This is an excerpt from my latest book. If you’d like to get a copy, you can do so by following the link: The Lost Road: A Search for the Soul of the West

A year or so after my return to Canada, when I was finishing up my BA in philosophy, I was told by a family friend about the group of hermit monks living in the woods of Nova Scotia with whom I would spend the next five years of my life. The friend passed me a book by the group’s founder, a Carmelite monk named William McNamara. I read it with fascination. Here was something new, a secret lying in plain sight, the Gospel of contemplative, mystical Christianity. McNamara’s claim was that Christianity had become effete and culturally insignificant because we had forsaken the mystical heart of the Gospel. God had become man so that man could become God, the Greek Fathers had taught.

Gradually the figure of the Buddha began to shrink in significance for me while the Jewish Messiah and crucified saviour filled my life. And unlike the Buddha, who had no foothold in my childhood or my cultural experience, Jesus was someone whom I once knew. The one I had been looking for was the one I had always known. My childhood devotion returned to me in a flood of feeling but now matured, tested by doubt. My love for him and desire to follow him crystallized and could no longer be ignored. I made a decision; the decision I could not make for the Buddha and became a disciple of the Christ.

When I entered the Carmelite monastery, I knew next to nothing about contemplative Christianity or Western spirituality. I could quote passages from the Upanishads and knew the distinctions among the major traditions of Buddhism. I was all over modern philosophy, from Descartes to Nietzsche, but I had never heard of Plotinus and his formative influence on the Church Fathers. I had never read Augustine or Aquinas. I knew Saint Paul only because I had grown up listening to passages of his letters read at church. I did not know what these letters meant, or who they had been written for.

The monastery was a second childhood and a second education, this time into the forgotten traditions of Western spirituality. I learned that Western spirituality is the product of a creative historical fusion of Greek philosophy and the Jewish-Christian Bible. Paul’s letters were not sent into a cultural vacuum. They were written by a Jewish convert to Christianity who had been educated among Pharisees. They were addressed to well-educated and, in some cases, highly cultured citizens of the Roman Empire. Many of Paul’s followers would have been familiar with the teachings of the great Hellenistic schools of philosophy: Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and Epicureanism. Some of them would have been involved in the Greek mystery religions, the cults of Dionysus and Mithras, with their promises of esoteric knowledge through mystical union with the god or goddess. Many of these extra-biblical presuppositions of his audience were taken into consideration by Paul and, over time, were integrated into the Western tradition.

Christianity is not purebred but a hybrid of various heterogeneous cultural elements current in Southern Europe and Asia Minor in the first three centuries of the Church. These diverse elements cannot be extracted from the thing. There is no pristine Gospel that preceded its interpretation by Greek thinkers. The Gospel is a fusion of opposites and is most alive in the tension between them. It is, above all, a fusion of two very different ancient attitudes to life, death, and the afterlife, the Jewish view, and the Greek. The Jews emphasized the body, the earth, and life in time with all its paradoxes; the Greeks emphasized the mind, eternity, and the spiritual world beyond the body. The Christ unites both as he unites the human and the divine.

To my delight, I discovered that philosophy, to which I was addicted by now, was an essential part of the Christian tradition. It was to be supplemented and expanded by the Bible, but it was no less philosophy for that. Philosophy was the product of “natural reason.” The Bible, by contrast, was God’s revelation. The two were not in conflict but related as the reasoning of the human creature to the revelation of the divine Creator. We may not know the divine in its essence, but every truth we think and everything good that we do expresses something of the divine reality.

Equally important was my initiation into the philosophical and theological world of the Latin Middle Ages, the era of Christendom, which is, to this day, one of the periods of the history of ideas that is least understood. “Everything we think,” Jung said, “is the fruit of the Middle Ages and indeed of the Christian Middle Ages.”¹ He does not exaggerate. Medieval Europeans lived in a Christian universe; modern Westerners continue to live in the same universe but unconsciously. I could not find faith in the Buddha because I needed to first address this unconscious Christianity in myself.

Religious orders are special institutions within the Roman Catholic universe. They do not belong to the parish system, with its hierarchy of laity organized into churches presided over by local pastors overseen by regional bishops. The orders are relatively independent of these administrative structures and are, in some instances, answerable directly to the Pope alone. Existing on a special dispensation from the Vatican dating back to the original fifth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, religious orders are independent havens of spirituality, communities of men and women who band together under a founding vision or charismatic leader for the sake of living a communal Christian life and fulfilling their understanding of the Gospel’s call to perfection. The orders of the Roman Catholic Church fall into two broad categories: active and contemplative. The active orders follow the vita activa and pursue Christian perfection through the service of others: the poor, the sick, and the uneducated. The best-known active order is the Franciscans. Think of Saint Francis and his band of disciples in brown robes wandering the streets of Italian cities in the Middle Ages, caring for lepers and the poor, and you will get the idea. The contemplative orders follow “the higher life,” the vita contemplativa, dedicating themselves to prayer and the liturgy, which they enact tirelessly in the solitude of a cloister, which is often set apart from the world in a rural area or a wilderness.

Contemplative orders practice solitude, regarding prayer as their chief work and restricting communal life to the liturgy and some shared meals. They might take vows of silence, speaking or singing only in liturgical prayer. The Church, with its strong Neoplatonic undercurrent, has always held that the vita contemplativa is the higher of the two styles of religious life, just as the contemplation of God is higher than any good work we might do here on earth. The assumption is that since the destiny of every human being is life with God, contemplation is to be regarded as the highest act of the human being and the perfection of all human potential.

The Church teaches that God calls us to serve, and the ultimate service is to contemplate the divine, which is the life of the angels and saints in heaven. All Christians shall experience the truth of God in the visio beatifica, the vision of God granted to the saved after death, as taught by Paul: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12). Some men and women, it is believed, are called by God to practice the contemplation of God here on earth, to begin to live the heavenly life now. The Church has always treasured these vocations and protected them through the institutions of contemplative orders, communities of monks, nuns, and priests who segregate themselves from society to create the ideal conditions for contemplation. These conditions are assumed to be (1) solitude; (2) simplicity, that is, voluntary poverty; and (3) community, a society of friends who share the same desire and protect each other’s contemplation.

