I started writing this Substack to explore what it means to “re-enchant” daily life. What it means to recover a fuller participation with the world, and how to orient oneself toward truth, goodness, and beauty.

To take this search further, I’ve been busy working on an online book club dedicated to the most important texts of the Western canon. We’re studying the great works openly and intentionally — and crucially, in dialogue with each other.

It’s called the Athenaeum Book Club.

Athenaeum Book Club

An online book club studying the great texts of Western Civilization.

I’m mentioning it now because we’re about to start our next read-along, and it is a really significant one that I think you’ll enjoy:

Augustine’s City of God.

In the early 5th century, after the sack of Rome in 410, the civilized world was falling to pieces. This was when St. Augustine penned his greatest work, The City of God. It hinges on a story of two cities:

• The earthly city: made of people who love themselves more than God. They seek power, security, and a lasting home in this world.

• The City of God: made of people who love God more than themselves. They live fully in this world (building families, communities, obeying its laws) while knowing that their true home lies beyond it.

We all want to live in — and help create — a more beautiful society. But how?

The City of God is Augustine’s answer for living through a difficult or uncertain age. But rather than a manual for saving a collapsing empire, or any political body, it is about what ultimately makes a society flourish: what its people love and what they build their lives around.

Augustine claims that destiny is shaped by what a person loves. The things we love most determine the kind of people — and the kind of society — that we become.

I’ve been meaning to dive into this text properly for a long time, but I haven’t had the group to discuss it with until now.

We set up our book club to try to encourage as many people as possible to get back into deep reading of the Great Books. We designed it so anyone can read along with us for free, by tuning into our broadcasts or reading our weekly emails.

We also offer a paid membership for those who want to join our discussion group directly. We meet every two weeks, and our circle is becoming really strong now. We just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov, which was transformative, to say the least.

As a reader of Beauty Matters, I want to invite you to join our group at a discount:

25% off, forever.

Join the book club (25% off)!

We’re running this discount for the next 24 hours. As a member, you’ll get:

• Live book discussions (biweekly) and recordings

• Access to our incredible community of readers

• Essays and discussion threads to guide you through the Great Books

• Ability to vote on what we read next

We have grown together over the last few months into a really thoughtful community. You won’t regret joining us, I promise!

Here’s a selection of the key texts we are covering…

Join the book club (25% off)!

Why be a good person?

When philosophers and writers talk about moral philosophy, it can feel like moral laws are a little bit like “don’t walk on the grass.” Sure, there may be a reason for those rules, but what happens if you break them? Somebody is…annoyed with you? At worst, a relationship is hurt, but that’s really because the other person does not like you to walk on their grass, not because there is something wrong with walking on grass of itself.

But, of course, if morality is no better than rules that someone prefers, then, at bottom, there is little reason to follow it. Even if morality is “objective” like this, why follow it?

That’s why the greatest moral philosopher of all time, Aristotle, took a different route. And his philosophy found a home in two of the greatest novels of all time: The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. His demonstration will change how you see right and wrong, and it may even make you a better person…

Why Morality is Objective

When the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle sought to build a philosophical ethics, he didn’t look for some abstract principles or bizarre thought experiments; he looked at our natures: what are we, and what are we made for?

Aristotle realized that, if we are created for something, then that purpose will determine just how good we are. Just like a pencil is only a good pencil if it writes well, a human person is only good if they are achieving what they are made for.

Aristotle argued that this purpose is happiness, and that happiness is achieved through virtue. When we practice virtue, we become the people we were made to be. As we continue to achieve this purpose, we actually become happier because we are living moral lives.

Now, this means that the opposite is true as well: when we act immorally, you shouldn’t just avoid it to please someone. You should avoid immorality because it will make you miserable!

Importantly, when Aristotle said “happiness,” he did not mean a simple, pleasurable experience. Instead, he meant something more like fulfillment: the realization that you are who you are supposed to be. This Aristotelian sense of happiness is why we can say the simple husband and father, with a happy family, decent job, reasonable house and peaceful disposition, is better off, even happier, than the fabulously rich man who pursues pleasures constantly but only finds emptiness and loneliness. Is the rich man capable of achieving more pleasure than the middle-class husband and father? Yes, almost definitely. But, to put it frankly, who would you rather be?

This is why Aristotle thinks that miserable people are the opposite of well-formed people. They have not become the persons they are meant to become, and unless they amend their lives, they will never find the happiness they are looking for. It is not that they do not want happiness. Rather, they are pursuing some goods in excess, some in deficiency, and some not at all. In other words, they are looking for happiness, which is good. But they are pursuing it in all the wrong ways. And those wrong paths to happiness will not just result in being sad; they result in a kind of self-destruction.

For many people, that idea is hard to believe; is moral fault really that destructive? But the greatest novelist of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was a firm believer in this idea. And the way it shows up in his novels will give you a whole new perspective on the importance of living a good life…

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When we go to school, we all get pretty much the same subjects: math, English, history, science and a few assorted special interests like physical education, health or a foreign language. But if you were to ask a student why they are studying the things they are, they would probably give you a blank stare.

“Umm…” they’d stutter. “To get a job after graduation?”

The philosophy behind our educational system, to the extent that it even exists, is rarely communicated to those who are receiving the education itself. Education instead seems like a random distribution of fun facts received until you can go learn something at college that should, somehow, make you more employable. And of course, employability is the only reason to get an education, right?

But it wasn’t always this way.

While our educational philosophy can sometimes seem arbitrary and lacking in a coherent vision, the medieval educational system had a coherent vision, and a plan to inculcate its students into this vision in a way that sought, not so much to make better employees, but to make better people, better citizens and better students moving forward. Today, I am going to explain how the medieval education system worked, and why we would be better off with a medieval education…

The Trivium

For any medieval student, the first part of their curriculum was an introduction to three topics (hence “Trivium”): Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. Far from arbitrary, these topics were meant to build thinking skills in each student, the “how to think” of education.

1. Grammar

First, students learned grammar. The reasoning here is simple: to think well, you first need to understand the structure of language. Like it or not, we pass ideas along using language. So to receive or give knowledge, you need to understand language. This way, every student received the raw materials of information and could order their own knowledge in an orderly fashion. But they could not attain or grow knowledge without the next science.

2. Logic

The next step of the Trivium was logic. If Grammar teaches you how to think and speak in an orderly way, logic teaches you to order your thoughts in a way that will actually get you to truth. Without logic, you may be able to absorb knowledge, but you will have a very difficult time assessing or building arguments. You will be vulnerable to poor reasoning that appears strong, and you will be incapable of seeing the implications of the things you do know. That is why students were taught to think rationally through logic. But even if you are able to think rationally, that is not enough: you need to be able to help people get to the truth, too.

3. Rhetoric

Rhetoric as a science has fallen on hard times in our modern day. In modern culture, speaking smoothly and persuasively is often considered to be the hallmark of a rat with no interest in the truth. But that is not how the medievals thought of it. Instead, they saw rhetoric as being in service to truth: if you are trying to get someone to believe something, you should make the truth attractive, for the same reason that it helps people who want to eat healthy if you make healthy food delicious. Of course, if you use rhetoric to support false or sneaky arguments, that would be dishonest. But the medievals didn’t see that dishonesty as a necessary implication of the use of rhetoric at all. In fact, the ability to make the truth beautiful and attractive was viewed as a skill and a virtue.

Once a student had studied the Trivium, they had a mind that was fit to receive knowledge and to use it: they could learn and communicate using Grammar, they could order their thoughts and beliefs toward truth using logic, and they could help other people see this truth using rhetoric. But of course, knowing how to think and argue is only the first step: you need to have real knowledge, too. And that’s why graduates of the trivium had only received half of what they needed for real research. Once their mind had been made orderly, it needed to actually receive a coherent worldview that would help the student see the world as it was.

That was where the quadrivium came in, and it was the quadrivium that really made medieval education superior to what we have now…

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“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

The father of Western philosophy, Socrates, uttered those words over 2000 years ago. His point was a simple, but powerful one: if we are going to live the life we should, it is going to take intentionality.

We aren’t going to end up good, happy, fulfilled people by accident. Socrates’ legacy is the massive explosion of the systematic search for precisely the kind of life he was advocating — this search is what we now call philosophy.

While it would be false to say that everybody should be professional philosophers, Socrates’ recommendation to examine our life applies to everyone, not just academics. And in the time of the internet, it doesn’t even take a college class to learn the examined life from great philosophers, both of today and from times past.

