Postmodern ageusia and its symptomatic agnosticism, however, derive from an unexpected ailment: the attenuation of reason under rationalism. In sidelining faith to privilege reason, having mistaken their relationship as a zero-sum game, modern rationalism did not enlarge its capacity as intended. Rather, it unwittingly imposed limits upon its range, enclosing it within the finite when it had once traversed the infinite. No longer looking beyond itself toward the transcendent, reason comes to think too little of its own capacity, and thereby too readily concludes its search in a posture of resigned uncertainty.

Based on appearances, the postmodern person would seem to exemplify the Neo-Scholastic conviction that the natural desire for God is not innate but elicited, grounded in an obediential potency and therefore not constitutive of human nature itself. Yet even though the palate has become malformed, the appetite itself has gone unsatisfied, nor indeed could it be satisfied by the finite objects to which reason turns. If human reason reflects the imago Dei, then its act is unrestricted in scope, unfolding according to the infinite measure of what it images and only fully sated upon beholding truth itself, bare and unmediated by finite concepts.[2]

In the end, agnosticism betrays itself. If it belongs to the nature of reason to affirm the truth, then skepticism will never satisfy. Left unsated by the finite, reason must be reunited with its partner faith. Faith alone can unveil the face of the eternal toward which reason already tends, and so ennobled beyond its presumed limitations, reason can again answer the invitation to feast upon the mystery from which it comes and for which it was made.

The Rise of Agnosticism at the Limits of Rationalism

In his encyclical Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II identifies the two daughters of rationalism: agnosticism and relativism.[3] At the outset, one would not think them to be related to their parent, given their divergent traits and appearances. While reason had been vaunted by rationalism, it fell out of favor in postmodernity, which claims little certainty on its behalf beyond positive knowledge and settles instead for skepticism, especially in matters of human purpose.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the sidelining of faith to make greater room for reason did not enlarge its capacity and scope as intended, but rather contracted them. As though having pitched a canopy that closed off the vast sky above, postmodern reason can look only to what lies within its finite horizon, and whatever extends beyond its empirical gaze is offered up not to wonder but to doubt, not to marveling but to indifference.

For de Lubac, identifying the trajectory of agnosticism nearly a half-century before its appearance within this encyclical, “the most distressing diagnosis that can be made of the present age, and the most alarming, is that to all appearances at least it has lost the taste for God.”[4] John Paul II adopts and forwards this same diagnosis of postmodernity, which, rather than recognizing the capacious scope of human knowledge, has “preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned,” and thereafter, grows apathetic: “with false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence.”[5] Once the light of the transcendent has been lost, blindness even in immanent matters follows, and with the dignity of reason so obscured, many postmodern philosophies conclude that “the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where everything is provisional and ephemeral.”[6]

Postmodern ageusia results, then, not from a true absence of desire, but from an attenuation of reason. If the finite mind is taken as the sole and final measure of truth, nothing beyond its radius can be known, but must be relinquished in the name of agnosticism. Nevertheless, though this posture arises as a corollary of rationalism, it is not as though reason thinks too highly of itself. Rather, it considers itself far too lowly. Unaccompanied by faith, it has forgotten how to reach for what transcends itself, withdrawn into habituated doubt. Yet the summons for postmodernity has not been extinguished. However far it advances, doubt will always shun contentment, and the skeptic never finds true rest.

Always, the appetite for God remains, even if the taste has been lost, for “the idea of God within us is perpetually menaced with extinction, but is always reborn.”[7] This hope for rebirth is not unfounded, but emerges precisely from the nature of reason itself, made in the imago Dei, for which nothing short of absolute truth can fully satisfy. As the psalmist claims, deep calls unto deep: God left his fingerprint upon the human person at creation, and only the infinite reaches of God can correspond to that impression.

De Lubac, Blondel, and the Natural Desire for the Infinite

Agnosticism cannot help but refute itself, and for de Lubac, this is because “the intelligence can never abdicate. It cannot renounce its own formal law, it cannot cease judging, and that always means affirmation.”[8] Behind every doubt, the unresolved question lingers and haunts, and reason ever inclines toward certainty despite its best effort to claim indifference. John Paul II situates the drama of human knowing within an irrepressible orientation towards ultimacy: “it is the nature of the human being to seek the truth. . . . Their search looks towards an ulterior truth which would explain the meaning of life. And it is therefore a search which can reach its end only in reaching the absolute.”[9]

Although the taste for God may wane, the hunger for meaning never truly goes sated. This discontentment reveals not only the image in which reason was made and the true object of its desire, but also the pervasiveness of God in each act of intellection, or, as Thomas Aquinas describes: “all knowers know God implicitly in all they know.”[10] Even if not known by name, God belongs to every act of knowledge because he is truth, and for this reason, de Lubac writes, “in its primary and permanent state the idea of God is not, then, a product of the intelligence. It is not a concept. It is a reality: the very soul of the soul; a spiritual image of the Divinity, an ‘eikon.’”[11] Because reason bears the imprint of God, no finite object can perfectly satisfy its search for ultimate truth; rather, it consistently looks to name and to encounter unmediated that which has accompanied it in each act from the beginning. Always, it seeks union with truth, with the absolute, with God.

This perspective casts the debate on the natural desire for God in a new light. While de Lubac often frames the issue in the classic terminology of nature and grace, the dyad appears under many names throughout theological discourse. In each case, the pairing concerns the relation between the human and the divine, the particular and the absolute, the creature and the Creator. And, in the context of modern rationalism, reason and faith.

As a key precursor to de Lubac on this issue, Maurice Blondel articulates the dyad in terms of philosophy and theology, particularly in his The Letter on Apologetics. For Blondel, while philosophy can provoke certain questions, especially regarding the purpose and destiny of humanity, it cannot supply every answer. It cannot give grace, though it may disclose the “vital need” for it.[12] In this way, the human person discovers within themselves a demand that exceeds their own capacities.[13]

If the natural desire were truly only elicited, then postmodern agnosticism could leave one content not to know what lies beyond the canopy pitched at the limits of reason. It would leave the skeptic in a kind of self-contained stability, at least within the immediate horizon of reason and human nature. In actuality, however, this desire for the true and final object of reason always remains, described by Blondel as “possible but not legitimate to thrust aside—and which we can never suppress.”[14] The skeptic may try to dismiss that ever-present tug, yet “to turn away from one’s destiny is not to free oneself from its control.”[15] Inevitably, this very dynamism, Blondel continues,

constrains us to the avowal of our insufficiency, leads us to recognize the need of a further gift, gives us the aptitude not to produce or to define but to recognize and to receive it, offers us, in a word, by a sort of prevenient grace, that baptism of desire which, presupposing God’s secret touch, is always accessible and necessary apart from any explicit revelation, and which, even when revelation is known, is, as it were, the human sacrament immanent in the divine operation.[16]

To operate only within the finite horizon, without ever opening itself to more, reason would never attain true fulfillment but would rather produce for itself a kind of hell: the attempt to be happy on its own terms, grasping at fulfillment by means of anything but God alone.[17] This restlessness would endure were reason not brought to rest through faith, which discloses the term toward which it was already implicitly directed. Faith removes the canopy that reason had erected over itself and lifts its gaze to the infinite sky, thereby both ennobling its capacity and awakening delight in the true object of its fulfillment.

Abyss Calls to Abyss: From Postmodern Malaise to the Gratuity of Grace

Blondel understands the relation between reason and faith as one of correspondence: reason discerns the need at the end of a question, while faith expands the horizon of inquiry, ushers in the mystery, and carries reason to satiety. As he writes,

For both faith and reason teach that the supernatural must be humanly inaccessible. What faith imposes upon us as a reality, reason conceives as necessary but impracticable for us. The one declares to be gratuitously given what the other can only postulate inevitably, so that they coincide not by overlapping but because one is empty and the other full.[18]

Through this complementarity, deep calls unto deep. In de Lubac’s estimation, this depth of emptiness and fullness can be formulated in a mode of self-discovery through self-gift: “man needs a beyond which can never be grasped, a beyond that always remains beyond. He cannot find himself without losing himself. At each stage, the final solution of the human problem lies in adoration. It can only be found in ecstasy.”[19] Faith stirs reason to reach beyond; it restores proper taste by redirecting its hunger toward the object that alone can satisfy it.[20] Faith speaks a Word to reason—not in an altogether foreign language, but familiar and comfortable for its native tongue to adopt—and, indeed, enlarges its capacity once received, so that it may not only begin to speak but to sing with this Word. The contemplation that faith brings to reason does not abolish its autonomy but opens a new horizon, emboldening it to behold what it had previously anticipated only by impressions. Postmodern malaise is thus met by grace as an altogether gratuitous and yet resonant reawakening, as reason comes to recognize what it was truly made for, even if beyond its wildest imaginings.

The innate desire for God, as recalled by de Lubac in the face of postmodern ageusia, carries with it the risk of presuming upon grace for human fulfillment, thereby threatening to strip grace of its defining gratuity. Yet the intellect’s natural appetite for absolute truth, by which it tends beyond the finite horizon, does not constitute a claim upon its giver but rather finds itself in a posture of complete humility before the indefatigable generosity of the one upon whom it depends.

When the sun pours forth its rays in abundance, travelling across an immense distance and through the dark and cold reaches of this corner of the universe, it touches even the smallest blade of grass with warmth and light. The blade was designed to receive light, but it cannot give it to itself; it is fulfilled by light alone, but it cannot place a demand upon its giver. And yet the good news for the blade is that while the sun is not compelled to shine, it nevertheless always does and will—every new day, every dawn that comes with the morning, to flood the earth with its bright rays, its very self—again, and again, and again.

So too must the human person trust in the abundance of God, who has imprinted his image upon the heart and placed within reason an appetite and a “taste” that can only be satisfied by the infinite. For he has made us for himself, and in him alone do we find our fulfillment. Indeed, in him do we find ourselves.[21]

What was I doing in Rome? When I landed in the Eternal City on a warm Sunday in May of 2025, I was apprehensive and second guessing myself. I had come for the Exorcism and Deliverance class sponsored by the Ateneo Pontificio Regina Apostolorum (APRA). While I was excited for the opportunity, I was also nervous, wondering how I might be received as a Greek Orthodox priest from the United States. In addition to being worn down by the travel, I was upset about missing some important family events that week. After the bumpy—speedy—ride to my hotel from Fiumicino Airport, I dropped my baggage at the concierge and decided to take a walk while my room was readied. It turned out this was a good decision.

My eyes were glued to Google Maps as I headed out in the general direction of Saint Peter’s Square, regretting my dress shoes and quickly weakening phone charge. While surrounded by gorgeous churches, lively cafes, and charming cobblestone streets, my dour mood kept me from taking much note. Then, something shifted. I gradually became aware that the already crowded sidewalks were swelling with more and more people. Excited chatter seemed to be coming from every street corner. To avoid the congestion, I cut down an alleyway, but it was blocked off by a few stern-looking police officers: I had no choice but to go with the flow. Somewhere, there was also a voice broadcasting. What was going on—some sort of political rally? As I continued to wander and wonder, government vehicles raced by, sirens blaring in European “hi/lo” fashion. Annoyed at all the fuss, I finally maneuvered myself into the portico of a little market to plan my return route back to the hotel.

That is when I finally realized what was going on. Peeking around a pillar at the now unmoving crowds, I saw the people were all looking in the same direction, rapt. A group of twenty-somethings were on their tiptoes trying to see; a little girl was on her father’s shoulders waving frantically at something. Before them—and me—about 100 yards ahead was Saint Peter’s Square, and the man speaking was the newly elected Pope Leo XIV. My heart swelled. I watched and listened with the help of the giant video monitor far ahead on the square; though I could not understand a word, I knew it was a message of love and compassion. The expressions on people’s faces and their joyous waves and shouts to “il Papa” attested to this. Ashamed of my attitude leading up to this moment, I finally allowed myself to listen and simply be in the moment.

The warmth of this Sunday encounter stayed with me throughout the week and, to my surprise, was manifest during the class on Exorcism and Deliverance. What I thought would essentially be an academic affair, surrounding protocols and directives, was something completely different. While there was much learned about process, medical issues, and history, the course truly revolved around Christ’s love and compassion in the face of human suffering. This was about God and his people. Along with valuable new information and pastoral tools, I came home from Rome with renewed hope in what can happen when people of different faith traditions listen to one another with a common purpose: the healing and liberation of God’s people.

A Journey of Inquiry and Faith

I live in the Boston area, and Rome may seem like quite a distance to travel for a class. But the topic of possession and exorcism has long fascinated me as a priest and researcher. Throughout my years of seminary I read as much as I could on these topics and then focused my doctoral work at Emory University on the issue of exorcism in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. How were we to make sense of this ancient, neglected practice in the modern Church? While few Orthodox clergy have ever led an exorcism, the prayers remain a part of the Church’s Great Book of Needs (Great Euchologion; Ευχολόγιον το Μέγα) and connect us to the mystery of Christ’s compassion and ultimate victory over evil.

Following my doctoral work, I contemplated the next steps in my research. My awareness of the Exorcism and Deliverance course sprang from a pop culture source: I had read Matt Baglio’s The Rite and even seen the related movie. A friend also sent me a New York Times article about the course, a rather superficial treatment but intriguing. Over the next several months, I read the course description online, conferred with some Catholic friends, and began to explore the possibility of attending. Though the class is designed for Roman Catholic clergy, members of other denominations are also considered. I knew there would be much to learn from striving and sharing alongside my Catholic brethren, and the experience would help triangulate my research. Thus, I went ahead with the application process, secured the necessary documentation, and I was accepted.

As I made notes in preparation for the class, my areas of focus were those explored in my doctoral project. First was hierarchical permission and guidance. While the rubrics of the Orthodox Christian prayers of exorcism require the permission of a hierarch, very few hierarchs are familiar with this unique ministry and rarely speak of it; in addition, most clergy either do not dare or simply do not bother to approach their hierarchs about exorcism. Many well-meaning priests just do what they think is correct and remain on their own. In related manner, guidance and training within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese were of concern. There is no official training available at the local or Archdiocesan level (certainly nothing like my class in Rome), and there are very few clergy and lay people who might be qualified to offer it. This situation leaves clergy at a loss for how to proceed with an exorcism, with no indication of which prayers should be read, in what manner, and according to circumstance or context. Too much is left to chance.

Concerns about mental health and medical factors were also important. The Archdiocese has no examination protocols for exorcism inquiries; there are no directives for conducting investigations into medical or mental health history. Once again, clergy are likely to do what they think is correct and compassionate. Upon interview, a parishioner may just seem to need a physician and be dismissed; conversely, the priest may too quickly opt for the exorcism prayers, which are dramatic in content and form, potentially causing agitation in someone with medical or psychological issues. The intricate relationships between possible spiritual ailments and psychological and medical pathologies deserve much more attention than they receive. Seeking to do good, Orthodox clergy can inadvertently do great damage.

In addition to a host of questions about cultural and occult phenomena, clergy fitness was also a consideration. In the Orthodox Church, there is no formal order of exorcist. Every priest is an exorcist, yet few priests know what to do in an exorcism. One Greek Orthodox priest I interviewed some years ago suggested that perhaps not every priest was fit for this ministry; he proposed that we “leave the surgery to the surgeon.” Yet he also stressed the importance of Christ’s exorcisms and other things that we might not understand about his ministry.[1] Was it wise or even responsible for clergy to avoid this mystery of the faith?

With these questions and concerns in mind, I appeared at the threshold of the beautiful APRA lecture hall. I wondered if I would find the answers I sought—or at least some of them. My questions and points of research were mostly aimed at technical issues, liturgical and pastoral barriers to exorcism in the Orthodox Church. Was I missing something? Perhaps the answer would be discovered in this class. In my heart, I believed that in the company of my Catholic brethren my perspective would become more complete and the puzzle pieces would come together.

Engaging the Mystery of Healing

I was a little overwhelmed on day one of the seminar, but the staff was friendly, and I quickly met a friendly Methodist pastor from Ohio, Stu, who became my new best friend. As we engaged our cohort, it was always exciting to meet someone who spoke English—but making friends goes beyond words: cheerful smiles and goodwill abounded. Observing my classmates during registration, meals, and breaks, it was impressive to see the diversity of clergy and lay leaders. There were brothers and sisters from a host of monastic backgrounds and orders; I enjoyed seeing them laugh and chat. After all, though we were there with specific academic and professional concerns, we were also there to discover new friendships in the context of faith. There were counselors, psychiatrists, and physicians; we heard from historians, professors, administrators, and dedicated faithful who lead deliverance ministries in parishes throughout the world. Of course, there were the exorcists: priests and hierarchs from Italy and beyond, many of whom were colleagues of the late Fr. Gabriel Amorth. They led the presentations with compassion, dignity, and a strong sense of community in Christ.

This sense of community was largely framed in daily worship, at the beautiful campus church stewarded by the Legionnaires of Christ. For the first time I witnessed a Mass in Latin, and one of the fathers mentioned he did a “little singing” at Mass, thinking my Orthodox brain might appreciate that (he was correct). I was moved by how many of the participant clergy liturgized, received Holy Communion, and otherwise engaged the services. I thought, quite a bit, about the connection between how we pray, how we think, and what we do about what we believe. During the services we prayed for the life of the world and celebrated the life-saving mission of Jesus Christ. The Cross of our Lord was connected to the crosses we bear; Christ was carrying us in our suffering, and our suffering was redeemed and transfigured by the Cross. In our seminars, we applied these spiritual beliefs and commitments to the plight of those who suffer with unconventional spiritual issues. Without this grounding in faith, the rest of our efforts and strivings would prove ineffective.

Within the seminars, many of my research questions and concerns about the ministry of exorcism were addressed, and much more was garnered. For example, the presenters highlighted the pivotal role of the hierarchy concerning exorcism: only priests specifically authorized by their bishop may lead the Church’s official liturgical ministry of major (or solemn) exorcism.[2] As mentioned earlier, while there is no specific order of exorcist in the Orthodox Church, the sparse exorcism rubrics of the Great Book of Needs do clearly state that clergy must have the express permission of the bishop to perform the service.[3] Thus there is a mutual sense of dependence on the authority of the local bishop. Further, it is important to note that the concepts of authority and obedience, for both Orthodox and Catholics, are not about dominance; they are instead about pursuing God’s will in mutual humility and respect. Clergy are the spiritual children of their hierarchs, as their parishioners are under the loving care of clergy. The Orthodox refer to this as “τάξις,” a sense of liturgical and spiritual order for the sake of the Church’s life-saving mission. In addition, the existence of this seminar itself spoke to the importance of guidance and training. Here was an incredibly organized group of faithful people, teaching, training, and learning together, all with the aim of bearing wisdom and healthy practices back home to their respective pastoral contexts. I appreciated the attention to organization and protocol; I was awed and moved at the pastoral demands on Catholic clergy. Exorcism is not a “one-off” ministry. Catholic exorcists walk with their people long term, encouraging a life in the Church and participation in the Sacraments. As with the Orthodox Church, exorcism is not only a liturgical event but a situation under the umbrella of ongoing pastoral care.

Moreover, I was relieved to hear a great deal about what have been termed the three “lenses” for understanding spiritual ailments in therapy: the spiritual, psychological, and medical.[4] We enjoyed the presentations of several medical professionals, who urged us to adopt healthy practices of investigation and pastoral care, giving attention to the symptoms of various medical pathologies. We were even referred to available questionnaire templates designed for the investigation process. It was not enough just to assert the importance of care and responsibility; we were given the very tools to enact our commitments. I found my instincts and concerns on this level were shared: many presenters warning us about the danger of seeing only spiritual ailments where there may be something more complex. The vivid, truly heart-wrenching narratives and case files shared by some exorcists and physicians reminded us of how important it was to be thorough. Further, it was important to realize it is not always a question of “either/or”—but, instead, the point of intersection between various pathologies and phenomena.

We might consider, for example, the hypothetical scenario of a person complaining to a priest of frightening experiences, such as hearing voices, seeing things that should not be there, or obsessing about certain ideas. What if the priest never bothered to explore the person’s medical records, home life, or family history? Treating the afflicted person on a solely spiritual level could have catastrophic psychological and medical consequences. We may be doing the person a great disservice and, while trying to help, exacerbate the existing issue and negatively affect the person’s general wellbeing.

My questions about clergy fitness were certainly engaged as well. The Catholic practices surrounding the order of exorcists and obedience were explored in depth throughout the class, and this resonated, reminding me of the “surgical” metaphor mentioned earlier. Within the Orthodox Church, it seems a hefty burden for every priest to be charged with the ministry of exorcism, though not all of us may be fit for this ministry. As one of the presenters reminded, exorcists not only need to exhibit high standards of piety and grace but also need to be ready—and always ready.[5] When the bishop calls, it is time for faithful, courageous action.

In terms of spiritual service outside the role of clergy, I was intrigued to learn about the Catholic Church’s deliverance ministry, to which there is no official counterpart in Orthodoxy. Deliverance ministry represents a kind of private prayer that may be engaged by lay people with pastoral oversight. For example, those gathered may offer prayers for healing and intercession, proclaim scripture, and renounce sin. It is vital not to confuse deliverance ministry with the official liturgical rite of exorcism, which is a juridical and liturgical act of the Church under the auspices of the local bishop. Further, the Church emphasizes the indispensable role of clergy in the ongoing liturgical and pastoral care of those who suffer with unconventional spiritual ailments, from the least to most dramatic situations.[6] Deliverance ministry is never a replacement for exorcism or the care of a priest. However, under the auspices of the local bishop and with discernment, deliverance ministry can provide space for impactful prayer, mutual hope, and vibrant Christian fellowship.

This part of the discourse also provided an occasion for me to learn about the development of the Rite of Exorcism within the Catholic Church, from the earliest codices to the current version within the Roman Ritual. The rite is highly systematized with voluminous rubrics, directing the priest according to circumstances and content, all in coordination with Canon Law.[7] The Great Euchologion holds the four exorcisms of Chrysostom and three of Basil (along with some minor prayers against evil), yet the Orthodox Church never developed a systematic framework of clarification to house them. There are other exorcism manuscripts, spanning various Orthodox jurisdictions, but those texts also offer little help in terms of guidance. While the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese certainly needs to clarify the protocols surrounding the ministry within the life of the Church, the seminar offered an encouraging affirmation that exorcism within both churches is driven by the same purpose: the healing of God’s people. Over the centuries, pastoral approaches, manners of systematization, and juridical structure have developed differently, yet the heart of the exorcism ministry remains the same within both great houses of faith.

The possible connection between occult practices—including wildly popular Pagan practices—and the danger of demonic activity was also addressed within the presentation. In fact, I could barely take notes fast enough as clergy and medical professionals, along with an anthropologist and law enforcement personnel, outlined the myriad unconventional religions, cults, and organizations functioning in Rome and throughout the world. While some, such as Wicca, are generally benign, the presenters revealed many groups as dedicated to evil not only in spirit but in devastating practice, including Theta Noir (a kind of AI cult) and the ghastly 764 Network (linked to child pornography).[8] We were warned against taking these threats lightly and downplaying the problem of superstition, lest we expel the evil one from our house of faith only to discover “the devil has re-entered . . . through the window.[9] Evil thrives in our complacency.

This discussion about the insidious progression of evil in our lives made me recall how M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist experienced with possession cases, asserted that whatever possession is, it makes people “very bad, very dangerous.”[10] In the cases he explored in Glimpses of the Devil it is terrifying how subtle and seemingly innocuous the early stages of demonic influence seem to be. No one sees it coming. Root causes range from isolation and trauma to psychological problems left untended and dabbling with occult practices. While demonic attacks are not necessarily tied to personal issues or sin, for some the passions lead them away from the presence of God until they no longer recognize themselves—and in some cases, begin to take on the virtues of the devil. As we were reminded throughout the class, evil is everywhere, always at work. It is evident in our selfish actions and the lies we tell, manifest in the wicked aggression of nations, and indeed revealed in the assault on the image and likeness of God through possession.

Finally, there were the spiritual convictions of the seminar, where I discovered profound unity between Catholic and Orthodox tradition. During his opening remarks at the seminar, Fr. Jose Enrique Oyarzun echoed Saint Paul and insisted that whenever one member of the Church suffers, the entire Church suffers.[11] This was an elegant reminder of the deep mystery of Christ’s love. Wherever God’s people suffer, there is God’s merciful hand and there must we all be. To love God is to love his people, and we must act upon this love.

This commitment to meeting the suffering of God’s people with the healing grace of Christ is central to Catholic and Orthodox theology. The rescue mission of Christ—the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection, Ascension and glorious Second Coming—all point to the victory of the Lord over evil. Exorcism is a sign of this victory. As Saint Athanasius reasoned, exorcism would not even be possible had not Christ accomplished all for us.[12] Many presenters drove home the idea that when we lovingly engage the ministry of exorcism, we are enacting the ministry of our Lord; we not only signal the victory of Christ but also mystically participate in its unfolding. We are part of Christ’s mission, alongside the saints of the Church who contested with evil for the sake of God’s children. At the core of the seminar were the adjurations of Saint Paul to remember that love never fails and to do all things with love (1 Cor. 13:8; 16:14). 

Looking Forward: A Worthy Fight

Quite late on the last day of the class, most of us were grabbing a coffee when “tubular bells” (a musical short from The Exorcist) began to play on someone’s phone. After it was abruptly silenced, the last note echoing through the auditorium, everyone laughed. I think we all agreed that someone must reference the novel or film at some point—or maybe there was a need for some emotional release in light of this serious topic. But it also made me think about exorcism as a cultural phenomenon. Why are we so drawn to it and why is it so fascinating? Is it because we all love a good scare or feel drawn to the forbidden? Instead, I think it is because somewhere deep inside we recognize the need for healing and renewal. We face our own horrors, day in and day out; we fight the everyday battles for our souls, even for the soul of the world. Perhaps the books, movies, videos, and social media pieces we devour on the topic become a metaphor for our demons, helping us cope, process, and even contemplate questions of redemption and forgiveness in some way.