In the vast literature on this subject, the story of Martha and Mary from the Gospel of Luke is cited often. In it, Jesus visits two sisters in their home: a care-worn woman, Martha, and her more spontaneous and intuitive sister, Mary. As Jesus sits in the house with Mary at his feet, listening to every word he says, Martha bustles frenetically in the kitchen, preparing food for their guest. Exasperated, she complains to Jesus: “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” Jesus answers, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38–42). The contemplative orders pursue the one thing necessary, the Church argues, and should not be begrudged for not participating in the more practical work essential for creating a Christian society.

I joined an offshoot of the Discalced Carmelites, the order that produced the great sixteenth-century Spanish mystics Saint Theresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. The Carmelites date back to the eleventh century when certain Crusader knights chose to stay behind in Palestine and live as hermits on Mount Carmel, the biblical site where the prophet Elijah was carried to heaven on a fiery chariot.

The group I joined was returning to the “primitive Carmelite ideal” and living a contemplative life in the wilderness. They had two monasteries at the time I entered the order. I started at Nova Nada, a hermitage on the site of a century-old hunting and fishing lodge in the woods of Nova Scotia. Later, I would move to their monastery in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of southwest Colorado, which was the older of the two foundations and was called simply Nada. The word nada means “nothing.” It is John of the Cross’s term for the path to union with God. We must let go of everything, any concept or image of God that might have once consoled us.

Nova Nada was an oasis of solitude amid tall white pines on an uninhabited lake seven miles from the nearest community. The hunting and fishing lodge, which dated back to the early twentieth century, had been laboriously converted by the monks into a dozen buildings: a large main communal house on a forested hill, an octagonal chapel, and an adjoining library on the shore of the lake, and a collection of hermitages scattered throughout the woods, ranging from small dark and draughty log cabins to modern solar-heated eco-retreats.

In short, I left the university and entered the Middle Ages. The five years I spent as a brother with the Discalced Carmelite Hermits were among the most formative years of my life. Even if I wanted to reject everything I believed then, I could never shake off the habits I acquired in the monastery, above all, the pleasure in manual work, the love of solitude, and the need for community life to balance it. But most important to the story I wish to tell, I discovered in the monastery how far the West has fallen from its spiritual roots, which lie in the contemplative culture kept alive in monasteries.

While monasticism expresses a universal pattern in human civilization, the motivation behind Western monasticism differs in an important way from other well-known forms of monasticism, in particular, from Buddhist monasticism. The Christian monk is not trying to liberate himself or others from a world that is considered to be mostly or perhaps entirely illusory. He is not trying to achieve a higher state of consciousness. Enlightenment is not the aim. Rather, the Christian monk is responding to a call from God to more deeply revere and cultivate his humanity. This always entails a deeper reverence and care for nature. The Christian monk is endeavoring to rise to the occasion of God becoming incarnate in natural history. Once God has become man, we no longer need to transcend nature or our humanity to reach the divine; quite the contrary. We need to rather cherish, affirm, and develop what is most human and natural in us.

The Carmelite Hermits spent half of their time totally alone, and the other half engaged in communal activities: liturgy, work, and common meals. My day started at 5 a.m. with lectio divina in my hermitage, stoking the fire in the wood stove. Lectio divina is the ancient practice of spiritual reading. One reads slowly and with concentration, stopping when inspired by the text and savouring what insights might come. While the traditional text for this monastic practice is scripture—and I certainly discovered my love for scripture in those days, regularly working through the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and the New Testament—I was encouraged to read widely. Sometimes it was Thomas Aquinas, sometimes Dostoevsky, and often it was philosophy or psychology of religion—the point was to follow the inspiration. The emphasis was not on the what but on the how. When one reads with a spiritual attitude, any text can be suitable for practice.

At 6 a.m., the bell would ring through the woods, and the monks would gather in the chapel for Lauds, the recitation of the psalms, followed by half an hour of silent meditation. Our meditation practices were as varied as our reading habits. Christian meditation is far less focused on technique than Yoga or Zen. This is no accident. It is indicative of fundamentally different understandings of what is needed for spiritual growth. Meditation in contemplative Christianity is always only a means to an end, not a technique for attaining higher consciousness, and never an end in itself. The end is prayer, which is always God’s work in us, not the result of a method.

In those days, I preferred to sit half lotus on the floor. I had learned the Eastern Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer, the repetition of the words of the blind man on the roadside calling out to Jesus when he hears him passing by, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18: 38) which the Hesychasts of the Orthodox tradition developed into a kind of Christian Yoga. One repeats the phrase silently, in rhythm with one’s inhalation and exhalation, until the words sink into the heart and continue perpetually and without effort. One starts by twenty minutes of repetition, extending it bit by bit until the mantra becomes a constant background of one’s thoughts and activities. In this way, the Christian learns to pray “without ceasing … in all circumstances,” as Paul advises (1 Thess. 5: 16–18). The phrase itself says everything that needs to be said. It names the Christ as the living presence in the soul of the one who prays, “the image of the invisible God” (1 Col. 15). It positions the soul correctly in relation to this one and only Word of the Father through whom all things have come to be (John 1: 3). The soul is not identical to God, but the one who cries out in desperate need of divine redemption. The one who prays the Jesus Prayer says, I need you, I cannot do this, I cannot redeem myself, and I long for your redemption. To know this in one’s heart is to feel the first effects of the Christ’s redemptive act.

On Wednesday and Friday mornings, it was Mass at 6 a.m. The liturgy would be stripped down to the barest essentials—no songs, no homily, no noisy “signs of peace” or jokes from the pulpit. After the readings, we sat in silence for twenty minutes. At the end of that period of meditation, the priest stood up and raised the patina holding the offertory bread, intoning the words of consecration: “Blessed are you, lord of all creation, through your goodness we have this bread to offer. Fruit of the Earth, work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.” The symbols of the ancient liturgy profiled against the contemplative silence became luminous with sense. In that quiet lakeside chapel, the Mass never ceased to blow my mind.