I have been studying philosophy for years, and it has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. Here is my advice for how to become an amateur philosopher without paying a cent of college tuition…

1. Method: Focus on Thinkers or Focus on Issues?

So, you are thinking about studying philosophy. Before you stand thousands of years, people and books, all with varying levels of importance and applicability to your life, not to mention ease for a novice. How do you choose?

I have seen two approaches suggested for breaking up philosophy into more digestible chunks: focus on thinkers, or focus on issues.

If you focus on thinkers, you take particular philosophers or philosophical traditions and learn them really well, understanding their whole worldview. This will generally involve understanding the cultural and philosophical context of these particular thinkers, which will in turn allow you to understand more and more of philosophy in general.

If you focus on issues, you will start with questions: does God exist? Do we have free will? Where does morality come from? Then, you will look for answers. The debates around each of these issues are long, and provides more than enough fodder for philosophical reflection to feed any intellect. As you work to understand one issue, it will frequently require that you understand other issues, and will also raise other questions. Thus you will be brought from issue to issue, answering questions as they come.

Of course, these approaches cross-pollinate: if you dive into one particular tradition, you will likely look to them to answer the questions you have. And if you work issue-by-issue, you will probably start to favor one or a few philosophers’ explanations over others. But you still need to choose: what will your framework for philosophical learning be?

Personally, I recommend picking a tradition and sticking with it. Especially at the beginning, you will be a student, not a critic, of the philosophers you read. Just like it would be silly for a freshman physics major to try to solve all of the puzzles in physics, a philosophical novice is probably going to make mistakes, be persuaded by bad arguments, and get confused. To reduce that, learning to see the world along with one or two particular philosophers will help you grow intellectually without requiring that you become the personal arbiter of multiple philosophical positions you discovered yesterday.

Of course, that requires that you actually pick a good philosopher to follow. And that decision is arguably as important as any you will make. Here’s how to do it…

2. Get a Good Teacher

Even if you ultimately make the decision to focus on issues in philosophy, you will still probably begin by learning from one or a few philosophers. That makes deciding who you listen to an incredibly important decision for your philosophical journey. To make it well, here are a few suggestions:

1. When studying dead philosophers, pick an important one. There have been thousands of philosophers in the history of philosophy, and the most historically important ones tend to be the ones who had the most interesting and most significant things to say. Don’t fall for the trap of wanting to be a niche philosopher fan at the beginning. Start with one of the important ones.
   

2. Look for virtue. You are looking for a teacher to help you live a better, more fulfilled, wiser life. Do not go looking for that teaching from a terrible person. They might be smart, and they might write well. But if you do not want, generally, to live like them, don’t try to think like them.

   
   The one important note for this is that every person, including philosophers, is a product of their own time, and needs to be considered as such. Having a moral view 500 years ago that would be considered unacceptable now should be considered differently as a general implication for the philosopher’s character than it would be if that person were living today.
   
   For example, one of my favorite philosophers, Aristotle, believed that some people were natural slaves. That was, and is, false. But Aristotle lived over 2000 years ago, and so such a view should be taken differently than if, say, you are looking into a philosopher alive today with the same view. This is especially relevant in the case of Aristotle because his other ethical views actually represented, generally, a move forward in the world’s ethical framework. There is an argument to be made that Aristotle was a particularly moral person for his time, not a villain.
   
   On the other hand, Martin Heidegger was a literal Nazi, and never repented of it, even many years after World War II. Thus, while there may be things to be learned from Heidegger, I would recommend avoiding him as your first and primary philosophical teacher.

My advice would be to pick one of the OG philosophical guides: Plato or Aristotle. They provide excellent avenues into the rest of philosophy, and almost everybody is responding in some way to what Plato and Aristotle said first.

Of course, once you pick a philosopher, you need to start reading. Here is what to do (and where to find free resources) once you are ready to start learning…

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What are we made for? How can we really become who we ought to be?

Perhaps the most popular suggestion for the key to happiness in the modern world is freedom. People cannot be happy, it is suggested, unless they are allowed to do whatever they want. To that end, people are increasingly running away from long-term commitments of any kind.

Commitments limit our freedom, which, of course, limits our happiness. Far better, then, to maintain your independence and keep away from commitments like that.

But G.K. Chesterton offers a rebuttal to this attitude in his essay A Defense of Rash Vows. In it, he argues that committing yourself is eminently reasonable. It’s not just that you can or should commit yourself to a cause greater than yourself, but that you cannot be truly happy without doing so.

Today, I’m going to examine Chesterton’s defense of rash vows, and see how they help us understand where true freedom lies.

An Appointment With Yourself

When someone really, truly believes in a cause, often they are willing to take on big risks and make tremendous sacrifices for it. An investor is willing to pour millions of dollars into a business idea she thinks will succeed. A volunteer will work until their arms cannot work anymore if they think their cause is a worthy one. And a soldier will run bravely into battle if he loves the home he is defending.

In all of these cases, the person commits themselves as a part of something greater; they are willing to put themselves at the service of a cause that is more important than their own money, comfort, or even life.

Vows are like this. When we promise ourselves to a cause, we are committing ourselves to it, even if we have not actually sacrificed anything yet. But what makes vows special is their relationship to time: we commit ourselves, not just now, but in the future. This is a different kind of risk: it risks that we will not be the person we have claimed ourselves to be. Chesterton writes:

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind.

Chesterton’s point is that one of the reasons we are often afraid to commit is that we fear we are not up to the commitment. We do not sign up for a work-out group because we fear that we won’t show up. We do not agree to carpool because hey, what if we’re running late? But this refusal is not where true freedom lies.

The Bondage of Freedom and the Freedom of Bondage

Chesterton compares two people: one who stubbornly refuses to commit himself to anything for longer than a moment, and one who commits herself to something that, on the whole, was probably a bit much. Who is happier?

The person who will not commit cannot be happy, because he cannot find himself at all. He passes, moment to moment, from identity to identity without finding any clarity or solidity to say “here, this is who I am.” When he makes a promise, he does not really take it seriously, and does not consider himself bound by it. When he meets a new person, he takes on whatever personality he suspects will most please the newcomer. But this behavior does not make the person free so much as it makes him trapped by the moment, as Chesterton shows:

And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us—this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.

If we refuse to bind ourselves to anything, those same things have no power to help make us happy, much less fulfilled or virtuous.

That’s why Chesterton prefers the rash vow-taker.

A person who is willing to take risks with herself, willing to make promises and bind herself to a moment, is the person who is willing to make her life about something. This theming of one’s life is the characteristic of all great people. If we do not have something we are living for, we have no reason to live at all.

And by committing, the rash vow-taker is willing to commit herself to the greatness of a moment where she saw more clearly than she will later. It may be that, at some other time, it seems like one’s country is not worth fighting for, or that war is too terrible, or death too frightening. But the man on the battlefield will be strengthened by the fact that he committed to be here at a moment he saw clearly what was at stake.

But war is not the paradigmatic example of a rash vow taken well. It’s marriage. And it is in marriage that Chesterton’s point is made most perfectly.

Marriage as a Rash Vow

In his essay, Chesterton clearly thinks of marriage as the rash vow par excellence, which is to say that it is only rash in one, mostly irrelevant sense.

In marriage, a true lover does not make the claim that he’s pretty sure that his spouse will make him happy forever, or that it’s for the best that the two of them stick around because they’re good for one another. In a truly romantic proclamation of love, practicality has no grounds whatsoever: “You are good, and I love you. I wish to commit myself to you wholeheartedly, forever.”

Chesterton’s point is not merely that it is wrong to hold to a marriage for as long as it makes sense. His point is that nobody can be truly happy in a love that is conditional. For love to really make sense, for it to be thrilling and true and all-encompassing, it must be unconditional, complete and, yes, rash. Otherwise, we will be stuck with mediocre lives, mediocre causes, and mediocre loves:

Thus in love the free-lovers say: ‘Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times.’

Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the aesthetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.

We are living through one of the great transfers in human history: the transfer of our mental faculties.

We have already handed our sense of direction to the GPS and our memory to the search bar. Now too, at long last, writing and thinking are being surrendered to the machine.

This transfer is understandably seductive. It feels free: Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT do the work for us, we save a bunch of time and effort, and we get to keep the results for ourselves. Right?

J.R.R. Tolkien would have recognized this Faustian bargain instantly, because his mythology was written, in large part, to expose precisely this. In his 1954 epic, The Lord of the Rings, we find that evil operates by surrendering personal sovereignty to what Tolkien called “the Machine.”

Tolkien, a veteran of WWI, had first-hand experience of how machines of war can rip apart an entire continent. But he was brilliant enough to also see the much more insidious power of technology: its ability to slowly rot the user from within.