Ultimately, it is safe to say exorcism is everywhere and clearly not going anywhere— certainly not for the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. For within the teaching of both churches, the devil is no mere metaphor for our inner battles with temptation: evil is indeed the “presence of something dark, irrational and very real.”[13] The stark, painful, and frightening true-life stories related to us during the seminar attested to this. The murders in our streets, cruelty to the most vulnerable members of society, and blatant disregard for human suffering throughout the world also bear witness. Evil is personal, it is corporate, it is cosmic. The battle for the image and likeness of God within us is real and ongoing. Our souls, and indeed the soul of the world, are worth fighting for.

In my heart, the importance of this fight goes back to that crowdsourced audience with his Holiness last May. The Pope’s loving presence remains with me and informed everything I saw and experienced during my time in Rome. Now, it even influences the way I think of the mystery of healing within my own faith tradition. Yes, when one of us hurts, we all hurt, and the Lord is there. The world indeed has its horrors (just watch the news during these turbulent times), and we have ours. But we also have the rescue mission of our Lord and the opportunity for a personal relationship with him. None of us will be abandoned or are alone. As I move forward in my own research and pastoral duties, as I think about the meaning of my life as a priest, husband, and father, I will continue to hold these thoughts high. Wherever there are caring pastors and loving faithful, there is Christ and the mystery of his grace. Wherever people suffer, there is the healing touch of our Lord and the promise of the Resurrection.

What gives me some confidence is her spirit of faith and her truly prodigious courage. What a valiant woman! She is not defeated by adversity nor elated by prosperity. She is admirable![1]
—Sister Marie-Dosithée, writing about her sister, Saint Zélie Guérin Martin

I want to become a saint, and that won’t be easy. There’s a lot of wood to chop and the wood is as hard as rock. It would have been better if I’d tried earlier, while it was less difficult. Oh well, “better late than never.”[2]
—Saint Zélie Guérin Martin

While the nineteenth-century French saint, Zélie Guérin Martin, had a happy marriage with her husband (Saint Louis Martin), the mystery of her rejection from religious life that she experienced as a young adult remained with her. A year and a half before her death of breast cancer at 45, Zélie relayed her dreams for her one-day retirement, with allusion to the rejection, in a letter to her daughter, Pauline:

So I do nothing but dream of the cloister and solitude. With the ideas I have, I really don’t know how this wasn’t my vocation or how I didn’t remain a spinster, or retreat into a convent. Now I’d like to live to be very old, so I can withdraw in solitude when all my children are grown (CF 150, 211).

While acknowledging these dreams, Zélie was on guard about dwelling inordinately upon them. She added: “But I feel that all these are only empty ideas, so I hardly pay attention to them. It's better to use the present time well than to think so much about the future.”

This frictional dynamic of longing and persistent endurance defined much of Zélie’s life as a to-be saint—even though she herself doubted that she would ever be made one. She frequently thought her impatience, stubbornness, and irritability, as well as her inability to pray regularly in solitude, would prevent her from sanctification. Yet, Zélie and Louis would be canonized in October of 2015, and their youngest daughter, Thérèse of Lisieux, was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church. Her other daughter, Servant of God Léonie Martin (with whom Zélie had great difficulty) also has a cause open for her beatification.

It was in and through the often precarious conditions of Zélie’s life—riddled as it was with uncertainty, tragedy and an array of unfulfilled longings, but nevertheless defined by the warmth of family life—that she became a witness to a faith which endures, even through the most severe of circumstances.

After Zélie was prevented from entering religious life, and seeing marriage as her only viable alternative path, she resigned herself to the fact that she would become a wife and mother. She prayed to consecrate her future children to God, and begged Mary to show her the kind of work God wanted her to take up to support them. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, in prayer to Mary, she received an answer, hearing an inner voice say: “Undertake the making of Point d’Alençon lace” (The Mother of the Little Flower, 2). Zélie immediately began to attend a professional school to learn the craft of lace-making and, at the age of 22, she founded her own business.[3] Celine Martin (also known as Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face, Zélie's daughter and biographer) offers a dignified portrait of her mother, who remained soberly grounded amidst her early successes:

Mother was as shrewd in business as she was quick and intelligent. Her energy was extraordinary, and she rapidly became successful in her undertakings.

An influential lady of the world, who admired the beauty and talents of mother, wanted to take her to Paris, perhaps with the intention of having her married advantageously; she categorically refused the proposal. She used to tell of the incident smilingly; the world had absolutely no attraction for her (The Mother of the Little Flower, 2-3).

Eventually, Zélie met Louis (who had also been prevented from entering religious life) and, at the age of 27, she married him. Nineteen years later, in a letter to her daughter Pauline, Zélie described the emotionally turbulent day before her own wedding, when she visited her sister (who had entered religious life) at the monastery:

I can say that on that day I cried all my tears, more than I’d ever cried in my life. . . . In short, for a very long time, my mind and my heart were only at the Visitation Monastery . . . I would have liked to hide my life with hers. You who love your father so much, my Pauline, are you going to think that I was hurting him and that I’d ruined our wedding day for him? No, he understood me and consoled me as best he could because his inclinations were similar to mine. I even think our mutual affection grew from it. Our feelings were always in accord, and he was always a comfort and a support to me (A Call to a Deeper Love, xxiii-xxiv).

In marrying each other, Louis and Zélie endured the loss of their respective dreams. Yet, their sharing of this loss helped form a foundation from which their love and family life could grow. The few letters of theirs that we have today reveal their mutual affection—in Louis addressing Zélie as “my dear friend” and in his signature, “Your husband and true friend, who loves you for life” (CF 2-a, 4), in Zélie’s proclamation, “it would be impossible for me to live apart from you” (CF 108, 135), in their confessions of longing for one another while away from home, in their promised prayers and kisses for each other. To help alleviate the stress and overwhelm Zélie faced with her lace-making work, Louis sold his beloved artisanal business and became a businessman representing Zélie’s. He wrote to her, “Once again, don’t worry so much. We’ll manage, with God’s help, to build a good little company” (CF 2-a, 4).

For Zélie, running the lace-making business came with a number of responsibilities, on top of those she had as a wife and mother. She frequently worked late into the night to fulfill orders and often while tending to children.[4] Sometimes, she bemoaned the work (“I have a lot of trouble with this wretched Alençon lace which gives me the hardest time” [CF 20, 25]), and other times, she adored it (“To tell you the truth, I only enjoy myself when I am seated at my window assembling my Alençon lace” [CF 82,102]). The business was, in the end, a means of providing for Zélie’s children and workers:

It’s not the desire to amass a great fortune that drives me because I have more than I ever wanted. But I think it would be foolish of me to leave this business having five children to provide for. I must go all the way for them, and I see myself in a dilemma. I have workers, and I have no work to give them while other companies are doing very well. That’s what distresses me the most! (CF 152, 214).

By certain (spiritually anemic) metrics, Zélie had more than enough excuses to overlook the needs of those outside of their family and business. Yet, she and Louis made the time—there is a story of Zélie and little Thérèse bringing a homeless elder home for dinner and arranging for him to be in hospice, according to his wishes (CF 159, 228-229), another of them feeding a struggling family while Louis arranged work for the father (CF 84, 103-104, n203), an account from Zélie of her accompanying an overwhelmed mother of young children on a cross-country train ride (CF 141, 191-192), and many others of the like. Pope Francis called them “an evangelistic couple who throughout their whole life gave witness to the beauty of faith in Jesus, both inside and outside of their home.”[5]

Their spiritual detachment helped make such a life of charity possible. In a letter to her younger brother, who owned a struggling business, Zélie shared with him her wisdom (which echoes that of her husband) as a seasoned business-owner:

You must take heart and not worry. I was like you when I began my Alençon lace business, and I made myself sick over it. Now, I’m much more reasonable. I worry much less and resign myself to all the unfortunate events that happen to me, and may happen to me. I tell myself that God allows it, and then I don’t think about it anymore (CF 26, 30-31).

In an earlier correspondence about a different matter, Zélie even went so far as to say to him that “it’s a bad sign when all goes well,” for “in His wisdom, God wanted it this way to make us remember that the world is not our true home” (CF 7, 8).

This was not an abstract reality for Zélie. She and Louis endured the horrific losses of four of their nine children, which I will only touch briefly on here. Shortly after losing her father and two babies to illnesses, Zélie recounted a time she was unable to pray on a trip to the cemetery where they were buried. She qualified the story with an admission of her own hypocrisy: “I preach to others, and I’m hardly reasonable myself,” and continued: “To see me [there], one would have said, ‘Here is the most indifferent person in the world.’ I was kneeling at the foot of his grave, and I couldn’t pray. A few steps away I knelt by that of my two little angels, the same apparent indifference . . .” (CF 39, 43). The deaths of her children would make her wish for her own (see CF 60, 71).

Yet, Zélie would persist in her attempts at prayer. Through the extraordinary pain and sorrow that accompanied each of their deaths, her trust in God and desire for heaven deepened. In a letter to her sister-in-law, who had just lost a baby herself, Zélie offered the consoling, hope-filled insight:

Several people have said to me, “It would be much better never to have had [your late children].” I can’t bear that kind of talk. I don’t think the sorrows and problems could be weighed against the eternal happiness of my children. So they weren’t lost forever. Life is short and full of mystery. We’ll see them again in Heaven (CF 72, 90-91).

Affirming the goodness of her late children’s short lives, she never regretted the cross she carried for them.

Zélie’s life was marked with an array of uncertainties: that of having chosen the wrong vocation, that of the well-being of her children, that of her sanctity and her own death. Shortly before she died from breast cancer, she sought a miracle on pilgrimage to Lourdes. In a letter sent before the trip, Zélie wrote:

If God wants to cure me, I'll be very happy because, deep down, I want to live. It's hard for me to leave my husband and children, but, on the other hand, I say to myself, “If I'm not cured, perhaps it's because it will be more helpful for them if I go away” (CF 189, 284).

Even as she faced the bleak probability that she soon would be absent from her husband and her young daughters’ lives, she trusted that God would use her absence for their good.

Sometimes, we take material prosperity and material peace to be sure signs of divine favor, and assurances that we are on the right path. Saint Zélie Martin renders the absolutizing of these impulses dubious. Her witness reminds us that sainthood simply requires the entrustment of our lives to God, and that this entrustment is not to be conflated with an empirical certitude about the divine plan.

Much of our lives—and the loose threads of unfulfilled longing, confusion, and heartache that run through them—will remain a mystery to us; the purpose of our pain in God’s great plan obscured from our sight, as was often the case in Zélie’s life. Yet, as Zélie was keen to remind those around her: It is not in prosperity or success that the meaning of life is found, but in the inseparable, interlinked tasks of how we love God and others.

Reflecting on her own inadequacies in the Christian life, Zélie declared: “I often say during the day, ‘My God, how I would like to be a saint!’ Then, I don’t do the work! Though it’s high time I started” (CF 154, 216). This remark holds a splendid note of dramatic irony for each of us who have come to appreciate this great woman today because of her canonization. This woman, who never assumed, and often doubted, she had chosen the right path, that she was en route to sainthood, was, in fact, being made a saint. Though she did not know it with certainty then, her hope to be with God and her family in Heaven would one day be realized.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Support for this essay was provided by the Sullivan Family Saints Initiative and the Global Catholic Research Initiative, both at the University of Notre Dame.

When I give students an overview of the English Reformations, I try to help them imagine the disorientation of the average English person (full disclosure: I borrowed this from Brad Gregory at Notre Dame). Whether in a room full of students at a state university, a Protestant homeschool co-op, or a Catholic liberal arts college, I start by asking them to imagine themselves born in the first year of Henry VIII’s reign (in 1510 to make the math easy, after his coronation on April 22 of the previous year).

You are probably illiterate, I tell them. Maybe your father is a blacksmith, and if you are a boy, you expect to follow his footsteps one day; if you are a girl, you expect to marry a similar tradesman. You are certainly a Christian, learning the prayers that your parents have taught you to bookend the passing days, and your parish church is central to your community and social world. You go to Mass weekly and receive communion at Easter, and have learned over time to follow the rhythms of the liturgical calendar, marking the year with the festivals and processions that connect to the images in the stained glass and paintings of your church.

How old are you, I ask them, when Martin Luther purportedly nails his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517? You are seven. And you certainly hear nothing about it, I add. Who cares about a random rogue monk in Germany?

But you do know about your king, your learned young king who raises the status of England on the international stage with humanist learning that is all over your head. How old are you, I ask them, when Pope Leo X declares your king, Henry VIII, to be “Defender of the Faith in England” in 1521? You are eleven. And you are probably pretty darn proud to be English. To whatever extent your parish priest has mentioned the Lutheran heresies trickling in from abroad, he has probably instilled in you the pride of defending the one true Church against Satan’s lies.

I skip ahead on the timeline. After all, your illiterate character would not know about Tyndale’s New Testament printed abroad in 1526, or the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacking Rome in 1527, or Henry’s poorly timed request for the annulment of his marriage to Charles’s aunt Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that she had been Henry’s brother’s widow.

Maybe you do not hear anything about it until your old parish priest is replaced by a young radical who explains that the invocations to the saints that you were taught are idolatrous, or that the pope has no authority over your king (of whom you should still be quite proud), or that the Bible (which you cannot read, but can certainly have read to you) should be in the language of the common person. How old are you when Henry is declared head of the Church in England in 1531, or when he marries the true queen Anne Boleyn in 1533, or when Parliament passes the Act of Supremacy in 1534? You are twenty-one, twenty-three, twenty-four—the age of a college graduate. You are young and full of life, beginning a bright new future.

If you live in the north of England, how old are you when friends and family end up on different sides of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, an armed uprising of 40,000 against the radical changes in the Church? How old are you that year when Queen Anne is suddenly executed as a traitor and the new Queen Jane is crowned? You are twenty-six, settling into your married life and trade with children of your own.

If you live near a monastery, which has been a staple of your community, how old are you in 1538 when the monks are forced to leave, the monastery looted, and an aristocrat given possession of the land? You are twenty-eight, which (I tell them) counts as middle-aged. By now perhaps these changes have become a norm of your adult life.

How old are you when Henry suddenly dies in 1547 and the changes become more radical under the protectors of the boy-king Edward VI, when the liturgy does finally change to English in 1549 as you had been led to expect would happen for over a decade? You are thirty-seven, thirty-nine. Your children are growing up and learning trades and looking toward marriage. Maybe your parish church is one of the ones white-washed, and the last visual vestiges of your childhood faith have been erased.

How old are you when Edward also dies suddenly in 1553 and Queen Mary is crowned and marries the king of the richest country in Europe? How old are you when the liturgy and prayers suddenly return to the Latin of your childhood, which you had been told to denounce as an adult? You are forty-three, which is getting very old (my age, I add, to elicit a chuckle). Is that young radical parish priest from your twenties one of the ones burned at the stake for heresy? Whether or not he is, how do you feel when you learn that the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer has been burned at the stake in 1556 when you are forty-six (really getting up there!)?

If you have lived this long, I tell them, the odds are you will live into your 50s or 60s. So how old are you when Mary also dies suddenly and the bastard (you thought?) Elizabeth becomes queen in 1558? How old are you when the liturgy returns again to a revised English in 1559? You are forty-eight and forty-nine, enjoying watching your grandchildren growing up but doubtless wondering about the kind of world they will inherit.

Will you live to fifty-eight, to hear your priest read in English from the official Bishop’s Bible authorized 1568? Or a year longer, when the Northern Earls rise up to depose Elizabeth? Will you live to sixty, to hear that Pope Pius V has excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and declared that her subjects (you) owe her no allegiance? Will you live to sixty-one to hear your new parish priest clarifying Christian doctrine along Protestant lines when the Thirty-Nine Articles are published in 1571? What kind of certainty do you, an average faithful Christian in England, have of the faith that you have never left?

It is an especially effective set-up if I happen to be doing it in a course in which I will be teaching the poetry of St. Robert Southwell, the Jesuit priest who would become a bestseller on the mainstream London press after his martyrdom in 1595. After all, born toward the end of 1561, Southwell was the same age as this hypothetical average English person’s grandchildren. This Reformation whiplash characterized the England he was born into.

Granted, Southwell was not born into the imagined average family that I described to my students. His grandfather Sir Richard Southwell had been knighted in 1540, after slowly rising in Henry’s government and playing a role in the falls of both Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, administering lands (including to himself) in the dissolution of monasteries, and assisting the Duke of Norfolk to suppress the armed rebellion in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Yet Sir Richard was hardly a Protestant hardliner, and would eventually be loyal to Mary during Wyatt’s rebellion against the Catholic queen in 1554 and surrender his offices upon the ascension of Elizabeth.[1]

The saint’s father, also named Richard, inherited Sir Richard’s monastic land at Horsham, and Robert probably spent his childhood in the house converted from the priory.[2] Despite his grandfather’s religious flexibility, Robert seems to have been raised firmly loyal to Rome. His father jokingly called him “Fr. Robert” as a boy, and in 1576, at the age of fourteen, the young man set out to receive his education at the English College in Douai rather than studying at Oxford or Cambridge where he would have been required to swear the Oath of Allegiance that declared the queen to be Supreme Governor of the Church in England. Southwell was what we might call a first-generation Catholic recusant.

The rest of Southwell’s life is full of adventure and intrigue that would make an excellent BBC miniseries. Moving from Douai to Paris because of religious wars in Europe. Being initially denied entry into the Jesuits in their second generation because of his youth, but eventually beginning his novitiate in Rome in 1578 (in time to meet St. Edmund Campion as the elder martyr was preparing for his mission to England) and to become ordained himself in 1584 (the same year that Elizabeth’s Jesuit’s, etc. Act specifically targeted Jesuits as high traitors).

Returning to England in secret in 1586, the year the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth was uncovered and anti-Catholic measures were heightened in response. Setting up a secret press in the home of Countess of Arundel Anne Howard, moving about secretly in London with occasional trips to celebrate sacraments with recusant families in the country, hiding behind paneling for four hours in a raid, writing a letter to Elizabeth with the radical argument that a papist could be a faithful subject of the queen, publishing a London best-seller while in hiding—all during times when national headlines included the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and the sinking of the Spanish Armada.

Finally, being caught by Elizabeth’s ruthless priest-hunter Richard Topcliff in 1592, being tortured for three years in prison, writing his heart-breaking final prose work to plead to be given trial, and eventually being convicted of high treason and hung, drawn, and quartered in 1595 at the age of thirty-three. The imagined miniseries would make much of the reported sympathy of the onlookers at his martyrdom at Tyburn, when they prevented the executioner from cutting the noose and tugged on his legs to speed his death so he would not feel the pain of being disemboweled. Seriously, if anyone from the BBC is reading this, give me a call.

But for the purposes of my classes in English literature, the most fascinating part of the story is Southwell’s afterlife, specifically among Protestant readers. Only weeks after his highly publicized execution, various collections of his poetry started anonymously appearing from mainstream London printing houses. In the same year of his 1595 martyrdom, there would be five editions of two different sets of poems in an age when few works ever went to a second run.

Nor was this popularity short-lived; his poetry would go through eighteen editions over the next four decades, and four prose works were also published on London presses, one of them becoming almost as frequently printed as his poetry. Southwell’s posthumous popularity was on the rise in the age of William Shakespeare, as later devotional poets like John Donne and George Herbert were learning their craft. What made the poetry of this Catholic traitor so appealing to his Protestant readers, I invite my students to ask. Was it a historical fluke or a strategic success?

To suggest at least a partial answer to that question, I love focusing on Southwell’s poem “Joseph’s Amazement.”[3] The poem has not received frequent scholarly attention. Anne Sweeney once conceptualized it in the context of Reformation debates around angelology,[4] but that was not enough to raise it above Louis Martz’s throw-away dismissal of it as “incredibly bad.”[5] As much as I respect Martz’s pioneering work that brought Southwell to the spotlight, I am glad that that moniker has mostly stayed in the obscurity of the poem itself.

Indeed, for Martz’s study on the significance of Ignatian meditation for the later development of English devotional poetry, “Joseph’s Amazement” was hardly Southwell’s masterpiece. I on the other hand, who started training after Alison Shell had made Southwell’s centrality to the development of English literary culture commonplace,[6] who studied under Martz’s student R. V. Young (my confirmation sponsor when I entered the Catholic Church) after he reframed the discussion of devotional poetry in terms of common meditational inheritance rather than confessional disputes,[7] had freedom to pursue other questions. Eventually, as I focused my questions more on the Petrarchan complaint poetry of Southwell’s contemporaries in the sixteenth century than on his later inheritance in the devotional lyric of the seventeenth,[8] “Joseph’s Amazement” became a goldmine.

Southwell depicts the betrothed husband of Mary and the eventual foster-father of Jesus as a betrayed Petrarchan lover. The entire eighty-four-line poem takes place in the transition between two verses of Matthew 1, after Jesus’s “mother Mary was espoused to Joseph” and “before they came together, she was found with child, of the Holy Ghost.” Southwell’s Joseph may be “a just man,” but at this point he is hardly “minded to put her away privately,” and as yet might end up “willing publicly to expose her.”[9] Southwell uses the extremes of human passion characteristic of Petrarchan complaint to help his reader imagine the turmoil that Joseph might have gone through in the dramatic irony before the angel brings resolution.

Southwell’s Joseph is “stranger yet to God’s intent” (3), and as such is “sore oppressed” by “doubts of jealous thoughts” (4) and is “wrought with diverse fits of fear and love” (5). Though he had initially been able to dismiss his suspicions in his “blind” love (9), “think[ing] rather sense deceived than her with child” (10), eventually “proofs so pregnant were” (11) that he had to admit the truth of her pregnancy. Not yet at the resolution to put her away privately, he is “daunted with a deadly wound” (14) and prepares to leave her, “But still ere he can frame his feet to go, / Love winneth time till all conclude in no” (23–24). With no decision yet made, it is not his will but rather his love that holds him in place; “She whom he flies doth win him home again” (30).

The rest of the poem is Joseph’s internal battle in the first-person, a war in which “every wound upon the giver lights” (36). He asks if his love was “so lightly prized” (37) and whether “such a spouse be stained with such a spot?” (40) and even at one point identifies Mary’s mortal peril if guilty of “Such crimes for which the law condemns to die” (54). Nevertheless, he is determined that “Joseph’s word shall never work her woe: / I wish her leave to live, not doom to die” (55–56). He declares that “Though fortune mine, yet am I not her foe” (57), and while he assumes that Mary has defiled herself, he insists that “She to herself less loving is than I” (58). Rather than putting her away, this Joseph describes himself as an exile, separated from his own heart which his seemingly false beloved still possesses.

The reader of course knows that Joseph is wrong about Mary. But until the angel eventually appears outside the drama of the poem, Joseph cannot know that. The reader may feel sorry for him, and might (as Sweeney describes) be looking forward to the appearance of the angel, but in the meantime the reader must want Joseph to endure the tension rather than to abandon the pregnant Mary and the fetal Jesus.

Furthermore, to bring this back to the set-up I give to my students, Southwell’s English readers of the sixteenth century faced their own tensions which connect to the poem. The average English person’s theological certainty almost certainly did not match that of Reformation polemic. While no one doubted Mary’s virginity, explicit as it is in scripture, related questions of devotion to the saints were hotly debated. Furthermore, her traditional role as Mother of the Church becomes especially relevant to the poem in an age where the ecclesial structures were sharply questioned, and some might see “proofs” every bit as “pregnant” as Joseph sees to accuse the structural Church of grave sin.

To that reader, the poem’s ending is particularly poignant as Joseph’s love forces him to endure the suspense before it can be resolved. Joseph realizes that love makes it impossible to run away, even if he tried, as he asks rhetorically, “But who can fly from that his heart doth feel? / What change of place can change implanted pain?” (73–74). This helplessness leaves him to the final, heart-wrenching stanza.

Yet still I tread a maze of doubtful end.
I go, I come, she draws, she drives away,
She wounds, she heals, she doth both mar and mend,
She makes me seek and shun, depart and stay.
She is a friend to love, a foe to loathe,
And in suspense I hang between them both (79–84).

Love leaves him in his “amazement,” his “maze of doubtful end.” He is left in the Petrarchan paradoxes of going and coming, being drawn and driven away, wounded and healed, marred and mended, seeking and shunning, departing and staying, loving and loathing. Until the later deus ex machina that Southwell’s reader knows will come but his Joseph never sees, the reader must be content to leave Joseph in the “suspense” that can only “hang between them both.”

Admittedly, my audience for this reading of Southwell is as much myself as it is my students. For sure, twenty-first-century undergraduates have plenty of their own uncertainties, some stereotypical of their stage of life and some new ones in an ever-changing world. I hope they can be encouraged by Southwell’s Joseph to endure the tension and to hold to the love at the heart of the poem: the love of the vehicle through whom the unseen Christ is entering the world (Mary, the Church), the love of Christ himself.

Furthermore, sixteen years after my own entry into the Catholic Church, I know that Southwell’s Joseph challenges me to the same stubborn love (Southwell uses the term “crazy love” in another poem, but that means something different in the sixteenth century than the Van Morrison hit). After all, by the time I had finished my twenties, my own theological framework had gone through more radical changes than that of Southwell’s English reader, and the tensions did not subside with my decision to enter the Church. Especially around Marian theology, I continued to struggle with certain dogmas like the Immaculate Conception long after I affirmed them to be true at my confirmation, occasionally finding deeper appreciation through the struggle (Renee D. Roden’s framing as “a dogma of consent” was a breakthrough).

On a level both broader and more personal, my own experience of clerical sexual assault in my thirties deepened the tension I felt with the Church, whom I still loved. Daniel Philpott and Thomas Berg have both written about the work of restorative justice that I have been honored to share in the aftermath, a desperate attempt to follow Southwell’s Joseph in enduring the tension in the wounds of love. I am sure that I will never write fully of the ripple effects of costs I have paid for that determination to stay.

Southwell invites his sixteenth-century English reader, along with me and my students, not to flee the tension of the suspense and “amazement” in which we find ourselves. Furthermore, as Southwell’s reader knows that Joseph will eventually understand the centrality of his role in salvation history, he invites us to see that first kind of confused “amazement” as one that will eventually lead to the future amazement in “the glory to be revealed to us,” a glory that will make the present sufferings not worthy to be compared (Rom 8:18). With that hope of redemption, along with the faith that brought me here and the love that holds me in place, I find myself in good company.