I had an hour or two to myself after morning prayer and would usually spend it in the woods or paddling on the lake. The workday began at 9 a.m. and ended at 4 p.m., with an hour of silence followed by Vespers (more recitation of the psalms and silent meditation). Work for me meant getting dirty: cutting and stacking firewood, building hermitages, or maintaining and repairing them. By 4, I was exhausted and filthy. From May to October, I took a solitary swim at the end of the workday. I had my secret pond, which I could access easily by mountain bike. Slipping naked into the cool dark water after a day of outdoor labor and feeling the dirt lift away was nothing short of a baptism. I did it as often as I could.

The work week finished with a common meal on Friday and the Eucharist on Sunday morning, followed by recreation with the community, volleyball in the summer, cross-country skiing or ice skating in the winter. We were hermits, to be sure, but a more lively human community I have not known before or since. We were united in a sustained effort to grow in love. The monastery, according to the ancient Benedictine rule, is a school of charity. Solitude is for the sake of living together more deliberately, deeply, and generously. We were not friends and likely would never have spent any time together had we met each other in some other situation. But what we shared in common—our commitment to the Christ, whom we believed in more than we believed in ourselves or our projects and goals—made us a family.

The Lost Road: A Search for the Soul of the West

This is Part Three. If you’d like to read the first part, it’s available for free here.

This is an excerpt from my latest book. If you’d like to get a copy, you can do so by following the link: The Lost Road: A Search for the Soul of the West

I felt decidedly unenlightened upon my return from India and sunk into the worst depression I have ever known. I could not resume my old life but had yet to find a replacement.

When I wasn’t studying, I spent my time roaming around the national parks of Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland with a large disobedient Golden Retriever named Ben. But I had made a significant advance since returning from India. I knew what I had to do: I would dedicate what abilities and energies I had to the question John had put before me. I would ask with my whole existence whether life as such was any good. I would ask what the question itself meant. What was life such that I could question it? What was “the good” that I demanded of life, as John had?

Buddhism taught me that no one could answer this question for anyone else. Later I would learn that my inner resources were woefully inadequate, that without what Christians call “grace,” and Shin Buddhists call “other-power,” nothing genuinely spiritual takes hold. But I would only come to this understanding by first believing that I could, indeed that I must, proceed on my own.

Buddhism, or more generally India, taught me a second thing, perhaps even more important. It taught me that I would not find the answer in a distant land. Wherever I went, I brought myself with me and my land and my culture. I could no more leave these than I could step out of my skin. The answer, if there was one, would have to come from home. I realized that I could not become a Buddhist without disowning my tradition, Roman Catholicism—which I scarcely understood, for I had never really looked into it.

I was moved by T.S. Eliot’s writings about his own failed journey to the East. After completing a dissertation at Harvard on Buddhist philosophy and writing The Waste Land (his most Buddhist poem), Eliot made an about-face and converted to Anglicanism. He felt that he could not become a Buddhist without abandoning his Western identity. And this he was not ready to do. Since my experience so closely matched his, I quote him at length.

Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit … left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after—and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys—lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle … My only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do. (Eliot 1934, 40–41)

I would only add that, from the perspective of middle age, it seems to me that we can never really forget “how to think and feel as an American or a European.” It was not that I did not want to surrender my spiritual heritage for “practical as well as sentimental reasons.” It was rather that I could not. Raised by devout Catholic parents, I knew just enough about it to know that I did not know enough about it to make such a decision. My European spiritual ancestry was like the bedrock of my soul: I was standing on it but had never examined it. And yet it was immovably there all the same. With the best of intentions, I could not become a Buddhist then, and even less so now. My ideals collided with the factual reality of my historically situated soul. We might be able to bring unconscious cultural assumptions into consciousness through study and reflection, critiquing and refining them over time—and I have dedicated myself to little else in the past thirty-five years—but we will never succeed in totally uprooting them.

Tradition is the vehicle for understanding. Because cultural presuppositions are always relative and finite, they can never be the only way—but without them, there is no way.

I spent my twenties investing myself in Western philosophical and theological traditions. First, I immersed myself in the study of philosophy; theology would come later. My days and nights were spent in the company of Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Hegel, and Husserl. My obsessive approach to study caught the attention of some of my teachers. For the first time in my life, I was at the top of my class. But the academic achievement was not what I was after. Scholarships and academic posts were not part of the razor’s edge that I sought. Academic philosophy, however useful it was to me then, struck me as a compromise with a world whose value I was putting into question.

I realized with a steadily growing despair that my life was a series of lies. At the center of it, all was the lie of consumerism: the deception cultivated through advertisement, social attitudes, and that nebulous cloud of unstated cultural assumptions which Hegel called “ethical life,” that my future was an infinite horizon of possibilities for self-construction through shopping, travel and accumulated, exotic experiences. I could no longer pretend that I had not been living based on this assumption. The consumer lie was not someone else’s problem, someone else’s self-deception. It was my problem. I was not different from my contemporaries. I, too, lived in faith that the self could be endlessly varied and steadily improved through shopping, recreation, and experimenting with sex and drugs. Disgusted by myself and the age in which I was condemned to live, I turned away from the world and fled to the wilderness.

The path I started on in the Himalayas finished three years later in the woods of Nova Scotia, with many detours through the Rocky Mountains, the lakes and rivers of Northern Ontario, and the barrens of Newfoundland. I hiked, climbed, and paddled into the wild wherever I could find it, always with a backpack full of books. I was not only travelling externally; I had begun the inner quest, the search for my true self, and I was no longer interested in associating with anyone who did not know what that meant. Despite my depression and discouragement, a profound spiritual awakening had begun for me as I trekked in Ladakh and Nepal. The Buddha had in a way appeared to me in the darkest moments of my youth like a beacon in a stormy sea, calling me to leave the safe and the familiar and to seek the path of wisdom, whatever the risk. I read everything I could get my hands on that spoke to this call.