The Lord of the Rings, then, is a cautionary tale about the use of technology. The threats and temptations posed by LLMs and algorithms may be different to the technology of Tolkien’s day, but his warning about the Machine is just as relevant as ever.

Here is Tolkien’s warning about technology, and what he suggests is the antidote…

Sauron’s Bargain

Explaining the One Ring to Frodo at Bag End, Gandalf says of Sauron:

“He made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others.”

Sauron, desiring absolute power, begins by giving his own power away and pouring it into the Ring. In return, the Ring lets Sauron’s will act on a scale that his own physical presence could never reach. This is how the Machine works: it offers the user external power, but that power must be paid for.

What this means is that Sauron’s existence now hangs on a thing that can be lost, or indeed, destroyed by the unlikely figure of a hobbit. Symbolically, this shows that when you externalize your strength, what you feed into the Machine may be amplified and “improved,” but it is no longer yours. Sauron’s Faustian bargain leaves him vulnerable:

The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction… A man who wishes to exert ‘power’ must have subjects, who are not himself. But he then depends on them.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 211

And it’s not only Sauron. We see how the self is diminished with all who come too close to the Ring. Gollum’s lifespan may be extended by it indefinitely, but his life becomes a hollowed out husk — lonely, miserable, and entirely pointless.

Should We Trust Technology?

So, does Tolkien mean to disparage all technology use? Surely technology has played an important role in human history, lifting the masses from food shortage and back-breaking menial labour. Is Tolkien merely a Luddite to be ignored?

In a letter to his publisher, he once wrote:

By the [Machine] I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 131

Tolkien’s concern, then, is when technology is a substitute for inner growth. Thus, a good way to judge your own technology use is to ask: has using it in some way diminished your inherent capability or agency?

Has LLM use diminished your capacity to compose an essay, or think up original ideas? Has your GPS worn down your sense of direction?

In other words, is it helping you grow, or is it offering to grow for you?

But if this is the standard, how are you to navigate a modern world that almost seems to worship technology; in which screens and software are an increasing part of virtually every aspect of life?

If The Lord of the Rings is a cautionary tale about technology, then what does it suggest is the antidote?

Fortunately, Tolkien does provide a way to resist the Machine by instead cultivating power within. To understand his radical answer to the Machine Age, we have to go and see the Elves…

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What is the “right” way of seeing the world?

Many assume that science should govern our entire worldview. Because of the success of physics and biology to explain many secrets of creation, they assume that science says the only things worth hearing.

But in “The Ethics of Elfland,” a chapter of his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton points out that this theory completely ignores the limitations of such a worldview. Science is powerful, but it is utterly incapable of seeing many things, including some of the most important.

Moreover, trying to make science explain everything is, ultimately, an abuse of science itself. Stretching science too far eventually makes it un-scientific. Instead, Chesterton argues that we need to look for wisdom somewhere else: fairy-tales.

His argument may just change the way you see the world around you…

The Democracy of the Dead

Chesterton lived, like us, in a time that was highly iconoclastic about past generations and their beliefs. In short, society was giving up on caring for tradition. Chesterton points out that, paradoxically, this corresponded with a growth in the belief that democracy was the best system of government.

And yet, tradition is a kind of democracy, because it considers opinions, not just of all people in a living population, but in past generations, too. When we take tradition seriously, we realize that nothing about our current generation makes us smarter than those who came before. We may have more scientific knowledge, but that does not negate the immense wisdom that has accumulated over many years of life experience, story telling, philosophy, and study.

One place where this wisdom is especially well-preserved is, surprisingly enough, in fairy stories. Fairy stories are not merely created for fun; they are meant to communicate a particular way of seeing the world. This is why fairy stories are so often interested in the rules of magic, the consequences of moral choices, and how one is to be happy: fairy tales are the past’s selection of truths that other generations felt their children needed to know.

The problem is that we have replaced a transcendent, reverent view of the world informed by fairy stories with a sterile, mechanistic view informed primarily by scientific understanding. This has led to many people taking a flat view of the world; where we used to see a world pregnant with meaning and pulsing with life, we now see a chain of atoms running into one another, forming chemicals, and creating molecules.

The scientific picture is certainly interesting, but who would be willing to die for atoms? Who sees molecules as the legitimate goal of a life-long journey? Arguably, nobody. We all want for more.

The great tragedy is that the “more” that we are looking for — the enchantment we need for our worldview to mean anything at all — has not been destroyed; it has merely been lost. It can be found again.

Enchantment is where it has always been: nestled in the fairy stories that tradition has passed down to us. In an astonishing piece of writing, The Ethics of Elfland, G.K. Chesterton lays out the foundations of thought from fairy land that will transform your entire worldview…

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Many people think that authors of fairy-tales are eminently un-practical men. After all, they write stories filled with goblins and dragons; what could they possibly know about the real world? Could a man who wrote of star-crossed lovers give real advice for real husbands and wives?

As it turns out, at least one can.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a deeply romantic man. He famously wove his wife Edith into the mythology of Middle-earth as the the inspiration for Luthien, a captivatingly beautiful elvish woman with a joyous love of singing and dancing — just like his Edith. But beyond romantic gestures such as this, Tolkien also offers up hard-won wisdom about real-life issues in marriage. In a letter to his son Michael, he penned some of the best advice I’ve ever read on the matter of lasting relationships.

If you are looking for a marriage that will last, this advice from the man who wrote The Lord of the Rings will guide you well…

1. Understand Your Limits (And Your Spouse’s)

A lot of Tolkien’s advice to Michael consists in acknowledging that we are fallen, imperfect human beings. This includes, perhaps obviously, to the sexual sphere:

This is a fallen world. The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall. The world has been ‘going to bad’ all down the ages.1

How does this apply to married people? For Tolkien, it means accepting that temptation will happen:

[Women] are instinctively, when uncorrupt, monogamous. Men are not…..No good pretending. Men just ain’t, not by their animal nature. Monogamy (although it has long been fundamental to our inherited ideas) is for us men a piece of ‘revealed’ ethic, according to faith and not to the flesh.

Tolkien was writing to his son here, so his advice is more focused on the masculine perspective, but he points out that, even if men are (sometimes) more obviously unchaste externally, women are not “less pure” than men. It is simply that they frequently are motivated to impurity by something other than the sheer chasing of pleasure.

But, man or woman, Tolkien is not really out to figure out who is “better,” and we would be foolish to try. The more important lesson for men and women is to accept that we have weaknesses. While it is romantic for a husband to say that he has never even felt the allure of adultery, what is he to do if he does?

For Tolkien, acknowledging temptation as a certainty is not about excusing immorality; it is about guarding against it. If you deny the possibility of temptation, you cannot prepare yourself for the day that you inevitably will, even in the context of a happy marriage.

So, how is one to defend against temptation? By training your body and soul for attack…

2. The Path to Happiness is Through Suffering

While Tolkien is frank about the possibility of temptation in marriage, he also offers Michael advice for how to deal with that temptation:

Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails…great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains…No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial.

Here, Tolkien gives a strong rebuke to a Disney-ified view of “following your heart,” where love and happiness mean doing whatever feels most right. Instead, Tolkien argues that love is a choice, and one that must be constantly reinforced by enduring suffering.

Sometimes that may mean fasting and penance, which Tolkien definitely had in mind as a Catholic. But sometimes it just means avoiding situations that are opportunities for temptation. Sometimes it means wresting the imagination away from the images suggested to it by popular media. Sometimes it means directing the mind to one’s spouse rather than thinking about others.

But more than anything, Tolkien is trying to push against the idea that suffering means something has gone wrong. Often, it can be tempting to think that, if we are suffering, it means that we are in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or doing the wrong thing. But that is not how marriage works. Truly loving spouses will not just remain faithful when things are going well. They will remain faithful not just through suffering, but by suffering, allowing pain to purify and hard times to heal.

And when we are willing to suffer, it allows us to realize Tolkien’s final point, which goes against everything you’ve ever learned from our modern culture about marriage…

3. You Probably Won’t Marry Your True Love — But That’s Okay

One of the most fundamental ideas that we have been given about marriage today is that marriage will only work, and we will only be truly happy, if we marry the one person we were destined to marry. If we find, in short, our soul-mate, or “true love.” If we find our true love, then marriage will be blissful and easy. But if we do not find our true love, our marriage will be miserable forever.

The problem with this theory is that it is completely false.

The search for a soul-mate is a path to nowhere, for the simple reason that it is an impossible test to pass:

Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates.2

In reality, every marriage is going to have difficulties. No “soul-mate” will make for a good or happy marriage. In fact, Tolkien sadly reflects on the effect this has on many marriages:

When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along.