Sts. Joseph and Robert Southwell, pray for us. All of us.

Dolly Parton’s death surprised many of her fans. She kept the details of her cancer diagnosis private, and shortly before her death spoke confidently of her health and hopes for her future. Stella Parton, Dolly’s younger sister, attributed Dolly’s reticence to reveal the state of her health to the fact that, “she did not want people sad.”

When the news of her death was announced, it precipitated an overwhelming response around the world. The King’s Guard honored Dolly with a performance of her song “9 to 5” outside of Buckingham Palace. Across the Atlantic, the top of the Empire State Building was bathed in a neon pink light at 9:25PM. In the days following her death, the authors encountered people grieving. Since neither of us would identify as Dolly fans, we had not fully realized the extent to which she and her work had entered our experience through her music, film, and philanthropy.

We are both involved in grief accompaniment—Abby as a grief scholar and bereavement doula and Tom as a religious seminarian ministering in pastoral settings. We frequently accompany people who grieve the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, a broken relationship, or more. We have seen firsthand that grief responses are complicated and do not easily categorize into neat schemata, such as the “Five Stages of Grief.”

One of the grief myths prevalent in the public imagination that we seem to consistently encounter is that grief is an emotion basically equivalent to sadness. However, grief is far more than just one emotion. Consider the wave of fondness that can wash over us when we remember a loved one’s mannerisms, or the relief that we can experience in our hope that a loved one feels no more pain. Consider the hint of joy someone might experience upon losing a job but now finding themselves open to new possibilities; or the warmth of remembrance when we see a pet who looks similar to the one we lost. None of these realities negates sorrow or replaces sadness. Rather, grief encompasses a wide range of emotions.

Societally, we tend to think that grief is something to be endured until we can reclaim joy again. However, this perspective of grief is too limited. As Catholics, we ought to view grief in a holistic way. The Catechism clarifies that “The word ‘catholic’ means ‘universal,’ in the sense of ‘according to the totality’ or ‘in keeping with the whole’” (§830). A Catholic lens must then look at the whole of the thing. According to the whole, grief is a state of being far beyond simply one emotion, not just stomach-wrenching sorrow. It is a holistic experience of loss, experienced by a whole person, expansive and subsuming, involving a wide variety of emotions.

Dolly Parton’s death and the grief that followed have highlighted to us the ways in which folks may already honor the whole of the experience of grief, while perhaps not even recognizing what they experience as grief. The grief responses we have seen to Dolly’s death have been overwhelmingly joyous. Part of this may be because of her unpolarized nature or because of her eclectic contributions to society (even those who were not fans of her music could find something to praise). The joy expressed may be partly attributable to the fact that Dolly was a sign of unity amid a deeply divided society.

It was a relief for people to bond over a public figure without fear of social criticism, and this elicited the joy that we saw. While this may be true, we think it does not capture the full picture. Instead, the grief response to Dolly’s death reveals something about the nature of grief that seems counterintuitive: grief can be a joy-filled experience. We see two lessons society can learn from the public response.

Lesson #1: Grief Accompaniment Means Being Present to More than Sadness

Both the authors observed and received invitations to enter into grief accompaniment after Dolly’s death. These invitations were not requests to enter into someone’s sorrow as frequently as they were offerings of the sharing of delight.

When Abby talked with her daughter about Dolly's passing, her daughter grieved the death of the woman who created the Imagination Library, a literacy program which sends a new book to a child every month from birth through their fifth birthday. In mourning together, Abby and her daughter turned on Dolly's songs and sang and danced. They read a picture book about Dolly they had recently checked out from the library. Her daughter gathered some of the books Dolly had sent through the Imagination Library and held them as treasured mementos.

The opportunity for Abby to enter into grief accompaniment was not just holding her daughter through tears or listening to her express sorrow. In addition to holding space for feelings of sadness, the companioning Abby was asked to provide in this scenario involved fond remembrances, eager learning, curious exploration of books not recently read, and even joyous dancing.

Whether deliberate or not, the public response to Dolly’s death has, to some extent, followed what her sister described as her wish: sadness has not been the defining characteristic of this grief. Instead, many emotions exist as a part of the whole experience of grief. In being invited into others’ grief around Dolly, many of us have been invited into experiences of joy or delight, curiosity or comfort. The grieving have shared favorite songs on social media, inviting others to listen or even dance; they have praised Dolly’s public health advocacy; or they have asked others to join them in investing in child literacy in honoring her love of books. All of these invitations to grief accompaniment are invitations into something other than sorrow—gratitude, eagerness, even joy.

Dolly’s death has provided a beautiful social opportunity for many people to become more grief-informed by supporting others through grief in surprising and unexpected ways. The arrow of accompaniment is changed from the typical expectation. While usually, people grieving wait for those who accompany them to approach them to provide accompaniment, people grieving Dolly actively sought out others to grieve with them. In many kinds of grief, this is seen as socially inappropriate because foisting one’s sorrow upon another, especially in a society that prizes independence, is an invasive thing to do. However, people are more than eager to share their Dolly connection, their favorite Dolly fact, their delighted Dolly memory with others in seeking their grief accompaniment.

The expansiveness of grief means that grief accompaniment is expansive too. The public reaction to Dolly’s death reminds us that companioning someone in grief can mean more than only entering into someone else’s sadness. When we enter into the wholeness of grief, that can mean entering into someone’s joy. Perhaps this reminder can help demystify grief accompaniment at a societal level, or make it feel less intimidating.

Lesson #2: A Joy-Filled Grief Response Can Strengthen Community

The joyous grief response creates particular opportunities to strengthen community. Many people experienced joy when they reflected on the impact that Dolly made in their lives. Their instinct was to listen to her music, watch her movies, and share their appreciation of her gifts and talents with others. Shortly after Dolly’s death, Tom was invited to a 9 to 5 watch party to commemorate Dolly.

The movie was projected onto a screen to accommodate a larger audience. Snacks, of course, were provided. In this case, Dolly’s death became an occasion to strengthen community. Guests were invited to enter into the joy of a communal grief response. If we view this expression of joy as a manifestation of grief, then we might be more likely to welcome opportunities like this watch-party invitation for the sake of community. The movie watch party is transformed from someone’s idiosyncratic fascination into an occasion for grief accompaniment and intentional community building.

The lesson extends beyond Dolly. We often encounter people who will share with us joyous memories of their deceased loved ones. Perhaps someone will cook and serve a cherished meal that their grandparents made for them as a child. Or maybe they will invite us to a special place that brings back fond memories of their family. These too are opportunities for grief accompaniment and strengthening community. Acknowledging this joy as an expression of grief can increase our empathy and make us a little more willing to build relationships despite our own inconvenience or disinterest.

These community bonds will last. One does not soon forget someone who showed up for the funeral of a close family member or friend. A more expansive understanding of grief will help us better love each other and strengthen our communion in Christ. Through the joy-filled grief response, we embrace a little more of the whole of the human person, a wholeness that marks the identity of the Catholic faith.

Conclusion

Millions of people are grieving Dolly, not just with tears, but with stories, books, laughter, gratitude—in sadness, yes, but also in joy. All of these can be natural parts of the whole human experience that is grief.

Recognizing the joy-filled grief response affords us the opportunities to enter into others’ delights and to strengthen our communities. Dolly’s legacy now extends beyond her toe-tapping music, her legendary artistic collaborations, her classic movies, and her contributions to health and literacy.

Her legacy invites us to become more grief-informed through the joyous responses to her life.

The drive proved relaxing, the farm tidy and well-appointed, and the fare satisfying, but I kept scanning the crowd until I finally saw him. He was sitting in a chair, talking with someone who, judging from Wendell’s[1] reaction, had just said something quite funny. How fitting that my first memory of Wendell Berry was of him laughing. For all his erudition, industry, and grave concern for the fate of the land and its creatures, I remember him as a man who loved a good laugh, an engaging story, a well-told joke.

Stirring up my courage, I approached, awaiting an opportunity to introduce myself. When at last he turned to me, we exchanged initial pleasantries, then quickly dove into a conversation of astonishing depth and feeling. When we parted, my satisfaction with how our brief exchange had gone was tempered by a mixture of starstruck bewilderment and pangs of imposter syndrome. Who was I to think this would be anything but a one-off conversation between a noted writer and one of his fans? I could not have known it at the time, but I had, in fact, just begun a decades-long friendship that would reshape my thinking, my convictions, and my life choices.

From that moment on, through exchanges in person, over the phone, and in letters sent by mail—Berry famously foreswore computers—he introduced me to new writers and better ways of seeing the world. Through him, I met Norman Wirzba, whose homage to Berry can be found here, and Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute and a man of great insight, sharply focused labor, and strong opinions. I learned I shared my admiration for his work with many others, from the American actor, Nick Offerman, to the English novelist and cultural critic, Paul Kingsnorth.

I encountered Berry’s detractors, too, many of whom rejected a caricature of his thought, either from not reading him carefully or not reading him at all. I continued to learn from his prodigious body of work, discovering the breadth and unity of his vision. Whether expounding the virtues of locally grown produce, exploring lasting social implications in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, or examining the inherent contradictions in the modern practice of medicine, his central concern was how to embrace our creatureliness in a world of limits.

Land and Limits

So far, I have been talking in abstractions, a habit Wendell abhorred. Better to show how he changed me than merely tell you that he did. “What I stand for is what I stand on,”[2] he writes, and from that embodied commitment to place, everything else in his work follows. One way to understand Berry’s massive literary output is as a series of explications of his first major book, The Unsettling of America (1977). His primary concern there is the way in which white European settlers saw arable land as a standing reserve from which food could be extracted like coal from a mine rather than as a gift in need of careful stewardship.

Preferring predictivity over sustainability and expensive technology over experience, modern farming practices drive farmers into crippling debt, ultimately concentrating farmland into fewer and fewer hands. These large-scale, technology-dependent practices also squander precious topsoil that took centuries to accumulate, the resulting runoff sending a slurry of loam and fertilizer down the Mississippi river to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, the agribusiness model requires long-distance distribution systems to move products from field to table, using many times the energy and storage space of small, local farms.

Furthermore, in The Unsettling of America Berry sees the consequences of bad farming practices extending far beyond the specialized concerns of flyover country. For Berry, the small farmer’s predicament is not merely a crisis of agriculture, but also of culture and character. Accordingly, his book also looks at the evolution of the family home from a place of production to a locus of endless consumption; the long-term consequences of energy misuse; an abiding American prejudice against manual laborers; the importance of marriage in a free society; and the intimate connections between the body and the earth.

For Berry, these are not tangential concerns but integral components of a culture whose people need to eat and hope to live well. They all radiate from his central concern—caring for the land without which we cannot live—like spokes on a wheel. To quote one of Berry’s agrarian influences, the twentieth-century English botanist, Sir Albert Howard, we must understand “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.”[3]

Accordingly, his ideological enemies are specialization, abstraction, and individualism: specialization because it blinds adherents to crucial matters outside their area of expertise, abstraction because it exalts generalized theory over the particulars at hand, and individualism because it obscures the countless ways we depend on other creatures—human and otherwise—not simply for our flourishing but for our very survival. Everything is connected and no creature is an island entire to itself. In my much-underlined copy of The Unsettling of America, in a passage on how the loss of community and connection has sickened us, stand two sentences I have called attention to with marginal stars, arrows, and exclamation points: “There is, in practice, no such thing as autonomy. Practically, there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.”[4]

I have lived in several places—all of them cities—since I discovered Berry’s work: Cincinnati, Atlanta, Baltimore, and now Santa Fe. Though I was born and raised in Cincinnati, moving to Santa Fe feels like the real homecoming. My wife and I had our first jobs on the Navajo Nation in Arizona and we fell in love with the landscape, the cultural mélange, and the desert quiet. Human foolishness in the face of severe ecological limits is so much clearer here as climate change wreaks havoc on land enduring its worst megadrought in more than a thousand years.

Yet in each of those cities, my wife and I attended to the gifts and limits of the place in our fashion: conserving water, growing some of our own food, supporting local growers, cutting our dependence on electricity generated from fossil fuel. My wife, being more sociable and outgoing, does better at immersing herself in the community, but I do what I can in a quieter way. Contrary to the assumptions of some of his detractors, Berry was not opposed to cities and the pleasures of urban life. He rather enjoyed his time in New York City, but left for Henry County, Kentucky when he felt called to embody his convictions. I wish it had not taken so many moves for my wife and me to finally return to the landscape of my heart, but I like to think we were answering a similar call.

I do not write this in a self-congratulatory way. Small individual actions in an economy bent on making the planet unlivable are necessary but insufficient and, like almost every other American, I am caught in a web of heedless consumption and ecological destruction that I cannot get free of. Saint Paul called such entrapping systems “principalities and powers.” In our faithless age, we are more likely to call them corporations and nation-states. Berry opens one of his well-known poems this way:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.[5]

He then offers a long list of possible responses such as “Love the Lord / Love the world,” “Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts,” “So long as women do not go cheap / for power, please women more than men,” and “Practice resurrection.” Berry sees these as starting places, attitudes and actions that begin locally but can spread from community to community as each begins to grasp that their hopes and struggles are connected to everyone else’s. The challenge of Berry’s witness is to bridge the gap between inspiring words and the hard work of “becoming native to this place,” a phrase Wes Jackson used as the title for a book he dedicated to Wendell Berry.

Medicine and Membership

Berry challenged my practice of medicine most directly in his essay, “Health is Membership,” and his short story, “Fidelity.” Early in the essay, Berry declares his belief that God, who created the world as an act of love, “summons the world toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.”[6] He then issues a one sentence manifesto that goes for the jugular of the hyper-individualist American medical-industrial complex: “I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”[7] Here, Berry returns to several of his central themes: the priority of place, the interdependence of creatures, and the limits of the body and local ecosystems. He again draws on the tradition of agrarian and ecological thought, most clearly in this instance on Aldo Leopold, who wrote, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”[8]

Key to Berry’s communal vision of health are the physical needs and limits of the body. Contrary to the reductionist metaphor of bodies as biological machines whose parts can be repaired, replaced, or augmented as the consumer sees fit, Berry points out that, “Divided from its sources of air, food, drink, clothing, shelter, and companionship, a body is, properly speaking, a cadaver, whereas a machine by itself, shut down or out of fuel, is still a machine.”[9] In the second half of the essay, he writes movingly about the hospitalization of his brother, John, after a severe heart attack. Like many people, Berry finds the hospital surprisingly inhospitable, a place where a world of love collides with but never quite engages a world of machinelike efficiency.

He describes a common experience for hospitalized patients and their families: exclusion from the arcane knowledge of health professionals. In “Fidelity,” he writes of a doctor meeting relatives of Burley Coulter, an aging, formerly high-spirited man who has fallen into a coma. The doctor speaks to them “from the bright, orderly enclosure of his explanation, like a man in a glass booth,” while the others “stood looking at him from the larger, looser, darker order of their merely human love.”[10]

As a retired physician, I know this to be true. My colleagues and I spend years acquiring specialized knowledge, applying it to situations that truly are matters of life and death. Patients come to us in distress and seeking help, trusting that we will use our knowledge to their benefit. I have seen the faces of parents who had little choice but to follow my recommendations for their sick child. If, as Francis Bacon claimed, knowledge is power, I wielded a staggering amount of power, an imbalance that all our pretense over “informed consent” and “shared decision making” cannot erase. Yet, despite all my power and knowledge, I also know that every patient is a unique case, each body a dizzyingly complex intersection of inherent qualities, particular experiences, and external forces.

That is why, when leading hospital rounds, I often quoted directly from “Health is Membership,” reminding residents and medical students of the sobering truth that “medicine is an exact science until applied: application involves intuition, a sense of probability, ‘gut feeling,’ guesswork, and error.”[11] My hope in doing so was to nourish the humility and empathy in my residents and students that American medical education tries to beat out of them. In “Fidelity,” friends of Burley Coulter rescue him from the hospital so he can die and be buried with his community—his place and all its creatures. While I never advised doctors in training to abscond with their patients, I did encourage them to remember that patients come from somewhere. Learning about the place where my hospitalized patients would return after discharge helped me understand how best to ensure their continued health.

Berry’s critique of the medical system did not blind him to moments when doctors and nurses bridge the divide between the worlds of love and efficiency, transforming the professional relationship into “a meeting between two human beings,” that he found “invariably moving.”[12] His attentive rendering of such moments gave me words to ask the same from those I taught on rounds. He gave me the courage to say to young physicians who had all the latest science at their fingertips that one requirement of being an exemplary practitioner is to love your patients, even the ones you cannot bring yourself to like.

Peace, Consumption, and Costly Hope

In “Peaceableness Toward Enemies,” a series of reflections on the 1990-91 Gulf War, Berry writes:

A number of things about our attitude toward this war were troubling, and the most troubling was our willingness to impose the whole burden of it on young people in the military services and their families. We evidently determined to preserve at all costs a way of life in which we will contemplate no restraints. We sent an enormous force of our young men and women to kill and be killed in defense of our oil supply but we have done nothing to conserve that supply or to reduce our dependence on it. We will not ration petroleum fuels. We will not mention the possibility of more taxes. We wish to give our people the impression that except for their children, nothing will be required of them.[13]

I could quibble with Berry’s use of “us” and “we” here—the first-person plural pronouns suggest that I, too, wanted this war—but at least George H. W. Bush sought and obtained Congressional consent for Operation Desert Storm, a nod to Article I of the U.S. Constitution the current administration openly ignores. Yet, to be honest, despite my objections to the war at the time, little in my life changed. I continued to drive my SUV across the Navajo Nation where I worked, dutifully played the role of voracious consumer, and outwardly behaved as if all was normal.

Years later, when I came upon the sentence, “We wish to give our people the impression that except for their children, nothing will be required of them,” I froze. With two children of my own, I had been given me a context with which to understand that war—and all American wars thereafter, with the exception of the prolonged and ultimately futile Afghan War. Yet even the Afghan War was couched as “a war against terrorism.” Such wars can indeed go on forever, there being no end to potential terrorists in a world where retributive violence is the norm. The aim in these wars, Berry asserts, is not peace but victory—a military achievement that both “justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence.”[14] For all the rhetoric over national sovereignty, weapons of mass destruction, and “not letting them get the bomb,” the primary goal in these wars has been to preserve an American way of life that, for all its many gifts, depends on limitless consumption. Berry concludes “Peaceableness Toward Enemies” with a direct challenge to the U.S. and its leaders:

Finally, if we want to be at peace, we will have to waste less, spend less, need less. The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.[15]

Thirty years later, Berry’s challenge remains unanswered.

Wendell Berry did not persuade me to endorse pacifism. Stanley Hauerwas had already convinced me that following Christ required nonviolent action in all my personal affairs. Pope Leo XIV seems to be moving in that same direction with respect to nation-states when he writes: 

Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. The use of force, violence, and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.[16]

Berry asserts, as do I, that pacifism is not passivity but a continuous practice of choosing not to exploit other people, other countries, and other creatures. Speaking of “other creatures,” Berry was not a vegetarian, nor did he believe that not eating meat was an inherently noble act. There are many commendable reasons to adopt vegetarianism, but Berry saw the real enemy in livestock agribusiness, where animals are treated as raw materials in a factory assembly line. He advocated living carefully and consciously, but:

That is not to suggest that we can live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.[17]

I have both fed and tasted Berry’s farm-raised lamb. While my wife and I intentionally limit our meat consumption, we have not eliminated it. We raise chickens for their eggs and grow our own vegetables and herbs. Could we do more? Certainly, but doing more and doing them well are two different things and there is so much we cannot change. I participate in a so-called free market economy that Berry finds “less and less distinguishable from warfare.”[18] Having worked with Native Americans, the inner-city poor, and Honduran campesinos, I have seen too much to pretend I can live a guiltless American life or that life is fair. But I can attend to the place I find myself, learn its glories and wounds, and address my fellow creatures in a loving way.

Berry titled his 2012 Jefferson lecture “It All Turns on Affection,” borrowing the phrase from E. M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End. We care for what we love, Berry says, and to care for the world, we must know and love a particular place in it—not as an abstraction, but in all that place’s inherent complexity. “Knowledge without affection leads us astray.” Berry adds, “Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope.”[19] Perhaps Berry is partly to blame for my self-identification as a hopeful pessimist.

Optimism, the belief that things will always turn out for the best, ignores the ubiquity of pain and suffering in the world. I do not expect everything will get better, but I can live in what I have come to see as costly hope. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s account of grace, there is a cheap form of hope that demands nothing of me, rendering it all but indistinguishable from optimism. There is, on the other hand, a demanding, costly hope that requires me to admit my addiction (in this case to limitless consumption), make a searching and fearless moral inventory of my assumptions and behaviors, acknowledge the exact nature of my wrongs, and make amends wherever possible to those I have harmed. Those familiar with twelve step programs will recognize the source for this language. Unbridled consumption and the obscured violence needed to sustain it are addictions. Like the unending process of recovery, shedding these faults will take a lifetime—or longer.

Costly hope is hard work, a journey littered with pitfalls. To brave the road, I need friends and mentors. I cannot do it alone. I long to live peacefully, but not to the detriment of others. Good luck with that. When others—the poor, the suffering, and those who call them to my attention—keep me mindful of what I am purchasing, using, or eating, a realistic aim is to limit the harm I cause. I cannot live blamelessly, but together, we can hope to live better.

So What? And Now What?

A mentor of mine once told me that the two most important questions to ask after reading a scientific paper were “What does this mean or change?” (so what?), and “How should we use this information?” (now what?). Berry’s many books never masquerade as scientific reports, but it may help to ask the same questions when assessing them. Wendell was my friend and his writing, as you have seen, affected me deeply, but that does not mean I always agreed with him or that he is immune to criticism. His late book-length essay on race, The Need to Be Whole (2022), was an expansion of—but not always an improvement upon—his earlier book, The Hidden Wound (1989).

In particular, his attempt to separate the Confederacy’s agrarianism from the brutality of enslavement falls flat. He has little good to say about wealthy Southern landowners, but he claims—without providing documentary evidence—that the common soldier understood himself as defending their farms and communities against Northern industrialism. While I appreciate Berry’s efforts to understand what motivated the common man in gray—life is full of tragic choices and ethical tradeoffs—this comes close to giving Johnny Reb a free pass.

Others may quarrel with his emphasis on local action rather than national policy, but that is a bit unfair. Berry advocated for policies that benefitted rural communities, including what he and Wes Jackson called “The Fifty-Year Farm Bill.”[20] He approved of the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, a piece of New Deal legislation designed to reduce surpluses of wheat, cotton, corn, hogs, rice, tobacco, and milk through subsidies that shielded farmers from the uncertainty of weather and markets. His real policy focus, however, was on local endeavors such as the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-Operative Association, an organization Wendell Berry’s father, a lawyer, actively defended. Though the product—tobacco—is deeply problematic now, the local effort helped keep many small farmers solvent in difficult times.

Thirdly, for all his attention to the particular, there is an objectivizing tendency in some of his fiction that turns some characters—especially those on the side of the industrial economy—into cartoons. In “Fidelity,” a story I otherwise admire, Detective Kyle Bode is a hapless urban divorcé who combs his hair to look like Ringo Starr and “objects” to the hills and hollows the other characters call home. Kyle Bode and his ilk are, of course, representatives of an economy that harms what Berry most cares about: land, community, wholeness. Yet, given Berry’s ability to render the inhabitants of the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky in rich, multidimensional detail, it is disappointing that he does not do the same for his enemies.

If the perfect is the enemy of the good, it would be a shame to use these objections as reasons not to engage his work. I strongly encourage others to see for themselves before rendering judgement. Those interested in answering the question, “So what?” in respect to Berry’s literary efforts might need some assistance in choosing which of his more than fifty books to read first.

Given how his poems, fiction, and nonfiction are all concerned with “one big subject,” I suggest readers dive into whatever genre they prefer. Latecomers to his writing are fortunate that many shorter works are now available as collections. Readers of short fiction might start with That Distant Land (2004), which gathers some of his finest stories. Novel lovers could consider trying Jayber Crow (2000) or the revised edition of A Place on Earth (1983). Berry’s New Collected Poems (2012) and This Day (2013)—the latter bringing together the Sabbath Poems he wrote on Sundays in lieu of going to church—abound with rich and varied verse. While The Unsettling of America is his foundational nonfiction text, it may not be the easiest starting place. Likely alternatives include essay collections such as The Art of the Commonplace (2002) and The World-Ending Fire (2017).

Not everyone finds Wendell Berry’s writing to their taste. That is no fault in itself. What I object to are those who pigeonhole his thought as Luddite nostalgia without seriously engaging with the texts. That is hardly an honest response to the question, “So what?” As I hope I have demonstrated, my answers to “Now what?” have been complex and life changing. How other readers choose to answer is up to them.

It is not merely a comparison or metaphor, no matter how fecund and rich, as found in political analogies that, present in pagan thought well before Christianity, assimilate the city or the collective to a body and its citizens to its parts. Instead, for those who profess the Christian faith, it is about a reality at once both supernatural and carnal. One does not enter into this body through birth, but through rebirth. One does not belong to it through the possession or the acquisition of rights of citizenship, nor through simple intellectual adherence to a doctrine, as in the case of a housing development or an association, but instead through an incorporation, baptism, which is of another nature.

This collective body draws its reality from a relationship at once both spiritual and corporeal to the individual body of Jesus Christ, and to the events that have happened and are happening, for in various senses they do not cease taking place in and through this body, above all his passion, his death, and his resurrection. It has its food and drink (eucharistic), and its proprioception, and the various other possibilities of a body. Its life maintains, organizes, and reproduces itself. It is visible in the world, although, as with the individual body, neither all of its life nor the whole of its life is given immediately to be seen in the world. And belonging to this body also transforms the manner in which I exist and in which I think about my own individual body and the way I relate to it.