Convinced for no particularly good scholarly reasons that authentic Buddhism had gone north into Tibet, I had headed directly to the mountains, where photos of monasteries clinging to the sides of cliffs surrounded by the highest peaks in the world enraptured me with hope. The symbolism of climbing, physical climbing, was necessary to me. I needed to physically express what I was internally undertaking, an ascent into the truth that required leaving most of humanity below in the valleys and the lowlands of ignorance and craving.

A glow of transcendence emanated from the symbol of the Buddha wherever I encountered it. At first, the meeting was through books. I had never been much of a student, but after John’s death, I started to read. Hesse’s Siddhartha and Kerouac’s Dharma Bums caught me up to speed with the counterculture, for I soon discovered, much to my annoyance, that I was not the first to head East in search of the self. I also gobbled up travel diaries, especially those that led into Tibet: The Way of the White Clouds, Seven Years in Tibet, and The Asian Journals of Thomas Merton. I began a meditation practice.

The Buddha inspired in me an indescribable hunger for truth. When I got to India, I was delirious with excitement to be in a culture where art and architecture were shaped by the figure. At first, I felt the Buddha’s presence in dark and smoky Tibetan monasteries draped with multicoloured mandalas of the five celestial buddhas who have always existed and whose dharmakaya radiates through the ten realms. I remember feeling it with particular force in a remote monastery in the mountains of Ladakh, standing before a two-story high statue of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of infinite compassion. But there were countless other small temples and stupas adorned with statues of the figure. I soaked it up like medicine. Whenever I looked upon the serene figure of the seated Buddha, eyes half-closed in meditation, a gentle smile on his lips, my soul ascended above the pain of the world. The junk culture of my middle-class North American upbringing receded from view, and I stood entranced by the possibility of liberation.

It was not a thought that gripped me so much as a feeling. The metaphysics of Buddhism, the jargon of the eightfold path and the mechanics of karma left me cold. Still, I was transfixed by a vague but powerful feeling that there was more to life than met the eye, an intimation of a depth dimension to existence, of which I knew nothing but which the Buddha had penetrated. I could follow him if I chose to. All that was needed was a single act of renunciation. All I had to do was say No to the world.

Several months into my trip, the buzz wore off, and I bottomed out in despair. In an ashram in Bodh Gaya in Northern India, eating a vegetarian lunch with a group of Westerners on a silent retreat, I crashed against a psychological limitation as real as a physical fact. I had just checked in for my one-month retreat and had been shown to my room by a kindly monk in a saffron robe. I looked around the dining hall at the earnest faces of the other retreatants and felt the seriousness of the place. They looked a lot like me: scruffy young Westerners, tripping around Asia, trekking in the mountains and sleeping in budget hotels, looking for something they could not find at home. Here, certainly, I could find fellow companions.

But that is not what happened. Instead, the opposite happened. I fell out of love with the Buddha as quickly as I had fallen in love with him. I lost faith in the Dharma if I had ever had it. The mirror that the group held before me startled me into a painful, humiliating awakening. The whole thing—not the others but me, my thing, my “quest” for the Buddha—stank of self-deceit. To this day, I cannot quite explain my reaction. Without finishing my lunch, I suddenly stood up and, without a word to anyone, walked out the door and left.

I was not afraid of silence or religious commitment—on the contrary. I had already made my decision to live for the truth and to give everything that was needed to achieve it. But the symbol of the Buddha was only playing on the surface of my imagination. It was an ideological fantasy, in Jung’s terms, a projection and a symptom of repression. The Buddha did not grip me in the depths of my psyche, not enough for me to find the resolve to cut the rope. Something was alien about the whole business. There was no path for me in the East, only a possibility that was not mine.

I fled the world, but not into a Buddhist monastery or an ashram. I headed as deep into the woods as I could get. Asia was already mapped and explored and crowded. But there was still wilderness back home, a vast wilderness free of automobiles, billboards, and shopping malls. There were mountains that had not been climbed, unmanaged forests, and long waterways that opened up to me alone in a canoe and led me away from the noise and madness of modern life. Thoreau in my pocket, I sought simplicity and elemental existence in a life roaming the wilds of Canada.

When I wasn’t canoeing, hiking, and camping, I studied philosophy with an intensity that surprised even me. What was real in my experience? What was true in what I had learned from my parents, my teachers, and my culture? Did God exist? If yes, then what was required of me? If not, then what? Why should I continue living as though life were inherently meaningful and satisfying? Nothing was more important to me than these questions.

I was reading all the existentialism I could get my hands on: Kafka, Sartre, Camus and especially Dostoevsky. I discovered Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in a used book sale in Calcutta. I remember the moment vividly. It was a dusty open-air book market put on by a Soviet publishing house near the station where the train on which I was traveling had made a brief stop. It was January 1988. I no longer remember the name of the town. Images of the ordinary Indian chaos of beggars, hawkers, cows, and masses of people pushing in every direction come back to me. Most of the books were of no interest to me, but I needed something to read on the long train journeys to which I was subjecting myself.

I knew nothing about Dostoevsky, and I do not remember what thought prompted me to buy the book. Perhaps it was the only novel on the table. At first, I was hooked by the existential dilemma of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, with whom I immediately identified. If God did not exist, then everything was permitted, Raskolnikov reasoned. Morality was merely a method of socially controlling the masses. The great ones, the honest ones, the ones who know that there is no God, and therefore no good or evil, could live with the vertigo of nothingness and assert their own will on the world with impunity. History would reward them even if their contemporaries did not.

Raskolnikov conducts an experiment on himself to see if he is one of the great ones or one of the sheep. He murders his landlady and her daughter with an axe to see if he is up for the truth. Can he live beyond the social conventions of good and evil? The rest of the novel describes in excruciating psychological detail the unraveling of his personality under the weight of his inextirpable, guilty conscience.