Does this mean that we should give up on marriage? Absolutely not. While this reality can make one feel trapped or doomed, it is actually freeing: a happy marriage is not dependent on you picking the “right” person. It is dependent on you loving the one you pick. Tolkien argues that:

The ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstances do most of it.

The question in marriage is not “did I get it wrong?” You very well may have! But that does not mean that an imperfectly matched couple a) cannot have a happy marriage or b) need not take their marriage seriously. Instead, they can be confident that, with love and sacrifice, their marriage will not just be livable, but very, very good.

So, when choosing a spouse, we must be wise. But we also must realize that very little in this world is perfect, nor needs to be. Happiness is found in seeing our life as beautiful and pursuing it virtuously, not in finding the perfect circumstances for love. Indeed, rather than looking for our “soul-mate” or “true love,” we should instead take Tolkien’s advice:

In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom…a clean heart, and fidelity of will.3

C.S. Lewis is most popularly known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity. Others know him for The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. But one of Lewis’ greatest works, and maybe my personal favorite, is frequently forgotten by more casual fans. This is a shame, because it is arguably his most perceptive and thrilling work: The Space Trilogy.

Lewis’ Space Trilogy is made up of the three books: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. The theological and philosophical themes tackled in this series include scientism, Nietzscheanism, materialism, consequentialism, the afterlife, myths, poetry, human sexuality, fairy tales, and magic. There is a lot going on.

But one central theme of the whole series is the ability that we have to participate in the spiritual realm, and how our own choices have major impacts on that world. Nowhere is that made more explicit than in the final book, That Hideous Strength.

It is very different in tone from the previous two, not least because it actually involves very little space travel. But it is also the best and most philosophical of the three, and its treatment of the relationship between truth and beauty is both profound and striking.

So today, I’m going to introduce you to Lewis’ oft-neglected masterpiece, and what it has to teach us about the importance of beauty in your personal life. You will never look at art the same way again…

A Quest for Relevance

The main characters of That Hideous Strength are Mark and Jane Studdock, two newly married intellectuals. Mark is an early-career academic at the small research institution Bracton College, and Jane is trying to finish up her doctoral thesis.

Mark has, up to this point, had a small and relatively un-influential career, but his prospects seem to take a major turn for the better when he is offered a position in the powerful, if a little mysterious, National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). Excited to be getting in with powerful and influential people, Mark jumps at the idea, and is brought to N.I.C.E. headquarters. But things at the institute are…strange.

First of all, N.I.C.E. is allergic to giving anybody clear instructions. Mark spends several chapters trying to figure out what his job is in the first place, and nobody will tell him. In fact, he is discouraged from asking. Far better to simply accept instruction as it comes, and to wait in the meantime. Moreover, Mark only ever receives feedback second-hand. He hears that things are going well or, more often, that things are going poorly with those in charge, only from people connected to the leaders who supposedly approve or disapprove.

Second, despite ostensibly being a scientific organization, N.I.C.E. clearly has political aspirations: it has connections in Parliament, its own powerful security force, its own newspaper, and seemingly endless money.

Finally, as is implied by the first point, N.I.C.E. has a strictly utilitarian relationship with truth. It manipulates news for its own ends, and silences opposition through mockery and scorn rather than argumentation. Its official “president” is a total figurehead, who is really simply a popularizer of scientific ideas.

All of these should be warnings to Mark, but he is too wrapped up in the desire to advance his career and be popular with the right people. So despite the misgivings of his conscience, and the tensions it is introducing in his relationship with Jane, Mark continues going deeper and deeper into N.I.C.E.

But unbeknownst to Mark, there is a far deeper, more devious secret behind N.I.C.E. And if it is not stopped, it could mean the destruction of England…

The Head of N.I.C.E.

Mark does not realize it, but there is a horrifying secret leader of N.I.C.E.: the decapitated head of the criminal Alcasan.

N.I.C.E. has long been experimenting with the ability to re-vivify dead bodies. Now, it seems to have done so with the decapitated head of an executed murderer. N.I.C.E.’s scientist, Filostrato, believes the head has achieved a higher level of consciousness, such that the whole group of executives in N.I.C.E. both worship it and serve it.

But Filostrato is wrong, and the true leaders of N.I.C.E know it. The head has neither life nor an elevated consciousness. What it does have is a group of demons that have possessed it, and those demons, referred to as “Macrobes” by the leaders of N.I.C.E., are directing the institution to seek more and more power, both political and spiritual.

Meanwhile, N.I.C.E. arrests Mark and reveals that he has been framed for the murder of a N.I.C.E. defector. He is offered two options: join them completely, or be hanged for murder.

Mark agrees to go through the conditioning to join N.I.C.E., where he is trained to be completely “objective” and to eradicate his emotions.

The purpose of Mark’s training is, ultimately, to make him completely unable to recognize good from bad, or virtue from vice. And what’s interesting here is the shockingly simple way in which Mark — and all human beings — can be corrupted.

But Lewis also reveals the just-as-simple way for us to resist corruption. What happens next will completely change the way you understand beauty, ugliness, and even art…

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Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling is — quite probably — history's greatest artwork. Visitors pour into Rome by the millions each year just to get a glimpse at it.

But why?

The fresco is ecstatically beautiful, yes; but what did the artist actually paint up there? What does the Sistine ceiling mean?

When you begin to investigate this, you quickly realize that these are no ordinary Bible scenes. What Michelangelo painted on that ceiling is a work of staggering depth and also strangeness. Some of its details have taken scholars centuries to unravel, and others are so confounding we may never know what the artist meant to reveal.

Michelangelo has a lot more to offer than just a beautiful painting.

Let’s walk across it…

A Celebration of Life

Man's greatest painting was made not by a painter, but a sculptor. Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor in 1508 when the Pope twisted his arm into decorating the chapel ceiling. He had never completed a fresco before, and was more than reluctant.

Michelangelo’s sculpting mind is evident in the 343 figures that look like they were somehow hewn from the ceiling: muscular, powerful forms that borrowed from classical sculpture.

To begin breaking down what’s up there, let’s start with a map.

There are 9 scenes from Genesis across the center: the story of man’s creation and his fall from grace. We begin with God’s dividing of light from darkness, and end with the Great Flood and Noah’s drunken disgrace.

The best known of all the panels is The Creation of Adam — likely the most famous artwork in the world today, if not the most recognizable image of any kind. In it, we witness the moment God imparts the gift of life to the first man:

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."

With this, we start to understand that Michelangelo was taking Biblical art beyond anything ever seen before. For one thing, the Bible describes God creating man by breathing the breath of life into his nostrils (Genesis 2:7), not by reaching out and touching him. The greatest work of Biblical art is not strictly Biblical.

But there’s so much more than meets the eye. A now well-known observation is that God reaches through what looks like the prefrontal cortex of an anatomically correct human brain. Elsewhere on the ceiling, we find a brain stem concealed in God's neck. Michelangelo, expert in anatomy, was creating a sort of treatise of the human body — a celebration of the sheer wonder of man's origin story.

It is not only a celebration of the body, of course, but the soul; imparted to Adam as if by an electric charge through his finger.

Why isn't Adam's finger fully outstretched like God's is? Because to find God, Michelangelo implies, we need only reach toward him as vigorously as he reaches toward us.

Now It Gets Strange…

Next, surrounding the Genesis panels are all these nude figures called the Ignudi. They seem to frame each of the scenes intentionally, but nobody knows why for sure, or what they represent. As idealized nude forms, it’s likely that they’re a nod to the ancient, classical ideal that equated beauty with virtue.

Around the outside are Old Testament prophets who predicted Christ's coming, like Isaiah and Zechariah. They're painted right into the architecture, except the ceiling is smooth. It was made “3D” by architectural elements entirely painted on.

Then there are figures not from the Bible: the Sibyls. These are oracles from other ancient traditions who also foretold Christ's coming, from Persia to Libya. Anticipation of the saviour, Michelangelo is saying, came from all across the ancient world.

The Sibyls and the Prophets are interspersed by eight triangular “spandrels” (where “family” is written in the diagram above), and around the outside are semi-circular “lunettes” which hug the chapel windows. Into these, Michelangelo painted various forerunners to Jesus and his ancestors who trace the genealogical lineage from Abraham to Joseph.

So, with all these suggestions of the Saviour present, many have pointed out the peculiar fact that the ceiling of the most holy space in Christendom doesn't actually contain any Christian (New Testament) theology.

Why is that?

To address this, Michelangelo plants one almighty (yet very small) clue. In his version of the Garden of Eden narrative, Eve is not reaching for an apple. She’s reaching for a fig.