But having recalled briefly these fundamental givens, some difficult, subtle, complex, and controversial questions arise as soon as we seek to think through with any precision its organicity. In the commentaries on the Song of Songs, this collective body of the Church will be that of the Bride, first and foremost. And the various parts of this body, its eyes, its cheeks, its teeth, and so on, will increasingly be identified with some functions or orders in the Church as a differentiated and hierarchical institution (bishops, doctors of the Church, monks, the simple faithful, etc.). The individual interpretation sees in these parts whose beauty the Song of Songs praises the parts of the “inner man” that I am, functions or organs of my soul. We will now study how, and with what sense and by what right, we come to speak of a collective body made up not only of individuals but also of orders which gather a certain number of individuals, a collective body differentiated into classes of individuals, in the widest sense of the term. The aim is not to achieve an impossible exhaustiveness in this genealogy, but to clarify, following certain privileged writings, its most decisive turns and major stages.

St. Paul does not talk of “organs” of the body but of “members” or “parts” (melē). Albeit used rarely in the New Testament, he employs this word on numerous occasions, and in a triple perspective: first of all, in order to speak of the members of our individual body, and of how we must use them (e.g., Col 3:5; Rom 6:13, 6:19); next, to name our belonging to the body of Christ, which makes of us its members (1 Cor 6:15; Eph 5:30); and finally, in order to evoke the bond among Christians, insofar as they are members of one another within the unity of the body of Christ (Eph 4:25; Rom 12:5). This simple finding already allows three important remarks to be made. The first is that our body, which is the unity in action of multiple members, can become a member of a higher body into which it is integrated, yet without ceasing to be what it was, which nevertheless certainly does not mean that its economy remains the same. The second remark is that incorporation into Christ through baptism implies a double corporeal relation, one or the other aspect of which can be more or less accentuated in any respective passage, but both of which are always present and inseparable: the relation of our body that has become a member to Christ as its head, and the relation of our body as member to other bodies as members.

The third remark, finally, is that these members that we have, or these members that we are, are never considered in themselves in a static way, as if they were offered to be looked at. Rather, they are always considered in terms of their usage and their function, in what they operate and the work they do, whether good or bad, free or ser vile, just or unjust. And this usage of the members, moreover, is not the neutral and as it were automatic exercise of their purpose (like seeing for the eye), but results from our decision and from what we make of ourselves, or to speak more rigorously, it is the location of the decision that we make about ourselves. I am what I make of my body, or with it, and the manner in which I use it, just as the end that I make it serve determines who I become. All of me is incarnated, and this is why selfhood (l’ipséité) is a bottomless question, for there are several ways to be incarnated, several ways one can exist one’s incarnation, several meanings of the flesh, which are just so many modes of the self, and of its possible alterations. The human body is the place of my freedom or of my enslavement.

Nevertheless, the epistles, which are always addressed to Christian communities, are neither metaphysical meditations, nor moral treatises, nor autobiographical accounts, nor lessons of exegesis—even if the reader can most certainly, from within these various orders, draw strong lessons. No, they are apostolic speech. It follows that not only what is said of the body, individual or collective, and of its members is always dynamic and uttered within the horizon and in the light of usage, but further that these descriptions themselves are always taken in a context that is itself prescriptive, where the Word of God through the mouth of the apostle invites us to commit ourselves to a certain conduct or divert ourselves from another. In responding to the call which itself inspired it, this speech in turn calls out. It is not only spoken of the body inasmuch as incarnated being requires from us something decisive having to do with freedom and enslavement: this word is itself requiring and instant, calling to us with force as body and as member, calling us to incorporation (conversion). It speaks about the body only in speaking to the body.

If the body is, according to the word of St. Paul, “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19), this temple cannot be deserted or mute: it must allow for a liturgy. This liturgical (affirmative, praying, praising) way of existing one’s body cannot be foreign to the speech that proclaims it. The person who fails to see this fails to see the starting point from which the declarations of St. Paul become intelligible, just as would the person who, while reading Plato, disregards the fact that he writes dialogues and ignores how he does so. Thus it is not a question of comparing, without any further ado, these statements with such and such a philosophical thesis on the body, chosen for its conformity with our purpose.

An example can show this while also advancing our questions. St. Paul writes in the Epistle to the Romans: “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function (praxin), so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another” (Rom 12:4–5). The word translated as “function” would be better translated as “task” or “work”: it has something to do that it alone can do. Reading only this sentence, one could draw forth a concept of the body as the unity of the multiple, and as totally sympathetic with itself, a concept that has nothing truly new about it. But one who continues reading the chapter to the end sees this purely formal concept become filled with meaning, a meaning absolutely new in relation to philosophy, by considering how the nature of the tasks of these parts, and thus their very nature, as well as the manner in which they are parts of one other, and the way in which this collective body behaves toward those who are not its parts, all become clear. For in the analogy between a natural concept of the body and the constitution of the collective body of Christ, the whole question is to know which of the two terms is interpreting and which is interpreted, which is determining and which is determined. Does St. Paul start from a natural concept of the body in order to think about the Church, or does he start from the body of Christ in order to transform and redefine the natural body itself?

The unity in the multiplicity is only an empty structure because what members of the collective body of Christ can do has no counterpart in the natural concept of the body: the members prophesy, serve, teach, give without return, love, exercise mercy with joy, and so on (the passage following the sentence quoted above enumerates these), and they cannot do these things except as parts, just as they would cease being active and living members of this body if they no longer accomplished these tasks. Whether it heals or kills, my hand is no less a hand, and it is my hand. It is not the same in this collective body, which lives by a truth that it receives and does not give to itself, and works only by transmitting this truth and spreading it, and in this way growing.

St. Gregory of Nyssa rightly emphasized the sovereign freedom of St. Paul, who does not cast his speech in already existing molds but forges for himself his own usage of certain words. “The great Paul’s wisdom knows how to use words as they seem best to him, and to add the meaning of the words to the sequence proper to his thought, even if custom leads the faulty usage of the literal meaning toward other ideas.” And after having given some specific examples, he added: “Many other examples may be examined closely in which the apostle’s words are found. They are not in thrall to the common use of speech, but Paul freely brings his own understanding to them, paying no attention to custom.” What is true of the lexicon is also true of the images and the analogies.

The most important page on the “members” or “parts” is the twelfth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. St. Paul insists from the outset on the fact that this collective body is a divine initiative and that its unity, like its internal diversity, is the permanent work of God: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:12–14a). We must take note of the strength and the strangeness of the end of the first verse, where St. Paul says “Christ” in the place where we would more normally expect to find “the body of Christ,” an expression that he will use a little later (“Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it,” 1 Cor 12:27). That the Christian community could itself be named “Christ,” as he is its perpetual source and origin (the commentators observe that Paul will only call him the “head” of the collective body in later epistles), shows the realism of Pauline thought about the Church. St. Augustine will speak later of the totus Christus, of the “total Christ,” to designate Christ and the Church. This Pauline shortcut already authorizes such bold language.

Present at the threshold and at the end of the second verse, the one Spirit clearly manifests that the unity of this body exceeds and overflows the analogy with the unity of the biological body. This unity of the body is not based on the collaboration between the parts; it exists above them and before them, as an active unification, which makes one of what was irreducibly different even to the point of hostility and contradiction (Jews and Greeks, slaves and free people), not in order to end up with the undifferentiated or the neuter but to establish, on the sole basis of the Spirit, new differences and a new internal plurality not determined by our social or religious provenance, and thus by our past, but by the future of our respective tasks in the unity of the new body, by what the Spirit requires of us, by what it enjoins us to be and to do. The unity of the body nourishes its members so that they become members (“given to drink of the Spirit”); it first gives in order to receive only afterward. It is the diversity of calls or of vocations that differentiates the collective body. The members are sent to their tasks beginning from the creating and recreating Spirit, and thus one becomes a member on the basis of the future, a future that forms the principle of individuation.

Precisely because he has thus firmly opened the spiritual and supernatural dimension of this collective body, St. Paul can, in the rest of the same chapter, adopt in the mode of a parable the language of the natural body, not in order to describe it in itself but to reinterpret it in light of Christ and his body, and make us grasp the latter’s properties. To say with Ernst Käsemann that “the thought of an organism is simply an auxiliary idea” is to go too far. In order to explain the absolutely new advent and event of the collective body of Christ, St. Paul transports us to the more familiar terrain of the biological individual body and its parts, but does so in order to make us take a new look and to reorganize this terrain itself. In a sense, he puts new wine, a wine that he first served, into old skins, but with the purpose of making them burst, so as to renew the old, and not to age the new.

Even the most varied commentators agree on this. Conzelmann writes that “Paul does not construct his vision of the Church on the basis of the idea of an organism, but he can use this idea simply as an illustration,” and Rudolf Bultmann puts forward the same thesis. “Now the body,” continues St. Paul, “is not a single part, but many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body,’ it does not for this reason belong any less to the body . . . If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended” (1 Cor 12:14–19). And further: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I do not need you’ ” (1 Cor 12:21).

Here we must have two ears, not just one. For this virtual conflict obviously makes no sense, not only because the parts or members do not speak in the biological body, and God does not “pose” or “place” the members in the individual body as if he were constructing it piece by piece but instead makes the body grow and differentiate as a whole. No, indeed, it is the divine call that convokes the collective body and baptism that incorporates us into it (etymologically, “the Church” means nothing other than convocation). This divine will does not treat us as an inert object: it needs our obedience, our response, our own will, broadened or freed by grace. The prosopopoeia which gives speech to the parts of the individual body is precisely no longer a fabulist’s fiction when we move to the collective body. Every day shows this to be true.

The necessity or the need (chreia) wherein the parts exist in relation to one another is not declared in the silence of a physiological process but in speech that is received, exchanged, given, asked for, expected. This pressing mutual request (explained here by the negative of “I do not need”) and the anxious concern of the members for each other (indicated in 1 Cor 12:25 by the verb merimnaō) form the two sides of the same solidarity. Indeed, in the rest of the chapter, St. Paul, after having recalled that we protect the most fragile parts of our body the most, and honor with clothing the least decent, continues: “But God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division (schisma) in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If [one] part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy” (1 Cor 12:24b–26). This is the end of the analogy with the individual body, after which St. Paul returns to the Church and draws lessons from this long development.

Two remarks are necessary. First of all, even if all of its parts are not enumerated, the body is considered in its totality from head to foot, and free from false modesty, with an evocation of the less “honorable” parts. That is, this body is not simply a sensorial body, which sees or hears, but it exercises a plurality of actions of all kinds, and all these functions are indispensable. What we cover up out of decency is no less necessary. The second remark concerns the allegedly “metaphorical” character of this page. For in what does the metaphor, or transference, consist, and toward what? If there is a “proper” sense and a “figural” sense, what are they? The “proper” sense, and the one with which St. Paul began, is the one which concerns the Church: indeed, it is only there that the parts speak to one another and share with one another joy and suffering. And the “figural” sense is that which concerns the biological body, and what St. Paul depicts as if it were a church. It is not “metaphorical” to speak of the Church as a body, but it is metaphorical to speak about my body as a community of members or a collectivity of functions (at least pending further information, for certain thinkers were able to speak thus with rigor).

There remains the most important and difficult question for the present subject, and the one toward which all that precedes is ordered: What exactly is meant here by the term “member” or “part,” and what is its economy? To answer, we must continue our reading of this page. St. Paul continues: “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it (melē ek merous)” (1 Cor 12:27). Does a “part” designate a function in the Church, and thus only those who end up accomplishing it, or a person who, by his unique vocation, would be the foot, hand, or eye of the Church? The end of this verse seems to work in the sense of the second response, as do certain elements in what precedes it. But St. Paul adds immediately:

Some people God has designated in the church to be, first, apostles; second, prophets; third, teachers; then, mighty deeds; then, gifts of healing, assistance, administration, and varieties of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work mighty deeds? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? (1 Cor 12:28–30). 

Without entering into the confessional controversies that these lines have aroused concerning the organization of the primitive Church, it is clear that St. Paul enumerates, without any concern for exhaustiveness in one case or the other, first some of the functions or missions, then some of the gifts or charisms. It is under one or the other that we are members of the body, and the differentiation of the members is thought of beginning from their work and their tasks, which proceeds in the sense of the first response.

We can put these lines in parallel with those of the Epistle to the Ephesians: “And he [Christ] gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up (oikodomēn) the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God” (Eph 4:11–13). Whatever the status that we accord it, the interpretation by category or function thus prevails. It is not by exercising a function which would naturally be mine, and mine alone, that I am a member of the body, in which case it would not be the body of Christ; rather, it is by receiving the call to a mission that is one of the needs of this body and responding to it with all my being and the best I can, even if it seems miscast or not matched to my talents.

This is why God sends people who stutter to preach: everything that is Christian is necessarily based on a principle of death and resurrection. This does not mean that this call constitutes an offer of anonymous recruitment, awaiting whoever might want to introduce himself: each time it is absolutely singular, since I only hear it from my own response (which could include the reticence to respond or the struggle not to respond).

For the biblical principle of individuation, which is the divine vocation sent out from the edges of time, from before the creation of the world and toward its end, cannot be confused with the psycho-physiological principle of individuation, which starts from my origins, my familial and individual past. I only belong to the collective body in and through the community, and thus by seeking to discern what my function, small or great, might be. This differentiated organic function does not freeze the community into a machine-like state, even a biological one, with its cogs because, continuing with the First Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul invites his readers to take up the “way” (kath’hyperbolēn), the way of excess, of hyperbole, of excellence, which is the way of charity (1 Cor 12:31).

It is in the famous hymn to charity in chapter 13 where St. Paul says in an unforgettable way that, whatever the greatness of my gifts and my works (and he returns to some examples that he has just underlined), without charity, they are nothing, and “I am nothing.” Charity throbs in each of the members so that it may be a member and animates each work so that it may be a work of the body of Christ—charity is the only measure, the measure without measure, of the life of the body and of its members, and it mobilizes, literally, the order of the missions and the hierarchy of the functions; for a teacher without charity is not only less than an illiterate parasite, but quite simply nothing for the body. Those who, like Fichte, oppose a Church that is Pauline to one that is Johannine forget this fundamental passage, among others.

Regarding the symbolism of the organs, it is striking that St. Paul, after having enumerated parts of the individual body and then functions of the collective body, does not put the individual and the collective body in one-to-one correspondence, as will be the case later in theology. Nor does he exclude the fact that it can be done; the possibility remains open, but such is not his purpose. What is evident is that this symbolism lends itself much more to a categorical development than an individual one. We can speak precisely of the “brain” of a gang of criminals, or of the “right hand” of a great boss, but who would have the pride to call himself the eye or the ear of the body of Christ, or the sycophancy to say it to another?

More important is the question of the plasticity of the parts: Is it conceivable that the same person could be sometimes one part and sometimes another? St. Paul’s turns of phrase, even if they do not necessarily aim at instituted and canonically defined functions, seem to imply a certain fixedness or permanence of the tasks. But one is not born a teacher or a preacher, one becomes one, and can cease to be one, or cease to be it with the same strength one had before. We are not owners of grace, nor are we installed so firmly in our mission that we cannot stray from it, or fail it, or discover another, stronger mission. This possibility of becoming another part or another organ than the one we were remains a notable difference between the individual body and the collective body.

Beginning from this page of First Corinthians, St. Paul’s commentators are able to pursue diverse paths regarding the meaning of this organicity. Two opposing examples are enough to show this, one by St. John Chrysostom and another by St. Thomas Aquinas. In the beautiful homily that the former devoted to this analogy of the body, Chrysostom’s essential goal is to show that membership in the collective body, which is without degree since one cannot be a part only halfway, confers on all the parts an equal dignity and an equal necessity. The baptism that incorporates us into Christ is for each the same baptism, and it takes place in the same Spirit.

He says quite rightly we all, adding also himself. “For not even I, the Apostle, have any more than you in this respect,” says he. “For you are the body even as I, and I even as you, and we have all the same Head and have passed through the same birth-pains. Wherefore we are also the same body.” 

The difference among the members is a condition for the existence of the body as such, and far from opposing the members, it gives them an equal honor, precisely that of being members. “As it is, however, because you do not have the same gifts, therefore are you a body; and being a body, you are all one, and differ nothing from one another in this that you are a body. So that this very difference is that which chiefly causes your equality in honor.”

Even though he calls to mind the various orders within the Church, St. John Chrysostom does not develop a precise symbolism of the organs. He emphasizes the importance of what seems minor and the necessity of what seems useless. “For in the body even the little members seem to play an important role, but the great ones themselves are often injured by them, I mean by their removal. Thus, what is humbler in the body than hair? Yet if you remove the hair from the eyebrows and the eyelids, you have destroyed all the beauty of the face, and the eye will no longer appear so beautiful.” St. Augustine pushes to the point of hyperbole this Stoic-inspired image by saying that if one removes “one eyebrow” (unum supercilium) from a man, all the beauty of his face is altered! And St. John Chrysostom arrives at a beautiful meditation on the beggars at the doors of the church:

For no physician stretching out the hand to apply the knife works so effectually to cut out the corruption from our wounds as does a poor man stretching out his right hand and receiving alms, to take away the scars which the wounds have left.

This medical analogy shows that, far from being merely passive, the beggar plays an active role, and far from only receiving, he gives, and gives much more than what he receives. Thus St. John Chrysostom can say of beggars that they “supply [. . .] [to the body] one of its greatest ornaments: and without these, there could be no perfecting the fulness of the Church”—which of course in no way constitutes a justification of pauperism! But how do they assume such a seemingly paradoxical function? As icons of Christ, beggars in their silence and their very effacement are a memorial of the human condition, a living “Behold the man”: they remind us that from one day to the next, all that we have, and that in which we put our pride, indeed that on which we base our arrogance, vigor, beauty, social power, riches, all of it can be taken away by the vicissitudes of existence. In beggars I learn to see something of my own condition.

This cancer that they take away is that of haughtiness and scorn. The internal life of the body does not form a spectacle: it is not immediately given for us to see, but instead we need to learn to discern it. This is why St. John Chrysostom devotes here his longest and most beautiful development to the apparently minor, or even useless and superfluous, parts and concludes with biblical evocations whose thread is that no one can know with certitude the function, small or great, that he occupies within the collective body. The organicity of this collective body does not lead St. John Chrysostom to match such and such part of the body with such and such ecclesial order but to an insistence on the necessity of each member, and opens on to the mystery of the “communion of saints” in which sometimes what is most inapparent plays a role of unforeseen magnificence.

When, many centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas comments on the same Epistle of St. Paul, he puts into practice all of the reflection accumulated during those eight centuries on the collective body, which henceforth is named corpus mysticum, the “mystical body” of Christ. Certain emphases remain the same, while others are new. St. Thomas likewise sees that St. Paul goes from the body of Christ to the natural body, and not the reverse, when he says that “the comparison of the natural body represents” the mystical body. He likewise insists on the mutual necessity of the unit of the body and of the multiplicity of the members. But when he gets to the examples of the members given by St. Paul (the choice of which in no way changes the economy of the Pauline demonstration: it is enough that they simply be different), he matches each of them—foot, hand, ear, the sense of smell, head—to an ecclesial order.

The principle is clearly posed: “in the Church He arranged diverse offices and states (diversa officia, diversos status) according to His will.” “If all the Church were of one state and grade, it would destroy the perfection and beauty of the Church.” For the organicity of the Church requires that it be “composed of diverse orders (ex diversis ordinibus),” and on this subject St. Thomas quotes from the Song of Songs, drawing on the tradition whose study is the object of Body of Symbols. Studying the examples of St. Paul, St. Thomas follows the fundamental opposition of motor power and sensorial power (what he calls virtus apprehensiva), which corresponds to the opposition of the active life to the contemplative life.

Hands and feet come under the former: the feet are the inferior, the hands the superior, the praelati who lead them (and concerning hands, St. Thomas again quotes Song 5:14). Eyes and ears come under the contemplative life: “as eyes, teachers who investigate truth” (and again St. Thomas quotes Song 5:12), and the ears are “the disciples.” Continuing his commentary, he comes to the sense of smell: “By this can be understood those in the Church who, even though they are not capable of words of wisdom, nevertheless perceive some of its indications from afar, as an odor” (again a citation of Song 1:5). Further, the head is compared to the “prelates.”

The details here are not so important: I simply wish to draw two lessons from these examples. The first is the increasing precision of the thinking about the organicity of the body, and likewise about the definition or the figuration of the various orders of the Church by as many parts. The second is the movement of perpetual back-and forth and of mutual enrichment between ecclesiology and thinking about the collective body on the one hand and the hermeneutic of the Song of Songs on the other: they cannot be separated. It is not by an allegoristic fantasy, or out of individual caprice, that the commentaries on the Song of Songs multiply and thicken over the centuries: this deepening measures the depth of the self-reflection of the Church as collective body, and of its meditation on its own organicity.

The interpretation of the Song of Songs is the questioning, heuristic, and abounding place where theologians go for insights, just as new theological developments come to enrich and transform the interpretation of the Song of Songs itself. The proof a contrario is given by the fact that when reflection on the Church as body weakens, the interpretation of the Song of Songs becomes either scarce or marginalized, or moves in completely different directions. But what is at stake in all of this—and this is decisive—are simply responses to the questions raised by the Pauline theology of the body of Christ (for the collective dimension broached here).

Now we must look at how and with what difficulties this correspondence between the orders of the Church and the members of the body was gradually forged in the patristic period, before reaching its point of medieval equilibrium. Again, the purpose is to grasp the logic of this movement, and not to describe it in all its details here. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, which one could call foundational owing to its majestic sublimity and influence, Origen develops at much greater length and more precisely the theme of the senses and of the organs of the soul, studied in the previous chapter, than he does the theme of the organicity of the Church.

This is in no way the sign of an emphasis placed on the individual interpretation at the expense of the collective, for the two are equally important and always present for Origen. But his anthropology and his thought on the acts and powers of the soul are more readily realized in this organic language than his thinking on the collective body was able to accomplish. Origen reflects deeply on both the singular and the multiple character of the Church, for the Church is made of churches. He meditates on the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and in a general way one could draw an entire theology of the Church from what remains of his commentary, but few are the pages dedicated to making the orders correspond to organs.

Which interpretation is the most important? After having quoted St. Paul at length, and in particular, of course, the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Origen writes,

Therefore, we are taught by these words that the Bride of Christ, who is the Church, is also His Body and His members. If, then, you hear mention of the members of the Bridegroom, you must understand by it the members of His Church. Among these, just as there are some who are called eyes, doubtless because they have the light of understanding and of knowledge, and others ears, to hear the word of teaching, and others hands to do good works and to discharge the functions of religion: so also are some who may be called His cheeks. 

They are those who “cultivate the nobility of chastity and purity.” A little further, Origen understands “the Bride’s neck” as signifying “those souls who receive the yoke of Christ” voluntarily and are characterized by their “obedience” to his precepts. The beauty of this neck lies in the way in which its obedience becomes as similar as possible to that of Christ himself.

This symbolism is both natural and minimal: it only makes plain the action and function of the organs (the eyes see, the ears hear, the hands handle . . .) and does not identify them with a determined order in the Church, even if the possibility of doing so is clearly open. Origen, who has often been reproached for tracing overly severe separations between Christians according to their degree of spiritual advancement (a reproach that Origen’s better readers have proved wrong), here takes into view the unity of the Bride’s body, acknowledging of course the differentiation of its powers rather than the anatomy of the ecclesial hierarchy. This anatomy is not forgotten in the rest of the commentary, but its indications remain occasional and do not become systematic: the cedar rafters of the spouses’ house symbolize the bishops truly worthy of their charge, the trees which do not yet bear fruit refer to the catechumens.

Another interpretation is meaningful: concerning the Bride’s dovelike eyes, Origen does not ask to whom they refer, but what they do. “Her eyes, moreover, are compared to doves, surely because she understands the Divine Scriptures now, not after the letter, but after the spirit, and perceives in them spiritual mysteries; for the dove is the emblem of the Holy Spirit.” Thus it is clear that the call to read and to see in this way is addressed to all of the members of the body and not only to one among them, even if the capacity of each to do this can assuredly vary.

Notwithstanding the generally rich symbolic inventiveness of Origen, here on this point he hardly goes beyond the affirmations of St. Paul himself and does not engage in a synoptic and recapitulative vision of the body of the Church in its organicity. The verses he is studying occasion Origen’s tackling of this collective symbolism, at least in what remains to us of his works. We are only at the beginning of a long history. Moreover, this is only natural and corresponds to a logical development of the affirmations: thinking about the collective body that is the Church is sufficiently new and disconcerting, in view of former thinking, philosophical or political, about the community and the body, so that the emphasis is put first on the reality, the unity, and the life of this body, and on what is generally signified by belonging to it. In a second phase, after the first point has been understood within a predominantly Christian collectivity, the growing Church, becoming more and more differentiated and hierarchical, producing multiple orders and functions, comes to reflect with greater precision on the meaning of its internal connections and its organicity.

One of the liveliest advances in this sense in the Patristic period is found in the work of St. Gregory of Nyssa. Like Origen, Gregory reads the Song of Songs in light of Pauline theology, but he fills with a rich content what had remained for Origen a methodical framework. Four of the five homilies that he devoted to the Song, the seventh and the last three, apply to the ecclesial body the Bridegroom’s praise of the bride’s beauty and the bride’s praise of the Bridegroom’s. We can legitimately see these praises as intersecting if the body of the Bride-Church is the collective body of Christ and lives to imitate his singular body. From the outset, St. Gregory of Nyssa sets forth the completeness of the correspondence between the Church and the human body. After having recalled the fundamental Pauline theses on this point, he writes:

Since this is so, I say, it is possible to find in the common body of the Church lips as well as teeth and tongue, breasts and womb and neck and, as Paul says, also those members of the body that appear unseemly [and which in fact are not]. 

He approaches them successively in the course of his commentary, leveraging the biblical symbolism in general and his knowledge of the Greek medical tradition, above all the Galenic, which for good reason is more precise here than among many medieval Latin commentators. But the Bible, of course, remains predominant. The richness of his analyses of detail will be considered later; only his approach is considered here.

It is in this way that the eyes, for example, which Gregory sees corresponding in the Church to prophets and contemplatives, have several functions and do not relate only to theoretical knowledge. They see the light and what appears in it, but they also discern the friend from the enemy, the proper from the improper, the helpful from the threatening, and they guide us on our way. This is why the eye is not enough without the hand. Gregory gives a strong and precise sense to the verse of St. Paul according to which the eye cannot say to the hand that it does not need it, which is not surprising coming from this great thinker of the human hand. “He shows us by this that the body of the Church needs to utilize the two, to combine for better seeing the truth and realizing it, for contemplation does not of itself bring the soul to perfection unless it makes room for works that further the practice of the moral life, any more than the conduct of life is profitable in its own right unless true and reverent belief guides the works.”