I could not put the book down. I was more shocked by Raskolnikov’s encounter with the Christ than I was by the murder. The prostitute, Sonya, whose life is a pathetic series of misfortunes and injustices driving her ever deeper into self-degradation, implores Raskolnikov to turn himself in and teaches him the Gospel of mercy, forgiveness, and resurrection. One encounter earlier in the book stood out for me. Raskolnikov, the atheist, interrogates Sonia about her faith.

“And what does God do for you?” he asked, probing her further.

“Be silent! Don’t ask! You don’t deserve!” she cried suddenly looking sternly and wrathfully at him. “That’s it, that’s it,” he repeated to himself.

“He does everything,” she whispered quickly, looking down again.

“That’s the way out! That’s the explanation,” he decided scrutinizing her with eager curiosity, with a new, strange, almost morbid feeling. He gazed at that pale, thin, irregular, angular little face, those soft blue eyes, which could flash with such fire, such stern energy, that little body still shaking with indignation and anger—and it all seemed to him more and more strange, almost impossible. (Dostoevsky 1914, 295)

Nothing about the injustice and hopelessness of Sonia’s situation justifies her faith, but neither could any cruelty or misery of life take it from her. Christ had called her and would redeem her in the end. Raskolnikov is converted by the apparent irrationality of her witness. Reason has led him to violence, nihilism, and madness. But perhaps there was something beyond reason? And at the moment that I read this, in some very secret place of my soul not even known to myself, I too was converted. There was no power within me for self-transformation. I could not reason myself into truth. I could not meditate my way to enlightenment. Salvation came from without, or it would not come at all.

The Lost Road: A Search for the Soul of the West

This is Part Two. If you'd like to read the first part, it's available for free here.

“It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.” W. Somerset Maugham

When I was twenty years old, I took a semester off from school and traveled. I was struggling through an English degree at the University of Ottawa at the time. I shelved my books and bought a pair of sturdy Italian hiking boots, a backpack, and a plane ticket to India. It was 1987, and traveling then, as I say on occasion to my students, was still possible. One could get lost. I went East with no clear plan to return. I carried with me an already well-read copy of Lonely Planet India, a little leather journal my grandmother had given me on departure, and a money belt stuffed with 3,000 US dollars—my entire savings after a year of mind-numbing bureaucratic drudgery in a government office.

I had grown up in Ottawa, one of six kids, and had more or less happily occupied my teenage years, skipping school, skateboarding, and watching mob movies. Then, at eighteen, something happened that changed me and set me on the lost road, which is the theme of this book. My twenty-year-old first cousin, whom I loved like the brother I never had, was found hanging from a tree. John had bought a one-way bus ticket from his suburban home in Montreal to a small town in Ontario where, one afternoon, he walked into a patch of woods at the side of a road, climbed a tree in his bare feet (his shoes placed neatly at the trunk), and hanged himself from a length of rope he had purchased that day in a hardware store.

We talked incessantly about why he did it. But none of the offered explanations helped me understand. What shook me to the core was not the possible reasons for his decision, which we will never know, but the fact of the decision itself. John had taken his life.

Until that moment, I had not thought of my life, the world as I found it, as a limited whole, as Wittgenstein once put it. I had never really considered it as one thing.

My life is divided into two distinct and incommensurate periods: before and after John’s death. For better or worse, John made me a philosopher. My intellectual and spiritual journey began with his death. In the pain and sorrow of it, I began to question. Because my intellectual path began in personal tragedy, philosophy could never be for me a merely academic discipline. It may disguise itself as such in order to secure a place in the knowledge industry, as I have disguised myself as a professor for the past two decades, but it really does not belong there. Compared, say, to history or physics, philosophy has little knowledge to disseminate. Philosophy is the practice of reflecting on life as such, of distancing oneself from it (to the extent that one can) in the interest of radically questioning it. What is life? Is it a good thing? There is something essentially human about the capacity to ask this question. It may be the single trait that most distinguishes us from other creatures. Existential reflection might just as readily be considered an imperfection as a virtue. It may be evidence of the dignity and greatness of the human being. But this capacity is also the source of the distinctive way that humans suffer.

John’s death was all the more painful and puzzling, given his cheerful, happy-go-lucky disposition. John was no morbid teenager but a merry prankster, always laughing and finding humor in whatever situation he was in. His was not the type of carefully rehearsed clowning that can be so annoying, the trickery of one who is always a step ahead of the conversation, strategically plotting his next moves. John’s humor was spontaneous, a direct expression of genuine mirth. And he was kind. He was a deeply personal young man who looked you in the eye and recognized your presence. He seemed to take the pressures of his upbringing in his stride, effortlessly acquiring the grades in school that were expected of him. He was no jock, but he played football and basketball well. More interesting to me (I was resolutely unenthused by sports), John had an encyclopedic knowledge of the golden age of rock music. I learned from him the essential bands of the sixties (the Who, the Zombies, the Animals), which I would then further research in secondhand record stores at home.

But at the age of twenty, John stepped back from his life, considered it as such, and concluded that it was not good. What went through his mind as he climbed the tree? Whatever else he believed, he thought that life was not worth the effort it was demanding of him. He believed this with a conviction that overrode his instinct for self-preservation. What did he expect would happen afterward? Did he fear the judgment of the God of Catholicism, traditionally understood to be so severe that suicides would be buried outside church grounds? Or did he expect nothingness? How can one expect nothingness?

Something had given way beneath me that I had, until then, regarded as solid ground. I found myself suspended over an abyss. I could not speak about it with my friends. I tried once, and the result was devastating. They shrugged it off and rolled another joint. And yet nothing was more important to me; nothing occupied my thoughts more. After John died, I no longer laughed at things as I had. The teenage sneer left me, and a pensive sadness took its place. I no longer fitted in.

