“Beloved ones, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born out of God and knows God. Whoever does not love has not known God, because God is love. By this, the love of God was made manifest in us, because God has sent his only Son into the cosmos so that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but rather that he loved us and sent his Son as atonement for our sins. Beloved ones, if God loved us so, we ought also to love one another.” - 1 John 4:7-11 (trans. David Bentley Hart)

There’s this line that gets thrown out a great deal—you’ve probably heard it: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” I believe it comes from Maya Angelou originally, but that’s mostly immaterial as it has taken on a life of its own. In my experience, it usually carries a cynical undertone with a sentiment that’s something like, “hey, you know those red flags you’re noticing? Don’t ignore them.” And look, as far as modern proverbs go, this one is actually pretty good. In many ways, it’s a close relative to that other, even more common cliché, “actions speak louder than words,” albeit the latter may be more neutral in connotation.

I know that many of my sophisticated, theologically-deep readers may feel that such street wisdom is a bit passé, but there is something in these sayings that cuts to the very heart of Christian theology.

One of the great challenges of theology is the fact that our words are always inadequate to fully describe God. Even inspired words, unique as they may be, can but grasp at the wonder of God, limited as they are by the nature of language. And thus it is quite consequential that we speak of Jesus himself, not a book, as the Word of God. You see, for Christian theology, the revelation of God is not first and foremost a matter of words about God but the Word himself, Jesus. As the great Scottish saint, George MacDonald wrote, “The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him, we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God.”1

To man’s greatest question, “what is God like?” the answer is given in the God-man, Jesus Christ, “the image of the invisible God.”2 And it is in his incarnate life, death, resurrection, and ascension that man comes to find the only word that approaches adequacy in describing what God is: love.

Something I find myself saying quite frequently to others and even to myself is this, “when you’re going through a period of uncertainty and you’re confronted by all the things you don’t know, cling to what you do know.” Generally speaking, the context in which I say this is when people are wrestling with theological questions. So much remains a mystery to me and many others. However, as the late Pope Benedict XVI said:

“Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the “goodness and loving kindness of God” (Tit 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.”3

Amidst vast incomprehensibility, this little do I know, and it is more than enough: God is love. Never have more profound words been written than these from the First Epistle of St. John. What more can be said of a God who takes on flesh, heals our brokenness from the inside, bears the weight of sin, drinking the cup of its poison to the final dregs, walks not just through the valley of the shadow of death but plunges all the way to Hades and delivers captives past, present, and future—all to restore us to communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Love. No other word can quite capture the potency of this great drama because there is no experience more transcendent than to love and to be loved. Far from being a mere idea, love is something known in the depths of our being because it uniquely harmonizes with what it means to be human. We know this truth not by letter but by spirit. Once again, MacDonald can help us: “All high things can be spoken only in figures: these figures, having to do with matters too high for them, cannot fit intellectually; they can be interpreted truly, understood aright, only by such as have the spiritual fact in themselves.”4 In Christ we find not just an exemplary display of this idea called love, but we find the very wellspring of it, indeed its essence in the face of Jesus: God is love. The connection could not be made more intimately.

In this majestic epistle, John says to us that God has made himself known to us in Jesus. And when God shows you who he is, believe him.

Sometimes, we tie our theology into knots, believing ourselves to be deep because we read widely we try to amass more and more knowledge, but the moment we lose sight of this message, that God, as revealed in the person of Jesus, is love—that moment, we have gone astray. Our theology ought not branch away from this with long chains of logic but rather ought to always revolve around it in orbit. All our theology is ultimately just footnotes on this great reality. It is the tone we must tune our instruments to at all times. The Christian life begins and ends in real-izing this love. Real-izing it in our hearts, our minds, our souls, and in our actions with all our strength. It is the commandment that is old and new, to love as God has loved us.

In many ways, this is not a groundbreaking idea. Doubtless, you’ve heard it before from pulpits and you’ve read in the sacred page that God is love. And yet, no sentence could be more earth-shattering.

I suspect this is not the essay you expected this week. I’m sure next week I’ll be back to pontificating on some theologian or another, or perhaps commenting on the latest trend in online theology. All those things are well and good. In fact, I tried unsuccessfully to write several essays along those lines this week. They wouldn’t come. I have no new ideas for you today. But I can offer you only the one that I cling to with all of who I am, that God is love. And that is very, very good news.

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The other day I was on a Zoom call with a young man who wanted to talk about his struggles in choosing a denomination. This is a pretty familiar situation for me. For years, I’ve made videos about church history, interviewed scholars from across the Christian tradition, and been pretty public with my own wrestlings about which church to join.1 And as time has gone on, this has resulted in a lot of people reaching out and sharing their own struggles about feeling ecclesially homeless. Getting to hear people’s stories and try to, at the very least, reassure them that God is with them in the midst of these big and often frightening questions is something I feel incredibly blessed to be able to do. It’s not something I take lightly.

In the early part of this conversation, the young man shared that he’s felt drawn toward Catholicism for some time, but he still wasn’t sure. He said he had concerns similar to ones I had raised in various videos, but nevertheless, he still felt a pull toward the Catholic tradition. Eventually he got to the real core of the question, the thing I sense he was most keen to ask: “How much more research do I have to do before I join OCIA?”

And at that moment, I felt a familiar, sinking feeling that much of my work has hindered, rather than helped people.

Here’s what I mean.

I love theology. I find it endlessly fascinating, and it’s been a true joy for me to be able to make videos for the better part of the last decade sharing my own explorations and talking to some of the smartest people I can find about the questions that press on my mind.

However, when I get questions like this, I worry that things have gone wrong somewhere. My goal has been to provide people with high-quality information to help them on their journey, wherever God leads them. I believe that studying historical theology can lead people to experience a sense of wonder at the beauty, truth, and goodness that suffuses the Christian tradition and that this can be an impetus for growing in love of God and neighbor. I’m convinced those things and God’s active work can be found across the lines that divide us. It’s for that reason that I never try to talk people out of joining traditions different than mine if they’ve prayerfully discerned the Spirit is leading them in that direction.2 I’m genuinely happy for people when they take a step of faith into the unknown spurred on by a desire to trust God.

The problem is, all of this “content,” all this pontificating about the faith, can make people think that if they haven’t answered all the questions I’ve raised, then maybe they shouldn’t make a decision. Maybe there’s this giant intellectual mountain to climb before they can look out with clarity on the ecclesial landscape and finally select a course of action.

But that was never the goal. Or at least, it certainly isn’t now. Maybe at one point, without realizing it, I thought it would be good if more people shared the intellectual struggles I had or the sense of feeling stuck that I had for many years as I wondered whether to become Catholic, Orthodox, or something else. To the best of my self-knowledge, I don’t think that’s the case, but we’re often mysteries, even to ourselves.

What I can say for sure though now is that, having gone through much of that myself and heard from countless people over the years about their own struggles, I genuinely do not wish this type of paralysis on anyone. In fact, more than ever, my advice is to take a leap. “We live forward and understand backward,” Kierkegaard once said.3 In most of our life, we’re forced to make decisions when we don’t have as much data as we’d like, when things aren’t entirely clear, and when part of us whispers, “what if this is a terrible decision?”

It’s in the midst of that uncertainty that I desire more than anything to offer people the words of St. Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”4 This isn’t to downplay the importance of these questions or make light of the differences that exist between Christian traditions. It’s to emphasize something much more fundamental: God’s love for mankind is far greater than we could ever ask, think, or imagine.

So much of the back and forth about “should I be Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant?” has the knock-on effect of shrinking our view of God until He is no more than a professor with His hands tied behind His back, regretting to inform us that, much as He’d like to let us pass the class, the Scantron results of our theology test indicate that He must do otherwise. Unfortunately, we made a wrong turn in our theological reasoning somewhere around the year 451 or 1054 or 1517.

And I suppose these days I just want to remind them that God is far bigger than our questions. That theology matters, it matters greatly, but it ought to be done from a place of pursuing Christ and being assured of His love for us rather than from a white-knuckled, frantic sense of fear over getting things wrong. Seek Christ, take a leap, and know that all shall be well. That’s my constant refrain.

And so, when this young man asked me how much more research he had to do before joining OCIA, something he really felt God was leading him toward doing, my answer was what it almost always is to people in this situation: “you don’t have to do anymore research before taking the next step.” There’s not some list of books one has to read, number of hours spent, or series of debate opponents one must knock down before taking the next step. In fact, living out our faith in the midst of uncertainty, taking that step when we’re a bit afraid, that’s some of the best “research” we can do.

Now, hear me, I’m not saying that hitting the books is bad. I’m not saying we should abandon reason and just go off our feelings. Nor am I saying that we should rush into every decision. Prudence is indeed a virtue. But in my experience, most people are struggling with indecision more than rashness. They’re inundated with information. They’ve already read or learned more about church history and the disputed questions than 99% of Christians throughout history. Plenty of saints have been made without ever watching a single debate on the filioque. Many people, at least in my experience, need to simply take the next small step, whatever that is, rather than standing still. That step might be a step deeper into their own tradition, choosing to set down roots. It could be a step away from their tradition. Perhaps they email that priest, register for that class, or have that conversation. Maybe they find it’s the wrong step. That’s ok. Life is long, decisions are made with the information we have available, and sometimes we get stuff wrong. But faith is meant to be lived in motion, not a ceaseless, anxious motion, but a steady pursuit of God.

It’s also meant to be lived with other people and in the context of the church, not just by processing information online. If someone feels God is leading them toward the Catholic Church, I’d rather them join OCIA than spend a few more hours watching YouTube videos. Go forth into the world and live the faith in your local context.

If people have concrete questions about church history or theology, I hope the videos I make are helpful. I wouldn’t make them if I thought they couldn’t be useful. Sometimes, we really do just need a bit of information to help us sort through things. But more information can also be a hindrance at times. And when it is, I hope people know that they’re free to take a leap with what they’ve got.

And here’s the thing, it’s not as though theology is just for helping you choose a church. I think we’ve become so catechized by polemics that we’ve forgotten that theology isn’t really just about settling the “who’s right?” questions. It should be a joyous exploration into the God who has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus in such a way that we can truly know His character while simultaneously never exhausting the fullness of who He is, and by studying theology, we can be led into a deeper and deeper sense of wonder before the God who is far better than we could ever know.

Right now, the internet is full of people giving you their opinions on theology and trying to convince you to join their team. Unfortunately, many of them are smarter than you, have read more than you, and, worst of all, they disagree with one another. You may feel that, until you can disprove those on every side save the correct one, you can’t move forward. But if you take this route, you will likely never move forward. Or, when you do, you’ll realize that your unassailable foundation of 100% theological correctness may, in fact, have some cracks in it. And if your faith is built on being the smartest person in the room, it is prone to crumble.

But the life of faith is not about defeating every counterargument. “Blessed are the winners of debates” is not found in the Sermon on the Mount. “Be ready to give an account of the hope you have”? Absolutely. But that account need not be perfect. It need not be the argument to end all arguments. It may be faith like a mustard seed, it might be a “Lord I believe, help my unbelief!” but I hope it’s a faith you can embrace with all of who you are, that rests not on your amazing research skills but instead on a sure sense of God’s goodness.

If you’re struggling with indecision regarding the church, you don’t need my permission to take the next step. You don’t need to be able to convince the never-ending chorus of people on the internet that you’re right. Take some of this weight off your shoulders and accept the easy yoke and light burden of Christ. Keep your eyes upon Him, look full in His wonderful face, and the opinions of man will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

Seek Christ, take that step, and know that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

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Despite being a creature whose natural habitat is a library, I did not read my way into the Anglican Communion. It all started a bit more organically than that. A stumbling into an Episcopal Church in Lancaster, PA, while on vacation. A realization that the beautiful stone church we drove past constantly was, in fact, also Episcopalian. Popping into that congregation on a Sunday we weren’t serving at our old church to see if the liturgy from vacation was just a one-off fluke, diamond in the rough. Being delighted that wasn’t the case. Progressively falling in love with it. The people. The liturgy. The preaching. The elderly couple whose faces break out in ear-to-ear grins every time we sit in the pew behind them. The coffee hour stories. even the ones you’ve heard before. Maybe especially those. Eventually the BCP takes up permanent residence on the kitchen table. Before you know it, you’re on the vestry. That type of thing.

Overall, I’m quite grateful that this was the path we took into the Church. I pretty much talk about books for a living, and it’s a constant temptation to live the entirety of my life between my ears. But this caught our hearts and bodies before our head. When it did catch my head, it was more so a realization that I had inadvertently adopted a way of thinking about theology that was amenable to a stream of Anglicanism than any sort of intentional catechesis at the hands of Anglicans.

Most of my theological reading is spent with the Fathers, Russian Silver Age thinkers, and 20th century Catholic Ressourcement theologians. Perhaps in a Rowan Williams-esque fashion, these seem to me to be perfectly good teachers for an Anglican.

Nevertheless, I’ve recently been trying to fill in the lacuna of explicitly Anglican influences in my theological study. So, in today’s post, I thought I’d continue my Notes from an Armchair Theologian series in which I give a brief rundown of some books that I’ve been reading. My goal with this is really two-fold. First, I hope it’s helpful for others who are seeking good books to read by Anglican writers. Second, and much more selfishly, I hope some Anglicans further along the Canterbury Trail might chime in with recommendations on where to go next.

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Anglican Identities by Rowan Williams

This small book is a collection of essays from the former Archbishop of Canterbury on various influential Anglicans throughout history. It is not the first book I’ve read by Williams, but it is the one most geared toward this particular project of Anglicanization. And, honestly, it’s a pretty perfect fit. Because it surveys such a wide variety of theologians, ranging from Tyndale (whom Williams cheekily includes as an Anglican) up to John A. T. Robinson, it is a difficult book to summarize. However, what I’ll briefly note is that Williams does a remarkable job of not highlighting one stream of Anglican thought as the only true one and considering any departures from that a fall from grace. While he doesn’t flatten them all into a false equality of value, he does show the promises and pitfall that each holds within their systems of thought and constantly strives toward creative synthesis and further improvement.

Frequent readers will know I hold Williams in the highest esteem, and getting to see his perspective on some of the major characters in the Anglican story has been a perfect launchpad for further study. In fact, it was this book which prompted me to read the next book on this list:

The Christian Priest Today by Michael Ramsey

From one former Archbishop of Canterbury to another, this list is also going from strength to strength. While Williams’s book is more academic, Ramsey’s is profoundly pastoral. Though it is directed toward ordinands, the wisdom found herein is profoundly applicable to people of all vocations. It is a book so rich that I’ve had to force myself to read it slowly and savor it, otherwise I’ll simply have to immediately begin to re-read it. Honestly, it’s that good.

I have so many passages underlined in this book that it’s hard to pick one or two to give you a taste of what one finds in this short work. For instance:

The glory of Christianity is its claim that small things really matter and that the small company, the very few, the one man, the one woman, the one child are of infinite worth to God. … For the infinite worth of the one is the key to the Christian understanding of the many.1

It’s not all soaring rhetoric though about the glory of the Gospel. You’ll also get down-to-earth wisdom like this, on the role of humor in humility:

Use your sense of humour. Laugh about things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh about yourself, and about your own absurdity. We are all of us infinitesimally small and ludicrous creatures within God’s universe. You have to be serious, but never be solemn, because if you are solemn about anything there is a risk of becoming solemn about yourself.2

The Purple Headed Mountain by Martin Thornton

Not too long ago, I had the pleasure of interview about the Anglican spiritual tradition, and he not only introduced me to the work of Martin Thornton, but he was kind enough to send me a few of his books. Unlike our last two authors, Thornton was not an Archbishop of Canterbury (though, admittedly, the genealogy continues insofar as Ramsey wrote the original forward for this book). He was a 20th century farmer and priest in the Church of England who had a remarkable knack for combining orthodox, historical theology with the practical spiritual needs of everyday people.

Something I’ve learned along the way from people wiser than me, is that the path to excellence in most spheres of life is actually fairly simple. It may not be easy, but it is often simple. For instance, I recall once asking a man who was remarkably strong and fit well into his 70’s what his secret was. His answer? “I just keep walking through the doors of the gym.” Thornton teaches us that, in many ways, the spiritual life is like this. We want the secret to spiritual growth to be complicated because then our lack of growth is due to us not figuring out the magic formula. If we just find that one new devotion, then things will change. Kind of like how we’ll spend hours, weeks, or even months, looking at different exercise plans from the comfort of our couch when, in reality, the most basic of plans consistently applied will yield results in time.

For Thornton, that basic plan is the reception of the Eucharist, praying the Office, and private devotion according to personal needs and abilities. No need to complicate things. Just do it. Very Long Obedience in the Same Direction type of feel for those familiar with Eugene Peterson. As someone who has jumped between devotional practices and dumped many after a month seeking something better, I can attest that the stability of simply praying the Office for the past two years has been much preferable.

King Oswald’s Heirs by Thomas Plant

“Re-enchantment” has been a bit of a buzzword for the last decade or so, and this past year has been something of a high water mark between Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild and Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. The basic impulse seems to be a sense that modernity/post-modernity has lost something of the God-filled, meaning-saturated view of the world that our ancestors had, and this is showing up in a wide variety of ways, most of which have some connection to our discontentment and despair. As is often the case, diagnosis and is easier than prescription. One source of re-enchantment that probably isn’t high on most people’s list—indeed, I would be surprised if it was anywhere on the list—is the catechism of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

But that’s exactly where looks for inspiration in his eminently readable book, King Oswald’s Heirs. Like Fr. Dallman, I met Fr. Thomas through the work I do online. Initially, I was interested in his work on Ps. Dionysius and Christian Platonism, but soon after our first conversation, he announced his next book, and I was immediately drawn in by the notion of a Reformation-era catechism being a source of re-enchantment. Plant connects things as simple as the catechism’s question of “what is your name?” with the struggles the modern world has with identity, and he argues for a sense of rootedness in place and tradition that is a challenge to our default ways of looking at things. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of the ressourcement theologians, and this book offers a picture of what it’s like to do a sort of creative Anglican ressourcement project, mining the tradition for answers to the present.

The Complete Poetry by George Herbert

Truthfully, I started reading this long before I even became Anglican, but I’ve tried to incorporate a poem a day of late. If I tried to adequately express my appreciation for Herbert, I would fill an entire post and still have only sullied his poetry with my lackluster prose. Suffice it to say, he’s great. Read him. You won’t regret it.

Walk in Love by Melody Wilson Shobe and Scott Gunn

I’ll end this list where my Anglican—or in this case, specifically Episcopalian—reading began: Walk in Love. This book comes from Forward Movement, an Episcopalian organization dedicated to inspiring discipleship and growth within TEC. It’s very much a “Beginner’s Guide to the Episcopal Church” type of book, and my wife and I took to reading it together at dinner over Lent. It’s eminently accessible, and its frequent connection to the Prayer Book is a particularly welcome feature.

Though it is certainly theological in nature, it is more of a survey than a deep dive as it covers a vast range of topics. Its chief merit is its accessibility. The chapters are short in pages and even shorter on jargon. It’s the kind of book I wouldn’t hesitate to give to someone who said, “I’m brand new to all of this, can you tell me what Episcopalians are about?” And for a church that is sometimes, to a fault, a church for people who already like church, this is a great accomplishment.

Honorable Mention:

On the point of accessibility, I really ought to add the podcast, “The Average Episcopalian.” It is no small delight that my wife is constantly telling me what she’s learned from this podcast and how much she adores it. The two sisters who host the podcast have a genuine and infectious love for the church, and I suspect this enthusiasm feeds into Eliza’s almost daily statements of “I just love the Episcopal Church!”

So enjoyable is that to see and hear that I even count it a joy when she tells me that this podcast makes a lot more sense and is generally just more enjoyable than my nerdy YouTube videos.3

Honestly, I get it.

Where to Next?

So much for the books I’ve been reading specifically for this project of Anglicanization. I have, of course, read other books by Anglican authors over the course of time, but those haven’t been for this specific purpose. From here, I have a few books on the horizon, but I would love to hear recommendations from my Anglican friends out there. Here are a few I have on my list:

1. Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity by Richard Hooker: If for no other reason than being able to feel like a real Anglican for having read it (or parts of it, let’s not get too ambitious).

2. A History of the Episcopal Church by Robert Pritchard: Confession: I began this book but didn’t finish it. I really should. I’ll try.

3. Absolutely anything by Rowan Williams that I haven’t yet read.

4. The Gospel and the Catholic Church by Michael Ramsey: I so thoroughly enjoyed The Christian Priest Today and this seems the best book by him to read next.

5. Tracts for Our Times: I’ve read a good deal of Newman and some of Pusey in other works, but I’m too fond of the Anglo-Catholic stream to have not read the Tracts. Shameful, I know.

6. Christian Dogma by Darwell Stone: Fr. Thomas Plant recommended this but I just haven’t gotten to it yet.

7. Christ, The Christian, and The Church by E. L. Mascall: See my comments on Anglo-Catholic shame.

8. The Spiritual Life by Evelyn Underhill: I hope by now you all are realizing that I’m not a real Anglican and you should never invite me to your parties.

9. Praying Shapes Believing by Leonel L. Mitchell: Okay, this one I just got in the mail so can I get a pass on not having read it yet?

That is, admittedly, quite a long reading list already, and I have no idea how long it will take me to get through those as most of my reading time is taken up with reading for YouTube videos and I’m currently in the midst of a long series on the history of Marian devotion. Although, I suppose I could turn any number of these into future videos outside that series. You know, kill feed two birds, with one stone scone.

Anyway, Anglican friends, if I haven’t spurned all your goodwill by revealing how shamefully under-read I am, I would appreciate your recommendations.

The word “liberal” gets bandied about in theological contexts in such varied ways that it appears all but meaningless besides vaguely expressing some amount of consternation for a person or view one deems to be less-than-optimally Christian.1 It is to many Christians what the expression “boo” is to an ethical emotivist: a gut-level response displaying distaste but lacking any rational import.

When “liberal” is applied, well, liberally, to figures ranging from John Shelby Spong to Gavin Ortlund, it appears to take on a semantic range within which we could fit the state of Texas 12 times over. And if the function of a word is to pick out identifiable concepts with regularity, then “liberal” fails to live up to its task.

One of the reasons for this vicious malleability is that the word is not properly native to theological discourse. It is an import from politics—and a most unwelcome import at that. Unfortunately, it seems to be rather difficult to return to its rightful owners. Perhaps we’ve exceeded the 30-day window for such things. Alas. As I’ll argue, the very foreignness of the word and the ideological battle lines it implies, are itself a symptom of the problem of one form of theological liberalism which has lost its ability—or simply refuses—to speak the language of Christian theology.