The approach of Gregory regarding some members of the body is always functional: it starts from what a member does or can do, and not from its visible appearance or its formal beauty. Thus he does not enter into the difficulties that will be those of subsequent commentators concerning the cheeks. The cheeks perplex many commentators, who tend to see only their beauty, or the fact that they can blush and thus serve as a symbol of modesty (or of the modest).

Luther puts it forcefully: the cheeks are a “splendid ornament. They do nothing special, they just glow and are gazed upon.” “The cheeks do not do anything except appear.” St. Gregory of Nyssa, on the contrary, puts emphasis on their function. Those, he writes, who want the bread of wisdom “stand in further need of that cheek which, with the teeth of its thoughts, grinds such food small. So there must be cheeks too in the body of Christ, for the benefit of those who are no longer attached to the breasts of the word,” according to the Pauline distinction. The function of the cheeks “is to grind small the food by which the body’s nature and power are preserved.” This cooperation of the cheeks in chewing will also be highlighted by other interpreters.

Conversely, the way in which St. Gregory of Nyssa approaches the hair will have little posterity. Most interpreters either collect biblical passages on hair in order to disclose its meaning, or they consider hair as either adorning or disfiguring the head. That the multitude of hairs may be gathered in braids or in locks plays an important role, just as does whether they are clean or dirty. One starts with the hair insofar as it is visible. Gregory for his part starts from the sentient body and transforms the negative property of hair being devoid of sensation into spiritual grandeur:

The body out of which hairs grow suffers pain when they are plucked out; the hair itself, however, has no sensation if it is cut or if it is burned or if it is combed and arranged out of some concern for good looks. Now to have no part in sensation is proper to beings that are dead. So one who has no sensation of the things that are much valued in this world, and is not elated by glory and honor, and is not pained by outrage and dishonor, but maintains herself in the same state with regard to both of the contraries, this one is the hair of the betrothed that is praised—undisguisedly dead and unmoved with regard to the affairs of the world, whether they go this way or that.

To be among the hairs of the collective body is to be dead to the world, to have attained with regard to the world a high form of impassibility, and thus a great spiritual elevation. It is only in this way that we meet up with the more habitual theme of adornment. This attention to the lived body more than to the visible body is characteristic of St. Gregory of Nyssa and corrects certain hasty interpretations that some have been able to place on him.

But with this overview of the organs there also appears an aporia in the thought of the collective body, an aporia that has its foundation in the things themselves. This collective body of the Church is the body of Christ, the Word incarnate. It is thus founded on the Word in person, and its life is that of the word of God received and transmitted, heard and understood. What air, nourishment, and blood are for our biological body, so the word of God is for this collective body. It draws its life from this word, and its various functions unfold beginning from that word and toward it.

Thus, the difficulty lies in thinking this collective body’s differentiation into multiple organs, for ultimately it could seem only to speak by listening, and to listen by speaking, to be only ear and mouth, an ear-mouth. Some have been tempted to see in every one of the members of the body the symbol of the preacher, of the exegete, or of the doctor of the Church, in which case the true diversity of the members would be lost, and most of them would only be various names for the same sole task, considered of course under numerous points of view. Some examples will be provided. Can we think of a body living entirely on the word without its members becoming interchangeable?

And yet we have in our remarkable body an example of the contrary, for its speaking does not take anything away from its complex organicity. This difficulty does not concern the clever device of a made-up symbolism, but the body and the task of conceiving it in its being. Without thematizing this aporia as such, St. Gregory of Nyssa confronted it. Reviewing the various members of the collective body, St. Gregory studies their function and their meaning before seeking to illustrate them with some examples. And in a striking manner the same example returns: that of St. Paul.

The work of the teeth, which is to make the food assimilable and digestible by chewing it, is Paul’s work: “What we observe, then, in the case of Paul, namely that he fulfills the work of the Church’s teeth by analyzing the teachings to shed light on them, we say also in the case of everyone who, after his example, clarifies the mysteries for us.” When he later comes to the neck and to its functions, Gregory writes: “Such a neck was Paul, and anyone else who conducts his life rightly in imitation of Paul. He bore up the name of the Lord as the Master’s ‘vessel of election,’” before detailing, through some considerations on the trachea and the larynx, how Paul took up those functions. When next we come to the breasts, the subject is “the person who, after the fashion of the great Paul, becomes a breast for the little ones and feeds the Church’s newborn with milk.”

As for the curls or the locks of the hair of the Bridegroom, which have become like palms even though they are black, it is again St. Paul who through his conversion, becoming an apostle after being a persecutor of the Church, provides the most eloquent example. When the subject is cheeks that are like bowls of spices, “Paul was such a bowl as this. He did not tamper with the word by cunning but commended himself ‘by the open statement of the truth’” (2 Cor 4:2). And the scarlet ribbon to which the lips of the bride are compared are once again illustrated by St. Paul.

With excellent intentions, certainly, the example of Paul is in fact turned against the word of Paul himself, for it is clear that when Paul develops the analogy with the body studied above, about our belonging as a member to the body of Christ, it is in order to show the singularity of our vocation and of our task, as well as its always finite and partial character, and not in order to argue that the same man can play the role of a great variety of members. The aporia appears clearly. In its details, St. Gregory of Nyssa’s set of arguments is convincing, and there seems to be nothing forced about the reasons that he puts forward to give St. Paul as an example of each of the members that he studies. How would it be otherwise, if their role each time is essentially relative to speech? It is clear that in that case only the highest biblical witnesses of the word can come to mind. But this only underscores the difficulty, which is that of the real differentiation of the members.

The Venerable Bede, at the beginning of the third book of his commentary on the Song of Songs, realizes the problem and, albeit briefly, gives his own solution. It is no longer about St. Paul in particular: these are the “doctors” of the church (in the sense of those who teach doctrine, the theologians, and not in the sense that this term took on officially later) who were recognized by him as signifying the various members.

Variously and in many ways are the same mysteries of Christ and the Church repeated (i.e., in the Song), but the repetitions always add something new that either serves to augment (augmentum procuret) the same mysteries or increases the joy (amplius delectet) in the minds of the hearers through its very novelty. Therefore the same teachers who were above designated by the name of “eyes” or “teeth” or “neck” are now expressed by the word “breasts.” 

And Bede, in the following lines, explains the difference of aim in these various symbols with regard to the word: 

For they can rightly be called eyes, since they perceive the hidden dimensions of divine revelations (sacramentorum); rightly are they called teeth, since in reproving the ungodly it is as though they are chewing them up and transforming them into tender and humble [members] in the body of the Church; rightly are they called a neck, since in preaching eternal joys it is as though they are providing the whole body of the Church with the breath of life (quasi vitalem flatum) and preparing the doctrinal food with which she is nourished unto salvation; and they are also quite aptly referred to as breasts, since they supply the milk of the life-giving word to those who are still infants in Christ.

Bede returns a few pages later to this difference of teeth and breasts, which is at once a difference of function and of object: the word is transmitted according to the nature and the condition of its addressees. That the same men, the doctors, are symbolized by several members translates the multifaceted economy of the word according to the stages of the spiritual journey and the increasing openness of the mind of the reader or hearer. Indeed, the Song of Songs, amidst the numerous questions that it awakens in those who scrutinize it, forms a privileged place for meditating on the meaning or meanings of repetition, by the very fact of all the repetitions that appear in it, notably in the praise of the parts of the body but also by the fact of the profusion of commentaries, which often both inspire one another and differentiate themselves. Bede sees at work in the Song of Songs itself this renewing repetition, which is neither a simple redundancy nor a failure of the organic model.

More than a century later, Haimo of Auxerre, who depends largely upon Bede, whose work he condenses and transforms, resumes these same multiple symbolisms of the doctors by expanding them to preachers. But he removes Bede’s attempted explanation, noting only that “It is no surprise that one and the same thing is figured in various ways,” without saying why we must not be surprised about it. We do not need to appeal to armchair sociology in order to consider that this might be a temptation of exegetes and theologians, who by definition are those who write the treatises on the body of the Church and the biblical commentaries on the symbolism of this body, to overstate their own role to the point of seeing almost nothing else, and at times to risk forgetting the diversity of the gifts and the functions which, while they all depend on God the Word, can be paths of speech in silence, and of intelligence in sapiential simplicity.

Haimo of Auxerre tends in this way toward a questionable “clericalism” when he says of “holy doctors,” who are compared to the neck in the body, that they are “mediators, so to speak, between Christ and the rest of the faithful that they instruct, and unite, so to speak, Christ to his body, that is to say, the Church,” forgetting that if the unique mediator certainly calls forth witnesses, his witnesses, he does not himself have need of mediators, in infinite regression, and that if it is not Christ himself who constructs his body, then it is no longer truly his body that is at issue. But Haimo restores the equilibrium a little later by showing that it is the entire body that is beautiful, and thus it is thanks not simply to “the doctors alone and the perfect ones alone,” but “also [to] all the simple faithful,” that its beauty is complete.

In the Patristic period, it is probably Apponius, the author of a rich and original commentary on the Song of Songs, even if he is a personality about whom we know little, who best avoided the temptation just mentioned. The very constructed character of his commentary gives a completeness to his vision of the collective body that some medieval syntheses will later have. But above all Apponius follows St. Paul in his attentiveness to the extreme variety of the charisms. Without entering into a comprehensive presentation of his work, we must retain the integration by Apponius of types of the faithful that other interpretations do not take into account. The general principle, frequently repeated, is directly Pauline:

And since none other than Christ could accomplish all the great works that build up the body of the Church, each of the saints now fulfills, in the body of the Church, according to his abilities (pro sua possibilitate), the office of one of its members. And each receives his name among the members of the Church according to the activity in which he is most expert (sollertior).

But these works are diverse.

Thus the hair is the rich laity, who contribute by their gifts to the life and to the beauty of the Church. Apponius of course does not depict them as saints.

For such people, because they find their joy in material realities and are unable to follow the arduous road of philosophy, namely the austerity of the apostles, are compared to a flock of goats; and because they make return of their wealth to the one who gave it to them, they have deserved to be the hair of the Church.

But of course he is talking about “that category among the wealthy who are contented with what they have and do not covet the goods of others.” Thus even the rich young man of the Gospel (Matt 19:16–22), who keeps all the commandments but who is not ready to abandon everything to follow Jesus, can, according to Apponius, become a strand of the hair of the Church by showing generosity.

As for the eyes of the Church, if they can be, as they are for many other interpreters, the “bishops” as “guides for the entire body,” they become, when later in the Song of Songs they are compared to pools, those who, “whether for their own faults committed long ago or for those of others, shed fountains of tears, and, having received the blessing of those who weep, transmit to others the example of penance, and guide them.” The failures of others affect them as if they were their own, and their tears bear witness that the members belong to one another and suffer for one another. They also weep for those who are without tears, vicariously, and this is why they are the eyes.

The gift of tears makes them an essential member (because what would a Church be whose tears were dried up?), and yet without matching directly to an institutionally defined structure, nor to an extraordinary intellectual capacity, for every man, whatever he may be, can indeed be brought to weep. This truth of tears is indivisible; it is just as much tears of joy as tears of affliction, as Apponius expressly points out: “They are so filled with this special gift that, whether the joy of the kingdom of heaven is being proclaimed or the sorrow of Gehenna, the flow of tears does not cease among them.”

The belly can serve as the final example of the balance achieved by Apponius. It is the “receptacle of food,” and in the Church, it refers to

Those who, although they do not apply themselves to teaching others by their words, nevertheless consume continually in themselves, enclosed in the silence of peace, thanks to their holy conduct, the food of souls, the Holy Spirit who gives life and whom they receive in their new birth.

Those who in the Church only listen are not reduced to being the pupils of a doctor, or disciples of a master, relationships conceived in a theoretical or pedagogical manner, but they are also those who take and keep in themselves the word they have heard so as to live on it in their action and thus, in a form completely different from teaching, diffuse its nourishing strength and power through the whole body. All of this suffices to show that Apponius, developing the Pauline analogy of the body in a symphonic manner, remains faithful to its spirit, which is to take into account the vital necessity for the body of all the members, no matter how humble, as the unheard-of variety of gifts received, which also measures the vitality of the body.

All this reflection on the organicity of the collective body, of which the preceding observations have shown the origin and genealogy, will find its fulfillment in medieval theology, singularly through meditation on the Song of Songs. The endlessly relaunched and renewed questioning that it assumes about a body’s potential and what it does gives that meditation a philosophical interest as much as one that is spiritual and historical. Before studying this thinking about the body in the fullness and concreteness of its exercise in my Body of Symbols: The Christian Tradition of the Song of Songs, let us make an observation that puts it into perspective and raises a question. In the twentieth century, the Catholic magisterium, in the person of Pius XII, devoted an important document to the collective body of Christ: the encyclical Mystici corporis Christi.

These pages, with the help of the Fathers of the Church, especially SS. Ambrose and Augustine, who are cited often, and of theologians, principally St. Thomas Aquinas, give a thorough exposition of the Pauline theology of the Body of Christ and its repercussions over the centuries. Strong emphasis is placed by Pius XII on the organicity of the Church:

As in nature a body is not formed by any haphazard grouping of members but must be constituted of organs, that is of members, that have not the same function and are arranged in due order; so for this reason above all the Church is called a body, that it is constituted by the coalescence of structurally united parts, and that it has a variety of members reciprocally dependent.

This “ordered or ‘organic’ structure of the body of the Church” is specifically not to be confused with the hierarchy alone. But while this organic differentiation is meditated upon at length, a determined category of the faithful is never named by a part of the natural body. There is no mention of the neck, arms, or nose. The same observation can be made in a theological work enjoying a certain authority, the Theology of the Church by Charles Cardinal Journet. The organic symbolism is left to the side, even as the organicity is strongly foregrounded and the biblical pages at the origin of the symbolism’s development are cited. That of which the growth and fulfillment are to be described has also been obscured. This symbolism has not been canonized in its detail, and the Catholic magisterium has confined itself to the affirmations of St. Paul, speaking of the organs without defining them.

Is this prudence with regard to a symbolic language, the detail of which has never produced unanimity, merely a sober prudence, or does it have a deeper meaning? It does not indicate a crisis of the organic model, which is reaffirmed, but rather a deficit of the realism with which this model is said and is expressed. Is there a change on the side of the natural body, as if its symbolizing capacity were collapsing, as if it no longer offered the basis, in its modern objectification, for such an open symbolization? Let us leave the question for now in suspense but retain it in memory.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from the book Body of Symbols: The Christian Tradition of the Song of Songs (Franciscan University Press, 2026). All rights reserved.

Perhaps these concerns are overblown; perhaps there is no “existential” issue, and perhaps no threat of “usurpation.” But evidence continues to mount that the architects of these programs have a vision of the future that is dangerous to human beings, and dangerous precisely on the existential level of how we understand ourselves and exist and act in the world as human beings. For example, earlier this year Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, prophesied a world where “intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” The moral turpitude of such a statement should go without saying. But is it even a reasonable claim in the first place? Is intelligence the kind of thing that can be owned by a third party and externally distributed to human customers and consumers, like water or electricity?

No, it is not. In order to help us think about these issues, I suggest we turn to one who knew nothing of artificial intelligence: St. Augustine of Hippo, and in particular his massive work, De Trinitate (On the Trinity).[1] In an effort to uncover a “likeness” of the Trinity in the human mind (VIII, 8), Augustine performs a sustained investigation into his own subjectivity, consciousness, and intelligence.[2] He identifies the mind’s knowledge of itself as the innermost element of consciousness and intelligence, and thus as the site of the most profound likeness to the Trinity. It is precisely the kind of self-appropriation that Augustine performs in his development of this “trinity of the mind” which we, sixteen centuries after De Trinitate, urgently require. By following Augustine in this investigation, we will develop a standpoint from which we can understand our identity as human subjects invested with intelligence, and from which we can begin to navigate the possibilities of AI exceeding or replacing this intelligence.

Getting Mixed Up

I suggest we begin in medias res, in the middle of Book X of De Trinitate. Augustine is grappling with the ancient axiom of the Delphic oracle, gnothi seauton—know thyself. But where does the mind go to look for itself? (X, 11). Augustine draws our attention to the danger of the mind simply identifying itself with its objects, as the same in nature as the physical objects of which it forms images and concepts. In an especially vivid expression, Augustine speaks of the “force of love” with which the mind thinks about things for a long time and becomes “stuck to them with the glue of care”; by this force of love, it develops the tendency “to drag these along with itself even when it returns to thinking about itself” (X, 7). By making images of the things it knows, the mind gives something of itself to its objects, and when it joins itself with these images it can make the mistake of thinking of itself as just another thing of the same sort. It becomes lost in these images of things it has perceived with the senses and fails “to see itself alone” (X, 11). Because the mind spends so much time thinking about bodily objects, and thinking about them by virtue of images which it forms for itself, it makes the mistake of thinking of itself as just another bodily object; it “drags” them into itself when it returns to thinking about itself, and thinks about itself as just another sensible and imaginable thing. In other words, it “mixes itself up” with the objects of its knowledge (X, 11).

In general, Augustine contends that the more we focus our intelligence on other, external things, the more we actually become conformed to those things and begin to see ourselves in their image. AI simply intensifies this problem: the more we invest our intelligence into AI, outsourcing the patient labor of thought to a third party, the more we become “stuck” to it and imagine ourselves as images of it, rather than it as an image of us. As Jeffrey Bishop argues, this is the innate problem of all technology, and of AI in particular: we imagine ourselves as the masters of such technologies, but in reality they “recursively create us, and set out for us what it is possible to imagine.”

We can see this recursive creation in our language, where we use personal metaphors for AI—verbs like “think” and “know,” the category of “intelligence” itself, as well as gendered names and pronouns—while using mechanical metaphors for ourselves, as Warren Kinghorn observes. This results in an exchange of identities where persons grant personal qualities to machines that are in fact incapable of receiving them, while personhood itself is effaced in the offshoring of personal (intellectual and rational) activities. From an Augustinian perspective, this recursive creation is another way—indeed a uniquely powerful way—that the mind can get “mixed up” with something outside itself and begin to forget its own identity.

As soon as we start to think this way, we also quickly recognize our own inferiority: if human intelligence is simply a “natural” version of “artificial” intelligence, then it is in many ways a lesser image, a pale imitation of the extraordinary things that AI can do. If our minds are just large language models, but simply lower on the evolutionary scale, then they may be inferior models, and we should invest all our technological capital into developing superior programs that can perform the labor of intelligence in more effective and efficient ways than we can, as we have designed machines to do our laundry, dishwashing, etc. But—Augustine wants to tell us—intelligence consists in something other than these tasks that we can outsource to AI. It consists in something more fundamental than these tasks, and by cultivating our self-knowledge we will be able to recognize this.

Augustine wishes to draw our attention to the categorical difference between knowledge of other things and knowledge of oneself. When the mind is commanded to know itself, Augustine says later in Book X, it is not commanded to know an absent being, like the cherubim and seraphim, but to recognize its own presence to itself (X, 12). Augustine has a variety of ways of expressing this strict difference between self-knowledge and other-knowledge, present-knowledge and absent-knowledge. Augustine expresses this difference by noting the dissimilarities between the eye and the mind.

While admitting the unique fittingness of the metaphor of vision for knowledge—I “see” what you mean, as we often say—Augustine uses this fittingness as an occasion for recognizing the profound difference between the mind and the physical eye (XI, 1). For example, the eye sees external things without seeing itself, but the mind can only know other things because it knows itself first (IX, 3). If the eye wants to see itself, it needs an external object—a mirror—to help it do so; but if the mind wants to know itself, it needs no external medium, and needs precisely to abstract from all these external media (X, 5). To think of the mind as a kind of eye, and nothing more than an eye, is thus another way of “getting mixed up.”

Augustine draws a threefold distinction between things the mind knows through the senses, things it knows through testimony, and things it knows through itself (XV, 22). When we know things outside ourselves, our knowledge is “co-generated” by ourselves and by those external things; but when the mind is the object of its own knowledge, it is the sole parent of that knowledge, as both the subject and object of knowing, the knower as well as the known (IX, 18).

Augustine therefore draws another distinction between knowledge of the mind in terms of generic or specific knowledge (i.e. classifying the mind as a certain kind of substance, a certain kind of soul, à-la Aristotle’s De anima), and knowledge of the mind in oneself, which one can see for oneself and tell to others (IX, 9). Following Augustine, Bernard Lonergan makes a similar distinction between “soul” and “subject,” with the former pertaining to a metaphysical consideration of the soul’s objects, acts, and potencies, and the latter an introspection where one discovers not only the acts of consciousness but also their intending subject. Lonergan contends that Augustine’s “trinity of the mind” falls, at least in the first place, in the latter category, in a “phenomenology of the subject” before a “psychology of the soul.”[3]

But Augustine does not wish simply to tell his readers what is going on in his own mind, as if a kind of psychological autobiographer. Reflecting on the role of literature, Augustine believes that the reader should not simply take the author at his word, but should discover with the writer that these things are true, and discover this in himself or in truth guiding the mind (XIV, 9). Lonergan therefore remarks: “As Augustine’s discovery was part and parcel of his own mind’s knowledge of itself, so he begged his readers to look within themselves and there to discover the speech of spirit within spirit.”[4]

To discover this self-knowledge requires a movement of the will. Because the mind becomes “mixed up” with its objects and forgets itself in them, it requires an act of will—a decision—to cultivate one’s self-knowledge and all it entails. This is implied by the fact that “know thyself” is a command, which one can follow or not. Augustine also states this explicitly when he states that the mind must “turn to itself the interest of its will” in order to recognize itself (X, 11). Augustine has a variety of reasons for recommending this kind of “non-bodily turning around” (IX, 3), and today we have urgent reasons of our own to add to Augustine’s. As significant technological, cultural, and economic forces seek to transfer intelligence from human minds into “artificial intelligence” (and the corporations which own these programs), it requires a decision to resist these forces and to cultivate the intelligence that they wish to usurp.

Fortunately, Augustine promises to guide his reader into recognizing the uniqueness and profundity of self-knowledge, this “subjective” knowledge which constitutes each human being as a unique subject, distinguishable from all other objects, whether natural objects or artificial intelligence.

Hidden Knowledge

Augustine begins Book X with the problem of the mind seeking to know itself. By seeking to know itself, it apparently does not know itself; but this is impossible, Augustine argues. Even if it seems not to know itself, the mind nevertheless knows some things, such as other minds; it therefore knows that it knows. Now, if it knows that it knows, then it necessarily knows itself knowing, and therefore knows itself (X, 5). Similarly, in the very act of seeking itself, it knows itself seeking and therefore “already knows itself” (X, 5). “It follows then that [the mind] simply cannot not know itself,” Augustine concludes, “since by the very fact of knowing itself not knowing, it knows itself . . . For it knows itself seeking and not knowing, while it seeks to know itself” (X, 5; cf. X, 16).

Augustine aims to prove that the mind knows itself, even and precisely when it seeks itself and seeks to know itself. In the previously cited passage, the most important word is “already”: the mind “already knows itself” when it seeks to know itself, and this act of seeking rests on this prior self-knowledge as its hidden ground. Augustine also uses language of “availability” for this truth about the mind: the whole of the mind is “available to itself” as it seeks for itself, and none of the mind is missing (X, 6). This also correlates with the language of “presence” indicated in the previous section: it is impossible for the mind to know other minds without knowing itself, because nothing is more “present” to the mind than itself (X, 5; cf. XIV, 14). With these key terms—already, available, present—Augustine seeks to show that all acts of the mind proceed out of a more fundamental availability and presence to oneself which constitutes a knowing of oneself; in other words, the apparent poverty of having to seek to know oneself paradoxically arises out of a profound wealth of self-knowledge, a wealth which is nonetheless hidden from our view.

Having recognized this wealth of self-knowledge, Augustine draws another key distinction between knowing oneself (se nosse) and thinking about oneself (se cogitare): even when one does not think about oneself, one still knows oneself (XIV, 7; X, 19). “Thinking about oneself” includes all deliberate acts of thought in which the mind directly turns its attention to itself, including Augustine’s composition of De Trinitate, and the thought processes that enabled it, as well as the reader’s participation in this thought. But all these specific acts presuppose the prior state of “knowing oneself” even when one does not think about oneself. Augustine refers to this primordial self-knowing as memory, as a kind of “confidential file of awareness” (XIV, 8; cf. XV, 40).

What Edmund Hill translates as “confidential file of awareness”—arcana notitia—could more directly be rendered as “hidden knowledge” or “secret awareness.” By directing his reader’s attention to this so-called “hidden knowledge,” Augustine does not mean to indulge in esotericism or obscurantism; on the contrary, he is attempting to show his reader that every mind necessarily enjoys this “hidden knowledge,” by which it knows itself even when it does not think about itself. Paradoxically, this seemingly opaque “hidden knowledge” can become most luminous to us, and Augustine aims to reveal precisely this hidden clarity.

Augustine’s derivation of this “hidden knowledge” represents one of his most salient insights for the age of AI. Much of the discourse concerning AI centers (and quite reasonably so) on its extraordinary products, which seem to outstrip the capabilities of human intelligence, at least in speed and efficiency (cf. Magnifica Humanitas §99). Augustine is contending, though, that the essence of intelligence lies in something else, neither in the products of intelligence nor even in the processes of thought which give rise to these products (and which AI mimics). Rather, the innermost nature of intelligence lies precisely in this “hidden knowledge,” this wealth of self-knowledge “out of which the gaze of thought is formed” (XIV, 8). The key word in this formulation is “out of” (unde). Augustine is drawing our attention away from both the product of knowledge as well as the thought-processes pertaining to knowledge, and toward the immanent source of knowledge, that “out of which the gaze of thought is formed.”