I began to read, to really read, as though my life depended on it. The books were not particularly scholarly—Herman Hesse novels, mid-twentieth-century travel logs of British sojourners to Tibet, popular introductions to Zen. I was drawn to stories of men who traveled East searching for wisdom, men who could no longer tolerate the lies of the West. The thought that somewhere, hidden from modernity in the highest mountains of the world, an order of spiritual beings existed, as they had for thousands of years, safeguarding the secret to human happiness, entranced me. This fantasy (for that is all it was, as I was to find out) freed up limitless stores of energy in my soul that had lain dormant since my birth, the breakthrough energy, the power to will one thing. It gave me the resolve to break with everything I knew, to throw caution to the wind and risk it all. I pinned a huge, detailed map of India on my wall and studied it daily. I worked in a government office in my spare time and saved every penny for a year. I dreamed about the spiritual breakthrough I would make in the Himalayas at the feet of a lama who had selected me for special training. I would make the breakthrough for John, the breakthrough he couldn’t make. I would do what he tried to do but by the wrong means, to liberate myself from suffering. I would expose the lie that had entrapped him and which also held me and my generation captive.

In the distance that opened between my peers and me, I became a wandering Buddhist. I held myself aloof from my friends. I still partied with them, but more than not, left early or talked of nothing but India and the wisdom of the East until I became a bore to them. I was deliberately following in the footsteps of Larry Darrell, the hero of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Traumatized by his experiences in the trenches of the First World War and disgusted by the mindless hedonism of the roaring twenties, he travels to India to train at the feet of a guru. After years, he returns to America, to find his old friends middle-aged, neurotic, and miserable. Larry becomes a magic, healing presence among them, a messianic figure whose stillness, depth, and sheer goodness are inscrutable to others. He changes everyone who comes in contact with him. Like Larry, I would find the truth that would set me and others free.

It was not clear to me then why I felt so sure that the answer to the question would be found in the East. It was probably because the lamas of the mountains of northern India, Nepal, and Tibet, were about as far from my familiar world as could be imagined. I was going to the ends of the earth to find the pearl of great price, the one Jesus says the merchant is willing to sell all he has to purchase (Matt. 13: 45–46).

One thing seemed clear to me at the time: the answer to the great matter could not be found in the tradition in which I had been raised, Irish Catholicism. My family was perfunctorily churchgoing, even devout when appropriate, but without much reflection. No one talked of spirituality. I heard nothing much about the saints and certainly nothing at all about Christian mysticism. As a teenager, I found the religion of my home to be mechanical and full of absurd inventions that seemed to me to be designed to make people feel better about their sad lives. It seemed that Western religion, which I identified with my local parish experience, did not ask the question that John had brought to the forefront of my attention. I was wrong about that, as I was about most things then, but my misconception of the situation was powerfully productive. My conviction drove me away from the bourgeois comforts of my family home, from the partying and pleasures of young adulthood in middle-class North America circa 1987.

I backpacked to the sacred sites associated with Buddhism: Lumbini, on the border of Nepal, where the Buddha was born; Bodh Gaya, where he was enlightened sitting under a great Banyan tree that is still there; and Benares, where he taught the Four Noble Truths. I traveled with a pack stuffed with cheap Indian paperbacks on Eastern spirituality: Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, Hermit in the Himalayas, and a copy of Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal, which I had pinched from my best friend’s father’s bookshelf. I trekked to remote monasteries in the Himalayas and attended every religious ceremony I could. I practiced meditation everywhere, in my budget hotel room in Kathmandu, in a tent by the side of trekking trails through high mountain passes, or under the stars seated on the sand in the Thar desert that stretches between India and Pakistan.

I did not find the Buddha, at least not the Buddha I was looking for. But I found my desire for God, which has guided me ever since, like a star in the night sky.

I also found beauty. I found nature. I found my love for wilderness. The first mountains I ever saw were the Himalayas, the abode of the gods in Hindu mythology. These sacred heights, soaring 20,000 feet into the azure blue Himalayan sky, shall remain forever for me a symbol of infinity. One looks up and sees, at first, nothing but an immeasurably high wall of rock, snow, and ice. The immensity of these mountains cannot be described: one must experience it first-hand. As the eyes become adjusted to the saturated scene, one notices details: countless spires and crags, hidden valleys, and inaccessible dark caves high up in the side of granite walls. Suddenly a small avalanche appears high up, a waterfall of snow tumbling thousands of feet with a distant roar. Beyond, one discerns further peaks and unseen landscapes, uninhabitable to us but the home of snow leopards and other spirit creatures. I could not get enough of it. I followed local guides through the mountain passes and stayed in huts I rented for a few dollars a night from the poor mountain people. If I was lucky, a pack mule carried my gear. Most of the time, I shouldered my heavy pack, climbing, always climbing. It was in the Himalayas that I learned that a human being is never more human than when he climbs. We should remain forever climbers. The one-pointedness, the fusion of physical and psychological effort, the strain that issues naturally into a forgetful trance, as the now of each step placed ahead of the last overtakes the mind. And the people of those mountains! Elfin children with leathery skin dressed in dark homespun clothes, watching over goats and sheep. Gaunt young men, sinewy and strong as oxen, ready to help me get to wherever I was going. People living in small stone shelters perched on the edge of steep ravines thick with cedars. And everywhere, little shrines, painted white, sparkling in the blinding sunlight and the thin mountain air, housing perhaps a Buddha surrounded by candles and the remains of incense sticks or a Shiva lingam.

After a month in the mountains, I descended to the plains and funneled alongside thousands of other train passengers into the great cities of northern India: Delhi, Varanasi, Calcutta. I saw for the first time in my life what poverty looks like: lepers waving rotting stumps in my face, heaps of reeking trash on street corners crawling with rats and children picking through it, hoards of people pressing in on me everywhere—a great mass of humanity in excess of all proportion, of all possibility of love. Who could care for such a multitude? They all seemed to demand care so desperately. Who could satisfy such infinite need? If it could not be satisfied, why did it exist?