The distinction I will put forward in this essay between two quite different forms of “theological liberalism” is not original to me. Instead, it comes from Rowan Williams, and in particular, his reflection upon the “liberal” 19th century Anglican bishop, B. F. Westcott in Williams’s book, Anglican Identities.

Methodology vs. Conclusions

Before we get to his acute analysis, I want to make a preliminary distinction, that, while faithful to Williams’s vision, is one further step back. That is, a distinction between liberalism as a methodology and a set of conclusions. While Williams will aid us in delineating two divergent liberal methodologies, it strikes me that, today, there is a deeper confusion between theological liberalism as method vs. doctrine.

Naturally, there is a relationship between a theologians’s methods and their conclusions, but they are nonetheless distinct. That two theologians come to the same conclusion does not mean they are doing theology in the same way, anymore than someone taking the train to DC from Baltimore is the same as someone flying to Reagan National from London Heathrow. In other words, in theology, the ends and the means matter.

Unfortunately, this is lost on many people. At least at a popular level, one of the leading candidates for a definition of theological liberalism is simply the affirmation of Women’s Ordination and LGBTQ+ relationships. However, these are only the latest controversial issues that serve as a litmus test for liberalism. In the past, slavery, evolution, inerrancy, and other issues have been the lightning rods around which the cacophonous roar of “liberal!” could be incessantly heard.

Please do not take my slightly pretentious prose as a sign of being flippant. It’s just self-indulgence. Truly, each of these issues matters. And to avoid straw-manning those who find the appellation “liberal” quite useful for these positions and the holders there of, it is true that there’s a positive correlation between those who hold to, say, LGBTQ+ affirmation, and methodological liberalism. Some might even say the correlation is so strong that there is no need to worry about tiresome distinctions between methods and conclusions. Rotten fruit (i.e., conclusions) must mean rotten trees (i.e., methods).

However, even if this is the case, I do think it’s much preferable to look at methodology rather than solely conclusions, if for no other reason than a liberalism tied to the hot-button issues of the day proves to be a moving target. Furthermore, it risks being slightly arbitrary. If it is not tied to a robust sense of a hierarchy of truths, then “liberal” is indexed to little more than whatever is getting attention at the moment, whether its structurally important to Christian belief or not.

For instance, imagine that in the next decade, the hot-button issue is whether women ought to wear gold jewelry. Is one’s position on that really a good indicator of someone being theologically “conservative” or “liberal?” It seems just as likely that an affirmative answer could be a rallying cry for conservatives as it could be for liberals (though never both at once). Do we not risk these terms being nothing more than indicators of whether one sides with the prevailing opinion of the time, be it ecclesial or cultural? Indeed, “liberal” in the Christian space often is accompanied by a sense of “siding with the the spirit of the age” but what do we do when the spirit of the age vacillates? Are yesterday’s liberals today’s conservatives, and is tomorrow a coin-flip?

Finally, if we only wanted to talk about conclusions, then we have better, ready-made terms for that. We really ought to use the language of orthodox and heterodox for conclusions, not “conservative” and “liberal.”

Suffice it to say, if we are going to try to turn “liberalism” into a sensible term in theological discourse, we can’t make it a shibboleth for the theo-cultural war of the day. Instead, we’d do much better to focus on method. And this is where the inestimable Rowan Williams can help us.

Liberalism as Theological Method

Rather than giving labels to for the two kinds of liberalism he sees in the church, Williams offers representative samples, such as B. F. Westcott vs. Benjamin Hoadly. Helpful as that may be for people neck deep in Anglican lore, my guess is that such examples are not all that meaningful to most of you, even though you lot are remarkably well-read. So, I will venture to provide some haphazard labels for these two approaches that are based upon Williams’s observations, but whatever faults in the labels should not be attributed to him. For now, we’ll speak of the difference between Internal and External Liberalism.2

What both groups of “liberals” share is an openness to change. The only foil Williams offers to liberalism generally is fundamentalism. That is an approach that says, “what has been is what must be, ever and anon.” Williams warns that such theology can end up being little more than a self-justification, a long task of reiterating what has already been said. Over against such ossification, both internal and external liberals say, “not so fast. Are we certain that we’ve said the final word?”

The principle difference between internal and external liberals has to do with the source of their motivation. And as my rather unimaginative titles suggest, one finds impetus for change from within the tradition, the other, from without.

I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that the foreignness of the word “liberalism” to theological discourse is symptomatic of liberalism itself. Though Williams doesn’t make that particular point, it aligns very closely with what he identifies as a key characteristic that distinguishes between two forms of liberalism. That is, some “liberal” theologians—what I’ve called Internal Liberals—are content to work within the context of Scripture and Tradition, taking them as given and then proceed to speak the language of the Tradition as a native speaker exploring the boundaries of possibility that deep familiarity with a language affords. On the other hand, other “liberal” theologians—what I’ve called External Liberals—disdain the very language of Scripture and Tradition, using it only as much as necessary but speaking more properly as natives of some other language. In this way, it is those whose first language is politics that have foisted upon theologians the language of “liberal” and “conservative.”3

One example Williams gives in this regard is the language of “rights” within theology. Without in any way arguing against the existence of human rights or their importance for flourishing society, Williams suggests that a theologian who forms their arguments upon the basis of an abstract notion of rights is showing themselves to be a theological liberal of the second type, one who is not speaking the language of Scripture and Tradition but instead is forming their thinking on some other basis.

Women’s ordination is one area where we can see both forms of “liberalism” showing up, albeit in meaningful distinct ways. For instance, you might see some theologians arguing that women’s ordination is fundamentally a women’s rights issue. All else being equal, women have the right to pursue the same employment opportunities as men, and therefore should be able to pursue a career as an ordained minister. This would be theological liberalism of the second kind. Others, however, argue for the same conclusion but in a quite different manner. Gary Macy and Beth Allison Barr argue for women’s ordination as a retrieval of the past. Sarah Coakley does so from a systematic theology perspective exploring what it means to be in persona Christi. N.T. Wright does so from a biblical theology perspective. The list could go on.

While I’m not sure all—or perhaps any—of these theologians would describe themselves as “liberal theologians,” they would broadly fit Williams definition insofar as they’re saying, “the status quo of not ordaining women is not one that needs to be maintained forever.” However, they are—to varying degrees—doing so from within the tradition.

Approaches to Scripture

One helpful distinction Williams makes between the two types of liberalism has to do with their approach to Scripture. External Liberals tend to think the Bible says less than meets the eye. Internal Liberals tend to think it says more than meets the eye. For instance, sticking with Women’s Ordination, an External Liberal may be inclined to say that Paul’s statements about women are really nothing more than patriarchal cultural assumptions wrapped up in the garb of Scripture. Internal Liberals, however, are often marked by a deep probing of the biblical text, assuming it always has more to tell us, and as such, we should be cautious to pronounce definitive judgments. Moreover, at least within Protestantism, there’s a deep theological tradition which points toward sin’s ongoing effects in man such that we shouldn’t be overconfident in the clarity of our vision.

As Williams notes, this latter approach actually implies a quite high view of Scripture. Westcott, his exemplar of this kind of “liberal,” sought to emulate Origen, who said that every syllable of Scripture was inspired and spent a lifetime meditating on the text, always believing it had more to give, and constantly shuttling between a microscopic view and a birds-eye-view, trusting that meaning was found in the parts and the whole.

Finally, we could further describe the divergences of these two types of liberals vis-a-vis Scripture as follows. The Internal Liberal takes Scripture and Tradition as given but the meaning as open. The External Liberal takes Scripture and Tradition as negotiable but the meaning as fixed. Allow me to quote Williams at length:

“In this context [Westcott’s “Internal Liberalism”], to be cautious about hermeneutical or dogmatic closure is not to discard or relativise sanctioned words; you occupy the territory marked out by those words, but you will not know where the boundaries are, because the search for definite boundaries suggests that you might be ‘in possession’ of the territory, not yourself included in (possessed by?) it. And this contrasts with a scepticism more obviously generated by Enlightenment suspicion of authority [what I’ve called ‘External Liberalism], in which the target of the questioning is the formulae as such and the processes by which they were shaped.”4

There is much to be said about these two sentences, but I’ll highlight for now the final line about the “processes by which they were shaped.” This is in line with my claim that the External Liberals takes the meaning of Scripture and Tradition to be fixed. As Williams goes on to argue, such liberals are often quite confident that they can get “behind” the text such that they can reduce the meaning of the text to the time/culture that produced it. Once again, this is to say Scripture means less than it appears to say. Not to beat a dead horse, but if Paul’s language about women is just patriarchy, then, having discarded patriarchy, we can discard Paul. Without denying that patriarchy might inform Paul, the Internal Liberal insists that God is speaking to us in this text and we have not yet exhausted its meaning.

Conclusion

Hopefully, that’s enough said about what distinguishes these two types of liberalism. Thus far, I’ve intentionally tried to avoid attaching value judgments to these, and Williams himself notes that there can be something to be learned from both. In my own estimation, Williams quite clearly falls into the Internal rather than External Liberal category, so it’s commendable that he is able to see some weaknesses of his “side” and some strengths of his “opponents.”

I should note that one of the difficulties with the clean dichotomy presented here is that it’s not always evident that, just because someone uses the language of Scripture and Tradition that they are truly attempting to think in and with the tradition. I take it that one of the prominent concerns people have even about would-be “Internal Liberals” is that they’re really just using Christian language as a disguise for non-Christian ideas. This is, of course, entirely possible. But I do wish to propose nevertheless that it’s not always the case. And Williams may be the best example of this, at least in my mind.

If we apply the current, conclusions-based criteria for theological liberalism, then Williams fits the bill as he is LGBTQ+ affirming and in favor of Women’s Ordination. For many, that’s case closed. But I suppose part of my inspiration for writing this piece is that reading Williams feels completely different from reading “External Liberals.” In Williams, I find a theologian deeply versed in the tradition whose thinking begins with the classical doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation then extends far from there without leaving that behind while showing a great deal of openness as far as the location of the boundaries of Christian confession. It’s not that Williams would say there are no boundaries and anything goes. However, policing the boundaries or declaring precisely where they are once and for all is not his main work. Instead, he shows a willingness to till the soil he’s been given for a lifetime, ceaselessly striving to see the world through Christ. And that includes seeing the questions the world poses in our time. As much as he loves the tradition, he is not an antiquarian, merely dusting off the relics of a bygone era. Instead, he takes up the task of our forefathers in the faith and continues to apply the heart of Christianity in new and trying times. This isn’t to say he gets everything write—though I can’t hide my admiration for him as a theologian. But, I suppose this essay is, in some sense, a long exercise in trying to express why “liberal” being applied to Rowan Williams in the same way we might apply it to say, John Dominic Crossan, just feels wrong.

In the end, I’d much prefer we exchanged the term “liberal” for something more native to the tradition. But if we insist on using it, might we use it a bit more judiciously?

I hope that’s not too much to ask.

I’m feeling two parts grateful, one part nostalgic, and a touch sad as I prepare for my final class at St. John’s College today where I’ve been studying for my Master of Arts in Liberal Arts. When I began the program, I was working in Public Relations and spending more time than I’d like to admit on LinkedIn, a site which forced me to add the “skills gained” underneath this educational experience in my profile. I remember pausing, wondering what marketable skills I would acquire from studying old books for the next few years. I landed on just one: thinking. That wasn’t one of the auto-fill responses, so I had to manually enter it. Apparently, it’s a niche skill.

I’d been working with B2B Tech companies at a Public Relations agency, the kind of place where people are always networking, looking for the next gig, and, like me, spending too much time on LinkedIn, so before long, I had clients and co-workers making quips about seeing this expensive book club in the form of a degree I’d signed up for. In self-deprecating fashion, I’d simply say, “After getting one economically useless degree (Theology), I decided, why not get another?” That usually did the trick. “At least he knows this is silly,” I imagine was the reassuring thought in their head.

At this point, I’m sure St. John’s administrators would want me to insist that it’s not an economically useless degree, that their alumni go on to lead successful careers in diverse sectors, blah, blah, blah. I don’t dispute that as a factual statement, but, frankly, most people don’t study the Great Books to get a pay raise. Forgive me if I sound hopelessly privileged in saying this, but measuring education in terms of ROI (at least monetarily) is a trend I wouldn’t mind falling by the wayside. Call me crazy, but sometimes we “just” get an education to learn.

And, man, what a joy it’s been to learn over these past few years. For those who don’t know St. John’s, it’s perhaps the most Substack-coded institution on the planet. All students study the same texts, ranging from Homer to Hegel (I’ll include reading lists below), you are graded only on your contribution to discussions, essays, and oral exams. There are no laptops in class, nor are there lectures (except the ones which are optional and well-attended on Friday nights because, you know, what else would you do on a Friday night?). You read classic texts from Mathematics & Natural Science, Theology & Philosophy, Politics & Society, History, and Literature. Then, you sit in a circle and discuss the text. You write about the text—but not research papers littered with citations of secondary sources. Simply extended engagements with the text and a question that you propose about it. A tutor (i.e., professor), reads this, marks it up, then extends the evaluation of the paper to include a 30-minute, one-on-one discussion about the paper which is every bit as important as what’s written on the page. Finally, there are oral exams. You propose a question, then you must discuss it with the tutor, one-on-one for 30-minutes. There are grades, but you’re encouraged not to check them (nor is it easy to do so). If there is a problem, your tutor will discuss it with you during a conference. It’s the closest thing to an AI-proof curriculum I know of.

A Few Things I’ve Learned Along the Way

After a few years of this, I’m convinced that the lone skill I put down on LinkedIn at the start of the program was indeed the correct one: thinking. And if we’re forced to speak of education as an investment (and there is indeed a financial cost to this that brings such language close to hand), I can scarcely think of a better investment to make in oneself than in your ability to think. It is a sort of meta-skill that you carry with you all your days. Not to turn this into a gloom and doom piece on AI—the Lord, quite literally, knows there are more than enough of those already—but it does concern me that so many are willing to outsource and atrophy their thinking to machines. Strip reason from man, and what have you left? Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to remind ourselves that reason is the excellence proper to man.

It is this domain, the exercise of reason, the growth of our ability to think clearly and deeply through sustained engagement with texts and peers, that is the element of Great Books education I hold most dear. I count it as something of a shame that the value of Great Books curricula has been subsumed into polarized political discourse. In that arena, studying the Great Books is a fight to save Western Civilization from those who seek to destroy it. Perhaps it helps in that fight. In fact, it probably does. Aristotle might be right about the centrality of politics (he’s usually right), and if by politics here we just mean the common good, then count me in. In fact, we could highlight that liberal learning promotes the common good.

However, I think we’d be wrong to reduce the study of the Great Books to a culture war. Winning culture wars and promoting the common good are not always the same. The latter is far more important. Without being flippant—for I do think Western Civilization has given us much for which to be thankful and seek to preserve—culture war debates don’t really get me out of bed. I don’t read Aeschylus to “own the libs.” I do it because it’s fun. I do it because it challenges me. I do it to enter into conversations that began long before me and will end long after me. I do it to learn. I do it to think. I do it to exercise my own humanity. Lord help us if these aren’t good enough reasons to do something. We must recognize that learning is a good to be pursued in its own right.

Of course, these things have knock-on effects. What I did at St. John’s has not stayed confined to the classroom. I’ve written previously on how St. John’s has shaped my approach to theology, which you can read about below.

I’ve become increasingly more interested in asking good questions than giving definitive answers. Not that the latter has no place—it does—but the mode of inquiry exemplified in the humanistic approach of St. John’s has lodged itself in me in such a way that may be irreversible. In other words, learning to think well is about learning to ask the right questions and explore them with curiosity, sit in the unknown, and not be satisfied by partial answers.

The wide-ranging curriculum has also broadened my interests. I’ve gone from swearing off mathematics as something, at worst, inherently opposed to my preference for the liberal arts, or, at best, irrelevant, to now seeing it as occupying a vital seat at the humanities table (for this, I must thank who wisely told me that my plan to skip the Math & Natural Science segment—you only do four of the five segments—was, in fact, a remarkably terrible idea … or something slightly politer but essentially the same). Perhaps more predictably, I’ve discovered a love for Greek tragedies and a fascination with Plato. But it’s not just the ancients. I’ve benefitted deeply from Hegel and Schopenhauer. I was dazzled by a semester studying Camus’s entire corpus, and the semester I spent with the Republic will go down as a highlight. With all of these, I sense my acquaintance has only just begun, and I look forward to developing the relationship further. Studying the Great Books ought to teach you that the books worth reading are worth re-reading.

Aside from the academics, I find I approach conversations differently. I like to think I’ve learned to listen more carefully. If you leave St. John’s—or any Great Books program—having learned only from books, you’ve failed immensely. Seminars ought to teach you the value in having more voices at the table. Further, they ought to teach you how to comport oneself properly in a group aimed at something as important and nebulous as wisdom. One tutor told us that becoming adept at participating in a seminar is akin to playing in a jazz band. Sometimes, you must put the solo aside in order to play the rhythm. You must attune yourself to the ebbs and flows of the conversation and draw out the best in your bandmates. That is, to learn well, we need to both speak and listen, contributing not only to our growth, but that of the whole.

Most of all, I hope all these books and discussions have taught me something about the good life and prepared me to pursue it more vigorously. That is an elusive thing to measure in yourself, but I do sense I value things differently, and St. Augustine insists that our desires shape who we become. Put differently, the most important lesson of the Great Books is learning to recognize the Good and pursue it beyond the pages of the texts.

I could wax lyrical (or at least attempt to do so) about these past few years ad infinitum, but perhaps it would be most fitting to honor a final lesson from St. John’s: that the discussions worth having don’t really end. What starts with you and the text extends to you and the seminar, then the seminar spills over into discussions on the lawn. It compresses back to you and yourself on the ride home before seeping into dinner discussions or musings on walks. It trickles into essays and books. Most importantly, they lodge in our souls and shape who we become. Today, I leave St. John’s, but the experience stays with me, and for that, I’m exceedingly grateful. Long may St. John’s, the study of these books, and the conversations they spark continue.

I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us to do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s bluff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?1

Saying Lewis was a rare talent may be the least controversial statement to make on a platform that has an entire cottage industry of notes featuring quotes from Lewis (or, as is often the case, quotes that sound like Lewis but are falsely attributed to him). It may be slightly more controversial to say that the closing paragraphs of Part 1 of Till We Have Faces, from which the lengthy quote above has been pulled, is one of his finest pieces of writing.

If there is any cudgel with which to beat Lewis over his writing, it is the one that Tolkien famously used: he can be too preachy in his fiction and more than a little on the nose in his allegory.

There is none of that here. Here, an aging and mature Lewis allows a character to lash out against the gods in a way that is not immediately rebutted. True, Part 2 goes a long way toward answering this question, and I intend to examine that in a future essay, Lord willing, but for now I want to look at where Lewis leaves us at the end of Part 1, with Orual asking a perennial question that has no easy answer: if God exists, why doesn’t He make it more apparent?

A touch of background

In case it’s been a minute since you’ve read TWHF, let me briefly say what has led us to this point. If you’ve got the story fresh in your head, feel free to skip ahead. If you don’t want spoilers, you may leave, but only after liking this article. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, but I hear the consequences for breaking them are severe. Why risk it?

The beginning of Part 1 deals primarily with the relationship between Orual (the main character who voices the lines above) and Psyche, her sister who is sacrificed to the gods. Except, the sacrifice doesn’t go according to plan. Rather than being eaten by the angry god of the mountain, Psyche is whisked off to a palace only she can see by a chivalrous god who saves her from death by exposure. Huzzah! But wait—to complicate matters, the god insists that she must not look at him, a demand to which she obliges.

Initially seeking only to bury her sister’s body, Orual travels to the site where Psyche was left to die, only to discover that Psyche hasn’t been killed at all. In fact, she’s perfectly healthy—at least in body. But when Psyche insists that Orual is standing with her in a castle, Orual realizes—or so she thinks—her sister has gone mad. The story of this unseen lover does not help. Eventually, Orual coerces Psyche into taking a lamp in the night to see her lover’s face, which leads to Psyche’s banishment and the god yelling at Orual for such foolishness. This direct confrontation with the god is important for today’s purposes.

But one other detail is absolutely essential to understanding the text we’re looking at in this essay: After Orual’s first argument with Psyche about the existence of the palace in which Psyche lives, she returns to her camp not far off. When kneeling for a drink of water—and surely this kneeling posture isn’t incidental—Orual catches a fleeting glimpse of the castle. It’s exactly as her sister described, and for a brief moment, Orual repents of her blasphemies against the gods and her disbelief of her sister. However, as quickly as the vision came, it vanishes when Orual rises to her feet, and she then asks the reader this: “That moment when I either saw or thought I saw the House—does it tell against the gods or against me?”2 This, of course, is the very question asked in the opening quotation. Is it better or worse that the gods give us fleeting glimpses?

Our Fleeting Visions

Most Christians, and I suspect most people of any faith they sustain for a lifetime, have moments they cling to in which the veil seems to have torn, the gap between the here and hereafter thinned, or the fog lifted on the really real such that the faith that is assured of things unseen becomes something more like a flash of the unseen that has been briefly but truly seen.

In the moment, such experiences are more valuable than words. Some are enough to sustain you for a lifetime. George MacDonald speaks about this in his Unspoken Sermons, saying, “He believes in the God of former vision, lives by that word therefore, when all is dark and there is no vision.”3 But for many, in time we can doubt what we have seen. We wonder, “if what I saw/experienced really were real, why was the vision so short, the experience so fleeting?” From there, we ask with Orual, “does this count for or against God?” Why would God play these cat-and-mouse games?

These are, in essence, the question of Divine Hiddenness. If the most important thing in life were knowing God, why doesn’t God make His existence, His presence more obvious? It is a question armchair and academic philosopher alike have wrestled with for centuries. Even within the pages of Scripture, we find Job, David, and others asking these same questions. They are not questions that I think have easy answers, and they’re further complicated by the fact that, for some, God is easily seen everywhere, while others search unsuccessfully for years.

Again, Lewis will try to answer this in Part 2 of the book, and it’s a brilliant and beautiful answer, but answers are for another day. This essay is for the tension in which we live absent answers. And especially, I want to look at that last line,

why must holy places be dark places?