In medieval Christian tradition, the Forbidden Fruit (the Bible does not specify which fruit) was almost always depicted as an apple. Michelangelo knew this well.

So why the departure?

With this tiny clue, we get a glimpse at what this enigmatic artwork is really all about. For Michelangelo concealed a code on the Sistine Chapel ceiling…

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We use the word “love” to describe our feelings about a lot of things. I might say I love my mother, pizza, baseball, and my dog, but of course, each of these loves is expressed very differently. Add in the different ways I love my siblings, cousins, best friend, and God, and the breadth of the word is obvious.

But while we use love in a lot of ways, it has always primarily been used to describe human relationships. In fact, many languages other than English use multiple words to describe the many relationships that fall under our one word of “love.” Teasing out the different relationships can help us better understand both those relationships and the people in them.

Fortunately, C.S. Lewis wrote a short book for exactly this purpose. It is titled The Four Loves, and its insights will not just help you understand love better — it will help you love other people better, too…

“Need-Love” Vs “Gift-Love”

Lewis first distinguishes between two ways to love, both of which are found in all four of the four loves. The first kind, “need-love,” is frequently found in children: they love their parents dearly, in no small part because they depend on their parents to survive.

The second kind, “gift-love,” is found in the lover who says “I would die for you.” This is not a request or a demand, so much as an offer. This expression of love expresses the desire to make a gift of oneself to the beloved rather than asking something of the beloved.

Now it is tempting, as Lewis acknowledges, to think of “need-love” as the “bad/immature kind,” and of “gift-love” as the “good/mature kind.” But Lewis thinks this is a mistake. For one thing, love of God is more frequently, and often more fittingly, the “need-love” rather than the “gift-love.” We need God far more than he needs us, and while it is possible to offer ourselves back to him, such an act is only proper if it is animated by a conscious remembering that it is us who needs him.

Moreover, each of Lewis’s four loves frequently have a combination of the two, and both are needed for a healthy love…

1. Affection

Affection, which Lewis attributes to the Greeks under the word Storge, is the love found between children and parents. Lewis calls it the “humblest love,” because the love we have for our family is not the kind that we brag about.

This is not true for all loves: friendship and romantic love might be bragged about, even without any real vanity. Many people love talking about how in love they are with their spouse, or how their friendship to Joseph is second to none — but few people will do the same for their love for their family. To be sure, they may brag about the people in their family, but rarely about how much they actually love their mother or son.

Affection is also capable of loving even those who are, in all other ways, unlovable. It is far less discerning than other loves. Just think of the common phrase that a face is one that “only a mother could love,” or the joke about “my MOM says I’m good at…” This isn’t a defect of Affection; what is special about it is that it sees the good in every person, even for all their faults, and is not easily destroyed, even by great faults. It is affection that prompts parents to tell their children “no matter what evil you commit, what mistakes you make, I will still love you.”

Need-love and gift-love both feature prominently here, and both are healthy — within reason. It is fitting and right that a child would love their parent in a needy way. And, in a way, parents “need” their children too. But both parents and children also give of themselves to one another; it is what makes family life so powerful.

Of course, affection can be corrupted, too. People take advantage of their parents’ love all the time. But Lewis is also concerned about the way parents can corrupt the gift-love side of affection to be so overbearing that nobody in the family is capable of living their own lives. What begins as a desire to give yourself to others becomes a domination of each member of the family. Neither are good.

Ultimately, however, affection is still vital for everyone. It is the first love that we experience as persons, and one of the ways we most fully love God. To have a healthy relationship of affection, one in which we both need our family and offer ourselves to our family, is part of what it is to be fully alive.

But it is not the only love that we experience; in some ways it might be called the lowest form of love. There are still three more, and missing any of them will ruin both your understanding of love and, so to speak, your love life…

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Most people know J.R.R. Tolkien primarily as the writer of the many legends of Middle-Earth, most famously The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But fans are sometimes surprised to find out that Middle Earth was far from Tolkien’s only fictional subject, nor did he exclusively write long epic novels.

Tolkien’s short stories are frequently just as profound, philosophical and fun as his most popular stories. And as an added bonus, you can read them in one sitting.

I recently posted a breakdown of one of Tolkien’s greatest short stories, Leaf by Niggle. But today, I thought I would share three more of his best non-Middle-Earth stories — each one with a classic Tolkien lesson…

1) Farmer Giles of Ham

This was one of the first stories I ever read by Tolkien after The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Farmer Giles of Ham presents itself as a history of a small forgotten kingdom with a proud, if relatively obscure, history.

The main character, Farmer Giles, is very ordinary. He lives on a farm with his family and his talking dog (remember that these are fairy-stories!), and prefers a quiet life. But Giles has a few things going for him: he is brave (enough), he cares about the people (and dog) around him, and he is cunning (at least, he can get things done).

Since his home kingdom has been peaceful for a long time, the king of Giles’ nation is none of those three things, which is a big issue when a dragon invades. Unfortunately, the knights that the king sends to deal with the dragon are similarly unhelpful, as the whole royal society has become incompetent and focused on external show.

This leaves Giles to deal with the dragon himself, though he resents it and considers himself not terribly up to the task. But through some courage and good luck, he manages not only to conquer the dragon, but to get it to do his bidding such that he eventually becomes king of the entire realm.

G.K. Chesterton once said that fairy tales have dragons not just to warn children that there really are dragon-like dangers, but to assure them that dragons can be defeated.

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

This story details another aspect of exactly this theme: if you allow yourself to grow lazy towards evil through focus on unnecessary things, it will destroy you. But confront it courageously, and that journey may itself be your greatest achievement.

2) Roverandom

This is a tale in which Tolkien shows his ability to weave the fantastical and fun into commonplace circumstances. Roverandom is about a mischievous dog named Rover. Rover is playing with his favorite yellow ball when a man picks it up and won’t give it back. Frustrated, Rover bites the man, only to find out that the man is, of all things, a wizard!

The wizard then turns Rover into a toy dog, purchased and lost by a boy at the beach. Thus begins a long journey home, in which he meets mermaids, visits the dark side of the moon, and meets mysterious space-spiders. Eventually, Rover is turned back into a real dog, and lives happily ever after.

Tolkien wrote this story to console his son over the loss of their own toy dog. It is one of the most pleasant fairy tales you will read — a truly delightful romp that glories in its playfulness, and serves as a fantastic introduction to the mind and works of Tolkien at large. Indeed, the keen-eyed among you will find bits and pieces in this story that would later find their way into The Hobbit…

3) Smith of Wootton Major

The final story on this list, Smith of Wootton Major, might also be the most odd of the three. But despite that, or maybe because of it, it is also the most profound of the three.

In fact, it is arguably the most philosophical. In the mythical village of Wootton Major, the Feast of the Good Children is overseen by the Master Cook, who also happens to be one of the most important figures in the village. The primary job of the Master Cook is to create a cake for the Feast, and the cake ends up becoming the central piece of any Master Cook’s career.

The story begins when an under-qualified Master Cook finds a fairy star in the back of his storage room. The Master Cook thinks it’s just a silly trinket, but his apprentice (who is himself from fairy land, or just Faery) warns him that things from Faery are not to be taken so lightly. Ignoring his apprentice’s warning, the Master Cook puts the star in the cake for the Feast of the Good Children as a prize, only for the star to be accidentally eaten by a boy named for his eventual profession: Smith.

This star gives Smith a kind of passport to Faery, and he travels there often when he isn’t running his successful blacksmith shop. But Smith soon discovers that the star, while a gift, is not a license. Faery has rules which he must follow, and makes demands of those who go there. In fact, while Smith sees many great things and meets many remarkable individuals, he is also corrected for thinking that his mere presence is permission to go where he will and do what he wants. Like any great gift, there are right and wrong ways to approach the land of Faery, and all the right ones involve reverence.

This story is an excellent account of Tolkien’s theory of the spiritual realm in general: while real and deeply relevant, the spiritual is not at our beck and call. Not even great saints, priests or mystics have control over the spiritual. At best, we receive permission to enter into it more deeply than most.

Unlike many of Tolkien’s stories, there is no war, no dragon, or even a proper hero’s journey. But while the story is a bit unconventional, it is moving and thought-provoking in a way that the others on this list are not. It is perhaps the best for really thinking about and seeing the world like Tolkien himself.

Thank you for reading!

Everybody could be a better writer. But many people think that the only thing standing between them and the next great novel is the right lifestyle. If only we had a hut in the woods and nobody to bother us, then we could write a great book.

Tolkien struggled with this very problem, for his was a life full of activity. During the time in which he penned his masterpieces, his occupations included: World War I soldier, professor at Oxford, translator of Arthurian legends, contributor to a new dictionary, contributor to a new Bible translation, and father of four children.