Before I got on the plane home five months later, I had a few things that I wanted to give away: a woolen blanket and a huge unopened jar of peanut butter that I had brought with me because I believed stupidly that I would not be able to eat the local food. I decided to take my humble offerings directly to one of the bigger slums in Delhi, which I had looked at often from a distance. Slums have a fortress-like quality: the tin roofs and cardboard walls mound up around each other, forming an almost impenetrable ramshackle wall concealing the life of the community inside. I wanted to see inside. I did not realize that even a slum has its sense of itself, possessing as much dignity and self-respect in its way as a gated community in the US. It had not occurred to me that, without an invitation, I would be trespassing. I walked in through a narrow opening and into a labyrinth of shacks. Garbage was everywhere. Children peered at me from the darkened doorways of huts leaning in every direction. Mangy dogs sniffed about in the gutter.

I was only a few steps in when I was confronted by a young man with a fierce look on his face. “Mister,” he said sternly. “You should not be here. Go.” He was right, of course. I had no right to be there, voyeuristically gaping at others’ suffering. I passed him the blanket and dropped the jar of peanut butter into the arms of the tiny, wide-eyed girl who was watching our exchange. Her thin arms coiled around the jar like a sea anemone. She did not know what it was, but she saw that it was big and bright and new and from the West. She turned and ran home with it.

The degree of human misery I encountered exceeded anything I had previously imagined. It was not the mysticism of India that impressed me but the crushing poverty of the masses. Still, there was mysterious serenity amongst the poor. I saw it in the faces of the beggars, young and old, an inner freedom from their situation, a lightness that seemed to take everything in its stride. Was their religion at work in this, stressing, as it did, Shiva’s ritual dance of death and rebirth? Did recognizing the circularity of life enable the average believer to approach suffering and death with lightness? Or was it that the caste system, with its rigid social determinism, alleviated them of the anxiety of upward mobility? Everyone, according to the law of karma, is exactly where they should be.

When I returned to my privileged home in Canada, I was an atheist. What I found in the East, however different from anything I had seen before, struck me as no more authentic than what I knew back home. Princely monks in red robes lorded it over the peasants who supported them. When I approached them for spiritual advice, they asked me for money. The sadhus with dreadlocks and painted bodies hung around the Hindu temples avoiding work. Young Indians treated me like a king from a land of promise. On the trails and in the budget hotels, I jostled with droves of other Westerners backpacking through Asia with the same Lonely Planet guidebooks.

Now that I reflect, thirty-five years later, it strikes me that Buddhism taught me something crucial. This path I was on, this search for the truth that transforms, I had to walk alone. Five centuries before Christ, Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, renounced his princely lifestyle along with the conventions of Brahmanism and the ancient religion of the Vedas and resolved to find the truth for himself. Nothing short of a personal experience of reality, he believed, could count as truth. No one could save him. No ritual passed down through countless generations was of any use to him. He needed to learn the secret of life, death, and liberation for himself. He had nothing to help him in this search other than his intellect, his will, and his experience.

Full Book: The Lost Road

I watched Paul Kingsnorth’s New York Times interview the other day—along with half a million others. I’m glad religious, techno-skeptic voices like his—articulate, moderate, and courageous—are finding their way into the mainstream press. I expect we’ll see more agrarianism and anti-consumerism aligning with a return to traditional monotheism in the dark days ahead, as “the machine,” as Kingsnorth calls it, tightens its grip on our humanity.

The most dramatic moment in the interview comes when Kingsnorth suggests that we may have summoned a demon with the development of AI: one of the “principalities and powers” Paul speaks of, a being from another dimension, maybe even the anti-Christ. It makes for gripping viewing. But I’m not sure what good it does to tell people that the darkness engulfing their families in tech addiction comes from beyond this world. It risks disavowing the all-too-earthly stages by which we have willingly degraded our humanity over the last fifty years: first to post-war consumerism, then to boomer individualism, now to millennial technological narcissism—while behaving more and more like machines in our work and our relationships. To reference my own field, academics have been training themselves—and their students—to write and communicate in a machine-like way for decades, eliminating rhetoric, ignoring artistry, and producing the appearance of an exhaustive survey of “the literature” in bland, objective, nondescript peer-reviewed papers. It’s not a great quantum leap to ask an LLM to do that writing for us. That might in fact be a good idea, freeing some of us for more satisfying intellectual work

Other parts of the interview feel strangely dated: for example, the anxious exchange between Douthat and Kingsnorth about “uploading our minds,” which is nowhere near a real-world possibility, instead of the thing actually happening before our eyes—handing over our distinctively human work of thought, expression, and communication to LLMs. In a few years, each of us will have a personal AI assistant—gender, ethnicity, personality selectable. She will know everything about me and tailor her guidance to my worldview and biases. She’ll write my emails, balance my bank account, edit my books, scan the internet in any language for things of interest to me, and give me psychological and—why not—religious advice. Roboticists are already designing the mechanics for how I could have sex with her.

This is what I see coming: not the fantasy of mind uploading, but the replacement of human community with machine companionship, a legislated, regulated, and consumer-friendly narcissism enabler. Think of it as the iPhone 20, no longer a handheld computer, just as the original iPhone was no longer merely a phone.

It won’t be a demon—at least not a particularly new and strange one. It will be depressingly familiar: a consumer product, designed to indulge ordinary human sin. No one will ever bother us again. And we won’t need anything from anyone. Like Wentworth in Charles Williams’ novel, Descent into Hell, we will achieve our desire, total possession of the beloved, by substituting an avatar for the real one, preferring a slave, totally obedient to our demands, to a flesh and blood human being. The black irony is that we will be the only ones enslaved in the end.

Mass resistance to total mediation is futile. But as Canada’s gloomiest technological determinist, George Grant once said, it always matters what each of us does. No demon is forcing you to upgrade your phone every other year, shop on Black Friday, waste your evenings on Netflix, or spend more time with ChatGPT than with your colleagues. We choose these things freely, which means we can also choose otherwise.

The academic prejudices against C. G. Jung that took hold in the 1980s—charges of charlatanism, obscurantism, pseudo-science—still linger, even as his cultural influence refuses to fade. When I published The Dark Ground of Spirit in 2012, I deliberately avoided a chapter on Jung so as not to alienate a philosophical readership or privilege one psychodynamic school over another. Freud, Jung, and Lacan all stand in the shadow of Schelling and the Romantic psychologists. Yet of the three, Jung remains closest in spirit to Schelling, and that alone warrants a fresh look.