As I wrote in a previous essay, one of the defining features of TWHF is its exploration of two approaches to religion. On the one hand, there is the Fox, who is representative of a rational approach exemplified in the classical Greek philosophers. On the other hand, we have the Priest of Ungit. His religion is one of blood and guts, of mystery and sacrifice. It is the latter which is marked by darkness. But it’s a paradoxical darkness, the darkness of holiness.

The Christian tradition tends to speak of God in terms of light. God dwells in unapproachable light, Christ is the Light of Life and His followers are the light of the world. If Lewis wanted this book to be a sermon, it would be about light versus darkness. In place of the Fox we’d have a good Christian against the bad pagan priest. Instead, he gives us two opposites that cry out for synthesis, not easy victory. What’s most fascinating to me about the book is that it’s not simply a story of the Fox being right and the pagan priest being wrong. The holy darkness of the Priest taps into the “thick religion” that the human soul needs.

You see, while it is true that, in the end, light shall triumph over darkness, on this side of glory, our experience of life is marked by the dark. That much may be obvious, but what is less obvious, what may even sound scandalous to some, is that our experience of God, of holy places, will often be marked by darkness as well. I do not mean the darkness that is moral depravity. I mean the darkness that conceals. The dark nights in which we cry out to a seemingly deaf heaven. The dark but holy places where we celebrate mysteries we do not fully understand. Where bread that looks and tastes like bread is said to be a sacrificial body. Where water is said to save. Where words are read that challenge and provoke and confound.

Just the other week, I found myself reading at our church, and the passage was Genesis 22, wherein God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son. With Kierkegaard I must declare I don’t understand it even if I try to admire it. And even more so, I know, like Kierkegaard again, there is a gap between my faith and the faith on display here.

It is this same darkness in the lives of saints I don’t understand. The stories were tempted to sanitize because how else can we understand young women starving themselves or men sitting on top of poles for a lifetime?

It is in relationship to this holy darkness that I can understand my friends who love the Latin Mass despite not knowing what is said. For all the disagreements we might have, I understand the pull of the holy darkness. So too with Orthodox liturgies in foreign languages that mystify and draw you in.

And yet, we must not fetishize this darkness. The darkness is not meant to stay forever. We worship a God of light. The darkness seems to me more an accident of our fallen state that an essential part of God. In God there is no darkness. On our earthly pilgrimage, however, there is in abundance. And strange as it is, often the only path toward the Light of Life is to journey through the darkness, into that cloud of unknowing or up the arduous hills that are the dark nights of the soul.

With Orual, I don’t always understand why this is. Why doesn’t God make Himself more easily known? Why are holy places so often dark places?

Perhaps, as Lewis insists, it has more to do with us than God. Perhaps, God cannot speak to us face to face until we have faces. But more on that later.

Thomas: Sorry to bother you old friend, but I need to talk to you about the papacy again.

Johannes: Again? I don’t believe we’ve discussed it before.

Thomas: No? I suppose I must have been talking to myself about it then. That guy simply won’t shut up about it!

Johannes: Who?

Thomas: Me! Or, I don’t know. That part of me that asks too many questions. He’s really rather annoying.

Johannes: Hmmm

Thomas: So, here’s the deal, I keep thinking I’ve settled the question of the papacy in my mind, and then—BAM! Back it comes, uninvited. That’s why I need your help. Give it to me straight. Is it true?

Johannes: Forgive me, but what would that mean?

Thomas: What do you mean? I’m just asking if it’s true. Is the papacy true?

Johannes: You’re going to need to be more specific than that.

Thomas: I guess what I mean is, is papal infallibility, as articulated at Vatican 1, true?

Johannes: Well—

Thomas: —Wait, no. Wrong question. Was the papacy as an institution founded by Christ?

Johannes: Ok—

Thomas: —Wait, honestly, that might not even be the question. Can we—the Church, that is—can we live without it? Is there any hope for unity without it?

Johannes: You do realize those are three very different questions, right?

Thomas: I know, I know. I’m sorry. My brain always has all three of those tabs open at once. It’s like a god-forsaken game of whack-a-mole.

Johannes: Why do you care so much?

Thomas: What do you mean? I care about truth! It’s truth I’m after!

Johannes: Why this truth? You’re not keeping yourself up at night asking if Joseph Smith really found those plates or if Neem Karoli Baba really stopped that train with his will.

Thomas: Should I be?

Johannes: If you ask me, it seems you need more sleep, not less.

Thomas: Fair point. I guess the reason this question—or really, set of questions—bothers me so much is that it puts me at odds with myself.

Johannes: Say more, please.

Thomas: Well, when I ask, “did Christ establish the papacy?” The skeptical historian in me says, “Christ promised a kingdom, we got a church. The papacy is a product of that shift.” When I ask, “is papal infallibility, as articulated by Vatican 1, true?” The dogmatist in me says, “If dogma is unchanging—which the same council said—then the pope has affirmed teachings that sure look like he meant to be binding—see Unam Sanctam—that no longer are held. At least, not in the same way. And that sounds like change. Not to mention “councils against councils, popes against popes.” Von Hefele was right. So that doesn’t work. But when I ask, “Is the papacy necessary?” I get stumped. The churchman in me says, “Well, I can’t think of another principle of unity that actually works. Councils, consensus, semper reformanda—they all sound nice. But they’ve been a mess. So is it pragmatically true? But I can’t say that. The papacy won’t let me. I’m not even allowed in with doubts. What nonsense! Or, at least, the old ones wouldn’t allow that. The new ones? I don’t know. Balthasar put “papal infallibility” in air quotes all the time. I like him.

Johannes: So, you’re saying you think it’s necessary, but you think the way it’s been articulated is false?

Thomas: If only it were that simple! The real difficulty is more complicated. Let me show you.

Johannes: Please do.

Thomas: So, I went from skeptical historian to dogmatist to churchman, right?

Johannes: It sure seemed that way. Are they not one and the same?

Thomas: Far from it! I like the skeptical historian on the papacy, but the churchman in me gets uncomfortable when he starts talking about Nicaea. That’s set in stone. The churchman won’t budge.

Johannes: I see.

Thomas: And then the dogmatist? Well, he’s convenient when holding others to their doctrinal standards, telling the Catholics they’ve changed too much, but I need to keep him firmly looking in the other direction. If I’m being honest, he’s a bit of a bore. He puts a straightjacket on development. Don’t tell the Catholics, but I’m not sure Newman went far enough, much less too far!

Johannes: Rules for thee but not for me?

Thomas: But they made the rules!

Johannes: I see. And the churchman?

Thomas: Yes, yes, the churchman, he’s a complicated one. He looks out at the papacy and sees hope for bringing these broken pieces, these wayward children back together. At least, that’s how he sees it today. But get him looking back over history and his blood will boil over what pontiffs have done to put into disarray the very thing that the churchman now thinks needs put back together. The churchman’s enemies and friends wear the same tiara!

Johannes: A bit gaudy, don’t you think?

Thomas: What’s that now?

Johannes: Oh, nothing, just the tiara.

Thomas: Yes! Oh you’re right. There’s another war within me if you really want to know.

Johannes: Apologies, I didn’t mean to further complicate things.

Thomas: No, no, not at all. But you see, there’s the aesthete in me who loves the pomp and circumstance, the smells and bells. The aura as the kids say. But then, oh then, there’s the wily prophet in me, the one who says “woe to you!” The one who says melt it all down and give it to the poor.

Johannes: Any others?

Thomas: And then there’s just the part that’s tired. That just wants to sit under a tree, read MacDonald and never be bothered by it all ever again.

Johannes: I’m quite fond of trees personally.

Thomas: Yes, yes. Me too.

Johannes: So, what shall you do next?

Thomas: I don’t know! I just don’t know. I feel stuck.

Johannes: May I give a suggestion?

Thomas: By all means!

Johannes: Perhaps before settling this question, you need to sit the skeptical historian, the dogmatist, the churchman, the aesthete, the prophet, and the tired, tree-loving, MacDonald-reading part down for a good long chat.

Thomas: That sounds as difficult as getting the Church to unite!

Johannes: Perhaps even more so.

Thomas: I’d need a pope of my own to do that.

Johannes: Perhaps that’s you.

Thomas: What, you’re saying I have to be my own pope? Wait till the apologists hear that one!

Johannes: It might not hurt to care a little less about the apologists every now and again.

Thomas: That’s fair. Can we chat again soon?

Johannes: Anytime, my friend. Anytime.

Before walking home, Thomas sat under a tree and pulled out some MacDonald, the best remedy he knew for a weary soul and the medicine that had kept him sane up till now. Just before he flipped open the book, his phone buzzed. BREAKING NEWS: THE POPE EXCOMMUNICATES THE SSPX. The churchman in him cried. So much for that unity. The dogmatist felt conflicted. The historian laughed. And Thomas himself? He closed his phone and opened his book.

Postscript

Thank you for indulging my foray back into the dialogue format. This is far from a polished piece, but I suppose that’s partially the point. I wanted to give voice to the inner wrestling I’ve experienced when it comes to the papacy. In my own life, I find that questions about the pope come and go. Most days, I’m pretty happily Episcopalian. I used to say, “I wish I could be Catholic, but my mind holds me back.” If I’m being honest, I don’t think that’s quite the case anymore. I love our local Episcopal Church. I love the BCP. I’m increasingly concerned about certain aspects of the trad movement, at least as it exists online. Yes, the Episcopal Church has its many flaws and many, many quirks. I wouldn’t cosign everything that happens within it—far from it. But when I focus less on the abstract and more on the lived reality of parish life, I feel content. In many ways, I feel more settled than I have been in years, probably because for the first time, my devotional and liturgical life match. No more going to a megachurch on Sunday and praying the rosary at daily mass on Monday. That goes a long way toward the integration that, I think, Johannes is getting at in this piece.

And yet, there are still days when I feel that draw toward Rome. Most of the time, it doesn’t have to do with the historical arguments getting any better. It’s just pragmatic. I long for greater unity in the church. I’ve yet to see a better model than the Roman one. That alone isn’t enough for me, but, annoyingly, it’s enough to keep those tabs in my mind open. And then there are the very real questions of double standards. I’ve yet to reconcile the historical-critical part of me with the tradition-loving part of me. I’m sure there are a million other contradictions within me as well, and intellectual exercises like this are a painful, but hopefully purifying, process. We are often mysteries to ourselves, and digging more deeply doesn’t always make things clearer. A large part of me wants the Vatican 2, all-embracing, theory-of-everything type of Catholicism to be the answer. But I wonder how much of that is wanting a simple answer to questions that defy such simplicity. Perhaps, as Johannes says, we must reconcile the parts within us before looking for an answer to do that. Or perhaps that’s a bunch of pop-psychology nonsense. Who knows?

Perhaps you have heard the phrase, “smells and bells.” In the context of debates between “low” and “high” church adherents, the conversation is often, “don’t just convert for the smells and bells. Focus on truth.” The implication here is that people are allowing the aesthetics of liturgical traditions to overwhelm their reasoning faculties. Underneath this is a belief that our religious lives should be led with the mind, not the nose or ears.

I do not wish to disparage the intellect, nor would I even object in principle to the idea that, all things being equal, the mind is better positioned to ascertain truth than the nose. However, I equally wish to avoid assuming that there’s nothing to these smells and bells. If our religion is going to call to the entirety of man and offer true transformation, it cannot be something suited only to brains on sticks or disembodied spirits. In many ways, the draw of liturgical traditions is that they rebel against such stunted anthropologies and offer something more fitted to the whole of man. They offer food for thought and for the stomach. Their arguments pass the sniff test but the experience itself also has a holy smell. Such faiths enter the ear not only through syllogisms but also in the sound of bells. Ideas are grasped, yes, but also are sacred objects with our trembling hands.

Till We Have Faces

Such thoughts, especially those related to the smell of religion, have been top of mind for me since I began re-reading Till We Have Faces, which is perhaps the most mature, and most misunderstood, work of C. S. Lewis. He himself considered it his masterpiece as well as the one work he managed to write without preaching. It was also his biggest commercial flop, which goes to show that quality and sales do not always coincide.

If you haven’t read it, TWHF is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche through the lens of Psyche’s half-sister, Orual. It is a work with many layers, and, as a shameless plug, I’ll note that I’m currently reading it with my Substack/Patreon book club, which you can join and access previous recordings by becoming a paid subscriber.

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The smell of holiness is a recurring idea in the book. For instance, when the priest of Ungit (Aphrodite) visits the castle of Orual’s father, the narrator records the following: “The smell of old age, and the smell of the oils and essences they put on those girls, and the Ungit smell, filled the room. It became very holy.”1 As the book unfolds, you learn that the word “holiness” has a different meaning than you may initially think. We’re prone to think of holiness as the domain of prim and proper saints with gilded halos, paragons of a certain Victorian vision of virtue. That is not the holiness of TWHF. In this work, we’re confronted with a more raw, ancient, and pagan notion of holiness. This is a holiness that smells of blood and burnt flesh. Later on, Orual is flummoxed by Psyche’s affinity for the gods and lashes out:

“Oh you ought to have been one of Ungit’s girls,’ said I savagely. ‘You ought to have lived in there—in the dark—all blood and incense and muttering and the reek of burnt fat. To like it—living among things you can’t see—dark and holy and horrible.’”2

Clearly, this holiness is not clean and pristine, nor is it even seen as a moral good by Orual. This wrestling with holiness and its hateful smell forms a vital part of a theme woven throughout the work: the conflict between rival visions of religion.

These views are juxtaposed in the figures of two main characters: the Fox and the Priest of Ungit.

The Fox is a Greek slave brought to the Castle of Glome to tutor the king’s longed for son. However, as that son is still wanting, he is left to tutor the king’s daughters: Orual and Redival initially, and later Psyche. His Greek background is not incidental. It reaches beyond the story’s world into our own, and it provides him with a set of views on religion marked by the predominance of philosophy. Much like Socrates, the Fox derides the anthropomorphized gods as the lies of poets, preferring instead a simple Divine Nature. Most of what is deemed supernatural he argues is rationally explicable. If holiness had a smell for the Fox—and I’m not convinced it would have any smell—it would likely be that of old books or perhaps fresh air.

The Priest of Ungit is an altogether different figure. He lives in the world of mystery and blood. A world of sacred rites and slaughter. His is a religion of the senses, and holiness most certainly has a smell.

These two come into conflict in the first half of the book in a disagreement over the value, or superfluity, of a human sacrifice. When the Fox derides the arguments put forward as hopelessly contradictory and lacking sense, the Priest responds by saying this is a feature, not a bug. He criticizes rationalists, saying:

“They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book. I king have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear like water, but thick and dark like blood.”3

In my life as a reader, both inside and outside academic environments, I have found it is almost universally the case that great books—and this is a great book—are best read with others. This was proved true in our first book club discussion about TWHF when a member of the group brought to our attention the way in which this passage directly draws out themes Lewis had explored in other settings, specifically this notion of “thick” vs. “clear” religions.

In a 1946 address on Christian apologetics, Lewis said that religions are a bit like soups, some being thick some being clear. He goes on to explain, “By ‘thick’ I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of thick religions.”4 In contrast, “By ‘clear’ I mean those which are philosophical, ethical, and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are clear religions.”5 For Lewis, both are essential. And it’s that striving after synthesis that makes the dialectic in TWHF so interesting.

On the one hand, the thick religion of the Priest of Ungit gives him an unshakeable confidence in the face of danger that the Fox lacks. When the Priest has a knife held to his chest, he doesn’t flinch, but the Fox is only where he is because he allowed himself to be captured in war. It seems evident that Lewis thinks philosophy on its own is not enough to carry deep convictions. Furthermore, Orual, for all her revulsion toward thick religion, cannot deny that the sacrifice appeared to work. The proof is in the pudding, right?

And yet, it’s not quite that simple. Remember, Lewis is striving for synthesis. TWHF is not offering an unqualified endorsement of thick religion. The Priest of Ungit is not the hero here. He recognizes something the Fox lacks, but so too does the Fox see things to which the Priest is blind. Orual finds solace and truth in the Fox’s notion of the Divine Nature. In a thinly veiled reference to Greek philosophy, Psyche even notes that some other Greeks recognized an afterlife, which appears to indicate that the Fox wasn’t so much wrong for being Greek but in not adhering to the best of Greek thought.

Insofar as this is correct, perhaps it’s not entirely accurate to say Lewis isn’t preaching in this book. Perhaps he is still turning his non-fiction into fiction, albeit more subtely. Some would view this as less artistically meritorious. An unwelcome infringement into the supposedly pure world of art. I don’t think this is the case. The beautiful and the true do not exist in isolation. They converge, and here, they do so exquisitely.

Thick and Clear Religion Today

If TWHF is meant to teach us something about the nature of religion, then we must return to the opening of this essay, to that notion of the smells and bells. It would seem that Lewis is saying that we need both the clarity of good teaching and the smells of incense and wine. We need rigorous argument and cherubic hymns. If the Fox and the Priest need each other, so too do the doctrinaires and aesthetes.

However, it’s worth pausing to ask if burning incense—or whatever other smells we associate with “high church”—is the only smell of holiness. Several years ago, Pope Francis urged priests to be shepherds who smelled like their sheep. This was a vision of holiness not so much wrapped in mystery and marked by separation, but rather a holiness found in the mire of human existence, a holiness that doesn’t stand far off but invades the mess of the world unafraid of its stain.

Without creating overly stringent dichotomies between the testaments, we can see something here of Old and New Testament holiness. In many ways, holiness in the OT means “to be set apart.” It is the holiness of the religious cult, a holiness that creates sacred spaces, a holiness that smells of blood and guts and reminds you that some places are unlike others because God dwells there. In the NT, we find the diffusion of holiness. The smell of holiness is that of oil poured on the feet of a messiah by a sinful woman. The smell of holiness reached beyond sacred places and mingled with that of donkeys, lepers, and the least of these. In time, that OT smell would go from burnt flesh to burnt incense. What passes for thick religion today is often much clearer and less wild than that of its pre-Christian predecessors. The Priest of Ungit, at least to me, represents less the respectable high church than something altogether absent today.

Still though, we wrestle in our own ways with what holinss ought to smell like. Is it closer to that of Narcan or church naves? Soup kitchens or incense? Sheep or shimmering marble? Perhaps, however, we must reach for the both/and rather than the either/or. Just as we must not neglect the Fox for the Priest of Ungit, we must recognize that the smell of holiness is not singular but plural.

For my own part, I’ve caught wafts of holiness in churches high and low, in sermons and song, on street corners and cathedrals. In many ways, maybe the task for some of us isn’t to determine which smell is that of holiness, but to start by recognizing that it does in fact extend beyond the mind and reach the olfactory. That we can not only know that God is good but taste and see and touch and hear and, yes, smell that God is good.

Odds and Ends

What I’m Reading: This summer features an odd combination of books. I decided to do a Bulgakov tandem read of The Master and Margarita (Mikhail) and The Sophiology of Death (Sergei). I can’t yet decide if there’s a deeper connection than they share the same last name and country of origin, but it’s a fun combo nevertheless. I’ve also embarked on a somewhat extended study of the history of Marian doctrine and devotion. Right now I’m reading Mother of God by Miri Rubin and Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion by Stephen Shoemaker. Both are excellent. For audiobooks, I’ve been inspired by TWHF to return to Lewis, so I’ve listened to The Great Divorce and I’m now trying The Pilgrim’s Regress for the first time. The former I’d read before and was delighted to re-read. The latter is new, and I’ll admit that I’m not fully sold yet. Time will tell.

Camino Pilgrimage 2027: I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. It’ll be an intentionally ecumenical affair in which Christians from diverse traditions will have the opportunity to walk side by side and in the footsteps of the saints who went before us. Learn more: here.

My Novel: In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. I’m delighted that the first endorsement has come in. Here’s what Matthew Levering had to say: "What a delight to read this novel! The characters come alive, and the book is a quest -- following St. Cuthbert's Way, guided by Br. Aidan -- a quest that turns out to be not only a recovery from loss ... but also a passionate search for the wellsprings of Christian unity. Christian unity, grounded in the heritage of the faith and in self-sacrificial acts of love, is the very center of this story."

Few things are more quintessential to an evangelical upbringing than youth group. If you’ve been a part of one, you know there’s nothing quite like these mystifying gatherings of hormonal teenagers.

I mean, where else can you find kids crying with hands held high in worship, making out behind couches, trading Pokemon cards, and playing games that you hardly ever see outside that subculture (I’m looking at you, gaga ball) all in the same room?

And in the midst of all of that, someone has to teach these kids about Jesus.

It’s a tall order, and I want to say from the beginning, God bless all the saints that volunteer to put up with sweaty and stand-offish high school students. You all deserve far more thanks than you get.

We shouldn’t be too harsh then if youth groups aren’t parsing the faith with the precision of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Still, in my experience, most people walk away from youth group with a theology consisting in three main ideas: Jesus loves you, don’t have sex before you get married, and be careful going to college because your professors are going to try to make you an atheist.

It’s certainly a truncated view of the gospel, but, hey, high schoolers don’t exactly have great attention spans and you’ve got to leave time for pizza and dodge ball. Plus, the first of those three ideas is basically the deepest idea there is. Seriously. If you get that through to people, you’re doing the Lord’s work.

While it would probably be more popular on Substack to simply bash evangelical subculture, that’s not what today’s piece is about.

This piece is about dangerous ideas.

College and Dangerous Ideas

My upbringing occurred at the intersection of suburbia and evangelicalism. The former told us that getting into a good school to land a high-paying job was essential. The latter told us that college was a breeding ground for atheism.

The natural compromise was to go to a respectable Christian college. This, at least in theory, would lead to the white picket fence while also helping you achieve tenets two and three of the youth group gospel. It’s not foolproof, of course. Many of us graduated to find the economy in shambles so studio apartments replaced white picket fences, but on the faith side, the promise of a Christian college was that with some good campus rules and biblical teaching in class kids would manage to not have sex and keep the faith.

Tempting as it is to wade into the economy or evangelical purity culture, for the moment I’m more interested in the concern so many people had over us encountering dangerous ideas at college.

What’s particularly intriguing about this is that it strikes at a tension in the evangelical world. On the one hand, evangelicals are often derided for being “anti-intellectual.” From popular conceptions of evangelicals as uneducated bigots behind the times to more sophisticated critiques of the dearth of evangelicals in the upper echelons of our elite schools, there seems to be a general sense that evangelicals—whether individually or collectively—aren’t at the top of our culture’s intellectual food chain.