But none of this stopped him from eventually becoming one of the greatest novelists of all time. There are more than a few lessons to be learned from Tolkien’s own life and writings — and the wisdom found there will make anybody better with words.

Whether you’re an aspiring author, a student who can’t find time to do their homework, or just someone who wishes they put pen to paper more, this advice will change the way you see writing…

Rule #1: Life Will Happen. Keep Writing.

Largely because of the many hats he wore while trying to write his books, Tolkien’s two greatest works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took years to write. The Hobbit took seven years, and The Lord of the Rings took 17.

Frequently, Tolkien missed deadlines, had to take breaks, and just flat-out could not write. But what he never did was give up, stop trying, or despair of finishing.

Part of the reason for that is that Tolkien really did enjoy his writing: both books famously came out of his larger Middle Earth legendarium, which he wrote largely for his own amusement.

But Tolkien also simply realized that serious writing took time. Frequently, when writers give up on their work, it is because the results are not coming as quickly as they want them to. Tolkien knew that good writing took time, and was willing to take that time to get his books right.

You could even say that good writing is all about perseverance. Writing when the story is flat. Writing when life is hard. And even picking the story back up when it has been a long time (Tolkien had to do this multiple times). Fortunately, that’s easier when you understand your subject matter…

Rule #2: Write About What You Know

Tolkien’s writing was, in some ways, driven mostly by his knowledge of languages. He once said of his own books that:

The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first, and the story follows.

Is this unorthodox? Yes! And you should not try to write that way unless you are a major language and word nerd! But Tolkien was those things, so he wrote books that took his two biggest interests, language and mythology, seriously.

Nobody has exactly the same combination of knowledge and interests that you do. If you are going to write, share why and how those topics intersect for you.

One of the great things about Tolkien’s work is that they are not ironic. He is not embarrassed about his love for myth, or song, or poetry, or adventure. He just wrote a story in which those things are taken seriously because they deserve to be taken seriously. And when Tolkien was willing to take them seriously, his readers began doing so as well.

This will also help you avoid looking ridiculous to people who understand your subject matter. Many have pointed out that the politics and warfare of The Lord of the Rings are consistent with actual ancient and medieval politics and warfare. This makes sense, because Tolkien was an expert on exactly these topics. This made his piece deeper and more interesting than if he were just making it up as he went along. The book doesn’t just sound right; it really is right, because Tolkien knew what he was talking about.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t learn something new to write a book, but you should lean on your core knowledge and experience; what it is that makes you unique and interesting.

Tolkien was the kind of writer who described a book of Finnish grammar as “intoxicating.” If his interests can create a great novel, so can yours. The important thing is to be willing to communicate why these things are interesting. And that is a skill that will serve you well whether you write fiction or nonfiction.

But none of that matters unless you are willing to follow his next rule. For, as you might be surprised to learn, Tolkien was no stranger to receiving harsh feedback on his work…

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This page was created to argue that beauty is important, and it has been incredibly gratifying to see how many of you agree. But sometimes, it is difficult to articulate what it is that beauty actually does to its viewer, and why it does those things.

If you are reading this, you probably agree that it is important to have a healthy relationship with beautiful things. But why? In other words, what will happen to you if you have a healthy relationship with beauty?

This is really important to get right. Fortunately, the German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand was a phenomenal philosopher of beauty, and has some great advice to help us understand:

• What sets beauty apart from merely enjoyable pleasures.

• Why beauty demands a response.

• Perhaps most importantly, how to introduce more beauty in your life in a way that makes a difference.

It all comes down to what beauty is, and how we ought to respond to it. Let’s begin.

The Different Forms of Importance

When Hildebrand is discussing beauty, he first points out that many things in life have the ability to evoke an emotional, even spiritual, response in us. But those responses come in three different forms.

First, there are some things that we appreciate only for our own subjective satisfaction.

We find these experiences in music (certain dance songs), food (Doritos) and, yes, parties, all the time. They are only valuable as a matter of taste: if you do not like chocolate ice cream, no problem. There is no “right way” to respond to it, and the importance of the subjectively satisfying is based entirely on your own preference for it.

There is not necessarily anything wrong with the subjectively satisfying (I, personally, love chocolate ice cream). But the subjectively satisfying can be dangerous because it keeps us focused on ourselves and our own preferences. It is easy to slip from innocent enjoyment to overindulgence.

Second, there are some things that we appreciate because they are objectively good for us.

This is the appreciation of water when we are thirsty, or for food when we are hungry. This importance is not based solely on your own preferences, but the needs and requirements of your nature. We value bad-tasting medicine or painful surgeries because they are good for us, even though there is no enjoyment in the immediate experience for us.

The objectively good is a higher good than the subjectively satisfying, but there is still problem: anything viewed exclusively as objectively good for us is viewed primarily under the lens of ourselves; it is self-centered, even if it is not, technically, selfish in a vicious sense.

That is why Hildebrand introduces a third category of importance: the important-in-itself.

The things in this category are those which present themselves to us as important whether we would view them so or not. In fact, unlike the subjectively satisfying, those things that are important-in-themselves make demands on us. If you do not like them, it is you who are wrong. Hildebrand’s favorite example is a great act of generosity or forgiveness. If you see a man offer his meal to another person, you ought to appreciate that act whether it does anything for you or not. In fact, you should appreciate it even if it harms you in some way. A hypothetical person who says “yeah, I am just not a big fan of generosity” has made a mistake about the kind of thing that generosity is in the first place! The important-in-itself is that which we most properly call valuable, and that is the term I will use for the rest of this essay.

This schema reveals why it is so important to properly appreciate beauty…

The Value of Beauty

If beauty were only subjectively satisfying, it would not really be important at the end of the day. You could take it or leave it with little harm. And if it were merely objectively good for us, it would only be valuable insofar as it helped human beings.

Instead, beauty is properly valuable: when you come into contact with something beautiful, you are experiencing something that requires a proper response: it deserves admiration.

This means that, in experiencing and appreciating beauty, we are drawn into a world that is higher than ourselves. Rather than living only for ourselves, beauty allows us to transcend our own lives and importance and be drawn into the higher order of the world of values. This also means that you also become a better, more moral person through the appreciation of beautiful things, because you practice responding properly to things that are important (like people!)

This makes our relationship with beauty important, not just for our happiness, but for our character. It will harder to be a good person if we are not, in some sense, an aesthetically aware one. The presence and relationship of beauty in our life is of moral, even eternal, importance.

Fortunately, Hildebrand is not just giving us theory; he also has some remarkable advice on how to better appreciate beauty in our day to day…

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Plato’s Republic is widely regarded as one of the West’s foundational documents.

And yet, The Republic stands opposed to almost everything we consider the basis of a free and fair system of living in the West today: democracy, liberty, free expression. Plato predicted that any society built principally around such things is destined to fall into tyranny, because they are fundamentally corrosive to the human soul.

Why? And how do you prevent it from happening?

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So goes the famous saying.

I’ve often felt that only reading modern books, no matter how good they are, is like trying to join a conversation halfway through. Indeed, the Western canon of literature is sometimes referred to as a “Great Conversation” through time — by reading the classics, you can enter this great dialogue.

G.K. Chesterton once made a similar claim to the above: “What we call the new ideas are generally broken fragments of the old ideas.”

You’ve probably encountered this argument — that there are “no new ideas” — several times before. However, arguments are best made with real examples.

In an essay, Chesterton made a brilliant case that reading the classics is essential because it allows us to put supposedly new or “revolutionary” ideas in their proper place, whenever they come knocking.

For example, in the 19th century, Nietzsche put forward his apparently novel idea of “slave morality”: that ordinary, altruistic morality came from a “slave” way of thinking. It was merely a trick invented by the weak to suppress the strong, who would otherwise naturally rule over them.

Chesterton writes:

Nietzsche, as everyone knows, preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior types to fight and rule them. Now, modern people, whether they agree with this or not, always talk of it as a new and unheard-of idea. It is calmly and persistently supposed that the great writers of the past, say Shakespeare for instance, did not hold this view, because they had never imagined it; because it had never come into their heads.

But what if Shakespeare had in fact already thought of it?

As it turns out, we’re only fully equipped to encounter Nietzsche if we’ve already read Richard III. 250 years before Nietzsche was born, Shakespeare writes:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

-King Richard; Act V, Scene 3

Shakespeare clearly had conceived of “slave morality” centuries before Nietzsche. But, says Chesterton, “he weighed it at its proper value and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat.”

Chesterton continues:

What we call the new ideas are generally broken fragments of the old ideas. It was not that a particular notion did not enter Shakespeare’s head; it is that it found a good many other notions waiting to knock the nonsense out of it.

