Sacrifice is a substitute paid so that the one who actually owes the debt does not have to pay it himself in full (at least not yet).

Thus, Genesis 3 sets the precedent of sacrifice, but further reading will show a refined development of this pattern.

Sacrifice Unfolding in Time

After Genesis 3, sacrifice continues immediately into the next generation. Both Cain and Abel offer sacrifices to God. We thus understand that, though man has fractured his relationship with God, unable to live in harmony with him, sacrifice becomes the practice to help, “mend the tear,” as simplistic as it can be.

However, Abel’s sacrifice of a lamb is favored over Cain’s sacrifice of crops. There’s no definitive answer for God’s favoritism, but one popular read is that the lamb itself is a more valuable sacrifice than crops, for it is a “blood sacrifice,” and blood has specially holiness in OT theology. Also, one might notice a symbolic significance of “sacrificing the lamb,” but more on this later.

So Cain and Abel teach us sacrifice is the normative practice of man to walk close to God. This gets re-emphasized by Noah. He sacrifices to God immediately after the Flood, which instills a new covenant of God’s peace which brings the righteous men of God closer to him.

And then, we have the infamous sacrifice of Abraham offering up his firstborn son Isaac to God. Though God ultimately stops the sacrifice, Abraham is counted blessed for offering up his son as sacrifice.

Finally, we have the Mosaic law. Moses is called upon the found the nation of Israel — God’s chosen people who will prepare a way for the messiah. Israel was called to be “holy,” (or “set apart,”) from the sinful ways of the world, and the laws of Leviticus trained them how.

Most notably, there’s an entire code of laws related to sacrifice as restoration of one’s relationship with God. And the most important sacrifice was the “passover meal,” where an unblemished lamb of each family’s flock is offered up to God in honor of Israel’s deliverance from slavery into the promised land.

This is the pinnacle of Old Testament sacrifice, and yet it also exposes the limit of animal sacrifice. Israel’s story is one of repeated infidelity despite the law and the many sacrifices offered. Even the tradition itself seems to sense this isn’t enough. The Psalmist writes,

“For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”

And this is where the Old Testament closes — Israel patiently awaiting a Messiah who would be a “New Moses,” to enact a “New Exodus,” with a “New Passover,” to bring mankind to the “new Promised land,” to save them once and for all…

Of course, this is an allusion to Christ, but the question remains — Why did Christ need to be sacrificed in the first place? Why did God demand sacrifice to begin with, and why did he insist on sacrificing himself? Wouldn’t it be easier to “forgive and forget?”

As we’ll now see, the crucifixion itself becomes not just a typological fulfillment of Scripture, but the answer to understanding human nature, the nature of the cosmos, and how sacrifice becomes the theological language of love itself…

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You don’t understand politics, world history, or what it takes to build a civilization until you understand what man loves.

Augustine wrote the work in the aftermath of the sack of Rome in 410 AD. At the time, pagan critics blamed Christianity for the catastrophe, saying Rome’s fall was judgment from betraying its pagan past.

As such, Augustine was inspired to give a defense of the Christian faith, in which he famously rebukes and dismantles pagan religion and philosophy. Yet in totality, City of God became far more ambitious a work than a mere pagan hit piece.

Ultimately, City of God became a 1,000 page masterpiece offering a deep inquiry into human nature, history, politics, and civilization itself. And though the work promises to give a totalizing account of mankind’s story, its genius can be boiled down to a single idea:

All of human history can be understood as the story of two cities — namely the City of God, and the City of Man.

Understanding the Cities

These of course aren’t literal cities, but spiritual cities giving an account of how man orders his life.

How then, can you determine whether one is part of the City of God or man?

Augustine says you can tell based on your loves:

“two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”

In other words, your destiny is shaped by what you love.

Man is fundamentally a creature of love, always oriented toward a conception of what he believes is the good. Thus the things we love most determine the kind of people — and eventually the kind of society — that we build.

The City of Man is ultimately ordered around the love of self. It is the city of pride: man seeking to exalt himself, his own glory, and his own power.

Augustine sees this pattern throughout history, from Babylon and Assyria to Rome herself.

The City of God, by contrast, is ordered around the love of God.

If civilization is ultimately the product of human beings pursuing what they believe to be good, then the preservation of civilization cannot simply be a matter of better laws, stronger institutions, or more competent rulers.

Instead, it requires the formation of human beings who love what is actually good.

Politics, in other words, ultimately depends upon anthropology, and anthropology ultimately depends upon the question of what man loves.

We recognize then that The City of God is much more than a book about the fall of Rome, but ultimately Augustine’s attempt to answer the greatest questions of man’s existence, purpose, and proper ordering of the political:

What is man?

What is a civilization? Why does man need it?

Why do civilizations rise and fall?

What should we love?

And what happens to a society when its people love the wrong things?

Augustine’s answer is that history is ultimately the story of two cities formed by two loves.

And if you want to understand the heart of man, and therefore the nature of civilization, there may be no better place to begin.

And if you are looking for a place to put that approach into practice with others, we just crossed 60,000 readers over at the Athenaeum Book Club!!

We had no idea so many people would want to be part of this project, but here’s why we think it’s happening:

Our discussions offer unmatched depth, understanding, and transformation that you cannot find anywhere else online. We don’t just read books to check off a list, but to train ourselves in the same loves Augustine preaches — a love of the True, Good, and Beautiful, or God.

What our members are discovering en masse is that a love of literature can fundamentally transform your soul if you allow it to. Such a transformation doesn’t only make life more meaningful, but helps form you into the mold Augustine believes makes for a truly beautiful civilization.

We are about to begin our read through of Augustine’s City of God ourselves over the next 6 weeks — and I’ll personally be leading the discussions. This will undoubtedly be one of our most important read-alongs so far.

The first discussion, focusing on Books 11, 12, and 14, is on September 15, at noon ET. Please join us (remember, all sessions are recorded if you can’t make it live)!

Note: you don’t have to have read all of Books by then, but the more you have read, the more you’ll get out of the session.

Thanks to every one of you for being here and making it possible for us to do this work.

Join Our Book Club!

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

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

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

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

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

United in Rebellion

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

Immediately, the chapter begins with an evocation to language:

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

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

The narrative continues:

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

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

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

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

How will God react to this?

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

An Artificial Unity

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

He states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Flames of Eros

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

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

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

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

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

A Grief that Seeks the Stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Poet in Exile

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

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

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

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

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

And with his story finished, one question remains:

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

Eros, Agape, and Human Genius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family as Foundational

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of the Individual

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

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

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

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

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

To appreciate the difference in simpler terms:

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

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

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

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

Here’s why…

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I have a love hate relationship with Twitter/X.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Pseudo-Intellectual

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

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

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

Below is a prime example:

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

But there are some problems with this post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dangers of Intellectual Vanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deconstruction as True Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chaos, Consumption, and Primordial History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against all odds, this plan works:

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

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

Wisdom Birthed from the Divine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s why…

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

Why do we read books in the first place?

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

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

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

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

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

“Read some books…”

The Count & the Philosopher

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

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

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

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

Greek philosophers call this experience self-knowledge.

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

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

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

To paraphrase him, he basically tells the audience:

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

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

Christians might recognize an echo of this in Scripture:

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

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

I reasoned:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Community of Readers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Our Book Club!

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

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

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

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

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

And this creates a fascinating tension.

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

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

Steinbeck’s Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

“Cathy Ames was evil.”

“Samuel Hamilton was a good-natured man.”

“Adam Trask was naive but kind.”

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

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

Freedom as the Greatest Good

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

“And this I believe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s why…

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