On the other hand, within the Christian world, I often hear evangelicals being criticized for being too intellectual. By this, Christian critics don’t usually mean that evangelicals are too smart, but rather that evangelicalism with its hour long sermons spent parsing the Greek and Hebrew can treat humans like brains on a stick when what is really needed is a faith that’s more sacramental, embodied, and liturgical to embrace the fullness of the human person.

Whether evangelicals are not intellectual enough or too intellectual, they’re certainly concerned about the power of bad ideas. Time and again we heard growing up that college was a place of dangerous ideas. A place where smug professors smuggled marxism into the hands of good kids in the form of overpriced textbooks. Before you know it, your kid who was in youth group six months ago comes home for winter break calling you a capitalist pig and deriding faith as the opium of the masses.

In reality, I think most kids who drift from the faith in college do so in much less dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, there’s a real fear that encountering new ideas in college will be destabilizing. And this fear isn’t entirely fictitious.

For many kids, college is the first place they come across people who see the world differently than them. Not only that, they come to find out that these viewpoints have depth to them. It’s only natural that they might wonder if these ideas are better than the ones they’ve grown up with.

So what are we to do? Should we keep kids from coming across dissenting ideas? Should we throw them into the deep end and see what happens?

My Experience with Dangerous Ideas

As I write this piece, it’s my final day of a semester spent studying Arthur Schopenhauer for my master’s program.1 Before that, I was studying Friedrich Nietzsche, and prior to Nietzsche it was Albert Camus. If you’re a bit rusty on philosophy, none of these men are too fond of Christianity.

And yet, I’ve found it has been one of the most rewarding experiences studying these famous enemies of the faith.

Why is that?

Could it be that ideas aren’t that dangerous after all and we’ve been getting worked up over nothing?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

You see, this isn’t my first brush with dangerous ideas. When I was in high school, I went through a really tough period in which my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, my sister lost her ability to walk, and my view of the church was rocked by scandals all in the course of a few short months. It was in the middle of that perfect storm that one of my teachers introduced me to Christopher Hitchens, one of the famous “New Atheists.”

It didn’t happen all at once, but I went from nodding along politely when he showed me one of his viral videos to seeking them out on my own. Before I knew it, I was agreeing with Hitchens more than I disagreed with him. Maybe all this faith stuff was nonsense after all.

Up to that point, I wasn’t just a casual church attender. I had gone through 8 years of private Christian school, was actively engaged in my church, and could crush anyone at a good sword drill (remember those?). More than that though, faith had been the center of my life, and like so many young evangelicals, I wanted to be a missionary because that seemed like the pinnacle of radical discipleship.

So how could simple ideas wrapped in clever rhetoric begin to unravel my faith?

For me, it wasn’t necessarily intellectual. I began to doubt God was good before I doubted that he existed, and I’m not sure I was ever that good at the latter if I’m being honest. That didn’t matter though, because when we cease to view God as good and beautiful, the question of whether he exists quickly becomes irrelevant. In my case, at least, I just didn’t care anymore.

I don’t think my story is all that unique. For every person who leaves the faith due to arguments against Christian metaphysics, I’m pretty sure a whole lot more leave because they’re not sure if God is good or beautiful.

My road back to faith was made possible because, despite my apathy toward God, I still found the person of Jesus compelling. And over time, as I tried to follow in the footsteps of this person I found so compelling, I realized that I needed to love the things he loved, including the messiness of the church.

It wasn’t only that Jesus was compelling, though. As I ran away from faith, I found I was running toward nothing. Luckily for me, I realized this pretty quickly before doing any real damage to my life. Not everyone is that fortunate.

My journey back to faith led me to getting an undergraduate degree in theology where I found that the beauty that drew me to Christ was matched by a rich and satisfying truth. It was there that I developed a love for the Christian tradition and delved into the Church Fathers. Along the way, I wasn’t blind to the fact that there was much ugliness in the history of the church, and yet even still, I found that here was something to build a life on. Here was a truth that captured my mind, a beauty that drew in my soul, and a goodness that I could give my life in service to.

During my undergraduate years, I didn’t spend too much time reading opponents of the faith. I was drinking too deeply from the depths of the tradition to give much time to that. Afterwards, though, I decided to expand my studies a bit in my master’s degree to focus more on philosophy. To do that, I’d have to come face to face with the enemies of the faith.

When I did, I found it much less unsettling than I thought it would be. It’s not that Marx or Nietzsche have nothing to say. They’re brilliant, and we’re still reading them for a reason. But as I read them, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. I wasn’t drawn into them. Perhaps I could get outraged over similar things, but I never found an impetus for life in the same way. When Camus told me to imagine Sisyphus happy, I couldn’t, despite the fact that I resonated with so much of his articulation of the absurd. I saw the problems but the solution was lacking. Not only did the intellectual foundations of my faith not crack, but far more importantly, I didn’t find beauty in these thinkers in the way I did in the Christian tradition. I imagine if an Atheist is reading this, it might sound like mere sentimentality. I get that. I really do. But we love what we love, don’t we?

I still get excited picking up these writers, as I hope previous essays have made clear. I’ve learned so much from all of them. My faith seems to have more than enough room for the good in these thinkers, while their philosophies are too narrow to fit the best of the faith.

So, what do we do with these dangerous ideas?

All of this brings us back to dangerous ideas. On the one hand, ideas really do have consequences, and they can undermine people’s faith. On the other hand, there’s a great deal of subjectivity here. What undermines one person might strengthen another.

Some of this will have to do with age. Hitchens felt impressive at 16 in a way that I’m not sure he would at 26 or 66. Other parts of this has to do with formation. My faith formation was heavy on personal devotion but pretty lacking in intellectual depth. I think we often think depth has to do with apologetic arguments, and maybe it does for some, but for me, depth was more to do with encountering a capacious theological imagination than arguing about the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Furthermore, some of this had to do with returning to what I found beautiful: Jesus. So much of faith starts with beauty before proceeding to truth. Finally, sometimes you just have to taste and see. I can’t imagine how scary it is for parents to watch their kids wrestle with faith. But so often, that’s part of the process. Sometimes you have to see what life is like on the other side of the fence before appreciating what you left behind.

So, were the youth group leaders wrong? Is there nothing to fear in these “dangerous ideas?” Not necessarily. We shouldn’t be naive to think that ideas are neutral. But as I look back on the fear people had about “secular” colleges and scary philosophers, I’m struck by the lack of confidence it betrays. Perhaps if your faith rises and falls on the dating of the Earth, the geographical expanse of the flood, or a peculiarly modern notion of what inerrancy is, then there’s reason to believe that we must avoid direct engagement at all costs for fear of a house of cards toppling. But as I reflect these days, I think we’d do better to focus less on instilling in kids fear of dangerous ideas and more on showing them the full beauty and capacity of the Christian faith. It is much deeper and wider than I was led to believe. I don’t mean we need to trade dodge ball and pizza for Latin lessons and seminars on the Summa (but if your high schoolers are interested in that, by all means). Rather, I think we need to demonstrate what it looks like to have a faith that’s open, curious, and big enough to withstand questions. A faith that looks out at the world not in fear, anxiously assuming a defensive posture, but a faith that looks out at the world and says, “all that is good, we have space for, and all that is evil we can withstand.” A faith that is confident is sings in harmony with the deepest desires of the human soul that was created for God and only finds rest in him. And, importantly, a faith that reminds kids that no matter how far the prodigal roams, God races off the porch to greet him with open arms should he have the slightest interest in coming home.

I want to end by reiterating that the people who are volunteering to walk alongside high school students who are often apathetic toward faith are the everyday saints of our times. This article is not meant in anyway to bash youth groups or those who run them. If you’re out there doing the work, thank you. Genuinely, thank you. If anything, I hope this encourages you and provides you food for thought. But keep telling those kids Jesus loves them. He loves you, too, you good and faithful servants.

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

When St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press began its Popular Patristics series nearly 50 years ago, the title might have been a touch aspirational. True, the currents in academia had decidedly swung toward patristics with the ressourcement theologians in the Catholic Church and the neo-patristic synthesis types in the East, but “popular,” at least at a lay level, was probably a stretch.

As is often the case, what was popular in the halls of major universities decades ago has now made its way into the pews, and the study of the Church Fathers is beginning to become “popular” indeed. Granted, this popularity is still niche—I don’t recommend starting small-talk on the train with, “so, what do you think of the logoi in St. Maximus?”—but there does seem to be a genuine rise in the popularity of patristics. Would people have predicted 50 years ago that YouTube and TikTok would be full of young men opining on the relevance of St. Cyprian to contemporary debates between Catholics and Orthodox? Probably not.

Whether this is simply a passing fad or a genuine shift in Christian consciousness is hard to predict. Nevertheless, for now at least, it’s here, and in my experience, it’s creating lots of new questions. Pastors who went to seminary two decades ago were probably not anticipating having young parishioners ask them whether the filioque is theologically accurate or not. In all likelihood, such debates were probably little more than a footnote in an assigned reading for a Church History class that has been long since forgotten.

To be clear, I don’t fault pastors or seminaries for this. The niche interests of people who consume hours of historical theology content online a day may not, in fact, be as important as the nerds among us may like to think (I say this with love and affection, knowing I most certainly fit that description of “nerd”). And yet, these are the times we’re in, and I think one of the questions that we must ask is, “how should we think about the Church Fathers?”

The Status Quo with the Fathers

In my experience, there’s often an implicit sense among people interested in historical theology that the Fathers de facto are authorities and should settle our interpretive debates. As the internet makes clear the extent of our disagreements about Scripture and thus highlights just how much interpretation is happening when we encounter a text, the Fathers offer, seemingly, a way out. It goes something like this:

Person A: Scripture says X.

Person B: No, it says Y.

Person A: No! It clearly says X.

Person B: That’s just your interpretation.

Person A: …

Person B: Look, the Fathers all say Y, so the Bible must mean Y.

That, of course, is a bit of an oversimplification, but hopefully an illustrative one nonetheless. The main idea is that the Fathers act as something akin to interpretive arbiters. This is not bad in and of itself. In fact, I think checking one’s interpretive conclusions against the Fathers can be a rather fruitful practice and can foster a certain intellectual humility when done well. I often compare the task of theology to sitting around a large table filled with theologians of the past, all looking at the same text and discussing it together. At this table in which conversations began long before we arrived, we’re invited to speak. We, too, can engage the task of theology and speak our minds. And yet, it’s both good table manners and wise theological practice to listen more than you speak. If everyone at the table reads differently than you do, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re wrong, but it should be enough to give you pause.

That being said, I think there’s a bit of a danger when we engage the Fathers as nothing but arbiters for our disagreements. Rather than listening carefully to the conversation and trying to understand how it has gotten to the point it has, we merely search for snippets of speech that confirm our hypothesis and then run from the table to go relay our findings. In such cases, we basically move the proof-texting wars back a layer. Whereas we once might have debated predestination by volleying verses from Romans and Philippians back and forth, we now try to play a trump card in the form of quotations from the Fathers.

This isn’t new, of course. When representatives from the East and West met for reunion councils in the late middle ages, it was common to produce florilegium—essentially long list of quotations from the Fathers in your favor, often divorced from context.

And it’s this idea of context that should give us pause. Most Protestants have had it drilled into them that context is essential for understanding the Bible. For this reason, study Bibles fly off the shelves as people seek to understand the times and places in which texts were written. These study Bibles may only scratch the surface, but they’re helpful tools considering the immensity of the task of trying to understand everything from the Philistines to Caesarea Philippi. When enlisting the Church Fathers as debate-deciders, we often fail to recognize that we’re adding yet another layer of context to understand which may or may not make things simpler.

I say this not to gate-keep patristics nor make people despair. Much of my work online is dedicated to trying to engage the Fathers in a way that’s accessible for those interested in such things. For now, I flag this merely to make us stop for a second and think not whether we should engage patristics but how we can do it well because, for all the ink shed about good vs. bad biblical interpretations, I think we often forget those ideas when we put our Bibles down and pick up the latest from SVS press. Thus, we end up reading the Fathers a bit naively. Oddly, we assume that the Fathers are more perspicuous than Scripture when, most of the time, that’s simply because we’re not aware that the hermeneutical difficulties that riddle Scripture are present in the Fathers as well. We just haven’t sat at the table long enough to hear the debates.

This naivety can create a blissful honeymoon period with the Fathers, and much of me does not want to ruin that for people, but I do want to warn against thinking that reading a couple books on the Fathers means one now has all the trump cards for proper theology. I’ve made the analogy before, but reading a couple chapters of Calvin’s Institutes didn’t settle debates on soteriology back during the height of the young, restless, and reformed days. Swapping Calvin for Chrysostom won’t either.

Ok, all that being said, let’s look at a few ideas for reading the Fathers well.

1. Secondary Sources Are Good, Actually

This one might surprise some people. In a lot of ways, I’m a primary source guy. I’ve been deeply shaped by my time at St. John’s College, which is famous for its exclusive use of primary sources in the curriculum. There aren’t even lectures, just conversations about influential texts ranging from Homer to Hegel. To be clear, if you want to read the Fathers, you absolutely need to read the primary sources. At its best, a call to focus on primary sources is a vote of confidence in our ability to understand difficult texts and an encouragement to form opinions of our own rather than just parroting back what others have said. I’m onboard with all of that.

However, we shouldn’t neglect the secondary sources. We’re not the first people to read the Fathers, and engaging secondary sources opens us up to the fact that, just as with Scripture, there are a range of interpretations of the Fathers. It’s not as simple as, “St. Augustine said it and that settles it.” In engaging secondary sources, the goal isn’t to become passive. Instead, it’s to avoid isolated reading. Learning should always be a communal task. Think of secondary sources as conversation partners and members of your learning community who have a bit more experience than you do. Feel free to disagree with them, but also be willing to learn from them. Most people today have an aversion to narrow, fundamentalist approaches to Scripture that fail to recognize there are many ways of reading the Bible. For those getting into patristics, don’t fall into the trap of swapping one fundamentalism for another.

2. Don’t Throw Hermeneutics Out the Window

On a similar note, if you’ve spent time learning about how to read the Bible well, don’t throw those lessons out when you read the Fathers. Remember that stuff about reading according to the genre and the historical-cultural context? That applies to St. Ephrem’s hymns and St. Cyprian’s sermons.

Our category of “Fathers” can be a bit reductionistic. It can make us flatten this diverse corpus of writing into one genre as though it were all the same. It’s not. These writers, like the biblical writers (indeed, more so depending on your theory of inspiration) are people whose thinking is bound up with the time and places in which they lived as well as the mediums in which they chose to communicate. That doesn’t make their writing less valuable, it just means you need to read it according to the rules of good interpretation and not as though it were all undifferentiated divine oracles with self-evident meanings.

3. Your Debates Are (probably) Not Their Debates

In many ways this is a sub-point of the previous one, but good hermeneutics dictates that we read texts on their terms, not our terms. The online historical theology space is dominated by debates. Unfortunately, trying to win arguments incentivizes shortcuts. Rhetoric can trump rigor in such cases, and careful readings give way to mic-drop quotations. One of the things that I often see happening within this context is that we assume the Fathers are speaking directly to whatever our contemporary debate might be. So, if we’re having an argument about Protestantism vs. Catholicism, we ask whether St. Augustine would’ve been a Protestant without seeing the anachronism staring us in the face.

Part of being a good reader is trying to first understand what the author is trying to communicate. When we do that, we must ask, “what questions are they addressing?” not “what answers do I want them to give me for my questions?”

Of course, this does not mean that the Fathers cannot speak to contemporary questions. They most certainly can. By no means do I wish to relegate patristics to a merely academic exercise of something akin to philosophical archeological excavation. Instead, I merely want to caution that, prior to leveraging the Fathers for whatever debates we find ourselves in today, we should first try to patiently understand what they were saying in their times and places. Then, we can do the difficult work, one that’s often more art than science, of translating those ideas into our times, recognizing that much can be lost—and gained—in such acts of translation.

4. Go Slow

“Patiently” was the key word in that last section, and it’s deserving of a brief section all of its own. St. John Henry Newman’s infamous quote, “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant” has created in many people a sort of call to arms, a challenge, if you will. Basically, people rush to fulfill this undefined criteria of being “deep in history.” But rushing rarely leads to depth.

The fact is, most of us are not “deep in history.” Many of us never will be. We didn’t start learning Latin and Greek at 10, nor did we master five or six research langauges by the time we graduated high school. We have jobs to do and dishes to clean. Not to mention we really like that new show on Netflix. Despite all this, we want to be seen as “deep in history” (know that I’m preaching to myself here).

Whether we attain that elusive description or not, we would do well to go slow. You’re not going to be an expert in church history in a year, so you might as well pace yourself. You’ll learn more that way in any case. It’s better to really understand one book than speed-read 10 that you forget instantly.

Fr. John Behr recently said in an interview with the guys at that you can really only get to know a handful of thinkers in your life. Bear in mind, Fr. John probably fits that description of person we’re not (found two paragraphs above) better than most. So, if one of the greatest living scholars of patristics says that he can only know a few thinkers in his life, well, shoot, I’d love to even know one then.

In the vein of going slow, I recommend trying to find that person whose thought you’d like to get to know and spend a year with their writing. For me, this year is St. Augustine. Outside of my reading for videos and class, most of my research reading is dedicated just to him, and primarily just his early works at that. Will I know Augustine come December? No. Will I know more than I did previously? Absolutely.

A Concluding Thought

I leave you with less of a fifth and final tip and more of a question to ponder: what is the shape of theological history? I’ve explored this a bit in my essay, “The (Protestant) Problem of History” found below:

In that piece, I survey a few different ways of thinking about how we’ve gotten where we are. One way I try to get people thinking about this is by asking, “does theology get better or worse with age?” Newman talks about this in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, wherein he states that, though many people assume theology is like a river that is clearest at its source, that is not in fact the case. Barth, somewhat similarly, talks about theology as a science that improves over time. Others disagree. Some say theology peaked in the first century, the fourth century, the 12th century, etc. That’s a hard question to answer if you’ve read deeply and widely. It’s even more difficult if you haven’t.

I’m not suggesting you should solve this question, but I do think it’s one to wrestle with as you consider how to engage with the Church Fathers. We’ve given them that title, and it bears weight for many. But it’s worth asking, “are you allowed to disagree?” I think this is especially important for Protestants who find that their theology is at odds with the Fathers in significant ways in certain areas. That might just mean you’re wrong. It might mean the Fathers were wrong. Maybe you’re both wrong. I have thoughts on that matter, but those are for another day. For now, I want you to be thinking about the long journey of history that has brought us to the present in which you hold the views that you do. What’s the shape of that journey?

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

I have the strange job of talking about God for a living. To be clear, I love what I do. I find theology to be a deeply life-giving, wonder-inducing task that fills my soul. But in a world drowning in content about God, it’s easy to forget that talking about God is a rather odd thing. Not odd in the sense of some middle school fashion choices we wish we could take back. Odd in the sense of birds trying to swim or dolphins trying to fly. Sure, a seagull can break the surface of the waves to grab a fish, and yes, dolphins delight us when they crest the waves and glint in the sun, but we wouldn’t call birds great swimmers or dolphins great aviators. Yet, in many ways, we creatures of the dust who dare to pontificate about the Divine are more like these animals than we’d like.

Wade into the Christian tradition and you’ll soon find a chorus of voices singing the same song telling us that our words about God are always incomplete. God is, in the final estimate, beyond our words. Spilling so much ink on such a God, then, is odd.

If you’re looking for a word to describe what we do in the face of the beyond-wordness of God—no, the irony isn’t lost—apophaticism would be the one for you. It’s an approach to theology that recognizes our predications about God ultimately fall short, and thus, the safer road is to say what God is not. Even this, though, is incomplete. As Pseudo-Dionysius taught, our negations fail much like our affirmations. We can say “God is wise,” for instance, and that’s true to a point, but our word “wisdom” doesn’t fully describe God. It’s too small a thing. So we try saying, “God is not foolish.” That too is true, but only to a point. “Not foolish” can’t quite grab hold of God. So, affirmations and negations fall short of the target.

We typically associate such ideas of apophaticism with the more “mystical” theology of the Eastern Church. This is not without reason. The East is home to great treasures in this domain. It would be wrong, however, to think this is an exclusively Eastern phenomenon. Our neat categories of “mystical” East and “scholastic” West obscure the fact that the latter is no stranger to apophaticism and the former has much acquaintance with precision as well.

The West is, after all, home to the likes of St. Bonaventure, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing, and many other apophatically-inclined thinkers. The scholastic theologian par excellence, St. Thoams Aquinas, made Pseudo-Dionysius one of his primary conversation partners in the Summa, and while not a full-blown apophatic theologian, Thomas insisted we remember that our language about God is analogical, which is to say, human words might express what God is like but not what God is. St. Augustine insisted that even calling God inexpressible is, in a sense, a step too far because it expresses something about that which is inexpressible!1

When you first begin acquainting yourself with the idea of apophaticism, it can be a bit discouraging. “If God is beyond words, what’s the point in saying anything at all?” At times, apophaticism leads to a sort of quietism, a reluctance to speak about God and a resignation to the utter unknowability of God. Though such an attitude is by no means absent from the Christian tradition, it fits awkwardly alongside a few core convictions of Christian theology. To abandon words is interesting when we worship one whom we call The Word of God.2 Furthermore, Christianity is a religion of revelation. We believe that God has made Himself known in the person of Christ first and foremost, as well as believing that the Scriptures are, in some sense or another, God’s revelation to us.

So, we have two pieces of the puzzle to put together. On the one hand, we have the idea that God, by His very nature, is beyond words in the sense that all our words fall short of fully describing Him. He is and ever remains, a mystery to us. On the other hand, we believe that He is a God who reveals Himself, chiefly in Christ, though also in other ways, most notably in Scripture which is, well, full of words. While some would dissolve this tension by saying the first part is just an imposition of Greek philosophy into Christianity, a malicious hellenization of the simple gospel, I would caution against that reading for at least two reasons. First, good metaphysics is just good metaphysics, regardless of origin. A recognition of the inherent mismatch between the finitude of language and the infinity of God seems to me nothing more than sound reflection. Second, Scripture itself points us in this direction. St. Paul says we see through a glass darkly, Isaiah speaks of God’s thoughts being above our thoughts, and Job offers us a startling picture of just how incomprehensible God can be to the human mind.

With these ideas in place, I’d argue that this is a tension we should learn to live with, rather than trying to avoid. But how do we do that?

Here, I’d like to propose that the limitations of our language to describe God should lead us to say more, not less.