Rowan Williams, one of the most eminent contemporary interpreters of Augustine, highlights the fact that self-knowledge for Augustine is not simply another piece of information, and that this provides a crucial point of philosophical interest today in navigating the “mental” status of artificial intelligence.[5] For Augustine, whatever information the mind possesses, this is not the most fundamental element of the mind. In uncovering this most fundamental element as “memoria” and “arcana notitia,” Augustine is developing a thoroughly non-informational understanding of the mind which is crucial for comparing “artificial intelligence” to authentic human intelligence. The source and “nature” of the latter resides in this surplus of knowledge, intelligibility, and meaning out of which thinking arises, and which is intensely personal and “subjective” (in Lonergan’s sense) in nature. When we see the nature of intelligence as such, we can see the inescapably improper and metaphorical sense of “intelligence” in the moniker “artificial intelligence,” because it is precisely this abiding personal subject, constituted in self-knowledge, which AI lacks.

Augustine provides us with further reflections that can help clarify and solidify this point. At a few points in De Trinitate, Augustine recommends prescinding from everything outside the mind in order for the mind to discern itself from what is other (e.g. X, 12). Augustine does not mean thereby to embrace any kind of idealism or solipsism for which the mind alone is true; when he distinguishes between what the mind knows through the senses and what the mind knows through itself, he explicitly upholds the former as a valid site of knowledge (XV, 21). Nevertheless, he remains confident that the mind can discern itself as distinct from everything outside itself, even while maintaining the reality of things outside itself, and he insists that we conduct this exercise in order to discover the necessary role that the mind plays in every act of knowledge, a role which, despite its fundamental status, frequently becomes obscure to us.

By “drawing off what it has added to itself,” the mind will be able to discern itself from what is other by recognizing itself as “more inward” than sensible things (X, 11); by putting aside all outward things, we will be able to discern the “nature” of the mind (X, 14). Though the mind gives something of itself by forming images and concepts of its objects, Augustine contends that that is “more truly mind” and more truly “rational intelligence” that the mind withholds from its objects, i.e., that which it keeps apart by making judgments on its objects (X, 7). In order to further distinguish the “inner” of the mind from the “outer,” Augustine recommends we pay attention to the various acts of the mind (such as judgment) which originate with the mind and are not simply reducible to the objects and information conveyed in these acts. Augustine therefore contends, “If [the mind] refrains from affixing to itself any of these image-bound objects of its thoughts in such a way as to think it is that sort of thing, then whatever is left to it of itself, that alone is what it is” (X, 16).

Augustine observes the many arguments about the nature of the mind (arguments which continue today), as some contend that the mind is nothing but a body or an organization of body, such as air, fire, or (as we are inclined to think today) brain (X, 14). But all of this is uncertain and subject to debate. Augustine therefore recommends that we disregard (at least for the moment) what is uncertain and focus on what is certain:

Nobody surely doubts, however, that he lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and knows and judges. At least, even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he is doubting; if he doubts, he understands he is doubting; if he doubts, he has a will to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows he does not know; if he doubts, he judges he ought not to give a hasty assent. You may have your doubts about anything else, but you should have no doubts about these; if they were not certain, you would not be able to doubt anything (X, 14).

Even if one doubts, Augustine is saying, one cannot doubt the very act of doubting, or the very act of thinking, judging, etc. Those who question whether the mind is air, fire, or brain fail to notice what we discovered above: that the mind knows itself even when it is looking for itself (X, 16). If we want to know what the mind most truly is, we need to attend to this self-knowledge and to the acts which proceed out of it.

Augustine thus makes the following recommendation: if you want to know what intelligence is, do not—at least in the first place—ask Google or an AI chatbot (perish the thought) about what neuroscientists, psychologists, or philosophers say about intelligence. Rather, attend to your own acts of intelligence by which you pose these questions, by which you seek their answers, by which you judge their truth. It is only in these acts that the meaning of intelligence can be determined, and can serve as the foundation for a comparison with AI: “When a human being is able to think about the nature of his consciousness and find out what is true about it, he will not find it anywhere else but inside himself” (XIV, 8).[6]

For Augustine, the key characteristic of all the aforementioned acts is that the mind knows them “in itself” (X, 16). Unlike their extrinsic objects, these acts cannot be doubted because they arise out of that ineradicable wealth of self-knowledge that we discovered above. As Augustine puts it, it is “not from the outside” that the mind receives what it remembers and loves within this self-knowledge (XIV, 11). Though many things are adventitious to the mind, “the mind, after all, is not adventitious to itself” (XIV, 13). By momentarily prescinding from everything that comes to the mind from without, Augustine has discovered the nature of the mind in that which does not come from without, in that which constitutes the most inward source of its life and its acts—its wealth of self-knowledge out of which all acts of thought are formed, and which exists distinctly from everything that comes to it from without.

Herein also lies Augustine’s most important idea for understanding the status of “artificial intelligence,” which, unlike the mind, is precisely adventitious to itself. Whatever remains after removing everything adventitious to the mind—that is what the mind is, according to Augustine (X, 16). What remains of AI when you remove everything that comes to it from the outside? Nothing. Everything comes to it from the outside: the programming of a human engineer, the “training” of human agents, the data it receives and processes, the prompting of a human agent who needs their homework done or their vacation planned. If AI-generated literature, art, or music seems to lack depth and soul—it is because it literally does. If it is improper to describe artificial intelligence as artificial intelligence, it is exactly right to describe it as artificial intelligence: unlike the mind, which has a nature discerned in its abiding presence to itself and knowledge of itself, AI has no nature, no immanent ground of life and being which persists independent of its extrinsic influences.

The Drama of the Image of God

If Augustine encourages us to consider the source of intelligence over its products and objects, he simultaneously insists that we move beyond this immanent source toward its transcendent source. Augustine considers all of the preceding necessary for determining what constitutes the “image of God” in the human being, which will be the most intense likeness to God in creation and thus the most adequate site for the “likeness” to the Trinity for which Augustine is searching (XI, 8). In other words, by laboring to uncover the immanent nature of the mind in its “hidden knowledge” of itself, Augustine is simultaneously uncovering the mind’s transcendence of itself and its orientation toward the God who is “more inward than my inmost and higher than my highest” (Confessions III, 11).

Augustine identifies the mind as the image of God to the extent that it has the “capacity to use reason and understanding in order to understand and gaze upon God” (XIV, 6). This “capacity to reason and understand” is provided by the mind’s immanent constitution as the kind of thing that always already knows and loves itself; by being this kind of thing it is capable of knowing and loving God. The mind’s natural love of itself constitutes its potency to cling to God (XIV, 20), and the mind is always “in God” to the extent that it is able by nature to remember him (XIV, 21). Augustine therefore identifies the mind’s trinity of remembering, understanding, and loving itself as “already the image of God,” which is innate to the mind and cannot be lost (XIV, 11).

The immanence of the mind thus breaks forth into transcendence: “This trinity of the mind,” Augustine famously writes, “is the image of God not because the mind remembers and understands and loves itself, but because it is also able to remember and understand and love him by whom it was made” (XIV, 15). This passage might seem to contradict Augustine’s earlier claim that the mind is “already the image of God” when it remembers, understands, and loves itself (XIV, 11). But it actually confirms and deepens this claim: the mind is the image of God because it “is able to remember and understand and love him by whom it was made,” and it receives this ability in its natural knowledge and love of itself.

All of this provides important ontological considerations for Augustine, i.e., truths about the being of the mind that cannot be lost, even in sin (XIV, 6, 11, 19). But the mind as the image of God is not merely a stable ontological reality; it is also situated within a drama of creation, sin, and grace where it can either forget and reject its status as the image of God or become more true to its innate dignity. If the mind does not remember God, then it is foolish, even as it always remembers itself (XIV, 15). Similarly, the mind that always knows itself can forget itself and begin to bury and obscure the identity which it always possesses (X, 7). Even more starkly, Augustine contends that the same mind that is constituted in its love of itself can grow to hate itself: “The man who does not love God, even though love of himself is innate in his nature, can be said to hate himself” (XIV, 18). For Augustine, the condition of the fallen human being is precisely this: to exist within this contradiction of self-love and self-hate, of remembering and forgetting. To be the image of God has incredibly high stakes: the mind constituted in its love of itself is the same mind that learns to love itself unduly, and in that twisted love grows to hate itself and hate others, exchanging love of God for love of self, justice for power, service for domination (De Trin. XIII, 18; City of God XIV, 28, passim).

As Augustine interprets it, the ancient axiom “know thyself” therefore has a fundamentally moral valence: by knowing itself the mind should live according to its nature, placed beneath God and above other created things (X, 7). But because of its “twisted desires,” it cannot do this on its own and must receive grace from God in order to preserve the honor of its status as image of God (XII, 16). When it finally turns to love God, it can then heed God’s commandment to love its neighbor (XIV, 18). This grace also enables it to achieve its highest dignity as the image of God, since it is only in seeing God face to face that it becomes most like him and achieves the deepest possible likeness to God (XIV, 23, 24; XV, 21, 26).

At risk of stating the obvious, AI cannot do any of this: it cannot know itself and love itself, it cannot know and love God or know and love its neighbor, it cannot sin, repent and receive grace, and it cannot see God. For Augustine, “intelligence” is that which allows us to do all these things. Anything that does not exist for this purpose and cannot achieve these ends is not intelligent.

Conclusion

Along with Augustine, we have seen how the mind has a tendency to obscure itself by attaching itself to external things and confusing itself with them; how the mind is immanently constituted in an abiding act of self-knowledge that serves as the ground for all intellectual activity; and how the immanence of the mind is ordered beyond itself to God, in whom alone it can find fulfillment. By following Augustine in his odyssey through the mind, we have also found crucial principles for navigating the question of “artificial intelligence,” focusing less on the products of intelligence than on its sources, both immanent and transcendent: to the extent that artificial intelligence lacks that abiding self-knowledge from which flows all intelligence, it is not truly intelligent; and because it lacks that abiding self-knowledge, it lacks the kind of rational nature which is capable of knowing God, in whom alone the mind, as an intelligent reality, can find its end.

It would seem, then, that Augustine’s message to the age of AI is one of comfort: however dazzling its products are, AI is not “actually” intelligent, because the essence of intelligence lies in something which AI, precisely as artificial, lacks. But Augustine’s message is not solely one of comfort, since in identifying the knowledge of oneself and love of oneself which constitute the mind, Augustine also discovers the dangerous tendency of the mind to forget its identity, to forget itself and to hate itself.

In an age when certain technological, cultural, and economic forces aim to strip people of their intelligence and then to commodify that intelligence, Augustine has two, seemingly contradictory, things to say: first, that intelligence cannot be stripped from people or externally distributed to them, because intelligence consists most fundamentally in that knowing and loving of oneself which exist as soon as one’s individual human nature exists; but also, second, that this same mind always bears the potential of tragedy, that it can forget itself and hate itself and so bury its identity as the image of God in any combination of moral, cultural, and technological accretion, that it becomes alienated and estranged from what lies most deeply within itself.

Intelligence may not be able to be lost or stolen, but it can be buried. In order to unearth itself from this existential entombment, the mind must heed its own acts and its own nature, discovering within itself the capacity for true knowledge of God and neighbor.

Only a glance at Hildegard’s extensive list of accomplishments is needed to confirm these characterizations. The Medieval polymath founded two monasteries, went on multiple preaching tours, and wrote musical compositions, theological treatises, the first documented morality play, works on science and natural medicine, and even a secret language that some scholars believe was used to foster solidarity in her Order.[4] Hildegard was renowned for her prophetic insight, which was sought out by her contemporaries, ranging from the women under her care to political and religious leaders. Newman sketches Hildegard’s distinctive personality, vividly:

Her sheer force of will, combined with a dazzling array of spiritual and intellectual gifts, a courage hardened by decades of struggle, and a prophetic person, which she displayed in season and out, made her a formidable opponent; and she did not take defeat easily.[5]

Hildegard placed this vivacity at the service of the twelfth-century Church beset with clerical corruption. It was out of her love for the Church that she advocated for its renewal and internal reform.

The papally endorsed Scivias (short for the Latin phrase Sci vias Domini, meaning “Know the Ways of the Lord”) was a fruit of this love. Scivias is a theological summa, which features twenty-six of Hildegard’s doctrine-inspired visions. In it, she draws on scriptural exegesis, Patristic authors, and contemporary science to show how the history and destiny of creation hinge upon the Incarnation. The illuminated work includes paintings of the visions, designed by the visionary herself and her community. In the preface to Scivias, Caroline Walker Bynum offers the preparatory insight that readers will find in the diverse array of Hildegard’s elaborate visions: that they are being shown the whole “structure of salvation” by the saint herself (5).

Scivias challenges many commonly accepted notions of the Church today, including those that render her primarily (if not purely) in functional terms. In such conceptions, the Church works as an automated “it”: a dispenser of grace via the sacraments—a means to an end for individuals to secure their spots in heaven. This narrowly individualistic vision of the Church can induce a kind of blindness to that profession of early Christians: “the world was created for the sake of the Church” (CCC §760).[6] No one remains alienated in the Church, but discovers, in her sacramental life, that they are made for communion with humankind and with the whole of creation in Christ.

Hildegard can help us see creation anew in light of this communitarian vision of the Church. The otherworldliness of her visions and the richness of her theological analysis can help make strange the all-too familiar Church for us today, and reawaken us to aspects of her identity that we have forgotten. We will sketch only three of Hildegard’s (many) visions of the Church presented in Scivias, to see how the saint artistically and theologically delineates the Church’s understanding of herself.

The Cosmos and the Church

We will begin with an aerial view: Hildegard’s sacramental map of the universe in the first book of Scivias. In this famous vision, Hildegard sees the universe in the form of an egg that is alive and bustling with the movements of the divine life, against those of the devil (1.3). Through Hildegard’s creative depiction of the relationships between the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, the winds, and the stars, she illumines the ecclesial orientation of creation as an interconnected whole.[7]

In this map, we (humanity) find ourselves in the yolk-like earth, at the center of the unfolding drama of the salvation of the universe.[8] Our home is enshelled with heavenly fires of divine power, from which winds blow, rushing into earth divine truth which “spreads with words of justice, which truly demonstrate to humanity the same living and true God” (Scivias, 1.3.8). God makes himself knowable through his creation.

The Sun of the universe is Christ, who lights it up with flames of charity. Reflecting his light of charity to humankind is the unconquered Church (symbolized by the Moon), which “shines most serene faith, with no uncertainty or infidelity hiding in it, since it is not founded by itself but dependent upon Christ” (1.3.11). Through the Church, Christ reveals to earthly humanity “heavenly things, so that, glorifying Him by serving Him, they reject all harmful error, and magnify Him” (1.3.4). In turn, the Church as Moon pours out the light of humanity’s “splendid works of piety” into the ether, adorning the with stars which, according to Fassler, represent saints (1.3.12). The Church then marvels at the stars—“at the brightness of the works done by the perfected through others” (1.3.12).

In and through the Church’s mediation of Christ’s light, the elements of creation are revealed to be “created for Man’s service” and thus “wait on him” to receive Christ’s light into their lives (1.3.16). For Hildegard, the physical world is not indifferent to our response to the Incarnation, but actually orders us toward becoming bearers of Christ. Though our grasp of cosmology is different today than it was in the twelfth century, to say the least, Hildegard inspires meditation upon creation (which includes human life) in light of its purpose to receive the light of Christ.

The Church as Bride

Precisely how the Church produces saints is considered further in subsequent visions. In the second book of Scivias, the Church is depicted by Hildegard in her most essential form: as the faithful Bride standing beside her Bridegroom, Christ crucified on the cross, to whom the Bride was joined “by the will of the Heavenly Father,” “in happy betrothal and nobly dowered with His body and blood” (2.6). The vision is imbued with Eucharistic meaning: the Bride holds up a cup to Christ, which she uses to catch the blood flowing from his side. In part of the painting accompanying the vision, the two are encompassed by a dark blue, starry sky, which indicates, as Fassler notes, that this intimate moment between Bride and Bridegroom exists eternally.[9]

When the faithful receive the Bridegroom in the Eucharist, they stand at his side, as the happy, adoring Bride in Hildegard’s vision, who receives her identity from the blood springing from Christ’s body. A body that was wounded mercifully for her sake. His Eucharistic love is what defines his Bride, the Church. She, then, is to become an extension of this mercy to humankind, as a voice from Heaven, speaking to the Son of God, proclaims: “May she, O Son, be our Bride for the restoration of My people; may she be a mother to them, regenerating souls through the salvation of the Spirit and water” (2.6).

The Church as Sorrowful Mother

This leads us to our final vision of the Church from Hildegard. In the third vision of the second book of Scivias, Hildegard sees the Church as a woman, as large as a city, without legs or feet (as she herself is still in the process of being made perfect), who is balanced on her womb, which is open before the altar of God (2.3). She is perpetually pregnant, laboring forth and offering up souls to God. Her womb is described by Hildegard as pierced like a fishing net that draws in humankind. Through her womb, the woman reunites human persons with God through Baptism and “expels unbelief and expands belief” in her children, who come out of her free of sin (2.3.1).

Mother Church, however, knows that she will conceive and bear many who oppress her “by heretical, schematic, and useless battles, by robberies and murders, by adultery and fornication, and by many such errors” (2.3). While she loves her children with the “deepest love,” “feeling their pain in the depths of her viscera,” she laments their return to sin (2.3.15). We will only note two things about this otherworldly vision.

First, we can notice how the Church is depicted as a maternal personification of the City of God, who is wholly distinct from her children. Her purpose, “which she devoutly keeps to in the heavenly places, can be obscured by no wickedness” even of those who are baptized in her (2.3.7). Their sins will not, in the end, overcome or corrupt her.[10] Yet, secondly, the Church is not unaffected by her children’s sins, but oppressed by them.[11] She experiences pain for those who sin and welcomes back those who are penitent.[12] While her gaze remains fixed upon heaven, she, as Hildegard sees it, remains physically open to all of humanity, despite the pain this will bring her.

It can be tempting today, in an effort to separate oneself from sin and corruption, to understand the Church as a closed fortress that doles out grace only to the deserving. Hildegard, however, shows us that the life of discipleship is perpetually open to others. We, as children of the Church, are called to be like Mother Church, who is merciful to all, including those who oppress her. It is this perpetually available mercy, which has its source in the Eucharist, that brings about the unity of the Church, and so too, the end of creation. 

Conclusion

With these three ecclesial images we have reflected upon, Hildegard has shown us the Church as a kind of sacrament of Divine Mercy, which brings the universe to its end, through her mediation of Christ to humanity and her production of saints; which as Bride, remains forever united to her Bridegroom, and, as Mother, unites each of us creatures to our Creator. This Divine Mercy mediated and embodied by the unconquered Church was not an abstraction for Hildegard, but was practiced in her life as a saint. At the end of her life, Hildegard endured excommunication, which forbade her community from participating in the Mass, receiving the Eucharist, and singing the Office. As Joseph Baird notes, this would have been an especially painful affliction for Hildegard, the poet and liturgical composer.[13]

The excommunication was the result of the burial of a nobleman, once excommunicated, on the consecrated grounds of Hildegard’s monastery. The prelates imposing the sanctions did not know that the nobleman had been reconciled to the Church by the time of his death and thus, demanded his body be moved—stubbornly ignoring Hildegard’s testament to the man’s reconciliation. She could have consented to their demands to avoid the prohibitions altogether. But she knew the man had been absolved and so, out of fidelity to Christ and his mercy to penitent sinners, Hildegard refused the demands and maintained that the man died in a state of grace, obediently accepting the consequences until a friend (an archbishop) intervened.[14]

Despite the upset this ordeal brought to her life, Hildegard remained faithful to the mercy of God. That mercy which has its source in the wounded, bleeding side of Christ, which is the lifeblood of the Church and indeed, that of every saint. That mercy which binds each of our lives together into one, making each of us and so too, the whole world, into a harmonious creation which sings praise to God.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Support for this essay was provided by the Sullivan Family Saints Initiative and the Global Catholic Research Initiative, both at the University of Notre Dame.

Here I would like to provide some global critiques of how neuroscientists define and research consciousness, before providing a less flawed approach. I will return at the end to the question of identity and the degree to which it can be conflated with consciousness.

A Global Critique of Neuroscientific Approaches to Consciousness

My survey in the previous installment indicates some of the myriad ways in which neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness consistently speak of the brain, or its parts, as agents. Bennett and Hacker call this the “mereological fallacy,” the fallacy of taking the part for the whole. Against it, they quote Aristotle on the soul: “To say that the soul is angry is as if one were to say that the soul weaves or builds. For it is surely better not to say that the soul pities, learns, or thinks, but that the man does these with his soul.” It is not the brain that is conscious or that senses or that acts; it is the human person.

Neuroscientists have objected to this characterization of their positions. They argue that saying “the brain is conscious” or “the hippocampus remembers” is a figure of speech, a linguistic shorthand that does not in fact give personal agency to the brain.[2] Against this, Bennett and Hacker can find numerous examples of the fallacy that do not seem to be mere figures of speech. Stanislas Dehaene (to pick just one example) states that “consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain.”[3]

Here materialist neuroscientists want to have it both ways—on the one hand, to claim that material mechanisms are sufficient to explain consciousness and, on the other, to bring some kind of trans-material personhood into the picture only when needed against the accusation of mereology. In fact, materialists who fall prey to mereology are also those who tend to fall prey to the “hard problem of consciousness,” as Chalmers called it. In proposing a purely mechanistic explanation, they cannot make sense of aspects of the human person that seem to transcend the brain. This leads to the “hard problem” of how the “wetware” of the brain’s neurons and tissues relates to the non-material “I” that acts, and knows, and loves.

In general, neuroscientists do not seem to be aware that their attribution of agency to a part (i.e., to the brain, or to one of its parts) is Cartesian at root. In fact, their overall debt to Descartes is profound. Bennett and Hacker argue,

In the second half of the twentieth century, with the rejection of Cartesian dualism, the fundamental logical structures of Cartesian and empiricist explanations of human thought and experience were unaffected. For all that was done was to replace the aethereal non-matter of the mind by the grey glutinous matter of the brain, while leaving all else intact.[4]

To understand this Cartesian view better, it is helpful to contrast it with the Aristotelian soul. The latter’s dual purpose is to give life to the body and to make the entity a certain kind of thing, with the powers that flow from that kind. These powers include bodily powers. Aristotle’s biology, which holds that the soul and body are inseparable until death, entails the impossibility of teasing out agency that belongs to the body alone, separate from its soul. The abilities to digest and to feel anger are due to the powers of the soul, while they are enacted by the body.

Descartes first redefined the soul to be a substance separate from the body with the job of thinking. He then extended “thinking” to include “everything which we are aware of as happening within us, insofar as we have awareness of it. Hence thinking is to be identified here not merely with understanding, willing, imagining, but also with sensory awareness.” The body, thirdly, is purely mechanical, and the soul is not its principle; the activities pertaining to living (such as digestion) happen because of the body’s own powers. So, for Descartes, my bodily part or substance does do things, and does them without my involvement, because I am not my body but only my mind.[5]

Neuroscientists generally accept all three of these points, even if they do not advert to the Cartesian origins: First, such researchers consider qualia or other first-person experiences to be of a completely different order than that of the brain, thereby spawning the “hard problem of consciousness,” namely, how “mind and matter” interact. Further, consciousness is understood to include sensory awareness; indeed, such awareness is almost the entirety of what consciousness studies measure. Lastly, the brain is viewed as the bodily side of the hard problem of consciousness, and neuroscientists believe it functions like a machine. Let us look more closely at each of these.

First, and based on the mereological fallacy, scientists tend to make “the mind” a distinct substance, rather than a way to speak of the intellectual powers of the human person. Here I am not using “substance” in a Cartesian sense but in an Aristotelian one. Primary substances for Aristotle are not a question of being a certain kind of thing (“material” or “immaterial,” as with Descartes) but one of existence. Primary substances exist per se, through themselves (they “subsist”), and not in another, as qualities do. The dog subsists, but his blackness, while real and existing, exists only in the dog and not on their own. You cannot play fetch with “black,” only with a substance that is black.

Neuroscientists tend, however, to substantialize parts, qualities, and functions as existing things (as substances). Bennett and Hacker give the example of logician Gottlob Frege’s picture of an “outer world” of physical things, an “inner world” of mental things, and a “third realm” of propositions. This picture influenced the neuroscientist John Eccles and his proposal of the “liaison brain” that mediates between these different worlds. His proposal is a clear antecedent of the Global Workplace Theory of consciousness. Against this view, Bennett and Hacker state tartly, “There is absolutely no need to succumb to Platonism and conjure new entities into existence and new worlds for them to inhabit.”[6]

Put in Aristotelian terms, “mental entities” such as thoughts and perceptions are not substances; they do not subsist, much less subsist as material realities with a location. In fact, they cannot have a location, not even “in the brain,” pace the great neuroscientist Charles Sherrington, who posited that the “finite mind” has “a ‘where’ and that ‘where’ [is] within the brain.”[7] Likewise, William James proposed that “the ‘Self of selves,’ when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of . . . peculiar motions in the head or between the head and the throat”!

“Mind,” however, refers to a set of intellectual powers, and these powers are properly spiritual. As Bennett and Hacker put it, if you want to pinpoint the location of a thought, you can only pinpoint the location of the person who is thinking. They appropriate Wittgenstein to say “the mind . . . is not a nothing, but it is not a something either” (i.e., not a substance).[8] Indeed, even physical powers, such as the ability to ride a bike, do not exist in a location that can be pinpointed, although such an ability necessarily entails habits of physical responsiveness that we call muscle memory. Such habits require the muscles, but the habit itself is not located in, say, one’s quadriceps. Abilities are not substances or even parts.

You would be confused by the request to point to your ability to ride a bike, and you could only point to yourself. “Powers are not tangible, space-occupying entities, but attributes of space-occupying entities. . . . (The horsepower of a car is not made of cylinders or of steel),” although the horsepower is due to these structures.[9] All the more so for spiritual powers that produce spiritual products such as ideas. “Where did Archimedes solve the problem of measuring the volume of an irregular figure? According to legend, in his bath (not an inch behind his right eye).”[10] Thoughts are not material realities that compete for space in the brain, shoehorning themselves into a neuron or synapse.