Barry Stephenson’s recent critique of Jung’s “myth” in Christianity, Metaphor, and the Urge to Truth (2025) calls out Jung’s pseudo-empirical method. Drawing heavily on Blumenberg’s metaphorology, Stephenson has no objection to Jung inventing a myth for “modern man”—every civilization needs a myth, and modernity is conspicuously poor in that department. His issue is Jung’s claim to have discovered this myth empirically in his patients’ psyches. Jung’s myth is the product of his own considerable creativity, but he naturalizes it as though it were a scientific finding. With this naturalization, certain Jungian prejudices—anti-Semitism, for example, or a gnostic, apolitical inwardness—get smuggled in as if they were rational, scientifically grounded conclusions.

Stephenson is dead right about Jung’s scientific pretensions. For orthodox Jungianism this critique is potentially devastating. The Jungian analyst who believes there exists an empirical criterion by which Jungian therapy can be shown superior to the countless alternatives in the self-help marketplace is on shaky ground. He may deferentially cite “Professor Jung,” gesture to the twenty volumes of the Collected Works behind his desk, and indulge his analyst’s fantasy that a reductively empirical science of the soul is on offer, but he has no leg to stand on.

Stephenson’s critique has made me spell out why I believe Jung still matters for the philosophy of religion—and why a big part of my upcoming book, The Soul of Nature (Cascade, 2026), is devoted to this always-controversial figure. The long and short of it is that I don’t believe Jung invents the myth at the heart of Jungianism; rather, he receives it from thinkers and visionaries who were in many instances more sophisticated in articulating it than he was.

My apologia for Jung rests on three points.

First, Jung is a major representative of what Charles Taylor calls the expressivist tradition in the philosophy of language—running from Hamann and Herder to Cassirer, Gadamer, and Ricoeur—which resists the mainstream modern nominalist reduction of language to a mere labeling tool. For the expressivists, language is originally symbolic, collective, and world-disclosing. “The symbol gives rise to thought,” as Ricoeur says, not the other way around. Nominalism leaves us with a nature without logos; expressivism sees language as the primordial, symbolic environment of human consciousness, as natural to man as forests were to our simian predecessors. Stripped of pseudo-scientific claims, Jung’s archetypes belong to a vital and increasingly relevant minority tradition in philosophy that rejected the reductionism of Russellian-Fregian predicate calculus.

Second, Jung is one of the most forceful 20th-century defenders of the idea that the human being is essentially religious. His notion of the psychological imago Dei—however inconsistently he handles it—recovers an ancient conviction found in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Calvin, and Schelling: that human consciousness is by nature oriented toward transcendence. His unfortunate decision to call this image “the Self” invites pantheist and New Age misreadings, but the underlying thesis—that religion is intrinsic to human development—remains crucial in a post-secular age.

Third, and most important for my forthcoming book, Jung is a living link between twentieth-century psychology and the nineteenth-century, theologically inflected theories of the unconscious that anticipated both Darwin and contemporary emergentism. These theories stemmed for the most part from a tradition of Protestant esotericism dating back to the first century of the Reformation. Jung will be best understood when he is read, not as a follower of Freud or a clinical psychiatrist, but as a Protestant esotericist working in psychology. With Weigel and Böhme, Oetinger, Schelling, and Hegel, Jung revives the ancient idea of Christian gnosis but in a post-Reformational secular idiom. Like his theological predecessors, he sought not mystical union but gnosis—a supra-rational knowledge of the divine that lends itself to conceptual articulation and has real-world consequences for our understanding of nature. Protestant esotericists developed several themes that remain worth scrutinizing, if only because of their enduring appeal among unchurched Christians. These include: an evolutionary history of religion culminating in Christianity; a God who becomes conscious in and through human history; skepticism toward ecclesiastical authority in favor of individual insight; and a hope for an age that reconciles science and myth. The tradition has its problems but it is serious enough to deserve an immanent, that is, a theological critique.

Theologians will find no end of heterodox entanglements in Protestant esotericism and plenty of good reasons to be cautious. But the tradition still has something to teach us. It has always been driven by the desire to modernize otherwise—by the conviction that another modernity is possible. And most importantly for Christian theology, the Protestant esoteric myth gives pride of place to the Christian revelation of the coincidence of opposites—divinity and humanity—in the historical figure of Jesus. This is explicit in Schelling and Hegel, but it is also unmistakably present in Jung. Despite his lack of traditional faith (which he readily confessed), Jung simply could not leave Christ alone.

So yes—Jung again, but only after we strip away the scientism and return him to the theological lineage he spent his life pretending not to belong to.

As a young philosophy student, I wanted to survey religion from a safe distance. I thought that if I studied enough, I could first come to understand what it was all about, how all religions fit together, and make a rational assessment of things before committing to any one. But this, I later learned, works no better in religion than it does in love. It is like saying I must know many lovers before I give myself to one. To love is to choose one person among countless possible ones—and, in choosing, to let the others fall away. Only through this sacrifice of possibilities do the depths, the mystery, the ecstasy of love reveal themselves. I came to realize that if I wanted to experience the world as a religious person does, I had to enter one tradition fully. That meant saying no to others. Yet the deeper I went into contemplative Christianity, the closer I came to the mystical heart of all religions. Two committed contemplatives, whose faith in their respective traditions is no longer up for negotiation, can understand each other far better than any skeptic can understand either of them.

This book is my most personal yet. It is the story of my discovery of contemplative Christianity thirty-five years ago, its ongoing importance to me personally as well as its cultural significance today for a declining Western civilization. Contemplative Christianity is a lost road for most. But the road remains there, cracked and in disrepair and blocked by the clutter and waste of our consumer society. It can still, nevertheless, be traversed. And it leads directly to the soul of the West.

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