An Apophaticism of Excess

We can think of our approach to the transcendence of God in negative and positive ways. By that, I don’t mean “sad” and “happy” ways. Rather, transcendence can lead to us stripping away all description until we find the God that simply is. I’ll call this negative transcendence. Get rid of everything until you find God in the nothingness that is everything. This isn’t altogether bad, but, once again, Christianity has a penchant for description. The other option, positive transcendence, is more like saying God is greater than our words. When coupled with the idea that we know in part and not in full, this can lead to a sense in which we can direct our words and worship toward a God who will never be fully understood by us or exhausted by our descriptions. Think less of a stripping away and more of a roaring waterfall whose bottom we cannot see and that never fills despite the ceaseless flow of water.

That’s a bit more like how I think of the task of theology. Not only does this allow us to make sense of an incomprehensible God who nevertheless reveals Himself, but it also makes sense of human experience.

For instance, we often say that an experience is “difficult to put into words.” But what do we do in such situations? We turn to the best words we can find. We form them into poetry that only ever approximates the feeling that defies description. We aim our arrows at the moon knowing they’ll never reach that pockmarked surface but yet we know that they’re headed in the right direction. We are, after all, children babbling on about a God beyond our wildest imaginations who yet delights in us as His children much as our hearts beam when our babies make even the first sounds resembling speech. Such is our theology, and it is a joyous task.

Two Inspirations for this Piece

This past week, I was spurred on to think about such things through ’s recent article in The New Ressourcement titled, “A Metaphysic of Love.” In it, I was introduced to two ideas that are particularly instructive for this “problem” of theology.3 The first was this phrase, “an apophaticism of excess.” Here’s what he had to say:

Christian mysticism is grounded in an apophaticism of excess. That is to say, although the beyond-being God—the divine essence—is not captured in any way by human language, not even that of goodness or love, we dare not let go of the positive language of revelation (the Trinitarian and Christological discourse and everything it entails), not even with regard to the God beyond being.4

If at first sight this is confusing, let me pair it with a second, related idea from Boersma: hyperphaticism. Here are his own words, once again: “when we speak of God as Love, we do speak of God himself—hyperphatically naming the unnameable from his theophanic appearance.”5 Basically, our words grasp at the ineffable one who reveals Himself as love in creation. Or, as Boersma goes on to say, “God is always more than words can express; but he is always self-diffusing Love,” and it is that self-diffusing love that Trinity and incarnation express.6

As it just so happened, I was reading George MacDonald on the same day as Boersma, and there was a wonderful convergence of ideas. In his unpsoken sermon on, of all things, the unforgivable sin, MacDonald touches on the limitations of language. He wriets:

“Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvellous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively.”7

While Boersma’s piece was an academic article diving deeply into debates surrounding Christian (Neo-)Platonism vs Aristotelianism and more, MacDonald’s piece is purposefully pastoral, written in a much different register. Nevertheless, they both recognize that our words are deeply limited and that God is a mystery to us. MacDonald takes this into an interesting place. For him, there is a priority of experience and feeling. That we can’t put feelings or thoughts into words seems to suggest that, while God can communicate with us through words, he communicates best at an even more intimate level, the level that, even in ourselves, is beyond expression, that of inner life. For instance, MacDonald writes, “No amount of discovery in his words can tell us more than we have discovered, more than we have seen and known to be true.”8 This is the language of “taste and see that the Lord is good.” It speaks to us of the God who is “known in the breaking of the bread.” A knowledge that can be approximated, but never fully contained, in propositions. And here, I think there is some overlap between MacDonald and Boersma. Boersma insists that our metaphysics be grounded in the self-diffusing love of God, and MacDonald is saying that our knowledge of God is first and foremost that of his love. Both, however, insist that this is not license to abandon the letter in favor of the spirit, if you will. Which brings us full circle to the title of this piece. The God who is beyond words is also present to us within words. Sublime as the words of Scripture are, they do not exhaust all that God is. Feeble as our words about God may be, God is not absent from them.

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

3

You can find that article here:

Fr. Hans Boersma

A Metaphysic of Love

Creation is theophany—divine appearing. And theophany is the love of God. This article—published in The New Ressourcement, 3, no. 1 (2026): 316–40—addresses how and why the world is the theophanizing of God’s love, arguing that creation is simply God appearing in a different (creaturely) mode. Since transcendence does not imply separation between creato…

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6 months ago · 52 likes · 9 comments · Fr. Hans Boersma

I’m an Anglican (Episcopalian if we’re being specific), but like many of you, when I found out Pope Leo was writing an encyclical on AI, I couldn’t wait. From day one of his pontificate when he took the name Leo XIV, he signaled that Catholic Social Teaching would be a major focus of his, building on the legacy of Pope Leo XIII who published the foundational work of Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum Novarum in 1891. What was implicit in the pope’s choice of that name has been made explicit in Magnifica Humanitas. On the surface, this is an encyclical about AI, but it goes much deeper than that. Pope Leo has taken the opportunity presented to him by cultural interest in AI to introduce the world to Catholic Social Teaching.

I, for one, think that’s great.

I’ve said in the past that it mystifies me that Catholic apologists don’t spend more time talking about Catholic Social Teaching. Sure, the New Eliakim argument for the papacy is cool, but Gaudium et Spes? Now we’re talking. Pitching Catholicism without talking about Catholic Social Teaching is like telling people they should check out San Diego and not mentioning the beaches or the fact that it’s sunny and 75 everyday. Anyway, Pope Leo seems to agree. In fact, to help the cause, he spent the first 89 paragraphs explaining the history and theology behind Catholic Social Teaching.

Now, if you were just looking for his thoughts on AI, this can feel like quite a lot of throat clearing before getting to the point, and I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that the document is longer than it needs to be. Such a view isn’t without merit, but I think it misses what the pope is trying to do. AI is merely the occasion for the encyclical. AI forces us to ask questions about human dignity and the common good, and I get the sense that it’s those things, the central aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, that Pope Leo wanted to talk about more so than just AI.

And when you pause to think about this, it makes sense, right? The pope isn’t an expert on large language models or machine learning. And as he insists in the document, if he focused on the technology itself, the encyclical would be obsolete as soon as it hit the press because the technology is developing so quickly. The fundamental principles of Catholic Social Teaching, however, have a much longer shelf life because they’re rooted in the unchanging truths of the gospel.

In this article, I want to briefly unpack the main theme of the document before exploring some of the fascinating and unexpected areas that the Pope also covered in this landmark encyclical.

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The Main Idea

In terms of how we ought to approach AI, Pope Leo’s writing shows his Augustinian roots. He places us at a fork in the road: will we build a new Babel or a New Jerusalem? This is the guiding metaphor throughout the encyclical, and it echoes St. Augustine’s notion of two cities in his magnum opus, The City of God.

It’s important to realize that this isn’t a choice between loving or hating technology. If you’re thinking of a fork in the road between embracing AI or swearing an oath to never touch it, you’re missing the mark. The difference is more subtle. Here’s how Pope Leo puts it, “Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence” (9).

Throughout the document, building Babel represents modes of engaging with technology that arise from a desire to transcend the limits of humanity, degrade human dignity, usurp the place of God, and benefit the strong at the expense of the weak.

In contrast, rebuilding Jerusalem is a collaborative effort done for the common good in alignment with the truths of human nature as it is in relationship to God.

That might all sound a bit abstract. And some of that is the point. This isn’t a policy brief on AI. It’s an attempt to apply the principles of Catholic Social Teaching to AI generally. This can be seen clearly in paragraph 109, where Pope Leo offers a condensed picture of how this works. It’s worth quoting at length here. He says:

To speak of the universal destination of goods means finding ways of ensuring universal access to both technologies and the education needed to use them. To speak of subsidiarity calls for protecting the ability of communities to make choices and corrections, rather than confining their role to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere. To speak of solidarity obliges us to recognize the hidden, often exploited workers, who sustain algorithmic systems. To speak of justice requires questioning the global distribution of power that decides who in fact can train these models and who is merely subjected to them. Likewise, it means acknowledging that social justice is not only a goal to be safeguarded after technologies are deployed, but a condition that must shape their very design from the outset.

If you came into this looking for advice on whether to use Claude, ChatGPT, or none of them, you’ll be disappointed. That’s not what’s offered. Nor does Pope Leo give explicit instructions around what kind of tasks AI can and can’t be used for. Instead, he asks higher level questions, and the fundamental one is expressed in paragraph 129, where he states, “Ultimately, the key question remains the one posed by Saint John Paul II: does AI “make human life on earth ‘more human’ in every aspect of that life? Does it make it more worthy of man?” This is the ultimate question because at its core, Catholic Social Teaching is about safeguarding human dignity, which in turn is grounded in the fact that humans are made in the image of God. So, does AI make us more or less truly human?

Answering that question takes wisdom and discernment, which can be aided by the rich principles found in Catholic Social Teaching. Principles like the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice. Even with them, though, difficult questions remain. And in such cases, prudence calls for patience. Perhaps one of the more underappreciated yet vitally important parts of this document is a call to move slowly. To not get caught up in the zeitgeist. To that end, Pope Leo calls for “slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions” (107).

Rebuilding Jerusalem is a slower, more arduous task than constructing a new Babel, but shortcuts here are destined to meet the same end as Babel. In a time of rapid change, the Christian is called not to knee-jerk rejection or uncritical acceptance, but to wise and patient discernment guided by the light of revelation and the resources of our tradition.

The Side Quests

Alright, so that’s the main gist of Magnifica Humanitas, but to change gears a bit, I want to touch on some surprising but fascinating parts of the document that you might not hear as many people talking about because, as I said, this encyclical is about so much more than AI.

Women’s Rights

First on my list of surprising inclusions are a few gems about the importance of women’s rights. In a time of reactive takes on gender relations within more traditionalist Christian spaces, I really enjoyed reading Pope Leo’s strong affirmations of women’s rights. Here’s how he put it: “It is, therefore, not enough to state simply that men and women have equal dignity and rights; it is necessary that this be reflected in concrete decisions, such as in laws, access to employment, education, social and political responsibilities, and the way society listens to and values women’s contributions. As long as this gap persists, we cannot say that society truly and fully recognizes that women have the same dignity as men” (57). For more on this topic, I suggest checking out this article by Claire the Catholic Feminist.

Disarmament

Next up we have the idea of disarmament. Pope Leo describes the phrase “to disarm” as close to his heart (110), and he sees this connecting to everything from war to mental health to the environment. In essence, we need to create technology that is peaceful in the full sense of that word. By the end of the encyclical though, he moves disarmament away from discussion of AI to focus on modern geopolitics. He warns against a rising support of realpolitik in which might makes right and wars are fought not for justice but for selfish pursuits. Given his criticisms of the war in Iran and war generally, this was par for the course in many ways, but I wasn’t expecting it in an encyclical about AI. Nevertheless, I’m totally here for it.

Slavery and Doctrinal Development

The next one is for my doctrine nerds. Given what we’ve seen so far in how the encyclical touches on a range of topics related to Catholic Social Teaching, the fact that Pope Leo talks about slavery in Magnifica Humanitas shouldn’t be that surprising. However, two things in his discussion of slavery were surprising. First, there’s the fact that he apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing slavery. He says the fact that it took the church 18 centuries to recognize the full incompatibility of slavery with the Church’s commitment to human dignity is a wound in the Christian memory and sincerely asks for pardon in the name of the Church. This isn’t the first papal apology, but they are still a relatively new phenomenon which we didn’t see much before the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. It’s a trend I deeply respect, and while not contradicting papal infallibility, papal apologies do guard against thinking the church or the pope can do no wrong.

That’s not the only interesting thing about the document’s discussion of slavery though from a doctrinal perspective. Something that really jumped out to me was the way in which the church’s relationship with slavery is marked out as a clear example of how the church’s growth in understanding–what’s broadly called doctrinal development–works. Here’s how Pope Leo puts it: “This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized (176).” Now, this is quite remarkable as it paints a picture of doctrinal development that is quite malleable. The basic idea is that development is occurring within a context of both continuity and discontinuity. The continuity is the Church’s affirmation of human dignity. However, there is discontinuity between legitimizing slavery and then classing it as something intrinsically evil, as Pope John Paul II did and popes since him have done. This means that doctrinal development can involve long precedents in the opposite direction as long as there’s a more fundamental continuity. Something similar happens with the church’s teaching on religious liberty. Examples like these suggest that Catholic practice–and I would argue, non-infallible teaching as well–is more subject to change than people might think.

Francis and Synodality

The final thing I want to highlight in this document is admittedly a bit less of a surprise but nevertheless still interesting. That is the document’s reaffirmation of synodality as vital to the church’s life. This reflects a broader trend of Pope Leo carrying the torch for some of Pope Francis’s trademark projects. Pope Leo goes as far to say that, “In the ecclesial context, the common good takes the form of a synodal approach for mission at the service of the Kingdom” (86). In total, Pope Francis is referenced more than 50 times in the document. Pope Francis was a figure that divided opinion, and one of the central questions when Pope Leo was elected was whether he would continue in his predecessor’s footsteps or not. Judging from this encyclical, the answer to that question seems to decisively be “yes.” That is not to say he’s a carbon copy. In terms of personality, they’re pretty different figures. In time, Pope Leo may reveal more areas where he disagrees with Pope Francis. But for now, he seems to be continuing his project and walking in line with his vision for a synodal church. And to me, that’s quite good news.

Odds and Ends

1. Exciting news! I’ll be leading a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago July 8-18, 2027. We’ll be doing a shortened, easier version of the walk with luggage carried and transportation shuttling us between some of the most scenic stretches. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of walking involved. Learn more: here.

2. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

3. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

4. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’ll be reading C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Till We Have Faces over the summer. We’ll meet June 22, July 20, and August 17 at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it.

There used to be a trope in popular culture of weird people who talked to themselves. Often disheveled, they’d pace back and forth as they carried out both sides of a conversation, oblivious to the world around them. In such a world, parents taught their kids to not do this—or, at least, not out loud—as an attempt to properly socialize them.

By and large, this trope has faded away. Not because we’ve come to accept talking to yourself as socially acceptable. Rather, there just aren’t enough people doing it for it to be a relatable cultural phenomenon.

Talking to yourself, for whatever awkwardness it may or may not have betrayed, required engaging with one’s own self in a way that we’ve become remarkably good at avoiding. We’ve replaced this with the constant chatter of podcasts in our ears as our noise-cancelling headphones block out not only the world around us but much of the world within us as well.

There is much to be said about our dying practice of talking to ourselves as a window into our modern malaise, but this is not that piece.

Instead, this is a piece about a particular intra-personal conversation, one that, when put to paper, introduced a new form in western literature. In this week’s essay, we will look at St. Augustine’s innovative conclusion to his Cassiciacum Dialogues: Soliloquies.

An Introduction

The title, Soliloquies, might bring to mind faint echoes of high school English classes. It sits somewhere in your brain next to “Iambic Pentameter” and the taste of cafeteria food. For most of us, soliloquies are those things that Shakespearean characters brought forth, speeches alone on stage that perhaps you read out in class in stilted and struggling attempts.

True as this association is, the idea begins not with Shakespeare or even theater in general, but with the writings of a young Augustine of Hippo while still a catechumen. It’s one of his many neologisms. Basically, it is a shoving together of solus (alone) and loqui (to speak) to create a word for speaking to oneself, which is precisely what Augustine does in Soliloquies.

As I mentioned, this forms the conclusion of his Cassiciacum Dialogues, works which for some mysterious reason have not been generally read as a unified collection despite the fact they were written as such and clearly build upon one another.1

This work, however, departs from the previous three (all of which I’ve written about on this Substack) in an important way. Those dialogues featured Augustine as teacher with his family members and students as dialogue partners whom he leads to understanding through dialectical exploration. In this final dialogue, these characters fade from the scene, leaving Augustine alone with himself. Or, more specifically, [his] Reason. Reason is now the teacher and Augustine is the impatient and often confused student who too readily accepts faulty premises only to later realize his mistakes.

In terms of surviving works from antiquity, Soliloquies is the first of its kind. Beyond being innovative in form, the structure is one that places Augustine in a position of humility. Reason pokes and prods Augustine, forcing him to realize not only his intellectual deficiencies but also his moral deficiencies. It’s a brilliant literary device as the work itself is interested in the topic of self-knowledge and the form of the book allows for this to happen on multiple levels. As Augustine is trying to understand self-knowledge generally, he is pushed to experience this personally, and we, the readers, are able to watch this play out within him.

So, What’s It All About?

Categorizing the content of Soliloquies is difficult, not least because it’s unfinished (more on that below). The most common description would probably be that it’s a philosophical dialogue about the immortality of the soul. For students of Augustine, you’ll know that he has another work that bears the title On the Immortality of the Soul, but that is actually just notes for the third book of Soliloquies that Augustine never finished, and those notes were published against his will. Later in life, when he was reviewing his works, he found the notes inscrutable.

Describing Soliloquies as a dialogue about the immortality of the soul runs into the same trouble as talking about On Order as a theodicy. In the latter, Augustine takes one step back from theodicy and asks, “how can we become the kind of people who could properly understand the problem of evil?” In the same way, Soliloquies probes the question of the soul’s immortality by first asking, “how do we know anything?” and also, “how do we become the type of people who can know sublime things like the nature of the soul?” In another parallel to On Order, Augustine thinks that knowledge of divine realities first requires a knowledge of ourselves. So, Soliloquies is as much about knowledge as it is about the soul.

With this in mind, we can appreciate why Book I of Soliloquies is something of an interrogation of Augustine by Reason in which Reason seeks to determine what Augustine loves. Only if Augustine supremely loves wisdom will he be able to be wise, and only if he’s wise will he be able to understand the soul.

This moral dimension to knowledge which says that attaining knowledge requires you to be a certain type of person was much more common in the Greco-Roman world than it is today. By and large, people today don’t see living a virtuous life as a prerequisite for being a good philosopher. But Augustine did—as did the likes of Plato, Plotinus, Cicero, et al.

To indulge in a brief aside, we would do well to revive this insight. While we shouldn’t expect our theologians to be morally perfect, we would be wrong to think theological acumen and virtuous living are disconnected. The extent to which we think they are separable is likely an indication of our misunderstanding of the nature and task of theology, which goes far beyond having a high verbal IQ.

As readers of Augustine’s Confessions will be aware, the great saint was not shy about revealing his own sinfulness. In Soliloquies, we find Augustine succumbing to the same temptation many of us do: pride. In this first interrogation by Reason, Augustine insists that he has firmly put away the lusts of the flesh. He is a single-minded catechumen focused on pursuing nothing but knowledge of himself and God.

Like a wise spiritual father, Reason allows this assessment to go unchallenged at first. It takes no longer than a day for Augustine to realize that he has not come nearly as far as he confidently declared. In a matter of a few pages, Augustine is confessing that on the very night of his assertion of triumphing over lust, his mind was given over to erotic fantasies. Augustine, ever the mirror to our own experiences, shows that pride goes before the fall and that the Christian life is often one of overestimating our saintliness.

And yet, praise be to God, there was grace for Augustine and there is grace for us. After realizing that he is not quite as sanctified as he previously believed, Augustine is kept from despair. Without denying that true understanding requires a soul free of the passions, Reason continues the conversation. Having addressed the moral dimension of knowledge, it turns to the structure of knowledge.

How We Know Stuff

Many essays could be written on Augustine’s epistemology. There are interesting overlaps between Augustine and Descartes as Augustine tries to narrow in on the very few things he knows. As I mentioned in my essay on Against the Academics, Augustine at this point in his life was much more of a skeptic than one might expect. The list of things he knows is miniscule (basically geometry). It’s important to note that he explicitly states that the contents of this dialogue are still in the sphere of probability, not true knowledge.2 There’s much to ponder in that admission, but, for today’s purposes, I want to focus on just two aspects of Augustine’s epistemology.

First, I’m struck by the book’s insistence on how we know that we know. That is a different question from how we know things generally. One of the first issues that Reason presses in this dialogue is getting Augustine to determine what it will mean to know something and how he’ll be able to recognize the fact that he knows something.

If you don’t spend much time puzzling over epistemology—and that might be better for your sanity—this could seem an odd question. Knowing that we know something is often immediate (i.e., without mediation). Sometimes knowledge is marked by a sense of eureka or what we might call a lightbulb moment. Most of the time, though, we’re not asking how we know that we know something. We just have knowledge and that experience of knowledge is self-evident to us.

As I said, puzzling over epistemology isn’t always wise. It can lead you down endless paths of introspection that leave you thinking about brains in vats. That’s not why Reason takes this path in the dialogue. Augustine has set out to know God, and Reason is asking a fairly sensible question: what does that mean, and how would you know that you’ve achieved your goal? Think of the “measurable” in SMART goals.

Specifically, Reason asks Augustine what will be considered “enough.”3 Augustine hesitates to say that it could even be possible to know “enough,” to satisfy his longing to know God. Reason, however, argues without some way of identifying knowledge, pursuing God is futile—a bit like making your life’s goal getting to California but not accepting any method of recognizing you’re in California. If “Welcome to California” signs, the cliffs of Yosemite, or your car careening into the Pacific Ocean don’t cut it, you might be out of luck.

The goal of this opening exchange is to get Augustine to realize that knowledge of God, however sublime and transcendent it is, comes about through a process that is analogous to other knowledge. Here’s the idea: God as “object”4 transcends other objects of knowledge. However, your mind as subject remains the same whether knowing grasshoppers, geometry, or God. While the dialogue doesn’t reach terra firma on the question of how you know that you know something, at the very least some level of agreement is reached that knowing God is analogous to knowing other realities. Therefore, we can pursue God with confidence that, when we find Him, we’ll know we’ve found him as surely as we know parallel lines will never cross.5

With that quasi-settled, Augustine can then move on to the three-fold structure of knowledge. He explores this by way of analogy to sight. To “know” something via sense-perception is not as simple as having eyes. Instead, we need:

1. Healthy Eyes

2. Attentive Looking

3. Seeing (as the result of the previous two)

In a similar ways, to know intelligible things, we need:

1. A Mind free of the passions

2. Reason capable of focusing on something

3. Understanding (as the result of the previous two)

Connected to this triad is another: the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. These are both medicine for the mind which bring it to health and an inspiration for contemplation of higher things. In other words, without faith, hope, and love, we wouldn’t be able to know God nor would we care to know God. Reason puts this quite nicely:

“But looking itself cannot turn the eyes (even though they’re now healed) to the light unless three things remain: faith, by which it is believed that the reality one should be turning to look at is such that it will make one happy when it is seen; hope, by which it is expected that when one has looked well, one will see; charity, by which one longs to seen and enjoy.”6

As in his other dialogues, there are trinitarian echoes here. The God whom we seek to know is a Father who reveals Himself in the Son and stirs us to seek Him by the power of the Holy Spirit. While this dialogue is philosophically focused, we should not take it to be a “secular” treatise on knowledge or the soul. Reason itself enjoins Augustine to pray (I might add, the opening prayer of this book is worthy of deep meditation). All of this is pursued by the grace of God. Indeed, we are only able to understand because our minds are a reflection of God.