The solution for this illicit substantializing is Aristotle’s hylomorphism, which makes a non-substantial distinction between body and soul, matter and form. Matter only exists as formed, and while you can distinguish between the shape of the seal and its wax, they actually always exist as united. This approach, which refuses to make realities like powers, habits, and thoughts into subsisting things, is derived from the actual harmony that we experience as embodied rational beings. Dennett and Gazzaniga know that their proposals of a disunified brain, with its sensory data duking it out amongst each other for fleeting “fame in the brain,” are counter-intuitive. What they do not advert to is that they are counter-intuitive because we simply exist and experience ourselves as unified persons. When this experiential unity is fractured, it is a sign of a pathology.

The second point concerns the confused extension of “conscious” to mean “awake, aware, perceiving,” and so forth. This is Cartesian in origin and deeply unhelpful definitionally. Helminiak summarizes this confusion within consciousness studies, which engage in “unrelenting attempts to use perceptual modeling to account for the imperceptible (as in Searle), insistent appeal to percepts and images to explain the invisible (as in Dennett, Griffin, Hay, Searle), [and] sustained supposition that the invisible needs explanation although only the palpable is actually deemed real (as in Chalmers, Dennett).”[11]

Indeed, almost all the leading theories of consciousness, including both local recurrence theories and GWT, rely on studies of visual awareness; such studies have achieved impressive results. But arguably what is being examined here is only the neural correlation of visual awareness, that is, whether or not a given visual percept is something we notice or not. Other animals respond similarly, in that their brains also allow only a certain amount of visual data to be brought to awareness. On a Cartesian account, this awareness is an activity of thinking. On a hylomorphic account, this pertains to sensation; it need not be connected to consciousness, given that non-human animals experience it.

Sometimes consciousness is viewed to be found at an even lower neural level than perception. It is sometimes taken to mean simply the opposite of “unconscious,” as one is when asleep, in a coma, or under anesthesia. We have seen that study of the neural correlates of “consciousness” often entails examining the brain activity of people moving from sleep to wakefulness. Bennett and Hacker offer a salutary schema of different kinds of “wakefulness” and their associated pathologies; these include waking from sleep, or being in a coma state.[12] All of these states are perfectly appropriate objects of neuroscientific study, and certainly it is necessary for a person to be awake in order to exercise the human powers that align with consciousness. But studies exploring states of wakefulness are at most preliminary, in that they establish a baseline of healthy functioning of any kind, but they should not be called studies of consciousness in itself. Helminiak writes,

The irony is this: These feats are explicitly concerned to track down an elusive phenomenon lurking "out there" or else hidden deep down "in here"—note the perceptual imagery—yet all the while, but inadvertently and like electromagnetic waves, as it were, this phenomenon [of consciousness] is everywhere actually governing the concern itself. Because of a focus on perception, human consciousness—the implicit, the taken-for-granted, the condition for the possibility of the analyses themselves—eludes attention.[13]

Lastly, consciousness studies reliably present the brain as a machine. This approach makes it easy to transition from the brain-as-machine to real machines, such as computers. If consciousness arises out of a machine, then it can arise out of other machines, such as AI programs.

This mechanistic reduction of consciousness is understandable, in that machines operate in regular and controlled ways, and if our bodies would only do this, they would be so much more penetrable by quantitative analysis. Alas, they do not, for the simple reason that they are not mechanical but biological, that is, living.

Life itself is an immaterial, non-substantial reality, a power of living things that cannot be isolated in a petri dish or reduced to a physical system, any more than a car’s power can be reduced to its cylinders. Horsepower arises out of these cylinders but is not identical to the parts themselves. How much more so does life transcend the material systems that are living, given that it cannot be simply the result of engineering the way horsepower is.

Theories like GWT try to address, to some degree, the mysterious complexity of a living being, but they fail insofar as they are reductionist about what life is. Life enlivens physical systems—or, more properly, the soul does so by giving life—but physical systems themselves are not that life. On their own, without life, without the soul that gives life, our bodies are corpses, not machines.

These critiques do not mean that neuroscience should abandon consciousness studies, but such studies need to be thoroughly reformulated conceptually. Consciousness is not a physical process like digestion, but neither is it a ghostly thing thinly buttering the brain. When scientists assume any of the ideas criticized in this section, they do not advance our understanding of consciousness at all. What neuroscience can do is “to explain how it was possible for [a person] to reason cogently at all (i.e. what neural formulations must be in place to endow a human being with such-and-such intellectual and volitional capacities).” It cannot, however, prove that these neural formulations are equivalent to consciousness or (even worse) to a conscious agent or “I.”[14]

Consciousness Holistically Understood

A helpful aid to coming to a better understanding of consciousness is found in the writings of Bernard Lonergan, SJ.[15] He argues, “The notion [of the ‘subject’] is primitive. It cannot be reached merely by combining other, better known concepts. It can be reached only by directing one's attention to the facts and to understanding them correctly.”[16] Unlike Dennett and Gazzaniga, Lonergan presumes that my ordinary experience of being a unified rational agent occurs because I am such an agent.

For Lonergan, consciousness is found in the rational subject, by means of his acts. These acts include those acts and states that neuroscientists most frequently study, but also ones that they generally neglect, such as conceptualization, judgment, and logical argument. As summarized by Helminiak, the cognitional structures that are distinctively human are “of four different kinds: reflective awareness and attention; inquiry, insight, and formulation; assessment and judgment; and deliberation, decision, and action.”[17] A perceptual experience, such as the omnipresent “seeing red” example in consciousness studies, can be experienced by other animals, maybe even better than humans can. But only a human being can say, “I saw the color red,” or even more: “I judge that this object is red” or “I am capable of reflecting both on the color red and on the fact of my seeing.”[18] Human perception is already cognitive, already the leading edge of understanding.[19]

What is necessary is not that all these experiences and statements must be brought to conscious reflection, but rather that they may be. This latent potency of human consciousness means that we, as inherently conscious subjects, have the capacity to switch our intellectual attention at any moment from focusing on the duck we are thinking about to focusing on our thinking of the duck. “We humans have access to acts of seeing and hearing as such because consciousness is imminent in the acts themselves. Accordingly, we can attend to them; and, regardless of their objects, we can make the subjective experiences themselves the objects of our wonder.”[20] Let us see how.

Lonergan argues that scientific data encapsulates experience as understood through our senses, while the data of experience of ourselves is consciousness.[21] But such inner experience is not like the “qualia” of consciousness studies; the latter are precisely not shared, because they are unshareable. This feature of qualia’s irreducible privacy and particularity leads to the “hard problem” of consciousness, of the incompatibility of private mind and public matter. How can I know you are conscious as I am conscious? In contrast, Lonergan assumes, on the basis of a shared human nature as well as abundant evidence, that his inner experience, which is consciousness, is fundamentally like your inner experience, which is consciousness.

Because of this shared reality, he can call his readers to examine themselves and move from the capacity of knowing themselves to actual self-knowledge. He writes, “I say that all of us are conscious of these activities, for our sensing and feeling, our inquiring and understanding, our formulating and checking, our deliberating and deciding, are not unconscious but conscious.” Consciousness shades all of our activities, because we are conscious subjects in all of them. But, he adds, “I say that so few have any exact knowledge of these operations, for while they are conscious, still that consciousness is not knowledge but only the infrastructure in a potential knowledge that few get around to actuating by adding its appropriate suprastructure.”[22]

Here I am interested in that suprastructure. What is it, if it is not an agential brain managing the chaos of sensory phenomena with post-hoc narratival rationalization?[23] Lonergan argues that consciousness is the raw material of actualized self-knowledge, and such actualization constitutes us as not only objects of our own knowing but also as knowing subjects. “Consciousness is knowledge, not of the objects of acts, but of the acts themselves and their subject.”[24] This subject is I myself, a conscious human being, and not my brain alone, and I am constituted as a subject in and through my consciousness. This constitutive power of consciousness deserves further elaboration.

Consciousness is fundamentally cognitive, as pertaining to the ability to know ourselves. This is a straightforward meaning of consciousness, and it is not wrong, according to Lonergan, but it is too simplistic, because it overlooks the truth that such cognitive acts also constitute us as knowing subjects. “A cognitive act exercises no constitutive effect upon its object; it simply reveals what the object already is . . . Accordingly, if consciousness is [merely] knowledge of an object [here, myself], it can have no constitutive effect upon its object.”[25] If consciousness is only knowing myself as a cognitive object, I am not transformed by that knowing, any more than my knowing a duck transforms the duck in some way.

But consciousness constitutes us as a subject, so it must be more than the knowing of myself as an object.[26] Thus, Lonergan writes, “My position cannot be understood if it is true to say that whatever is known is [only] an object. . . . One and the same act is at once the act of the object and the act of the subject; inasmuch as there is a sensibile actu or an intelligibile actu, an object is known; inasmuch as there is a sensus actu or an intellectus actu, the subject in act and his act are constituted and known.”[27] In this act of knowing, we know both the object known as well as know ourselves as the knowing subject. “The subject in act and his act are constituted and, as well, they are known simultaneously and concomitantly with the knowledge of objects.” Thus, “the object is known as id quod intenditur, the subject is known as is qui intendit, and the act is known both as the intendere of the subject and the intendi that regards the object.”[28]

When we do not advert to this subject-constitution happening in our cognitive acts, we are not actualizing the full cognitive possibilities latent in the data of the experience of consciousness. “It is one thing to wonder about sensible objects: it is quite another to wonder about intellectual wonder itself.”[29] Lonergan provides a method, especially in his book Insight, for pursuing this wonder about wonder. This pursuit relies upon the constant reality of consciousness and attempts to bring it to reflective understanding, judgment, and action.

Lonergan criticizes the neuroscientific reduction of consciousness to perception avant la lettre, when he writes: “If consciousness is conceived as an experience there is a psychological subject, while if consciousness is conceived as the perception of an object there is no psychological subject.”[30] Researchers in consciousness studies do the latter by focusing on perception and then by making the subject of consciousness the brain (the mereological fallacy). Lonergan’s observation sheds light on why they are so prone to posit the mere epiphenomenality of an “I” or a subject, or even its total nonexistence. Namely, by conflating consciousness with awareness of perception or (worse) wakefulness, they have abandoned the cognitive reality of consciousness that makes it precisely consciousness and that therefore allows for a conscious subject.

Lonergan notes, “If without consciousness John has no other psychological unity beyond the unity found in the objects of his knowledge, then by consciousness John is merely manifested as having no psychological unity beyond the unity found in the objects of his knowledge.”[31] This is an exact representation of, e.g., the support given to the Global Workplace Theory of consciousness (developed long after Lonergan wrote these lines). Supported by animal and visual studies, brain scans determine the neural correlates of perception (again, mostly pertaining to vision). Having begun studying the absence of consciousness, the studies conclude that consciousness is no more than what was studied, namely, the unity of perceptions, now proposed to be unified within a brain that magically turns perceptual pandemonium into a (misleadingly) coherent autobiographical narrative.

Against this, Lonergan insists, “Consciousness does not reveal the psychological unity that is known in the field of objects; it constitutes and reveals the basic psychological unity of the subject as subject.”[32] In order to study consciousness, as an experience of a rational subject, neuroscience requires a course correction.

Back to Identity

Let us take stock and return to the question of identity. Neuroscientists writing on “identity,” “the self,” or “the I” tend to reduce it to consciousness, which is then reduced to brain activity. For example, Antonio Damasio states that consciousness raises two problems: “the problem of how the movie-in-the-brain is generated, and the problem of how the brain also generates the sense that there is an owner and observer for that movie.”[33] Here the self is the illusory “owner” of the brain’s “movie.” Further, Blakemore writes, “The ‘I’ in me is the operation of a mind, which is itself the operation of a brain, constructed solely by genes and the environment.”[34] In positing that identity is a kind of self-construction, here a neural one, neuroscientists are thinking in line with the dominant theories of self-construction since early modernity.

In contrast, according to Lonergan’s understanding of subject-constitution by means of our knowing acts, self-consciousness is a power that is constructive; it is not the given (and inexplicable) result of unconscious neural pre-construction. A person is pre-formed primarily by her human nature, which gives her certain powers to form herself further. These powers include the ability to be formed by material and social realities that pre-exist us; we are the kind of being that, as material and social, is formed by such conditions. Our human nature further means that we are conscious beings, and we form ourselves well or badly through our awareness and thinking and also through our judgments and choices. All of these make us to be who we are and so help to construct our identity. The neuroscientific self-constructionists are not simply wrong, but they fail to hold the balance between what is given—which has a priority—and what is formed based upon that givenness. If we were not human, which is a given, we could not construct ourselves at all.

With this correction in place, we can advance fruitfully. Philosophers such as Paul Ricœur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor have convincingly demonstrated that the crafting of an autobiographical narrative is necessary for historical beings to root themselves in the present and act coherently.[35] Psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that damage to the parts of the brain that are utilized in memory, or other psychopathological conditions that affect memory, can be thoroughly disruptive to healthy functioning.[36]

And yet, in these pathological cases, it cannot be said that a person’s identity simply evaporates because the creation of an autobiographical narrative becomes too difficult. Believing otherwise is a result of conflating the first two meanings of identity—continuity through time and the true self—into the third meaning, self-understanding. An elderly man with dementia is still the same man who served in the Korean War, who married Susan, who loved, thought, prayed, and suffered. His continuity through time is safeguarded metaphysically, not only consciously.[37] It is a continuity that supports not only his mind and memory but also his body, which is part of his hylomorphic “true self,” as a human body-soul unity. Self-consciousness is key to our identity, but who I am cannot be reduced to what I think myself to be.

Our neural functioning, psychological health, and human powers are all contributors to my “true self,” but my identity cannot be flattened to any one of them. I argue, elsewhere, that the central aspect of identity is Identity2, my “true self,” and while all of these factors contribute to it, who I am as an individual is ultimately found in God’s idea of me.[38] This is the saint who God wants me to be. This is the heart of Identity2, my “true self,” and it is not self-constructed, although our pursuit of it does form ourselves for good or ill.[39]

With this more synoptic vision in place, it becomes clear that both neuroscience and philosophy have a real but limited role to play in understanding the phenomenon of identity and the self. Scientists can study the neurological substructures that allow for essential human functioning, in particular for rational activity, while psychologists can probe how these structures are incorporated more broadly in true human flourishing. Philosophers can deepen our understanding of human nature and activities, in particular the reality of self-consciousness. These studies need, however, to be normed by conceptual clarity around the key terms—especially “consciousness”—as well as a richer, hylomorphic anthropology. That strategy would dissolve the “hard problem” of consciousness as well as the conceptual tangles that are downstream of the reigning post-Cartesian psychology. These disciplines would only be strengthened as a result.

One can well understand how immediately challenging the Mithras phenomenon must have been to a profound thinker and theologian such as Justin Martyr. Unfortunately, however, the explanation he came up with in order to make sense of the phenomenon was far from inspired. Had he been able to examine more closely the Mithras phenomenon, Justin would no doubt have realized, as did Christian authors after him, how profoundly different it was, both in belief and practice, from his own religion. But the surface resemblances were, at first sight, so alarming that Justin felt constrained to come to the grim, unhappy conclusion that the rites were nothing but a mocking parody of Christian ritual, a deliberate device invented by the devil to disturb and confuse genuine believers. Likewise, Tertullian, writing half a century later—and believing, quite mistakenly, that the mysteries included such things as “the oblation of bread” and “an image of a resurrection”—repeated Justin Martyr’s theory. The devil, he wrote, is the one “who apes some of God’s things” to turn believers from their faith and “who vies even with the essential portions of the sacraments of God.”

The first great scholar of Mithraism, Franz Cumont, though not inclined to repeat the notion of a diabolical parody, was persuaded nevertheless that the rites practiced by the two religions “offered numerous analogies.” Like the Christians, he declared, the Mithraists “purified themselves by baptism,” they “expected from a Lord’s Supper salvation of body and soul,” and they “celebrated the birth of the Sun [Mithras] on the 25th of December, the same day on which Christmas has been celebrated since the fourth century at least.” This quite extraordinary depiction of the claimed resemblance between the two religions sounded so convincing that it gained widespread acceptance for many years. When, however, evidence for the claim came under close scrutiny by scholars, the Cumont theory began to look weak and unfirm. Although a few of the resemblances pointed out by Cumont remain convincing, such as the shared Mithraic and Christian emphasis on abstinence and self-control, other analogues proposed between, for example, the figures of Mithras and Christ, and between the two cults’ rites and practices, are now viewed with a skeptical eye by scholars.

Already in 1989 Leonard Boyle made bold to declare that “the resemblance between the two religions is entirely superficial. . . . The Mithraic ‘sacrifice,’ ‘last supper’ and ‘ascension’ seem to echo the Christian beliefs, but they belong in fact to a different world. The historical Christ and the legendary Mithras are as removed from each other as reality from myth.”

One of Cumont’s theories, dismissed eventually by most scholars as possessing no credible basis, is the notion that December 25, the reputed date of Christ’s birthday, is also the date of the birthday of Mithras. On this subject, Jaime Alvar writes in Romanising Oriental Gods, “It is fatiguing to have to clear away such mountains of continuously repeated misconception and error. There is no evidence of any kind, not even a hint, from within the cult that this, or any winter day, was important in the Mithraic calendar.” As for terms such as “baptism” and “salvation of body and soul,” which Cumont felt were applicable to both Mithraic and Christian practice, the feeling among scholars today is that Cumont unfortunately tended to project into Mithraic practice and belief Christian terms and categories that were not applicable.

The term “baptism,” for example, Jonas Bjørnebye points out, is “unattested in the Mithraic corpus of evidence.” Nothing, in other words, has been found to suggest a close resemblance between the Mithraic ablutions and Christian baptism. As for the term “salvation of body and soul,” which, according to Cumont, the Mithraists believed was in some way attainable through their own ritual practice of a quasi-eucharistic meal, “a Lord’s Supper,” Alvar writes, “There is not a shred of evidence that sacrificial meat in the cult was considered a manifestation of, or symbolic substitute for, the deity.” And he adds, “Our information about the Mithraic banquet is too poor to allow ourselves the luxury of attempting to reconstruct it by an appeal to the Eucharist.”

On February 27, 380, the Emperor Theodosius signed a decree that made Christianity the religion of the state, banning outright the practice of pagan rituals. That effectively marked the beginning of the end for all the mystery cults that had been popular in the early centuries AD. But here a question arises: Among all these religions, was the cult of Mithras perceived as a uniquely dangerous threat to Christian growth and flourishing? Ernest Renan, writing in the nineteenth century, notoriously remarked, “If the growth of Christianity had been arrested by some mortal malady, the world would have been Mithraic,” clearly indicating that, of all the Roman mystery religions, Mithraism was by far the greatest rival to Christianity. That view persisted for a good part of the twentieth century, the majority of scholars inclined to believe that so deadly a rival was the Mithraic cult to Christianity that it was, by the close of the fourth century, effectively persecuted out of existence.

But is this a true picture of what happened? Was Christian opposition the principal and determining factor in the decline of the Mithras cult? Or is it not perhaps the case, as Leonard Boyle and several leading scholars of the Mithras cult came to believe, that “too much has been made of the threat of Mithraism to Christianity”? Two factors in particular had, in the past, been given enormous weight: first, the manifest disdain for the cult voiced by a few notable apologists, such as Tertullian and Justin Martyr; second, the recorded instances of Christians desecrating Mithraea. Taking the last point first, there were indeed isolated cases of Christian iconoclasm, but according to David Walsh, “to assume that these accounts demonstrate an active conflict between Christian communities and the cult of Mithras would be misleading.” Why? One reason he gives is that “in reality there was little scope for Christians to actively persecute the Mithras cult given that the two groups operated in largely different areas.” Walsh adds, “Nearly all the works which claim that Christian iconoclasts were the driving force behind the damage and destruction of mithraea rarely attempt to ascertain whether there is any evidence of a Christian presence in the area at the time.”

But if Christianity was not the great destructive cause of the cult’s demise, how are we to explain that by the mid-fourth century the cult of Mithras had already begun to decline? Walsh offers three reasons. He has in mind, first of all, the fact that a very large number of the cult members of Mithras were soldiers in the empire. But, he notes, “as Roman hegemony became harder to maintain on the frontiers, the Mithraic cult found itself with an increasingly limited number of recruits upon which it could draw.” Second, there was a marked change in the social networks of potential Mithraic followers, and a new exposure to the attraction of other cults: “With mixed populations now living in much closer quarters and the distinction between military and civilian becoming increasingly blurred, it is not difficult to see why a male-only cult that had become bound up with Roman military identity might find itself decreasing in popularity.” Third, the Mithraic rituals by the beginning of the fourth century had become less and less demanding on new members. As a result, the bonds formed between initiates became much less strong. Instead of severe initiation rites, it was enough, apparently, simply to deposit coins on occasion in order to gain access to the Mysteries.

Step by step, the value of being a member of the cult was being undermined. By no longer placing “considerable demands” on its adherents, “the value of worshipping Mithras decreased.” Worshipers of the cult “felt less indebted to each other” and were “less likely to pull together to maintain their community during times of hardship.” In light of these facts, it would seem wise when trying to determine “the final fate of the mithraea” to examine critically the view of commentators such as Eberhard Sauer, who attributes the demise of the Mithras cult almost exclusively to Christian iconoclasm. Sauer’s thesis has been impressively challenged by none other than Richard Gordon, one of the cult’s foremost scholars. Gordon, as paraphrased by Walsh, points out that “many of the Mithraea that Sauer had looked at had failed to produce any convincing diagnostic evidence for Christian iconoclasm.”

Looking back over the years of debate on this question, Luther H. Martin, in The Mind of the Mithraists, notes that Leonard Boyle’s original “revisionist judgment minimizing any direct threat [from Mithraism] to nascent Roman Christianity” can now be seen as authoritative, being overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. “The actual conflict between Mithraism and Christianity,” according to Bjørnebye, “was minimal, contrary to what the rhetoric of Jerome and Prudentius would have us believe.” Furthermore, the close social interaction between Christians and non-Christians implies that “there were other modes of interaction at play between the two than fierce competition.”

When Christianity and Mithraism did, in fact, encounter one another, according to Bjørnebye, “the two religions lived side by side in relative harmony, peacefully for the most part.” If what Bjørnebye is saying here is even partly true, and if the scholarship of authors such as Walsh, Gordon, and Martin is to be given credit, then Mithraism and Christianity were not, as has so often been claimed in the past, such fierce, deadly rivals.

From Pagan Temple to Christian Basilica

Next to the domus in which was housed the Mithraic temple, there stands a large tufa-block building whose identity has long puzzled scholars. Generally referred to as a horreum (storage building), this structure is now thought most likely to have housed the Roman mint, a place connected in Roman mythology with the goddess Juno Moneta, the patroness of the funds of the empire. From her name derive the English words “money” and “mint.” In time, the horreum, together with the domus next door with its temple to Mithras, would be filled in with bricks and debris, and on top of both structures a Christian church, the Basilica of San Clemente, would be erected. But the building phases leading up to the construction of the basilica would prove, according to Juhana Heikonen, to be “as complicated and interwoven as one might expect in a city like Rome.” How these various phases eventually developed into the famous basilica has become the subject of much debate.

The horreum was the first of the two buildings to undergo radical change, and this happened at a time, mid-third century, when the Mithraic temple next door was still in use. After the first floor of the horreum had been pulled down, all the rooms at ground level were filled up with rubble. A new space was thus created and, eventually, in that space, a new building also. But what kind of building was it? What was its function, its character? On this question, Heikonen writes, “The function of the new building is still not known, and the remains of this phase are scarce. What we do know, according to Federico Guidobaldi, is that it had a rich decoration, having a central space surrounded by a narrower aisle on three sides. The remains of a rich opus sectile pavement point towards something more than just another factory or storage space.” It might well, in Guidobaldi’s opinion, have been a domestic dwelling, a private rather than a public building. It is also possible that it may have served as an early Christian gathering space. But the archaeological evidence itself offers no clear indication as to the exact function of this third-century building.

How, by the end of the fourth century, this Roman domus became transformed into the Basilica of San Clemente is a question that has been explored with particular focus by three outstanding scholars: the most recent, Federico Guidobaldi (to whom reference has already been made), E. Junyent, and Richard Krautheimer. Guidobaldi is now generally regarded as the greatest authority on the architectural history of San Clemente. Relying for the most part on the work of Guidobaldi, Heikonen—a younger, more recent scholar—looks afresh at the relation of the domus to early Christian architecture. In light of topographical, architectural, and socioeconomical considerations, Heikonen concludes that the first building phase of San Clemente was an aula ecclesiae—“a church, that is, constructed in the public space of a domus.” The domus may at some stage have been a center for Christian worship, the service most likely “divided,” it is thought, “into two parts: a reading of the Holy Scripture, open to everyone, and the Eucharist, which was for the baptized alone.” With the passing of time, however, there was a felt need in Rome for “larger meeting places.” As a result, according to Heikonen, we witness the development from “private dwellings to larger places of Christian worship (domus ecclesiae) up to the aula ecclesiae which could hold more people but was not a proper basilica.” When, by the late fourth century, the Mithraic temple next door had ceased to function, the property was acquired by the Christian authorities. It was now possible, over that abandoned area, to extend the length of the aula ecclesiae, and thus provide a firm foundation for an apse in the newly constructed Basilica of San Clemente.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Majesty and Beauty: The Basilica of San Clemente and Its Underworld (Word on Fire, 2026). All rights reserved.

This longue durée perspective cast TC as the most recent example of a consistent papal drive to assert interpretive control over the reception and implementation of ecumenical councils, a process I noted went back at least to the fraught Council of Constance (1414–1418). I even used a clunky German word to describe this dynamic: Deutungshoheit (literally “interpretive sovereignty”).

I enjoyed writing this piece, but I thought, like most of my attempts at trendy commentary, it was eccentric and contained too many obscure references to early modern Catholicism. I was surprised when the article became probably the most-read thing I have ever written. I think the essay was helpful for people because it mapped responses to TC into four basic camps, it showed that the real dispute was ecclesiological and not liturgical, and it put the controversy into a historical context that went beyond the issues that Francis and his supporters and critics typically circled around: Vatican II and its implementation/reception, Lefebvrist and traditionalist resistance to the Council, and whether Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum had been good or bad for the Church.