The reason we read the classics, then, is to expose us to the “full picture” of truth, and not just whichever ideas happen to be fashionable in the present moment. This helps us to avoid becoming products of our time, or as Chesterton put it, prevents us from being “merely modern”…

Where to Begin?

Ever since leaving university, I’ve sorely missed having somewhere to go to discuss the great books with others. I’ve failed to find a society or book club where I really feel I belong.

And so… I’m incredibly excited to tell you all that I’ve started one myself!

A few months ago, I got together with a couple of close friends to set up the Athenaeum Book Club. I haven’t announced it too widely yet because we’ve been working on making it better first.

In short, we are an independent, online community studying the great texts of the Western canon — slowly, together. We’re reading a broad range of classic works, from Homer to Hemingway, in dialogue with each other. That’s it.

Join the book club!

Here’s how it works:

• We read a new classic text from the Western canon every month (unless it’s something longer that requires more time)

• We meet every 2 weeks to discuss

• Between sessions, we discuss inside our community chat room

• Once we’ve finished a book, we vote on what to read next

If you’d like to read along with us, there are two main ways of participating:

• Join our biweekly live streams on Substack — free for all to watch

• Join the discussions directly in our “inner circle” via Zoom — paid members only

Our core reading group has become really strong in recent weeks, and the discussions have been so fruitful lately. Now is a brilliant time to join if this interests you.

Our real mission at Athenaeum is to spread our love of classic literature widely — to encourage others to pick up the great books at a time when it is desperately needed.

That’s why most of what we put out on Athenaeum is completely free.

However, if you want to participate fully in the discussions and join our inner circle, please consider a paid membership for a few dollars per month. It helps our small team to work hard introducing others to the Great Conversation…

Join the book club!

P.S. Here is a FAQ page explaining some more of the specifics of format, cadence, reading list, etc.

C.S. Lewis is often referred to as a “medievalist.” And not just because he had such an affinity for medieval literature — Lewis saw our modern modes of thinking as being in profound tension with those of our medieval past.

But why would one of the sharpest minds of the 20th century turn to the intellectual traditions of the Middle Ages for guidance?

To Lewis, the medieval worldview possessed a genuine answer to a very serious modern affliction: the feeling that we are strangers in our own universe.

Medieval man felt that he was an integral part of the universe, because of the “Medieval Model” through which he interpreted it. This Model may hold the key to reviving a sense of meaning today…

The Medieval Model

In the last book he ever wrote, The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis laid out what he called the Medieval Model: the framework through which medieval people understood the universe and their own place in it. This Model has its roots in the Medieval (and Ptolemaic) understanding of cosmology…

To give a (very!) brief overview for the purpose of this article, medieval man believed the cosmos to be geocentric. Just as in Dante’s Paradiso, the universe was understood as a series of celestial, concentric spheres (usually nine of them), with Earth, unmoving, at its centre. This cosmos hummed with harmonic music, as each of its rings was moved by a certain angelic Intelligence. Beyond the rings lay the realm of God.

Everything in the universe had its proper place in the Chain of Being, and the medieval scholar sought to integrate all new scientific discoveries within this framework. The universe was considered intelligible by the minds down here on Earth, who, crucially, were part of its very structure, and Man himself was felt to be a microcosm (literally a “little cosmos”) of the universal macrocosm.

Lewis referred to this unified whole as a “finely ordered multiplicity” — yes, the cosmos was known to be vast and enormously varied back then, but it was also orderly and unified. Where modern thought tends to have trouble reconciling multiplicity and unity (seeing them as opposites), medieval thought saw the overwhelming scale and variety of space and nonetheless agreed that it could be placed within the system.

This all meant that medieval man looked at the night sky and saw a comprehensible system that he undoubtedly was part of. Space, of course, wasn’t understood back then to be infinitely expanding, and so looking up at space was more like looking up into a beautifully ordered cathedral than into a massive, unsettling abyss.

In Lewis’s language, medieval man stood at the bottom of a stair whose top was “invisible with light”; modern man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is “lost in obscurity.”

The 7 Liberal Arts

Lewis concludes his description of the Model with an explanation of the seven liberal arts. Integral to a medieval education was the idea that academic subjects weren’t distinct disciplines, but a connected web through which a soul was trained in its capacity to understand the universe as a whole. Scientific discoveries were not separable from, say, theology or philosophy, for they all came together to explain the pattern of reality.

A medieval university curriculum consisted of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Subjects were connected because they worked together to explain the nature of reality — music and math, for example, stood together as sciences because the universe was interpreted as a great symphony. Lewis explains how each discipline prepared the mind for the next.

Ultimately, the liberal arts trained a mind by mapping it to the inherent order of reality: "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe."

Under the Medieval Model, all manner of human pursuits were pointed toward the same objective, the same telos: understanding ultimate Truth.

Lewis contrasts the Model to where we find ourselves today:

If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance… It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning – or at least a shape – to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance.

Lewis knew full well that we cannot return to the Medieval Model, not least because advances in astronomy have contradicted its scientific claims.

But he saw great value in how it communicated to man a purposeful universe with built-in significance:

I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree.

So, what did he recommend we do?

Unfortunately, there is no single, easy answer — but there are ways that we can subtly reframe our perspectives and see our reality as more meaningful.

In a short but profound essay, C.S. Lewis suggested one way to unshackle our modern minds…

Read more

First of all, thanks to all of you who have found this page already. I suspect we have a lot in common.

“Beauty Matters” is now about 4 months old, so I thought it made sense to lay out why this publication actually exists.

Beauty is a useful catch-all term, I think, for what many of us are searching for. We all want to add more beauty to our daily lives; that’s obvious — but why? What does encountering beautiful things do, exactly? And what is beauty, anyway?

I have come to understand beauty as a kind of “force” that activates something deep within us. Beautiful things startle us awake, reminding us that there is more to life — that there is real goodness to aspire to.

You see, beautiful experiences operate in a way that is distinct from mere pleasure experiences. Pleasure (mental and physical) tends to make us into passive participants, whereas with beauty it’s the opposite. Beauty lifts you, and comes with a sense that you yourself could be more, as philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand once declared:

“Beauty is the archenemy of mediocrity.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written about how authors have conveyed this power of beauty and the ways in which it compels us. It shows up in many timeless works of literature, from Dante to Tolkien, wherein beauty holds a kind of nourishing or healing effect upon protagonists. That said, it also comes with a certain pain…

Because the other thing about beauty is that it appears to point beyond this world of ours. That is the ancient argument that declares beauty a transcendental property, next to goodness and truth. It is a point at which the finite human experience touches upon the infinite — a glimpse of something else.

As something else, something not of this world, beauty comes attached with a sense that this world is incapable of providing the full set of what a human being requires. Human beings will always strive for more of whatever can be accumulated, and yet never be entirely fulfilled by it. This is the famous claim made by C.S. Lewis: that true beauty produces an inconsolable longing that our worldly experiences can’t satisfy.

So much of modern culture is an attempt to fill this bottomless hole. We now have recommendation algorithms powered by entire warehouses of supercomputers, precision-designed to identify the exact thing that will keep you looking the longest. But no matter how much content you consume, even if it’s phenomenally entertaining (or even beautiful), it will always fall short of what you’re searching for.

There is something about an encounter with true beauty (or what C.S. Lewis called “Joy”) that calls one beyond what any screen or even physical pleasure experience can replicate — because what it longs for is beyond this world.

Recently, I’ve been trying hard to make encounters with beauty more frequent in my life, like making little additions to my home and routine. I’ve spent more time in nature, and more time wandering art galleries, of which my city has many great ones. I’ve felt an uplift in my daily contentment, sure, but I’ve also come to realise what Lewis once did: that to relentlessly chase beauty or Joy is ultimately a fool’s errand. You’ll always be left unsatisfied, and so you’re better off trying to figure out what it was the longings were pointing at.

So then, what is this page about?

Rather than to simply seek out encounters with beautiful things — in art or architecture, say — our task as moderns is to try to see beauty (and meaning) in what’s already right in front of us, where we might’ve overlooked it. Beauty’s true power is contingent on our willingness to see it, even through plunging darkness if we must.

Something that gets a lot of discussion these days is this idea of enchantment: the ability to experience everyday life with a sense of wonder. There’s a sense that our world has become overly prosaic, mechanical, and boring. Routines and obligations seem to take up the entirety of one’s existence. The modern world has done an excellent job stripping away the beautiful elements of daily life, and thoroughly disenchanting it.