It’s often said that Augustine has a “psychological” model of the Trinity in which God is like a mind and its relationships to itself in memory, understanding, and will. But it would be more accurate, at least here, to say the mind is like God. The lesser is like the greater. The mind is the way it is because God is who He is and has created man in His image.

And this helps us tie together why the mind must be healed. Why it needs faith, hope, and love. God is the source and summit of faith, hope, and love. If the mind is to comprehend God and the soul, it must be conformed to God, and it can only do this through the theological virtues.

The Ending that Never Was

At this point, I’ve said quite a lot about a dialogue on the soul without saying hardly anything about the soul. This is intentional. Augustine insists we answer the question before the question. In my reading of this dialogue, the method is more important than the conclusions. This is underscored by the fact that the dialogue is unfinished. We don’t get the final answers on the soul and its immortality.

And I think this is intentional. Augustine had decades to finish this work. It’s not as though he died in the middle of writing it. He simply set it aside. Furthermore, there are other works which he started, set aside, and then came back to, but he didn’t with this one.

Why?

Part of that may be that Augustine was uncomfortable with some of his points in this dialogue. He tells us in Retractiones that he regrets some of his account of knowledge, which bears the imprint of Neoplatonism with imagery of “digging up” knowledge that is buried in us. So maybe he just thought it was too far gone.

But he doesn’t really go that far.

Of course, we can’t know for sure, but part of me wonders if even an elderly Augustine felt that he still hadn’t overcome the interrogation in Book 1. There, Reason essentially asked if his soul was pure enough to truly understand the soul, and he quickly found it was not. Perhaps Augustine’s path looked like becoming progressively more aware of his own sins and choosing to not speak beyond his station.

Admittedly, this is highly speculative and doesn’t entirely jive with his later theological approach, but, hey, this is Substack, and I think that’s a nice way to think of it. Is that not reason enough to maintain it?

However, rather than putting off an essay this week, I decided I could simply return to my “Notes from an Armchair Theologian” series in which I give a brief rundown of the books I’ve been reading. The first installment was dominated by books on St. Augustine for a project I’m working on. While that project and the accompanying research continues, it has largely been on the back burner due to more pressing matters. In place of books on or by St. Augustine, today I’ll be giving an overview of a few of the books I’ve found particularly rich on the topic of peace.

Revelations of Divine Love - St. Julian of Norwich

Yes, Saint Julian of Norwich. She has a feast day in the Episcopal Church (reason enough to join us if you ask me). Y’all in the Catholic Church need to catch up on this one.

I digress.

St. Julian holds a special place in my heart. We have a lovely modern icon of her from Gracie Morbitzer hanging on the wall behind our kitchen table (seen above). I’ve mentioned this before, but when I first came across her famous line, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” I won’t lie, it seemed like bumpersticker theology. Stick it on a throw-pillow and sell it at one of those kitschy knick-knack stores.

I was far too sophisticated for such, “Let Go and Let God” theology. I studied this stuff after all.

And then I realized I’m a spiritual dunce (a common theme in my life).

In fact, St. Julian was right. More than that, I’m pretty convinced that just about the entirety of the Christian life is learning to believe this all the way down to your bones.

While all these writers’ fingerprints will be found in my retreat talks, it’s St. Julian who I’ve leaned on the most heavily. If I can get the people there to come away believing all shall be well, then I’ll call it a success.

Side note: Essay series on Revelations of Divine Love after I finish the Cassiciacum Dialogues? Maybe? We’ll see. Let me know if you’d like that.

Story of a Soul - St. Therese of Lisieux

Unlike some of the other works, I didn’t specifically read this to prepare for this retreat. A very kind priest sent this to me a few months ago (shoutout Fr. Jose), and I’ve been slowly making my way through it. I’ve delighted in it, but it wasn’t until very recently that I began to see the overlaps with peace. And then once you see them, they’re everywhere.

For instance, early in the book, when a young Therese desperately wants to join the monastery but is experiencing roadblocks, she says that surrendering herself to the will of God is what brought her profound peace even as she came up against disappointment. As a teenager, she was already learning that faith is about saying, “thy will be done” and resting in God’s providence. Toward the end of the book (chapter 8, I believe) St. Therese mentions how “self-abandonment” became her only compass. It’s through this complete surrender to the will of God that she finds the peace that surpasses understanding.

The main takeaway for current purposes is that total abandonment is at the core of her spirituality. And it’s also at the core of peace. Until we can truly learn to rest in God’s providence, our peace will only be as strong as our circumstances are favorable. That is peace as the world gives not the peace of Christ.

Abandonment to Divine Providence - Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Speaking of total abandonment, this is the real classic for that idea. While I’m sure this book is popular in some circles, it’s a Tan Classic, after all, I’ll admit that it had flown under my radar. When you start reading in the “Spiritual Formation” category, certain names pop up a lot. Even Protestants like John Mark Comer or Dallas Willard are constantly citing Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross.

But Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade? I’d never heard the name.

However, I found his work—which, full disclosure, I haven’t completed yet—to resonate deeply with the general approach to peace I am taking in this retreat. For Caussade, the whole of religion comes down to fully entrusting oneself to God. Preempting much of our modern emphasis on “living in the present,” Caussade coined the term, “the sacrament of the present moment.” It is in the present that God meets us with his grace. He writes, “Leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.”

This also relates to my post last week about avoiding self-castigation. The past is in the past. Confess your sins, repent, and move on, seeking Christ in this moment. And as it relates to the future, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious about itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

If we wish to move beyond the anxiety of worrying about the future, we must learn to trust that God is good, he will work all things together for the good of those who love him, and all shall be well. That’s what makes Caussade et al. different from secular varieties of “live in the present.” The latter is often, essentially, a tactic of ignoring the future. It’s an “out of sight out of mind” approach. But the Christian approach is far deeper. We don’t turn our eyes away from the future because it’s scary—that’s like telling people to not look at the tiger in the room because, hey, it hasn’t attacked yet—rather, we can rest in the present, abiding in Christ, because we have nothing to fear.

As a brief, autobiographical side note, I find it interesting that these days I’m drawn to ideas like Caussade’s. If a Calvinist on the internet was talking about Divine Providence, I’d probably get a bit uneasy. A 14th century anchoress or a 17th/18th century Jesuit? Count me in.

That’s probably a touch of hypocrisy.

However, at least in the case of St. Julian, I would argue that there’s a significantly different flavor to her approach to providence. Less, “glory in double predestination” and more “all shall be well.” Alas, though, I suppose there are probably some superficial reasons mixed in there too. Cue the need for some soul searching.

Anyway, I’m touched by Caussade’s simplicity of approach. He’s also eminently quotable.

Searching for and Maintaining Peace - Fr. Jacques Philippe

The final main conversation partner for this retreat has been Fr. Jacques Philippe. Although he doesn’t have that same mystique that older writers have, his work is brilliantly accessible, and I would point people here first. Philippe has a wonderful way of synthesizing the tradition without feeling stuffy. In this book you’ll hear from Dom. Lorenzo Scupoli, St. Francis de Sales, and many others, without feeling like the author is trying to impress you with all he’s read. That’s harder to do than it sounds. Most of us writing historical theology on Substack—myself included—would do well to learn from him in this.

One thing I really found helpful in this book is the way he talks about the things that get in the way of our peace. It’s easy to talk about peace from a 30,000-foot, aspirational vantage, but it’s much more helpful to the average person to say, “yeah, but what about the fact that people are sometimes really annoying?”

Because my rushed writing of this piece has been anything but eloquent (forgive me), I’ll leave you with a long quote from Fr. Jacques Philippe which hopefully ensures you get something out of this:

If you read the Desert Fathers, and you most certainly should, you will come across one theme again and again: weeping. You can find this in the most prominent figures like Anthony, Macarius, and Moses as well as in more obscure figures. Abba Poemen, whose sayings comprise about one-seventh of the Alphabetical Collection, offers a clear picture of the Desert Fathers’ teaching on weeping for your sins:

A brother asked Abba Poemen what he should do about his sins. The old man said to him, ‘He who wishes to purify his faults purifies them with tears and he who wishes to acquire virtues acquires them with tears; for weeping is the way the Scriptures and our Fathers give us, when they say ‘Weep!’ Truly, there is no other way than this.

In many similar sayings, we find the Desert Fathers telling people, “If you can become a monk, great. But if not, sit in your cell and weep for your sins and you’ll accomplish the same.”

The idea of weeping as central to the Christian life neither began nor ended with the Desert Fathers. As Abba Poemen alludes to, the Scriptures are replete with weeping, and as time went on, “Holy Tears” took on a prominent role in the Christian imagination.1 As with so many other things, the Medieval West systematized this practice. Prayers for tears were included in votive masses, instructions for crying were written by scholastic theologians, and St. Catherine of Siena offered a typology of tears in her Dialogue.

It was during my undergraduate years that I first came across this strand of the Christian tradition. I was writing two undergraduate senior theses on St. Catherine (one for History, one for Theology) so I was immersed in Catherine’s effusive language about holy tears. Simultaneously, I was enamored by the Church Fathers, intrigued by the East, and like so many people who start exploring Orthodoxy, I had my copies of the Desert Fathers and The Way of a Pilgrim always close at hand—and said hand quite naturally had a chotki on its wrist. This combination of influences meant I couldn’t ignore a theology of tears.

In some ways, it was quite amenable to my emotion-centric Evangelical upbringing. Seeing people cry during worship nights or on youth retreats was common, and indeed, expected. If students weren’t crying by the end of the Saturday night session of a weekend retreat, we would’ve thought something was wrong. I myself wasn’t immune from that.

And yet, as I soon found, there’s something rather different about crying while the band sings the bridge for the 15th time on a sleep-deprived weekend versus sitting in your dorm room—as close as I’ve ever been to a cell—on a Tuesday night and trying to weep for your sins. I can remember several occasions in which I sat by myself and did all I could to think of my sins and weep. And … nothing.

Turns out, that’s easier said than done.

As someone with a perfectionist streak in me, this was both annoying and dangerous. Annoying, in that I wasn’t fond of being bad at this seemingly basic Christian task. Dangerous, in that such attempts for weeping over one’s sins can turn to a spiritually harmful self-castigation if one is not careful. When we try to manufacture tears for our sins, it’s quite easy to shift our focus away from the sins themselves and toward ourselves. What seems a subtle difference on the surface can be disastrous in its consequences.

That difference—one we often neglect—is what I want to focus on today.

Self-Pity and Self-Hatred is Bad Theology

During my undergrad years, I wasn’t just reading Catherine and the Desert Fathers. As I was at an evangelical bible college, I was surrounded by more than a fair share of young, restless, and reformed types, the precursors to the current, young, rooted, and apostolic types. On several occasions, I recall my hyper-reformed peers asking questions like, “how can we teach children in Sunday school that they are sinners by nature and deserve God’s wrath?” The “how” in that sentence wasn’t a how of moral indignation (i.e., “how could you?!”) but a how of practicality, of necessity.

Having gorged themselves on John Calvin (or, more likely, popularizers of Calvin), they felt a deep need to convince people, including children, that they were really, really bad.

With ideas like this in the air, the tradition of Holy Tears can be cannon fodder for showing people that one of Christianity’s primary tasks is convincing people they’re abominable. And to be fair to these cage-stage Calvinists, it’s not as though such teaching is entirely absent from the tradition prior to Calvin. The line between weeping for sins and weeping for your depravity is, as I said, a narrow one.

However, when we make Christianity out to be a message of your general awfulness, we distort the Gospel and disrupt Christian formation. It is not that we should not believe we are sinners. Indeed, with St. Paul we should be able to say, “Of sinners, I am the worst.” Though I’m not personally a fan of, “the Gospel isn’t good news if you don’t include the bad news first,” it is nevertheless the case that if we remove any seriousness about sin from the Gospel then the Gospel becomes unrecognizable.

We must remember that when God created us in His image, and that when He surveyed all of creation, He deemed it very good. Though sin entered the world as a profound sickness, in Christ God is—and in another sense, has already—redeeming and restoring all things, making us a new creation. Much of the best Patristic theology only makes sense once we recognize that the message of the Gospel is not, “you suck, hate yourself, and maybe if you convince yourself of that enough, God will be better disposed toward you.” Instead, it’s more like, “your soul, having been made by God is naturally good—it could be no other—but the sickness of sin has caused your desires to become disordered, encumbered by passions. Christ offers healing, and this involves liberation from the passions so that your soul can do what it most naturally desires, seek God.”

Of course, in fairness to Christians of all stripes, I don’t think the “you suck message” is a good representation of any theological system at its best. But to a 20-year old in his college dorm room reading the Desert Fathers and St. Catherine, it’s easy to take “weep for your sins” in that direction. And when the tears don’t come, it only serves as further indication that you are, in fact, the worst. This is a flawed theological anthropology leading to poor spiritual formation.

A better path—one that can make room for Holy Tears, properly understood—is to recognize another important insight from the Tradition: nothing is worth losing your peace.

Even our own sinfulness should not be something that causes us to forsake peace in favor of despair. As Abba Dorotheos writes, “Allowing ourselves to be disturbed by these experiences is sheer ignorance and pride because we are not recognizing our own condition and are running away from labour.”2 Whatever it means to weep for our sins, it does not mean becoming greatly agitated or surprised on their account.

Fr. Jacques Philippe in his wonderful little book, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, argues that much of the time, our self-castigation is a not-so-subtle form of pride. Here’s how he puts it:

The sadness and the discouragement that we feel regarding our failures and our faults are rarely pure; they are not very often the simple pain of having offended God. They are in good part mixed with pride. We are not sad and discouraged so much because God was offended, but because the ideal image that we have of ourselves has been brutally shaken. Our pain is very often that of wounded pride! This excessive pain is actually a sign that we have put our trust in ourselves — in our own strength and not in God.3

Often, we set unrealistic standards for ourselves as a way of trying to buy into a false image of our own perfection, and then we reprimand ourselves for not meeting them. Not only does this evince an elevated view of self, but it also is a defense mechanism against holding ourselves to reasonable standards. We don’t want to accept where we are, so we protect ourselves—paradoxically—by pretending we ought to be perfect because failing to be perfect is an easier pill to swallow than failing to be decent.

What we need to recognize, indeed what we need sufficient faith to accept, is that God loves us exactly where we are, not where we pretend to be.

This isn’t to make light of sin. Sin is truly the sickness that is ravaging the world. The Fathers were right that we should weep for our sins, but we must not weep for ourselves. We must not have so little faith in God’s goodness toward us nor in the fundamentally good nature of the souls He created that we should despair of ourselves.

There is a tightrope to be walked here. On the one hand, we have the temptation to think we’re so great on our own that we could do no wrong. We’re just misunderstood. It’s the world’s fault, etc. On the other hand, we are tempted to think our sins are so great that it must mean that we—even as we are before Christ, which is our true self—are despicable. We’re awful. We can never do anything right. We’re unworthy of love, etc.

The paradox of formation is that these often exist side-by-side. Not believing we’re lovable on our own, we create an image of ourselves that is inflated, desperately praying that version of us will finally be enough. Perhaps we deflect blame entirely. Or, perhaps we castigate ourselves. Either way, we end up pretending we’re someone we’re not.

Believe you’re unlovable, awful? A lie.

Believe you’re perfect but misunderstood? A lie.

Believe you’re truly perfect on your own (i.e., not by grace) but constantly failing at that? A lie.

The truth? You are loved infinitely by God. You also screw up. A lot. And those sins are probably certainly more destructive than you realize. That which you hate in the world is probably connected to that which you do.

And yet, you are good, not because of what you do but because you are created by God.4 You are loved. A mess? Most certainly. In deep need of healing? Without doubt.

The key connection between the teaching of the Fathers and Philippe is honesty and awareness. We must cultivate an honest awareness of ourselves before God, recognizing simultaneously the goodness of our creation, the infinite love of God, and also our utter dependence upon God’s grace. Fundamentally, who we are is who we are before God, not apart from Him, for there is no being who is truly apart from God, who is Being itself.

Returning to St. Catherine, she argues that self-awareness is the beginning and end of the spiritual life. But it’s not just any awareness. True self-awareness, or what she calls “seasoned” self-awareness, is seeing simultaneously two things: our own sins and the image of God in us. Noticing the dissonance between those things in our souls is the beginning of the spiritual ascent and also something we never grow beyond.

At some point, the Holy Tears may come. We may gain insight into the full depth of the tragedy and horror of sin. But in my own experience, I would merely caution that trying to jump straight into weeping in your cell without first having a proper view of the self can be disastrous. We must have that seasoned self-awareness, that abiding sense of God’s grace and love if we are to not turn attempts at weeping into an exercise in a self-hatred that only reinforces a false vision of the self that keeps us from true growth. And if St. Catherine is right, those tears ought to move quickly from tears of despair to tears of joy, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.

I was sitting with my wife when I got the text, “Congrats on 100k, brother!” It was a Sunday evening, so I had been away from my laptop for the better part of the past two days. The only way I know how to keep an ounce of sanity while making a living as a YouTuber is taking tech sabbaths. Otherwise, the hamster wheel of YouTube Studio refreshes, the constant striving after the screen that explodes into confetti when your latest video outperforms the previous ten, and the dopamine-optimized color-coding will all conspire to drive you mad.

I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t want to grab my laptop and confirm that I’d crossed the milestone. Earlier in the week, people had offered anticipatory congratulations, so I couldn’t be sure that I had in fact summited that silver play button mountain based on one text alone, but I refrained.

It could wait until the morning.

On Monday, I went through my normal routine. Woke up at 5:11am (Eliza takes precisely 11 minutes to get ready in the morning, I’ve got the timing down to a science), did morning prayers with her, finished off my morning routines after she left, and by mid-morning, I was logging on to my laptop to start the portion of my workday that requires a glowing screen.

And there it was. 100,000 subscribers. And all I felt was —

Getting There

Rewind the clock a few years, and I remember when my YouTube channel first started to get some traction. I had been making multiple videos a week for over a year, and I still had barely cracked 100 subscribers, averaging about 10 views per video. It’s a cliché, but I really was in it for the love of the game. You have to be when no one’s watching and you’re not making any money.

Dumb luck, providence, perseverance—whatever it was, eventually things changed. I remember when I hit 1,000 subscribers, my sister sent me custom M&M’s to my college dorm room as a congratulations gift.

By the time they arrived I had nearly hit 10,000.

That’s just how these things go sometimes. Overnight “success” after years of toil. You know the deal.

When I hit 10,000 subscribers, I remember my mom gave me a call to congratulate me. At some point, she asked, “what’s next?” and without skipping a beat I said, “100,000.”

If I wanted to put a positive spin on it, I’d say it was just me being driven, setting one of those SMART goals we learned about in school. And yeah, I guess being competitive and backing myself to “succeed” has probably helped me in life.

But it was mainly pride. Lust for more. I had touched the One Ring of seeming notoriety and I was hooked.

That was several years ago. For awhile, the channel continued growing at a pretty fast pace, but eventually things slowed down. I pivoted away from the more algorithmically-optimized approach of putting my own religious journey front and center and tried to step back a bit. Just focus on theology, the stuff I really loved, rather than the type of content that had propelled the channel to that point which focused on, “Protestant goes to Catholic Church” and filled the comments with “when will he convert?”

It was a shift that was much more fulfilling for me, but also meant that the elusive 100,000 subscriber milestone seemed to stretch farther into the distance.

When I hit 10,000 subscribers, I would’ve estimated I would hit 100,000 in about two years or so. It took five.

The Milestone

And maybe that’s part of the reason why, when the moment finally came, I didn’t really feel much.

I know when you hit milestones like this you’re supposed to say, “wow, I never believed this would happen.” I’ve even found myself reaching for those words. They sound right. The culturally appropriate humble brag. Maybe in some sense they’re true. If you would’ve asked me if I’d hit 100,000 subscribers when I had 100, I probably would’ve said no. But of course, that was years ago. Whether it was warranted or not, I certainly believed I’d do it when I had 10,000 subscribers, and it was pretty obvious for awhile now that this would happen. These things don’t generally happen overnight, so even if you didn’t believe it at 50,000, don’t tell me you didn’t at 99,000.

It’s not that I felt nothing when I saw that number. It felt nice, I suppose. I gave a slight nod of the head, lips curled up at the corners, and I said to myself, “there it is.”

But that was about it.

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to dissect this. Was it the fact that it was slow in coming? Was it that I knew it would happen?

It’s not that I’m incapable of feeling emotions. I’ve hit other milestones that were much more, slack-jawed “wow” than head-nodding “nice.” And some that elicited the former reaction from myself would be considered objectively less impressive by many than the latter.

So why is that?

I still don’t fully know, but I’ve got a few ideas.

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Vanity

Ecclesiastes famously kicks off with, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” King Jimmy’s translators really outdid themselves with that one. The loveliness of the prose is the perfect juxtaposition with its message. Like Lucretius, the Roman philosopher who would later say that he coated his bitter Epicurean truths in the honey of the Muses to make them go down easier, the author of Ecclesiastes offers pretty words to get at a darker truth: We’re toiling for things that don’t really matter.

As long as you play along, mistaking vanity for reality, you get all the sweetness of Lucretius’s honey. But when you see that the emperor has no clothes, things are different.

And that’s the first thing that I think had this milestone feeling a bit lackluster: it doesn’t really mean anything.

Any YouTuber will tell you that subscribers are pretty much a vanity metric. In terms of the algorithm, YouTube cares fairly little about how many subscribers you have. At best, they’re a lagging indicator, but they might also just be a holdover from days past. In other words, of the 100,000 subscribers I have, I trust many stopped watching years ago, and that’s ok. On the other hand, about half of the people who watch my videos these days aren’t subscribed. YouTube doesn’t really care. It just wants to keep people on the platform by showing them videos it thinks they’ll like, whether they’re subscribed to that person or not. That’s why YouTubers often push people to turn on notifications. It’s one of the only ways to make that subscription turn into views.

Anyway, enough of that, suffice to say, part of the reason 100,000 subscribers might not have felt like much is, well, I already knew it was vanity.

I hope this doesn’t come across overly nihilistic. In many ways, it was liberating because I didn’t expect it to feel like much. A younger me would’ve been waiting non-stop for the dopamine rush of seeing that number expand to six figures. These days, I didn’t place much weight of expectation on it. It came, it went, and that was that. Perhaps it’s also that it’s now my job, and, as a result, I care slightly more about the “revenue” tab on the backend than “subscribers.” I don’t mean this in a mercenary way. I mean it in a, “we’ve got a mortgage” way.

Wisdom?

If neither Socrates nor Augustine claimed to be wise, I won’t either. The Isle of the Blessed and the beholding of the Forms still elude me, a mere cave-dweller.

And yet, even in the Cave, I think I’ve learned a few things along the way. I know enough to know that numbers on a screen don’t actually make you happy, so it’s best not to ask them to do so.

It’s not that I get know joy out of doing what I do. Much the opposite. I still pinch myself that I get to spend my days reading, writing, and thinking about the topics I love most. When I say it’s a dream job, I’m not offering platitudes. The doing of it is a gift.

And when those numbers on a screen transform into faces, things are a bit different. When I hear people’s stories and see on their faces that somehow, God has used the work I do to impact their lives, it’s a deeply moving experience. A much more genuinely, “I can’t believe this is happening” than when that line is used for metrics that can be mathematically predicted.

And it’s that part of the job, the beauty and burden of touching real lives, that I would’ve told that kid in his dorm room really matters. If I could slip through the door to Culbertson Hall 403, I’d look at that kid on the phone with his mom, place a hand on his shoulder and tell him to take a breath before answering, saying 100,000 was next. As long as he chased that, it wouldn’t do much for him. Having hit it, I can promise him it pales in comparison to having even one person say, “this video changed my life.” And I’d tell him to focus on the stuff that plays a role in the latter rather than striving after the former. And when it happens, don’t believe you were the one that did it. You’re not that special. I’d tell him the numbers on a screen are just that. The joy is found in the people, not the pixels.

This time, when my mom called me, she didn’t ask what was next. If she had, I’m sure my first words would’ve been, “I don’t know.” But I hope they would’ve been followed by, “I’m just grateful to do this” and even more so, “I’ll just keep offering fish and loaves to the One to whom I owe all. He may multiply them. He may not. More than anything, I pray I’m just faithful to doing that to which He’s called me. Pray I don’t screw this up, please.” And hopefully, I’d end by saying, “thank you. I love you.”

Finally, Thank You

Which is how I want to end this piece as well. On the one hand, this piece has been about the fact that, this milestone doesn’t mean what I might’ve once thought. That’s the main message here. But, on the other hand, it is a good opportunity to pause and say thank you. When people first started watching my videos, I remember being overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude—and frankly, surprise—that people cared about what I had to say. I’ve tried to maintain that sense, but I know I haven’t done so perfectly. I’m working on it.

So, to all of you who have watched my videos, read my articles, bought my book, or just been along for the ride, thank you. It’s been quite the adventure. I have no crystal ball to see the future, but I pray that whatever it holds, it would come from and lead others toward a deep love for Christ, who is far better and far more beautiful than we’ll ever realize.

Much love for you all.

The problem of evil is the most serious objection to classical theism. Any religion that claims God is all-powerful and all-good is faced with the task of explaining how that can square with the presence of evil in the world. If God were not omnipotent, we might say that the existence of evil doesn’t threaten his omni-benevolence because, well, “He’s trying his best.” If God were not omni-benevolent, we might say that the existence of evil is not a threat to His omnipotence because, well, “He just doesn’t care.”

Neither of those options are attractive to Christians or classical theists generally. And thus, the problem of evil remains acute. For millennia, theologians and philosophers across the world have attempted to solve, or at least give a credible answer to this problem.

Among those theologians is St. Augustine.

In today’s essay, we’ll continue our series on Augustine’s Cassiciacum Dialogues, this time turning our attention to On Order wherein he takes up this very question. However, the way in which he does it is most likely not what you expect. Compared to Against the Academics and On the Happy Life, this third dialogue is significantly more complex. Though it deals slightly less with the history of philosophy than Against the Academics, and therefore you can get away with less background knowledge, tracing Augustine’s argument is no easy task. The dialogue appears to meander between subjects and only answers the primary question in a roundabout way. But I think that’s intentional.

First, the meandering is far more structured than you might be led to believe. In fact, the journey that Augustine takes his students on mirrors the journey of the soul trying to understand itself, which, as we’ll see, is central to his theodicy. Second, as far as answering the primary question only in part, it might not be correct to label On Order as a theodicy at all. It may be better thought of as a preliminary manual in how to be the type of person that could answer the problem of evil, rather than a direct answer to the problem itself. With those two things in mind, one can see the order—pardon the pun—within this seemingly disordered dialogue more clearly.

The Parts and the Whole

Like all of the preceding dialogues, On Order begins with a preface in the form of a letter to a friend to whom Augustine is dedicating and sending an early copy of the dialogue. The first thing Augustine makes clear in this preface is that the task of exploring the problem of evil is one of seeing how the parts relate to the whole. To explain this, he uses the analogy of someone looking at a mosaic. If one attends only to the individual broken shards of a mosaic, they see disorder. Likewise, when one focuses on particular events in the world, things don’t make sense. We see pain, strife, and division. In other words, we see evil. However, if that person were to step back and take in the entire mosaic, they would see harmony and beauty. So too, Augustine argues, is the case with life in this world. At a micro-level, evil is apparent, but at a macro-level, there is order, justice, and harmony. In this sense, “God is working all things together for the good.”

So far, this seems like a pretty stock answer. And while there is some truth to this, it’s unlikely to satisfy many skeptics. What we’d expect from here is for Augustine to tell us to trust that God is working things together and keep the big picture in mind.

But that’s not what he does.

Instead, Augustine argues that, if we want to understand the whole, we first have to understand ourselves. As he writes, “the greatest cause of this error [i.e., focusing on the parts instead of the whole] is that man is unknown to himself.”1

The Importance of Self-Knowledge

At first blush, this seems like a strange way to address the problem of evil. If Augustine explained that self-knowledge was necessary to understand evil because, in knowing ourselves we see that we are the problem, that would be one thing. Then the message would be that the problem of evil is solved by taking accountability.

But that’s not at all where Augustine goes with this.

The value of self-knowledge in addressing the problem of evil relates directly back to the mosaic analogy. The only way we’ll understand evil is if we can somehow grasp the whole. And self-knowledge is the path to that.

Here’s why.

Understanding the whole is not, for Augustine, about understanding the sum of all the parts. The whole precedes the parts. Unity is more foundational than plurality. So, the task of the philosopher is to grasp the underlying unity of all things by moving away from the distracting pluralities of the world. When we use our senses to look at the world around us, we find a dizzying array of things. This is not the stuff of true knowledge. Instead, the philosopher must turn inward and seek to know the unity of her soul by means of her own soul. The soul is the primary unity that is intelligible for humans, and only in grasping this can humans begin to understand the question of evil within a world of order guided by an all-powerful and all-good God.

How to Know Yourself

If this self-knowledge is the key to unlocking one of life’s greatest mysteries, it would be helpful to know how we can achieve it. The good news is that Augustine makes that clear. The bad news is that it’s not easy.

There are two key ingredients needed to become the type of person who attains self-knowledge, which is to say, becomes a true philosopher. These ingredients are moral discipline and intellectual formation. As Augustine states, “This discipline, therefore, commands those longing to know it to follow at the same time a double order, one part of which pertains to life, the other part to education.”2 These two are intertwined. For Augustine as for many ancient philosophers, one cannot think well if one does not live well and vice versa.

This is demonstrated narratively in the dialogue during scenes in which Augustine rebukes his students for moral flaws in the midst of their intellectual formation. They must not delight in one student getting an answer wrong if they are ever to truly learn. Throughout the Cassiciacum Dialogues, Augustine insists time and again that moral and intellectual growth must go hand-in-hand.

While Augustine demonstrates and describes the value of moral formation quite elegantly, he spends most of his time focused on intellectual formation. I take it this is less to do with him thinking the latter is more important and more to do with the latter simply being harder to describe.

When it comes to intellectual formation, there are two main paths which, once again, are not mutually exclusive. These are authority and reason.

There’s a clear order for Augustine. One starts their intellectual formation with authority, but you must not end there. On the one hand, “it so happens that for those desiring to learn the good, the great, and the hidden, nothing except authority opens the door.”3 On the other hand, “those who are content with authority alone, who constantly apply themselves only to good mores and upright desires while either disdaining the best liberal disciplines or not having the capacity to be educated in them—I don’t know I can call them happy, at least while they are living among men.”4 The reason for this is that only through reason can the soul come to know itself, not through authority. Authority can teach one truths about the world, but it doesn’t reach all the way to grasping the fundamental unity that is reflected in the soul’s inner unity.

While self-knowledge is the ultimate goal, and reason is the way in which this will be attained, it’s important to realize that this isn’t reason’s first step. You’ll notice that in the quote above, Augustine speaks of “the best liberal disciplines.” This is not a throwaway line. It’s central to his argument. The liberal disciplines, we find, are the training ground for the rational soul, and only when one applies themselves to the liberal arts does the soul gain the strength it needs to understand itself. And, once again, in understanding itself, the soul is then at the doorstep of understanding the problem of evil.

Augustine and the Liberal Arts

The second book of On Order (the dialogue is divided into two books), takes a winding path through the liberal arts, depicting reasons journey through many disciplines and ultimately back to itself before ascending to God.

Thus, we can map the movement in terms of three steps:

1. The soul moves outward, recognizing rational patterns in the world and desiring to bring unity out of multiplicity.

2. The soul moves inward, seeing that the very rationality and unity it sees in the world is reflective of its own rational unity.

3. The soul moves upward, recognizing that the intelligible is distinct from the phenomenal, and that the principles recognized in intelligibility point toward a Supreme Principle that is known by not knowing since the Supreme Principle is beyond the order of things.

It’s helpful to have this big picture in mind when trying to ascertain what Augustine is up to for long stretches of this dialogue (which, by this point, has turned to a monologue). Augustine extols at length the virtues of dialectic, grammar, music, and, above all, mathematics. What he’s doing in all of this is showing how the soul applies its reasoning to make sense of patterns and find unity.

That is why he’s especially keen to talk about mathematics. Previously, I’ve written about how Schopenhauer thought math was immoral. In many ways, Augustine is the anti-Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer thought math, or at least, Euclidean geometry, moved people away from intuition, genius, and access to Ideas, Augustine sees math as the closest that the liberal arts get to a true understanding of unity. In particular, Augustine is keen on the concept that reason itself might be mathematical, and the book ends with praise for Pythagoras. Without getting too into the details, the key contribution of mathematics for Augustine is that it can move purely into the realm of the intelligible, which is the journey the liberal arts have been on all along. For instance, music takes sounds in the world and finds harmony. Poetry takes syllables and makes meters. It’s a constant movement from things to ideas, and math is the pinnacle. Furthermore, math brings Augustine back to the idea of oneness that he’s been so keen on throughout.

But What if You’re Not a Liberal Arts Genius?

For the bookish, this might all sound rather exciting. Augustine is telling us that we should spend our lives pursuing the liberal arts, and maybe, just maybe, for the first time I can justify spending thousands of dollars on a Master’s in Liberal Arts.

However, there is also a problem. Augustine’s prescription basically requires you to study these things from your youth and devote all your time to it. I mean, that sounds great, but for most of us, it’s not practical. Within the world of the dialogue, it creates a problem for his saintly mother, Monica, who, though pious, is uneducated in the Liberal Arts. What then for her?

Here, Augustine offers some good news. He insists that you don’t have to become an expert at all these disciplines. He even notes that, though he’s considered a master dialectician and rhetorician, people still give him a hard time about how he pronounces his Latin and some of his word choice. The key is to get to the heart of the disciplines, and he argues that Monica’s saintliness will make this intuitive for her. Remember, the life of the mind and the life of virtue are connected.

He then goes on to modify this even further. If you can’t learn all the Liberal Arts, or even get the core of each of them, apply yourself to one or two, and if you have to pick, he argues that math is a good one.

Within these accommodations though, it’s fascinating to me that Augustine does not say that you can bypass all this reason stuff by just having faith. In fact, he explicitly rules that out, saying, “For [the soul] leads itself step by step to mores and to the best life, not by faith alone, but by the certainty of reason.”5 For those who refuse to engage with reason, he argues that they should not be asking such difficult questions about the nature of evil. They must rest content with faith.

At first glance, that can appear harsh. However, it seems to me that Augustine is making a fairly simple point: The problem of evil is a difficult question. If you want to understand it, you must be able to think deeply. To do that, you must train your reason. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine, but don’t assume you can understand hard things in an easy way.

Where this Leaves Us

And that, more or less, is the message of On Order. Admittedly, there’s much more to the dialogue than what I’ve been able to cover. This is only scratching the surface, both in terms of depth and breadth. However, I hope that it has provided you with a new angle for thinking about the problem of evil.

I can’t say that this particular work has “solved” the issue for me. In many ways, I have had to rest content with faith. What this dialogue has offered me is not so much answers as a sobering reminder that this is a difficult question that should be taken seriously, and that involves doing the hard work of training our reason through the liberal arts.

I must say, my main takeaway from this dialogue hasn’t really been connected to theodicy at all. Rather, I’ve been quite taken with Augustine’s vision that the function of the Liberal Arts is to train the soul such that it can return to itself, and in so doing, ascend to God.

The demise of the Liberal Arts is a topic much discussed here on Substack. For many, there’s an intuitive sense that the Liberal Arts are good and our neglect of them is to our detriment. But it’s often hard to express precisely why this is the case. In On Order, Augustine offers us a unique response.

After a brief hiatus last week for Good Friday, we’re back to our series on Augustine’s Cassiciacum Dialogues. If you’d like to check out the first essay on the preceding dialogue, Against the Academics, you can do so below.

Austin’s Substack

Should We All Be Skeptics?

Perhaps no scene from Augustine’s life is as famous as his dramatic conversion in the late summer of 386. After wrestling with the claims of Christianity for years, Augustine’s search reaches a boiling point. In a moment of immense, tormenting inner conflict, he hears a voice saying, …

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5 months ago · 49 likes · 17 comments · Austin Suggs

I have a rather annoying habit of asking my wife, “so, do you want the good news or the bad news first?” Like a sensible person, she always starts with the bad news, and because I’m not a misanthrope, I never deliver genuinely bad news in this way.

So, it is with this essay. We start with the “bad” news: Augustine thinks we’re all miserable. Yes, I know, that’s a little bit of a dour note on which to start an essay about happiness. Perhaps, On the Happy Life, would’ve sold a few more copies if it was a bit more upbeat.

However, there is also good news. At a superficial level, I find some comfort in knowing that being “miserable” can look like chilling at an Italian villa with your friends on your birthday and chatting about philosophy. If Augustine and Co. are miserable, as he insists they are, they certainly don’t seem to be feeling miserable. There’s some solace in that.

But I’m guessing that’s not Augustine’s moral of the story. The good news from Augustine’s standpoint is that this dialogue at least reveals what happiness is and how we can get there. That’s what we’ll look at today.

You’re Either Happy or Miserable

To understand this dialogue, it’s important to look at one of its chief assumptions that many modern readers will not share. That is, Augustine insists that the relationship between happiness and misery is like that of life and death—there’s no middle ground.1 As Michael Foley notes in his commentary, Augustine is following in Plato’s footsteps here by associating a thing only with it’s fullest perfection. Translation: Happiness is only really happiness when it’s perfect happiness. There are not degrees of happiness and misery. It’s one or the other. Cicero also takes this approach, comparing it to drowning: Drowning an inch from the surface isn’t any less drowning than drowning a mile below the surface.

This strikes me as one of those things that may be philosophically true in one sense, but is not experientially true. Sure, a proper definition of the nature of happiness might require us to look at happiness in its fullness, but at the level of our day-to-day lives, happiness certainly seems to permit of degrees. Licentius, ever the contrarian in these dialogues, points this out in the previous dialogue, Against the Academics. There, as in this dialogue, they determine that happiness is tied to wisdom, and therefore, the one who is not wise is not happy. But Licentius points out that they’re having a great time at Cassiciacum despite not being wise themselves. This insight will be important later on, as the ending of the dialogue might crack open the door to problematizing this binary. For now, though, know that as the dialogue proceeds, the working assumption is that there is no middle ground.

Happiness is about Getting What You Want

So, with that background in mind, we must now look at what makes you happy. Augustine begins with a simple observation: We all want to be happy.2 With the group eagerly agreeing, he proceeds to argue, if that is so, then it must be the case that not having what you want is misery. After all, happiness so far is seen to be rooted in desire. Augustine then argues the inverse. If not having what you want is misery, then having what you want is happiness.

Right about now, alarm bells might be going off in your head. Didn’t a bunch of sermons, country songs, and fables tell you that happiness isn’t just about getting what you want? Whether it’s dragons hoarding gold or athletes achieving everything they wanted and still being miserable, we’re given myriad cautionary tales to illustrate that happiness is not as simple as getting what you want.

One of the things that makes the dialogue format so fun, is that it intentionally leads readers down the wrong path, and Augustine is always testing his students, getting them to commit to answers that will terminate in dead ends. He doesn’t give them the answers. He invites them to explore questions themselves and see what they make of their discoveries.

In this case, his saintly mother spots the problem. Monica interjects, “If he wants good things and has them, he is happy; but if we wants bad things, he is unhappy, even if he has them.”3

Augustine, always keen to praise his mother, rejoices that she has found the problem so quickly, and he pivots the discussion to the critical question: What should we want?

Learning to Want the Right Things

There’s a real happiness quagmire, and it’s this: most of us are really bad at predicting what will make us happy. We think a bigger kitchen, jet skis, or a promotion will make us happy. And they might. For a time, But generally speaking, the things we think bring happiness bring less of it than we anticipate, and the things we don’t often associate with happiness—like helping people move, serving at a food kitchen, or praying—do make us happier than we expect. The data bears this out, just ask .4

Augustine argues that true happiness must not consist in material things for the simple reason that material things can be lost. And if we tie our happiness to stuff we can lose, then anxiety about losing those things will plague us and keep us from being happy.

Though his companions agree with this, Augustine offers them a counterargument to make the dialogue more interesting. And it’s one you’ve probably considered yourself. You see, we’re often told, “stuff won’t make you happy.” And that’s usually coupled with the notion, “the more you have, the more you want.” But Augustine argues, “what if you’re rich but also content. Surely that would make you happy?”

It’s a tempting thought. All things being equal, it sounds nicer to have than to have not. And Augustine doesn’t reject this outright. However, once again, it’s Monica to the rescue. She responds to the example of the contented and happy rich man by saying, “He’s happy not by virtue of the things, but by virtue of the moderation of his mind.”5

And this moderation of mind is nothing other than wisdom. Augustine defines the wisdom as follows: “Wisdom is none of than the measure of the mind, that is, that by which the mind balances itself, the result being that it neither runs over into excess nor is it constricted by what is less than full.”6

Only the Wise Man is Happy

So, happiness requires wisdom. This is a pretty stock take in the ancient world. Aristotle, for instance, didn’t think philosophy was the abstract pursuit of a bunch of ideas for the sake of ideas alone. Philosophy was about the pursuit of wisdom, and wisdom was the foundation of the good life. Put differently, the self-help section and the philosophy section would’ve been stocked with the same books.

Augustine adds a noticeably Christian layer to this, though. Just as philosophy and self-help went together for Aristotle, philosophy, self-help, and theology went together for Augustine. It is the mark of the Augustinian wise man that he recognizes the greatest good to be desired is God Himself.

This leads to one of the primary points of the dialogue: “He who has God is happy.”7

God and Happiness

So far, so good. If you want to be happy, you’ve got to want the right things. Knowing what to want is wisdom, and that wisdom leads you to recognize that God is the greatest good to desire. That, in a nutshell, is the path to happiness.

However, a problem arises (sorry). If being happy requires having God, we must determine what it means to have God. This is the next task Augustine sets before his students, and they offer three options:

1. The one who lives well has God (Licentius)

2. The one who does what God wants done has God (Trygetius)

3. The one who doesn’t have an unclean Spirit has God (Adeodatus)

Eventually, Augustine gets them to agree that these three options essentially express the same thing. But then he springs a trap. He asks them if God wants people to seek Him.

They promptly agree. But there’s a problem here. The one who seeks does not have, otherwise He would not be seeking. But if having God is doing what God wants, and God wants us to seek Him, then we’re forced to decouple these ideas. That is, we must now say that even the one who does what God wants (seek Him) does not have God.

This mirrors the debates they had about wisdom in the previous dialogue. There, they determined that the wise man can’t simply be the one who seeks wisdom. He must have wisdom. Therefore, the skeptics were found to be inconsistent when they said the wise man assents to nothing. Wisdom was not about seeking but finding. And so too, it seems, is happiness.

The Joy is Not in the Journey

That means we must do away with one of our favorite clichés. The joy, it turns out, is not in the journey.

Well, that’s unfortunate.

It may be a cliché, but I’m still quite fond of it, and, being a touch stubborn, I don’t like being disabused of my favored opinions. However, it’s worth bearing in mind the distinction we started with: For Augustine, happiness is all or nothing. If that’s the case, it seems fairly logical to say that the seeker, by nature of seeking, lacks, and the one that lacks happiness cannot be said to be perfectly happy. And, since perfect happiness is the only happiness deserving the name, then the seeker is miserable. Bah humbug.

This development in the conversation is one that Augustine recognizes is uncomfortable. They all view themselves as those trying to do what God wants, and this primarily involves seeking Him. That’s what this philosophical retreat is all about. However, the very fact that they’re seekers forces them to say that they’re miserable.

Who “Has” God?

Once again, Monica attempts to find a way out for the group. She takes issue with their working idea of “having God.” She says, “It seems to me that everyone has God, but those who live well have God well-disposed to them, while those who live badly have God hostile to them.”8 What seems like a promising distinction is soon shown to not hold up.

Here’s why.

It goes back to the seeker. Since seeking God is good, they must say God is well-disposed toward the seeker. That should lead to happiness. However, that would mean that the seeker both has God and seeks God, and Augustine won’t allow that.

Or, at least, so it seems. At the explicit level, Augustine argues against this, maintaining a dichotomy between seeking and having, with only the latter attaining happiness. Once again, this is tied into wisdom. The wise man must have wisdom, not merely seek it.