Unlike past societies, modern man has a much more transactional, arm’s-length relationship with the natural world. The world is a set of resources.

Re-enchanting the world — or rather, our re-enchanting our own perceptions of it — might be the great test of our age, and it won’t be easy. Re-enchantment is going to take work, and it falls upon us to intentionally form a more intimate connection with reality.

Beauty Matters is an exploration of what it means to re-enchant our perspective on life and the world, and how. Beauty is central to this, because it is like a spark or gateway into a more enchanted form of living. It disrupts our habitual numbness, and shocks us into a deeper participation with what’s around.

These articles will be all about understanding, finding, and creating beauty. How do we live in tune with beautiful things, or create them for ourselves? How do we resist the inexorable destructive force of our age: the technological hijacking of our mental faculties and the collapse of creativity? What really is beauty, and what role does it play in adding joy and meaning to daily life?

There are ancient sources that I will lift from, like Plato, and modern ones, like Barfield and Tolkien — and many more in-between. Much has been written on the issues raised in this article, so I would like to spend time travelling through this history of thought and communicating it here as best I can.

With all this, I’m also challenging myself to both read and write more. Because no matter how sophisticated our technological enemies become in this battle, the ancient method — the written word — will always be our best defence.

Whenever I have something useful to add, I’ll post it here. I’ll aim to write at least one thing every week.

I hope this can also become something of a community project. If you’d like me to write or publish something on your behalf in support of the collective mission, please do send it my way. To contact me, you can instant message through Substack or simply reply to any email you get from me.

Thank you for reading this far, and I hope these articles and musings are useful.

See you soon!

P.S. Thanks so much for all the new joiners recently. It’s an honour to have you here.

As a reminder, Beauty Matters is a 100% reader-supported publication.

If you do find this newsletter valuable, please consider taking out a paid subscription for a few dollars per month if you’re in a position to.

Subscribe now

And if you’re just arriving here, below are a few recent essays that I think set out reasonably well what this page is about…

Welcome!

If your childhood was anything like mine, you often found yourself lost in Narnia: the stories that took you beyond the four walls of your bedroom, through the wardrobe in the attic, and into an exhilarating world of magic, prophecy, and mythic beasts.

But like many of the things that sing to us in childhood, revisiting Narnia as adults can unlock entirely new levels of meaning.

It’s well known to most that Lewis’s Chronicles are religious stories, written by a devout Anglican who imbued them with Christian allegories and ethics. However, they were not written for any straightforward moralizing or evangelizing purpose.

Rather, Lewis understood that fantasy tales are to be experienced at a much deeper level than didactic allegory. By composing Narnia, he was attempting to awaken a mindset shift in all of us; one that transformed his own life in his early thirties.

Narnia is instructive because it reveals why adults need mythic stories — and their own imaginations — even more than children do…

Allegory in Narnia

The allegorical elements of Narnia are glaringly obvious at times. Edmund, a stand-in for sin, eats the Turkish Delight before betraying his siblings to the White Witch, seduced by pride. We see the poisonous influence of the serpent in Genesis.

Aslan the Lion then comes, as revealed through prophecy, to save Edmund (and all of Narnia) through sacrifice. Note that, in the Book of Revelation, Christ is described as “the Lion of the tribe of Judah.”

When Aslan gives himself up to the White Witch, he isn’t just killed. He’s taunted by a mob, spat on, and kicked on the way to the Stone Table (much like Christ at Golgotha). He’s later resurrected by a “Deeper Magic,” which can reverse the death of one who willingly took the place of someone guilty.

Biblical parallels permeate the entire series, which even concludes like the New Testament does. In The Last Battle, the “real” Narnia emerges out of the old one’s apocalypse, commanded by Aslan, and the corrupted world is replaced by eternal joy. Death, we learn, is not an ending but another doorway. Aslan now wields judgment, letting some through and condemning others to be “swallowed up in his shadow.”

Beyond Allegory

Notice, however, that there are few simple, one-to-one allegories. Edmund can be read as Adam, Judas, or sin itself. And unlike Judas Iscariot, who committed suicide shortly after betraying Christ, Edmund ultimately repents and finds forgiveness.

This is because Lewis knew that allegory is an unsuitable medium to properly ignite the imagination. He rejected the label “allegory,” preferring to call his Narnia a “supposal” instead:

Suppose there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, what would happen?

So, if not for mere religious allegory, for what purpose was Narnia really written?

The answer lies toward the end of the series, when the Pevensie children grow up. Susan refuses to accept that Narnia was ever real, and gets lost in the material world: “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”

The story ends with the children’s tragic death in a train wreck, and reunion with Aslan in Narnia. But Susan wasn’t with her siblings at the time. She carries on in life, “too keen on being grown-up,” and we’re left to wonder if she’ll make it into Aslan’s “heaven.”

The key point, perhaps of the entire series, is Susan’s desire to grow up. Lewis saw that the grind of modernity (and adulthood) makes us lose a sense of mystery in ordinary things, and with it a sense of meaning. But mythic stories, experienced through the receptive lens of a child (or a childlike adult), open us up to the idea of reality beyond the material world, and new meaning within it.

What, then, is Lewis’s advice to the adult lost in modernity? As we’ll see, it is not an escape from reality through stories, but rather an unveiling of the mystery already within reality…

Read more

We often think of antiquity and the medieval age as ages of “enchantment”— times when people experienced the world as alive with supernatural wonder and mystery.

In their world, human participation was of deep significance, and their actions imbued with a sense of meaning and adventure.

By contrast, human activity in the modern world only has meaning if it can be rationally argued for (if it passes a kind of cost-benefit analysis), and the physical world can be fully understood in rational terms. In this “disenchanted” age, it’s common to hear calls for “re-enchantment,” for us to somehow put magic and mystery back into everyday life — but how?

Fantasy writers C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are often seen as revolutionaries of this re-enchantment through literature. But when Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he dedicated it to a young girl named Lucy Barfield. Lucy was the daughter of Owen Barfield, a philosopher and writer who was perhaps Lewis’s single greatest influence.

Before any of Lewis’s or Tolkien’s fantasy novels were penned, Barfield had produced an astounding idea that breathed new life into the literary world.

Barfield argued that the enchantment of past societies was actually a different stage of human consciousness — one that he could demonstrate, and in time, would be reclaimed once more.

Because although modern humans have evolved away from this ancient mindset, we are also arching back toward a new age of enchantment…

Winds and Spirits

Barfield is best known for developing his idea of the evolution of consciousness. Across a number of published works, such as Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances, he demonstrated how ancient peoples had an entirely different relationship with the world.

Take his example of the following passage in John’s Gospel (per the King James translation), in which we find three similar yet distinct words: “Spirit,” “spirit,” and “wind.”

Jesus answered, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit… The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

– John 3:5-8

It’s eye-opening to learn that these three words were translated by King James’s scribes from only one Greek word: “πνεύμα” (pneuma)! Pneuma means all three modern interpretations at once, as well as “breath”. The ancients’ experience of pneuma was simultaneously the wind that can be felt by the senses, and the spirit that cannot.

According to Barfield, the New Testament was written closer to a time when ancient man identified what was within his own mind as indistinguishable from his surroundings — his thoughts about things were not differentiated from the things themselves. He did not passively observe nature, but was actively involved in its very structure.

In Barfield’s nomenclature, this is called “Original Participation”. A tree or a storm wasn’t just an external thing, but something with its own inner life that connected directly, without barriers, to the person experiencing it. The human spirit was never disentangled from the wind, and this produced an enchanted and unified relationship with the natural world.

The Disenchantment of History

Barfield read the next 2,000 years of history as a gradual evolution away from this mode of consciousness. Humans now perceive that we are entirely separate from nature, which we understand as a set of “dead” objects with which we interact. Instead of something that meaning is inherently a part of, nature is something we project meaning onto.

Things like pneuma were once felt and immediately recognized through a pre-conscious process that produces our perceptions of things. Meaning was drawn from nature as we breathe the air. Now, external stimuli are received and then represented by our modern minds (say it slowly: “re-presented”) as either objective things (breath and wind) or subjective things (spirit and soul).

Ancient man never distinguished between these two categories, and the result was that his connection with nature was richer and his life was charged with meaning.

Without stepping too far into the details of this transition, Barfield asserts that human consciousness evolved into a state of heightened self-awareness. He points to monotheism and bans on idol worship (images treated as though they have an inner life) as revolutionary steps in this evolution, sharpening the distinction between humanity and the world/God.

So then, practically speaking, how can we begin to participate fully in the world again?

Fortunately, Barfield proposes a fascinating solution. Unfortunately, the way forward is not easy, nor is it simply a return to the way things were before…

Read more