Trinitarian Happiness

However, in a delightful theological move toward the end of the dialogue, Augustine reflects on the Trinitarian structure of knowledge which helps us see wisdom in a new way. For Augustine, “The Son of God is none other than the Wisdom of God.”9 The Son, who is wisdom and truth, proceeds from the Father, who is the measure of truth. We already knew wisdom and happiness were linked, but now we know it in a deeper way: To be wise is to be happy because to be wise is to know Wisdom, and Wisdom has a name, Jesus.

But it gets even better. This elusive Wisdom and Happiness we’ve been searching for aren’t hiding from us. The eternal third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is reaching out to us. Augustine writes, “Moreover, a certain Admonition that pleads with us to remember God, to seek Him, and—after driving out all distaste—to thirst for Him flows out to us from the very font of Truth.”10 God, in His very being, is both the means and end of our happiness.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Eucharistic Happiness

In fact, I think there’s a way in which Augustine subtly hints at how seekers can be happy in this life. This last point forces us to read a bit into the text, but Augustine said in Against the Academics that philosophers don’t always put the deeper meaning of the text on the surface, so I think we’re justified to go out on a limb here.

To get to this deeper, slightly esoteric reading, we must look to the context of the dialogue. Throughout, the dialogue is compared to a feast, and this feast starts on Augustine’s birthday, which would’ve been on a Friday that year. The dialogue lasts three days, such that it is ending on Sunday. And as it’s wrapping up, we find Monica singing hymns as Augustine once more speaks of feasting. Foley, quite brilliantly from my perspective, suggests that Augustine is intentionally echoing eucharistic themes at the end of the dialogue. If that’s the case, we might have a secret key to how a seeker can be made happy.

Augustine and his friends grant that they aren’t wise. They cannot be said to fully “have” God, and thus they must concede they’re miserable. And yet, in his trinitarian argument, we’ve seen that God is actively reaching out to us to bring us to knowledge of Him. In an even more remarkable way, though, God gives us Himself in the Eucharist. That is, the imperfect seeker is truly able to “have God.” And thus, it would seem, the eucharist is the pledge of the full happiness that is to come in knowing and beholding God fully.

In a beautiful summary statement, Augustine says, “This, then, is the full satisfaction of souls, this is the happy life: to know piously and perfectly Him by whom you are led to the Truth, whereby you may thoroughly enjoy the Truth, through which you may be joined to the Supreme Measure.”11

Following Foley, I’d propose that it is in the Eucharist that we are able to taste this happiness, even as seekers. So, maybe, happiness isn’t as elusive as Augustine seems to imply. Maybe, happiness is to be found at every church altar where sinful seekers find that which they’re looking for and receive a taste of that which will one day be the fulfillment of their deepest desires.

A Resolution

While this resolution is, admittedly, speculative, I think it offers us a more satisfying read of this book. Up until the very end, Augustine’s argument feels a bit forced. Sure, on a technicality, the seeker doesn’t have and thus must not be happy, but why can’t there be degrees of having? Surely, Monica was onto something when she said that everyone has God. Part of being human is being made in the image of God, and insofar as we are, we are never absolutely separated from God. Our being is contingent upon His Being.

They tried to bypass this with the distinction about having God well-disposed toward you, but that seems misguided. Surely the God who is Love always has the same disposition (if we can speak of Divine dispositions). Our disposition toward God is what changes.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say all have God, and all have God well-disposed toward them, but that both of these permit of degrees experientially. As it relates to “having God,” we could take the traditional line of being made in God’s image but continually working to conform to His likeness, such that we have God but are growing to have Him in a greater way by our ever-increasing participation in His divine life by detaching ourselves from sin and clinging to Christ. As it relates to God’s disposition, though this is unchanging, our acceptance of this Divine Love is what changes such that this love is not painful to us but bliss.

If this is the case, we can have in part, but one day will have in full, just as now we see in part but will one day see clearly. The thing that bridges our incomplete present with the promised complete future is the Eucharist, that great bastion of our hope in which we taste and see that the Lord is good.

Odds and Ends

1. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

2. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

3. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’re currently reading Irenaeus, Against Heresies. We meet on Mondays at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it. If studying the church fathers with people from diverse church backgrounds is something that sounds fun to you, I think you’ll love our book club.

Perhaps no scene from Augustine’s life is as famous as his dramatic conversion in the late summer of 386. After wrestling with the claims of Christianity for years, Augustine’s search reaches a boiling point. In a moment of immense, tormenting inner conflict, he hears a voice saying, “tolle, lege,” and upon opening the Scriptures, decides to give his life to Christ. Finally, the decisive domino has fallen. As Augustine writes, “the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”1 We love to see it.

We often forget, however, what comes next in the story of Augustine’s life. We want to move straight from conversion to baptism and onto that sublime contemplative experience he has with his mother at Ostia. After that, we soon get Augustine the priest and bishop who spends his life writing, preaching, and rallying all his intellectual might against the Donatists. That sounds like more than enough for a biography. However, between that garden conversion and his reception into the church at Easter, an important period of Augustine’s life passes.

During the traditional autumn vacation (around November), Augustine takes a small group of family and friends to a villa in the Lombardy hills outside Milan for a philosophical retreat. There, they fill the days reading Virgil, writing poetry, debating philosophy, and doing some occasional work with their hands. Their conversations range from in-depth debates about Platonic philosophy to whether or not it’s permitted to sing hymns while going to the bathroom.2

Side note: I now really want to arrange a pilgrimage to Lombardy where we just have a philosophical retreat. Who’s in?

Out of this philosophical retreat came four dialogues, the first works Augustine wrote as a Christian: Against the Academics, On the Happy Life, On Order, and Soliloquies.

Whether it’s due to their inherent quality or my personal affinity for the dialogue format, I can’t say, but I find these works to be incredibly enjoyable either way.

Augustine’s Dialogue on Academic Skepticism

The first of the dialogues, Against the Academics3 will be the focus of this essay. With a title like that, it might be helpful to know who these “Academics” are. I won’t bore you with lots of background information. For the sake of brevity, all you need to know is that Augustine is broadly addressing those philosophers who claim the wise man gives assent to nothing.

I often hear people lament that, living in the modern world, we have access to so many competing points of views that it makes certainty feel impossible. If so many people who are smarter than us disagree, how can we ever really know anything at all?

As Solomon quips, there’s nothing new under the sun, and it didn’t take 24/7 access to YouTube for people to come to a similar point of despairing of certainty. Greek and Roman philosophers before Augustine—figures like Carneades and Cicero—noticed that, once we begin pulling on the threads of epistemology, everything starts unraveling.

However, they didn’t despair. They still believed strongly in the pursuit of wisdom, even if we might never attain it. While we might not know the truth, we can recognize that things are “truth-like.” And this probabilistic approach to knowledge, they argued, was enough to ward off the paralysis that can come from doubt.

So, it’s this set of ideas that Augustine encourages two of his students, Licentius and Trygetius, to explore in the first of the Cassiciacum dialogues. Licentius takes up the position that wisdom is about the pursuit, not the attainment of knowledge (the Academic position), while Trygetius argues for the opposite.

Like most students trying to wade into the deep waters of philosophy, they make a hash of it. So, somewhat against their will, Augustine and his friend Alypius (who, you might remember, was in the garden with Augustine during his conversion and experienced a conversion of his own) get roped into the debate, now squaring off as sparring partners instead of their previous roles as teacher and judge.

Alypius takes up the defense of the Academic position, succeeding Licentius in this role, and Augustine plays the prosecutor, putting skepticism to the test. Alypius’s defense of the Academics is quite interesting at the level of biography. Alypius himself was a lawyer, so we might suspect that, in defending the Academics, he’s simply performing the role thrust onto him by the stumped students. If that was the case, we’d see this as a simple exercise in dialectic. However, what’s fascinating is that Alypius actually seems to hold the Academic/Skeptical position himself. Bearing in mind that Alypius is himself a new convert to Christianity, hear his passionate defense of skepticism:

“If you ask me my own position, I think that the truth has not yet been discovered. I also add, which is what you were demanding of the Academics, that I don’t think that it can be discovered either—not only by virtue of my own deep-seated opinion, which you have almost always noticed, but also on the authority of the great and outstanding philosophers before whom either our weakness or their strength somehow or other compels us to bend the neck, and it should be believed that nothing can now be discovered that surpasses their authority.”4

Clearly for Alypius, being an Academic/Skeptic and being a Christian are not at odds.

For a book with the title, Against the Academics, you might expect that Augustine views things radically different from Alypius. Certainly Augustine, the man who has had light dispel all doubt, doesn’t share this assessment that we can’t know the truth, right?

The Case Against Skepticism

On the one hand, yes. Augustine argues forcefully against the Academics, mustering his dialectical skill to tie their position into knots and win the argument. However, I must say that the argument is rather different than I expected. When the contours of the debate begin taking shape in Book 1 while the students are still stumbling through it, you expect that Augustine the confident convert will argue decisively for our ability to know things, but by the end, you realize that Augustine and Alypius are not too far apart.

Recall that the debate is centered around this question of whether the wise man assents to anything. The framing here is key. In fact, as far as Augustine’s argument goes, the fatal flaw in the Academics’ position is their foolishness in using the term “wise man.” This opens the position up to the charge of internal inconsistency. That is, they claim there are, in fact, wise men, but they are forced to simultaneously say that these wise men do not possess knowledge. Augustine goes on the offensive, poking holes in this by asking whether it’s more probable that the wise man possesses wisdom, and, having established that it is more probable, he argues it would be foolish for the wise man, likely possessing wisdom, to not assent to wisdom. And if he assents to wisdom, then it can’t be said he assents to nothing. However, one gets the impression that, if the Academics would have just said there are no wise men, Augustine’s argument would either collapse or have to take a much different tact.

Aside from the internal critique about the foolish wise men, the only certain truths Augustine puts forth are relatively axiomatic ones. For instance, he argues that we can’t know whether there is one world or many, but we can know that there is either one or many. This is true, of course, but it is not incredibly inspiring. Michael P. Foley argues in his commentary on this dialogue that Augustine concedes that 99% “of what people think of in the course of their lives is not genuine knowledge or scientia, for it cannot be truly perceived or comprehended.”5 Again, probably not the kind of statistic that makes the epistemically anxious feel warm and fuzzy inside.

There’s another important point to notice in Augustine’s reserved affirmation of certainty. That is, Augustine doesn’t consider himself a wise man. He admits, “There is nothing I find, however, that isn’t doubtful; but the wise man as we have been saying, finds wisdom itself.”6 Indeed, while dogmatic about the possibility of wise men, he doesn’t seem to think there are many of them.

The real problem for Augustine is that, by asserting the impossibility of certainty, the Academics dissuade people from even searching for it. He writes, “Don’t you know, then, that I as yet have nothing which I perceive as certain, but that I’m prevented from seeking it by the arguments and disputations of the Academics?”7 The irony is that the Academics were trying to promote inquiry by their method, as they saw dogmatism as the stifling force and skepticism as the liberator. But by the time of Augustine, skepticism had become the dogma and now, in order for philosophy to thrive, skepticism must be overthrown so people don’t despair of the truth.

What this Means for Theology

This has really interesting implications for our theological debates today. On the one hand, if we are overly confident in having arrived at the right answers, we will dissuade people from properly engaging the task of theology. It becomes nothing other than a process of memorizing the conclusions. Why study when you have the answer key, right?

In response, people often push back against such dogmatic certainty, emphasizing the apophatic nature of theology (we can say what God is not but not what God is) or the analogical nature of theology (we can say what God is like but not what God is). However, pushed to extremes, these can lead people to despair of knowing anything about God.

In Against the Academics, Augustine tries to chart a middle course. We must affirm the possibility of true knowledge without hastily asserting that we’ve already attained it. In method, then, Augustine works similarly to the Academics. He argues from probability and he’s wary of easy conclusions. The core difference, though, is he doesn’t turn method into dogma.

How this Affects Our Picture of Augustine

All of this offers us a fascinating counterpoint to the clear-eyed convert we meet in Confessions. If that work tempts you to think conversion brings with it immediate certainty, Against the Academics forces you to reconsider the scope of that certainty. It’s true, Augustine appears to have given his full assent to Christ back in that garden. But it is not an assent based upon empirical certainty. It is an assent that holds within it space for much exploration in pursuit of greater clarity. And, at least at this point in his life, Augustine saw philosophy as a genuine path to that clarity. Toward the end of the dialogue he writes:

“Therefore, I am determined not to depart ever, in any way, from the authority of Christ, for I find no authority more powerful. But what should be pursued by a most subtle reason — for I am now of such a mind that I impatiently long to apprehend what is true not only through believing, but also through understanding — I am confident in the meantime that I shall find among the Platonists, and that it won’t be incompatible with our sacred [teachings].”8

Though written more than a millennia after this dialogue, Augustine’s fellow Doctor of the Church, John Henry Newman’s thoughts might be of service here. In An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Newman distinguishes between inference and assent. Inference is always probabilistic. Agreeing with the skeptics, Newman concedes that the data itself never leads to certainty. However, assent is something different. While inferential arguments might prepare the way for assent, they are not, ultimately, the foundation of it. There comes a time in life when your confidence in an idea is not strictly proportionate to, or even dependent upon, the arguments that got you there. The assent becomes unconditional.

Perhaps that is the best way to read Augustine here. He is the convert who has given his unconditional assent to Christ. He’s not doubting Christ. There’s no turning back for him. And yet, he is still the philosopher who knows that his reasons are never certain. Whether this imposition of Newman’s categories is anachronistic or not, Against the Academics offers us a brilliant picture of passionate conversion not putting a stop to rigorous philosophical inquiry.

Odds and Ends

1. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

2. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

3. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’re currently reading Irenaeus, Against Heresies. We meet on Mondays at 8pm EST on Zoom. Recordings are provided for those that can’t make it. If studying the church fathers with people from diverse church backgrounds is something that sounds fun to you, I think you’ll love our book club.

When St. Augustine was 72 years old, he took upon himself the task of reviewing his books, letters, and sermons “with a kind of judicial severity … indicating what dissatisfies me.”1 If you have even a passing familiarity with Augustine’s literary corpus, you’ll recognize this as a gargantuan task. His was a life spent writing, and his complete works in English span 49 volumes. Just re-reading all those works, much less examining them with “judicial severity” and articulating what went right and wrong, is quite the undertaking, to put it lightly.

We can still find this review of his works in a wonderfully unique book, Retractiones. Though it didn’t quite achieve the comprehensive survey he intended, he did succeed in reviewing 93 books that he had written up to that point in his life.

More than the individual critiques, what stands out to me about Retractiones is what it reveals about the task of theology. Augustine is revered by many as the theologian par excellence in the Western Tradition. It has often been said, with only a touch of exaggeration, that Medieval Theology was largely footnotes on Augustine and the Reformation was a debate about Augustine. And yet, this man of near unparalleled brilliance in the Christian tradition, thought he got a bunch of stuff wrong.

And if that’s the case for Augustine, how much more so will it be the case for us?

The Wonderful and Precarious Task of Theology

I was 18 when I first stumbled across the work of British New Testament scholar N. T. Wright. Immediately, I was hooked. Previously, my love of literary analysis and passion for faith were completely separate. Faith was something devotional and personal. My academic love of books was something different. Wright’s work was my gateway into the world of theology where faith met academic rigor, and in time I’d fall in love with philosophy and historical theology.

Somehow, talking about these things has become my job, thanks in no small part to the people who support me on Patreon and over here on Substack.

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Early in my theological journey, I took a course called, “The Theologian’s Craft.” Before taking systematic theology courses, all theology majors were required to spend a semester thinking about the craft of theology. It was a class about method, not conclusions, and it instilled in us a sense of the sacredness of the work of theology. Pedagogically, this was wonderful. Many of us rush into doing theology without first thinking about the nature of the task we’ve undertaken and end up doing it all the more poorly on account of this.

It seems to me there are two vices opposing vices in the work of theology. On the one hand, there is the Charybdis of flippancy, not recognizing the gravity and care that becomes speaking of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. On the other hand, there is the Scylla of scrupulosity, an immobilizing fear of saying the wrong thing that makes us settle for merely restating what has already been said before and never joining in the conversation ourselves.

In my own work, I’ve felt the pull of both of these. I’ve spent the last seven years creating theological videos online (673 at the time of publication). In a world where rebuttal videos are a genre all to themselves and comments are flooded with critiques, it’s easy to become overly cautious, trying avoid the six-headed Scylla of every possible response. When we do this, though, our theology can become a bit dull. Sure, if we merely repeat what St. Thomas Aquinas said, we won’t anger too many people. We’ll be on safe ground, but we’ll hardly be enaging the task of theology. Each generation must join into the great conversation of our Tradition, lest it become less than a living Tradition.

But Charybdis is equally deadly, that swirling whirlpool that sucks us in when we’re careless. If we make theology into an exercise of just rattling off reactionary hot takes or half-baked thoughts, we’re primed to see our ships go under.

At this point, it’s tempting to despair. The way seems remarkably narrow, and the stakes are high. In many ways, this is an accurate description. But it’s also incomplete. And I think Augustine shows us a better way than white-knuckling it through these precarious waters.

The Augustinian Way

Conventional wisdom would say you should walk before you run, learn the scales before you solo, and sit at the feet of the masters before hazarding your own thoughts.

Augustine did almost all of this backward.

Much has been made of the fact that Augustine was a poor student of Greek and thus was isolated from much of the best theological thinking of his time. In the hands of some Orthodox apologists, this is pinpointed as the fatal misstep of the West. If only Augustine would’ve read the Cappadocians, all would be well. Maybe.

But, as it was, Augustine’s linguistic isolation meant that he was often doing theology in a speculative, creative mode. And he was doing it without first waiting to spend years studying from the masters.

Even before Augustine was baptized, he was rattling off works of theology at a remarkable pace. Now, he wasn’t an unlettered man speculating with no training whatsoever. He was a master of rhetoric, a keen student of philosophy, and a self-learner when it came to Scripture.2 Still, he showed little fear to roll up his sleeves and start theologizing right from the start.

For readers of this Substack who are already wary of the phenomenon of over-zealous converts propping themselves up as experts, this might be cause for concern. Surely, we don’t want to encourage such behavior?

I’m sympathetic to this. However, I think Augustine’s early works, many of which are dialogues, reveal something about theology that we often forget: it’s a process of discovery.

Here, I would like to make a distinction between theology in its authoritative mode and its discursive mode. Some theology is a pronouncement from on high, a binding decree. We often call this dogmatic theology. Properly speaking, this is not the domain of laypeople on the internet, and certainly not of recent converts. Other theology, however, is simply the task of reasoning together about God. And, done in a spirit of openness, mutual discovery, and—critically—humility, this form of theology encourages all people to participate.

Augustine’s early dialogues are not all super polished pieces. But I think that’s by design. He invites young students and uneducated family members into the task of theology. He treats it less like a white-knuckled voyage and more like a joyful exercise of shared learning.

In other words, he’s not sailing between Scylla and Charybdis because he doesn’t see theology as the type of thing where you’ve only got one shot to get it right. Instead, it’s the task of a lifetime in which it’s ok to go out on a limb sometimes as long as you commit to always learning and being willing to admit your mistakes when you get it wrong.

The danger I see today is less in people sharing too many thoughts out of season, but rather in taking themselves a bit too seriously in the process. That’s not to say we should be flippant, not caring whether we’re right or wrong and spouting off ideas that could shipwreck not only ourselves but others too. James rightly says, not all should be teachers. But I think flippancy is setting oneself up as a teacher and not recognizing the weight of that office nor caring to correct oneself or be corrected when necessary. It is a different thing altogether, though, to take the posture of a learner and invite others along for the journey while committing to constantly refining one’s thoughts.

It is this type of attitude that forged the thought of Augustine. Notably, while he critiqued his earlier works, he didn’t delete them. He doesn’t pull his punches where he thought he spoke incorrectly, and this is more common in those youthful works of his, and yet he allowed those works to stay in circulation. He didn’t rewrite the record.

I’m not going to say Augustine always got this right. Committed though he was to inquiry and the liberal arts, he did also allow the Donatists to be suppressed by imperial force, setting up a dangerous precedent for church-state cooperation against heretics. At times in his later years, it’s harder to find the same joie de vivre that marked the time when his son was still alive, when he was living in a philosophical retirement and hadn’t yet the scars of decades of ecclesial ministry in a divided North Africa.

And yet, it’s a deeply Augustinian insight to recognize that none of this should surprise us. The same man who critiques his own theology examines his flawed soul in Confessions.

As some of you will know, I’ve set out to spend this year studying St. Augustine. Soon, I will be writing a series of essays on those delightful Cassiciacum Dialogues. But I thought it might be helpful, before starting at the beginning of his works, to join him in his late reflections, realizing that, brilliant though he was, he got a lot of stuff wrong. And that’s ok. In fact, it might just be a mark of being a good theologian: being willing to dare a few thoughts that you later realize were incorrect. If we’re lucky, in time we’ll realize that some of what we said was better than we thought, much was worse, and the conversation of the Great Tradition will carry on full-steam ahead, hopefully taking the good and leaving the bad. If we have enough humility to be corrected when need be, and enough faith in the church of today and tomorrow to recognize truth from error, we can explore the fields of theology freely, learning together and always keeping our eyes fixed on the One who is greater than any of our words could ever express.

Odds and Ends

1. In case you weren’t aware, my novel, The Long Road to Holy Island, is now available for pre-order. It’s a story about a grieving young man who embarks on the pilgrimage his mother always dreamed of—St. Cuthbert’s Way—despite not sharing her faith. Along the way, he meets a monk who becomes his traveling companion, and through their conversations and other people he meets, the protagonist is forced to wrestle with questions of faith in a world that so rarely makes sense. Pre-ordering is a huge help, especially for debut authors like me. So, if you’re so inclined, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed a copy early.

2. If you’re looking for ways to start studying church history, I recently put together a Church History in a Year reading guide which takes you through 2,000 years of primary sources in just 52 weeks. It’s available for $15 individually or freely to all my Patrons.

3. Finally, paid subscribers receive access to my book club, in which we’re currently reading Irenaeus, Against Heresies. On Monday (8pm EST), we’ll be tackling the most famous sections of the book, in which Irenaeus talks about the “pre-eminent” authority of the bishop of Rome, apostolic succession, and more. If studying the church fathers with people from diverse church backgrounds is something that sounds fun to you, I think you’ll love our book club.
   

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