Five years later, I stand by virtually everything I said in this essay. The four basic camps I plotted were: (1) “celebration” of TLM crackdown; (2) seeing TC as a “sad necessity”; (3) “mourn and move on”; (4) “reject and resist.” These camps still exist, albeit in mutated form. Certainly, the controversy TC addressed (and contributed to) is still only about liturgy in a surface-level way. The most outspoken advocate for the TLM in the hierarchy is definitely still Cardinal Burke, and while he is obviously deeply, piously devoted to the old liturgy, it is no accident that he also led the charge against Pope Francis’s “ambiguities” in general and synodality in particular, finally generating the formal Roman response to his dubia he so desired.

The “TLM movement” that Archbishop DiNoia argued had “gotten completely out of control” has, if anything, become even more radical after—and surely in part due to—Traditionis Custodes. Indeed, it is now difficult to see much theological (as opposed to prudential or disciplinary) difference between SSPX and the leading traditionalist spokesmen, or at least the ones who make the most noise.

Undoubtedly, the two most important ecclesial events pertaining to these questions in the last five years have been the election of Pope Leo XIV (May 2025) and the SSPX excommunications (July 2026). We no longer need to wonder what Leo will do about SSPX. His reaction was decisive and rigorous. But what will the first (North) American pope do about the TLM? I have my guesses, and they are surely much less educated than those of anyone close to the pope. My prognostication is also, presumably, much less educated than any predictions my friend and collaborator Stephen Bullivant might venture: he spent thirty minutes in private conversation with the pope on his forthcoming co-authored book on traditionalist Catholics.

Botched football and basketball predictions have taught me the perils of saying what will happen in the future. Let me offer instead a plausible best- and worst-case scenario for traditionalist Catholics at the five-year anniversary of TC.

Let us start with the worst-case scenario. Assuming TC is not rescinded, more and more bishops, especially those appointed by Francis and Leo, could restrict the TLM fairly rigorously, either because they have lost patience with trads, they feel pressure from Rome, or both. Most will probably seek to avoid flurries of negative press (e.g. the diocese of Charlotte), but if bishops are committed to the “long game” clearly envisioned by TC—that is, that traditionalists “need to return in due time to the Roman Rite promulgated by Saints Paul VI and John Paul II”—it is they who possess the institutional machinery to make this happen. Traditionalists who brag about their unbeatable arguments and churn out reams and reams of apologetical material will look even more quixotic than they do now. A further doomsday scenario would involve Rome turning on FSSP and ICKSP, who, unlike the SSPX, do not (and presumably will never) possess their own bishops.

Trads should, however, take comfort in the fact that it is extremely unlikely that Pope Leo will merely continue the program of Pope Francis verbatim. Indeed, the first American pope has already, at least symbolically, broken with Francis on some things. It seems clear to me, however, that Pope Leo shares Francis’s basic reception of Vatican II. I am confident Leo would subscribe to this key formulation in Francis’s cover letter to TC:

To doubt the Council [Vatican II] is to doubt the intentions of those very Fathers who exercised their collegial power in a solemn manner cum Petro et sub Petro in an ecumenical council, and, in the final analysis, to doubt the Holy Spirit himself who guides the Church.

I also think it likely that Leo would endorse the following statement by Francis on the reformed liturgy, a statement that strikes at the heart of postconciliar traditionalism, or at least at the radical traditionalist movement: “Whoever wishes to celebrate with devotion according to earlier forms of the liturgy can find in the reformed Roman Missal according to Vatican Council II all the elements of the Roman Rite.” Consequently, I suspect that Pope Leo’s comment to the effect that if someone wanted Mass in Latin they can attend the Novus Ordo in Latin reflects a principled ecclesiological stance rather than ignorance of the traditionalist worldview.

I think it is naïve to believe (or hope) that Leo is simply uninformed about the TLM and traditionalism and has not yet devoted much thought to either. While he probably does not have the same first-hand familiarity of many bishops (especially in the US, UK, and France), the man Pope Francis tapped to lead the Dicastery for Bishops, and who oversaw thorny cases such as the deposition of the renegade Bishop Strickland, is certainly well-versed in the basic problems and tensions.

I do not believe that Pope Leo will formally rescind TC, although of course he could do so. The best-case scenario for traditionalist Catholics, then, is probably the motu proprio dying a death-by-a-thousand-cuts. That is, Pope Leo and his advisors could decide that “exceptions” to TC become the norm, while TC technically stays in place as a safety valve so that bishops (or Rome) can corral and control renegade traditionalist communities. Those hoping for a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario could point to significant gestures of goodwill from Pope Leo, like permitting Cardinal Burke to celebrate the TLM in St. Peter’s basilica—an unthinkable scene in the latter days of Pope Francis. One could also point to the relative peace that TLM-only communities like the FSSP and ICKSP have been left in after TC, which seems to have been most effective at (and aimed at) suppressing diocesan celebrations of the TLM.

Ironically, the temerity of the SSPX might be a godsend for traditionalists within the Church. The SSPX excommunications provide a timely chance for trads to publicly and vehemently assert their loyalty to Pope Leo and their disapproval of schismatic actions and mindsets in a tangible rather than an abstract way. Prominent traditionalists like Taylor Marshall took this chance, drawing a clear line in the sand after the SSPX consecrations, a line that was, to put it mildly, much fainter during the pontificate of Francis. Organizations like the FSSP and the ICKSP, which form TLM enclaves but are in full communion with Rome, are currently a win-win both for “loyal” trads and for the hierarchy, who need to be able to point to stable homes for anyone wishing to flee the SSPX and reconcile with the Church.

How many souls avail themselves of this succor is probably less significant than the symbolic value of the presence of a pastoral option for traditionalists, especially those who know nothing but the Latin Mass, or who would be tempted to break communion with the Church if no approved TLMs were available. Rome, and bishops with SSPX communities in their dioceses, need to be able to show that at issue is schism, disobedience, and theological deviance, not liturgical preference or reverence.

SSPX is often credited by traditionalists, even many who bemoan their schismatic actions, with “preserving” the Latin Mass during the dark ages of postconciliar persecution, perhaps even saving it from being wiped out by the forces of Bugninian innovation. Under this “best case” scenario, the SSPX might have yet again helped to “save the Latin Mass”—though this time inadvertently and, in an additional irony, by furthering divisions in the traditionalist Catholic world.

16 July 2026

During the actual ceremony, on the day of pardon, petitions were offered for various sins of the past. Then Cardinal Ratzinger prayed for forgiveness for “sins committed in the service of truth.” He prayed that each of us recognize “that even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.” Prayers were also offered that Christians may be given the grace to repent “of the words and attitudes caused by pride, by hatred, by the desire to dominate others.”[1]

The 2000 Day of Pardon did not happen in a vacuum. It was a high point of many years leading up to the 2000 Jubilee year during which, in many of his interactions with various groups all over the world, Pope John Paul II asked “forgiveness” for the “sins” of Christians down the centuries. In 1992, for example, he asked forgiveness from the Indigenous peoples of South America for the “pain and suffering” caused by the Church’s 500 years of presence in the Americas.[2] In 1995 he wrote a letter to women in which he apologized for the lack of acknowledgement of the dignity of women down the centuries. Although he argued that it was “no easy task to assign the blame for this, considering the many cultural conditions and historical realities which down the centuries have shaped ways of thinking and acting,” he still asked for forgiveness for the actions of any Christians in several historical contexts who would have contributed to this situation. He prayed,

May this regret be transformed, on the part of the whole Church, into a renewed commitment of fidelity to the Gospel vision. When it comes to setting women free from every kind of exploitation and domination, the Gospel contains an ever-relevant message which goes back to the attitude of Jesus Christ himself. Transcending the established norms of his own culture, Jesus treated women with openness, respect, acceptance, and tenderness. In this way he honored the dignity which women have always possessed according to God's plan and in his love. As we look to Christ at the end of this Second Millennium, it is natural to ask ourselves: how much of his message has been heard and acted upon?

In all, Pope John Paul II issued apologies for over 100 historical or moral situations in which the Church was involved down through its history.[3] One of the last ones before his death was for the child sex abuse crisis, which came up significantly towards the end of his papacy. These apologies are usually for obtaining pardon from God and the communities so wronged and for “the purification of memory; this calls everyone to make an act of courage and humility in recognizing the wrongs done by those who have borne or bear the name of Christian” (Incarnationis Mysterium). One of the prayers which the pope offered on this day of pardon sums up clearly the reason for these pleas for forgiveness:

Lord God, our Father, you created the human being, man and woman, in your image and likeness and you willed the diversity of peoples within the unity of the human family. At times, however, the equality of your sons and daughters has not been acknowledged, and Christians have been guilty of attitudes of rejection and exclusion consenting to acts of discrimination on the basis of racial and ethnic difference. Forgive us and grant us the grace to heal the wounds still present in your community on account of sin so that we will all feel ourselves to be your sons and daughters.[4]

Focus On Slavery

Since Pope John Paul II’s ecclesial pleas for forgiveness, the discussion regarding forgiveness has been extremely complicated. My focus here is on slavery. I am not offering any detailed presentation on this matter, as there has been abundant scholarship out there on the involvement of the Church in slavery over the centuries. John T. Noonan, the great historian of ideas and renowned jurist, devotes a large chunk of his 2005 book, A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching, to the question of slavery. Noonan’s book is not about slavery per se. It is a study of the idea of intrinsic evil in Catholic moral theology. What was it? How does the Church arrive at the determination of intrinsically evil deeds with regard to certain behaviors? It is, more precisely, an attempt to determine whether there could be disagreements among conscientious people about what constitutes intrinsic evil.

To answer these questions, Noonan studies four issues that he believes are central to how the Church characterizes the gravity of intrinsically evil issues and how the notion has fared in the Church’s moral discourse down the centuries. Noonan shows how various thinkers in the Church have held divergent views on any number of these matters. In this regard, for example, he points out that although Pope John Paul II and John Henry Newman agree that an intrinsically evil act cannot be done without sin, they disagreed on whether slavery in all forms and at every time was to be considered intrinsically evil.

Noonan analyzes a little piece of writing in which Newman seems to argue that although slavery was wrong, it did not always constitute an intrinsic evil. Had slavery been intrinsically evil, he argued, Paul would have told Philemon to liberate all his slaves at once. Noonan argues that Newman was, to his mind,

Following a classic pattern. He supposes the slave’s soul to be unaffected by the body's servile state. Imagined in this way, slavery does not destroy or even impair the essential self. Newman's vision of slavery is the antithesis of an account of slavery that sees it as an assault upon the person. The dualism implied in this view is a prime reason why slavery was so long seen as acceptable.[5]

Newman was not alone in his position on slavery. Noonan claims in his study of the subject that for much of the Church’s history there was hardly any direct condemnation of the institution of slavery. There were certainly discussions on the treatment of slaves and on conditions of enslavement, but no direct condemnation of the institution. The breakthrough came at Vatican II.

Vatican II did make the mutation, but not with fanfare and trumpets, not after a bitter theological battle, not a conscious correction of the old theology. By 1960, everyone knew that slavery was bad . . . The evils of the practice of slavery in the few corners of world where it existed were not controversial issues.[6]

So in §27 of Gaudium et Spes, the Church stresses respect for each human person and enumerates certain “crimes” which violate this respect. These include:

All offenses against life itself, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and willful suicide; all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressure; all offences against human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children, degrading working conditions where people are treated as mere tools for profit rather than free and responsible persons: all these and the like are criminal: they poison civilization; and they debase the perpetrators more than the victims and militate against the honor of the creator.

An even more forceful condemnation of slavery comes some years after the council in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason—selfish or ideological, commercial or totalitarian—lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity. It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit. Saint Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother . . . both in the flesh and in the Lord” (CCC §2414).

Pope John Paul II in Gorée Island (Senegal)

The next and perhaps most definitive chapter on the Church and slavery came during the trip of Pope John Paul II to Gorée Island. This trip is important for a number of reasons. First, it was, up to that point, as far as I know, the first official acknowledgement of Christian involvement in the sin of slavery. Also, it offers some important roadmaps on how to deal with this issue.

Pope John Paul II visited Gorée Island on February 22, 1992. Gorée Island is a small island that is located just three kilometers off Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. It is a particularly prominent place in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. It was one of the last points from which thousands of enslaved African peoples were shipped off to the New World. It was one of the four places on the Atlantic Coast of Africa from which Europeans carted away many Africans into slavery to various parts of the world. Gorée was not the biggest of these ports or points of no return, but it still represents an important reminder of this sordid trade between Africa and the New World.

Gorée Island was designated a World Heritage site in 1978 by UNESCO. Earlier, in 1962, the “House of Slaves” (Maison des Esclaves) with its “Door of No Return” was made a museum. UNESCO has also designated Gorée Island a “memory Island” and “a symbol of human exploitation and a sanctuary for reconciliation. When Pope John Paul II visited Gorée Island on Saturday, February 22, 1992, he gave two speeches. The first was a prepared speech that he delivered to the Catholic Community of the Island gathered at St. Charles Borromeo Church. The second was a short impromptu speech he gave at the Maison des Esclaves. Because both speeches “speak” to my intention in this article, I will discuss them in some detail.

The Speech of Pope John Paul II at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Gorée Island

After the usual pleasantries and the sentiments of joy and thanksgiving to God and to his hosts at Gorée, the pope gave a speech mainly centered on Gorée as a slave port. The speech begins with a lament—the overwhelming “sadness at the thought of the sordid deeds that this place (Gorée) evokes” (§3). The pope recounts that:

For a whole period of the history of the African continent, men, women, and children were brought to this narrow piece of land, taken by force from their motherlands, separated from their relations to be sold as goods. They came from various countries, in shackles, and heading for other foreign lands; the last picture they had of their native Africa was the huge mass of the basaltic rock of Gorée. We can say that the island remains in the memory of all the black diaspora.

For the Pope, “these men and women were the victims of a disgraceful trade, in which baptized people who did not live their faith, took part” (§3). The pope also celebrated these victims of the slave trade by memorializing them: “How can we forget the outrageous sufferings inflicted, in contempt of the most elementary human rights, to the deported populations, of the African continent? How can we forget the human lives destroyed by slavery?"

The third part of the pope’s speech is a general confession of guilt: “we must confess that sin of man against man, of man against God, with utmost sincerity and humility.”

He laments that despite all of the types of things which took place at Gorée and other such places, the human race has yet to “consider and respect themselves as God’s image” and to love each other as sons and daughters of the same heavenly father.” In a dramatic move, the Pope asked forgiveness from God for sins of the children of the Church over the centuries: “From this African sanctuary of the suffering of Black people, we implore God's forgiveness. We pray that, in the future the followers of Christ show full observance of the command of brotherly love inherited from their Lord.”

From “this sanctuary of the suffering of Black people,” the pope offered a number of prayers: for the followers of Christ, to show full observance of the command of brotherly love inherited from the Lord; that Christians no longer indulge in any oppression of their brothers and sisters but rather seek always to show compassion like the good Samaritan helping people in need; that the scourge of slavery disappear forever and that each side effect and some of the painful incidents that have recently occurred in Africa keep us all alert and urge people to pursue the long and painful conversion of the heart.

The pope called for strong opposition to “new and often insidious forms of slavery such as organized prostitution which disgracefully takes advantage of the misery of third world populations.” He notes that Africa still suffers the consequences of the forced depletion of her populations and will do so for a long time. “It is therefore only justice to provide the aid that she urgently needs so that through effective solidarity she can overcome the tragic difficulties in which she finds herself.” He also prayed that “God grants the human race the conditions for effective and active solidarity” so we can overcome the tragic conditions in which we find ourselves.

Speech at “Maison des Esclaves”

Following his encounter with the faithful gathered at St. Borromeo Church on the Island, the Pope also visited the infamous “Maison Des Esclaves” on the Island. Here he gave a short and impromptu impassioned speech during which he spoke again of the injustice of Gorée. This injustice was all the more insidious coming from a world which “considered itself to be Christian.” What happened at Gorée and places like it was a tragedy of immense proportions.

From Gorée there continue to rise up cries. The pope had come to Gorée, he said, “to listen to this cry from centuries and from generations of Black peoples, of slaves” (§1). He had come here “to pay tribute to all those victims, unknown victims; we do not know exactly how many they were, and who exactly they were.”

Magnifica Humanitas and Slavery

On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV briefly but significantly revisited the question of slavery in his encyclical on artificial intelligence. As he notes the reality of slavery and the modern forms it is taking as we head full steam into the era of artificial intelligence, he touches on the ancient and persistent aspects of the reality of slavery. In §176 of Magnifica Humanitas, he speaks of the involvement of the institutional Church in slavery. His main source of anguish was the blindness which for a long time prevented the Church from realizing the contradiction between its proclamation and the reality of its practice on the matter of slavery over much of its history.

The Church had on occasions in the past “intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and in certain cases, the enslavement of ‘infidels’—all the while still teaching and speaking about the ‘dignity of every human being, created in the image of God.” Like John Paul II before him, Pope Leo XIV expresses sorrow at the inauthenticity of the Church’s witness on this matter. “It is impossible,” he says, “not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon” (MH §176).

A lot has happened since Pope John Paul II went to Gorée. One of the significant developments was the March 25, 2026 UN resolution that

Emphasizes the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labor, property and capital.

The declaration also “affirms the importance of addressing historical wrongs affecting Africans and people of African descent in a manner that promotes justice, human rights, dignity and healing,” and “emphasizes that claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs against Africans and people of African descent.” This call for reparations from the UN resolution echoes a growing, long-standing opinion on this matter, especially from African peoples and governments.

After Gorée?

Although the Pope’s Gorée trip happened many years after Vatican II and the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the papal trip to Gorée still offers us the most explicit example of how to deal with this issue of slavery, from the perspective of the Catholic Church. Many people have written over time calling for some form of reparations for slavery, as did the UN in its March 2026 declaration. This is fraught with a lot of problems if by this they mean paying out money to any set of groups or peoples for the wrong that was done during those 400 years of slavery. I do not think this will work. Whom do you pay? How do you pay? For what do you pay? How much do you pay?

On the contrary, the pope’s trip to Gorée offers us some ways to attend to this sordid past in our human history. First of all, we must do whatever it takes to remember. The title of Elochukwu Uzukwu’s book comes to mind here.[7] We must continuously memorialize the unsung. We must continuously remember them. What I have in mind here is akin to what the Jews continue to do about certain painful aspects of their history. They have Hanukkah, and they have other ritual times which help them never to forget what they have been through. Christian involvement in slavery was massive enough to warrant repeated and ecclesial-wide rituals of remembrance. What if we set aside some day in Lent to do what the pope did on March 12, 2000, that is proclaim a day of repentance during which we pray for forgiveness for the past sins of the Church, including slavery.

The bishops of Africa did precisely this type of thing about eleven years after the pope's visit to Gorée. In October 2003, the bishops came back to Senegal for their plenary assembly, and they returned to the island for a spiritual pilgrimage, this time joined by a delegation from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The American delegation, on that occasion, noted that places like Elmina, in Ghana, Zanzibar in Tanzania, and many other locations in Africa, the continent lost her most precious treasures, her children. The wounds of that reality are still lingering, and their aftereffects are evident in racism and many forms of institutionalized injustices towards the children of Africa everywhere.

These have continued to trouble not only Africa and her descendants but also all humanity. The bishops of Africa themselves, on that occasion in 2003, held a penitential service in which they stated that they had come to Gorée in the footsteps of the pope and as leaders of the local African churches to ask forgiveness for the sins of the Church and the Children of the Church, who unmindful of their faith in the Son of God, came to Africa to engage in the odious trade of Black Africans as beasts. They pleaded for forgiveness for the silence of the Church during these five centuries. “We recognize that this tacit complicity has been fearful, as a result of an increased weight of this history of woe for the Black race.” They are concerned that slavery has continued unabated in other forms by white and Black Christians who have continued the sins of our fathers—"in the person of children under guardianship, of the child victims of modern slave traders, in the women victimized by pimping, in the victims of wars provoked and maintained for the easy access to diamonds, petrol, other riches of the African subsoil."[8]

Gorée is not the end of the history of slavery in Africa. Through global capitalism, more lethal, hidden, forms of "slow violence" (Rob Nixon)[9] are being carried out in Africa today by the same Western "Christian" nations that were the key agents of colonialism and slavery in Africa for 400 years. We must therefore acknowledge that slavery and colonialism have not ended; they may have changed names, but they continue in new and more lethal forms of extraction of land, lives, bodies, and resources.

We must think about what reparation means in the context of ongoing sacrifice of African lives. What does it even mean to do theology not just after Gorée but in the midst of Gorée? This is because Gorée is not Africa's past; it is in many ways Africa's present. That present is evident in the reality many Black persons live in this country and elsewhere today; Gorée continues in new ways and forms in ideologies, structures, systems, and practices that consider African/Black lives, here and everywhere, "less than" equal to other human lives. It is this situation which prompted the reaction of the U.S. Catholic bishops to issue their 2001 Pastoral letter, Solidarity with Africa.

In 2001 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter in which they invited the generality of Americans, but especially Catholics, to pay closer attention to Africa. The title of this pastoral, A Call to Solidarity with Africa, was itself a clarion call to all Americans for greater interest and involvement in Africa. While acknowledging the complexity of the African reality, which on one hand gives reason for hope, and on the other provides a lot of cause for concern, the bishops insist that the people and especially the Church in America must be in solidarity with Africa. In their text, the bishops speak of:

The many destructive forces that have robbed, and continue to threaten, the integral development of the peoples and nations of Africa. Slavery, a system fundamentally evil and base, stole from the African continent many of its most precious resources: men, women, and children. Millions of people were forcefully uprooted from their families and communities to lands and conditions so alienating and dehumanizing that words cannot convey the depth of their suffering. Our own nation, as well as the rest of the Americas, still lives with the effects of this evil. Our own people still bear slavery’s scars and live its history—a history that has not yet been fully acknowledged or entirely reconciled. America's own responsibility to overcome this legacy of slavery and racism should be reflected in our domestic and international programs and policies. Moreover, great efforts must also be made by African nations and the international community to eliminate the ongoing practice of slavery in countries such as Sudan and Mauritania.[10]

The most important thing in this text is that the bishops chose to remember and to acknowledge the ongoing devastation of slavery and its aftermath on African and Black peoples everywhere. They call for solidarity with Africa. Being in solidarity with Africa would first of all mean taking Africa seriously as a continent of human beings. As Pope John Paul II points out, the exercise of solidarity is valid when we recognize one another as persons.[11]

The rest of the world hardly takes Africa seriously enough. What happens on the continent is either exaggerated (when they are bad) or underrated (when they are good). There is no doubt that Africa has had more than its fair share of diseases, political instabilities, and other forms of disasters—natural and human-made. Ecclesial repentance of the Church’s role in slavery must be an ongoing reality—in ritual form.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally presented as a lecture at a conference sponsored by the Notre Dame Office of Human Life and Dignity in 2025.

There have been proud spirits who placed the whole efficacy of the virtues in free will alone; in our age there are also many who utterly despair that free will is anything at all.[1]

So Anselm in the early eleventh century contrasted the issues of his day to Augustine’s contest with Pelagius six centuries prior. Considering it repugnant to the nature of free will for God to move the heart directly, Pelagius asserted the sovereignty of human freedom to determine its own fate, whether to life or to death.[2] “God,” he reasoned, “decided to give rational creatures the gift of good will and the power of free choice. By making a person naturally capable of good and evil, so that he could do both and would direct his own will to either, God arranged that what an individual actually chose would be properly his own.”[3] Against this thesis, Augustine asserted the sovereignty of God over the inmost movements of the heart. Even the sinner’s desire to be converted, he argued, arose from God’s direct operation on the radical orientation of the will.[4] So thorough was Augustine’s triumph over Pelagius that Anselm found it had become exigent to defend human free will by showing its harmony with divine foreknowledge, predestination, and the interior action of grace.

Augustine and Anselm represent the constellation of tensions that Catholic theology, doctrine, and spiritual practice have aimed to hold together: the necessity of grace for conversion, good fruits, and perseverance; the indispensable role of consent, cooperation, and merit in justification; and, of special interest here, the innocence of God from any responsibility for sin.[5] As the Council of Trent has it: “If anyone should say that it is not in our power to make our ways evil, but that God works our evil deeds just as he works our good deeds, not permissively only, but properly and per se, so that the treachery of Judas is no less God’s proper work than the call of Paul: let him be anathema.”[6] What Trent puts in a doctrinal mode, St. Benedict offers as spiritual counsel: we ought to praise God for whatever we find good in ourselves; but acknowledge our sins as ours and ours alone.[7] Our exclusive ownership of and responsibility for sin—Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—is a law of prayer and a law of belief. The contrast between what God plants and fructifies, and what God endures in us, has been spiritually and theologically intelligible to Catholics from time out of mind.

Anselm’s plaint is called to mind by a novel perspective on these matters, recently featured in this journal.[8] Roberto J. De La Noval does not doubt (as did Anselm’s opponents) whether free will is anything at all, but whether it has anything at all, even failure, that is properly and solely its own.[9] “It is not difficult,” he says, “to reduce Pelagianism to one basic error: the idea that the final explanation for the salvation of any sinner is their own created freedom.”[10]

A “commonsense Pelagianism in Catholic culture,” he feels, stubbornly persists.[11] It “keeps us from cultivating awe and gratitude to God for authoring every aspect of us, from our holy desires to our fruitful decisions.”[12] But, he wishes to add, the converse is also true: it is “Pelagian” to think that even our failure, even final impenitence, could have its “final explanation” in “created freedom.”[13] “The total explication of why any sinner is damned [must] account for God’s free choice not to impart the grace that, were it given, would inexorably produce its intended result.”[14] Who, then, is ultimately answerable for our failures? God, apparently. Hence Noval’s universalism: if anyone is damned, it is finally—though Noval is far too learned and artful to put it so bluntly—God who has failed.

The Logic of “Pelagianism,” According to Noval

It is worth unpacking Noval’s argument. God has created us from nothing, and we can do nothing at all, whether good or evil, apart from his creating and sustaining power. As we can do no good without God’s help to succeed, Noval avers, so we can do no evil without his permission to fail. Our whole freedom, for good or for evil, is contained, as it were, within the transcendent decree of God’s freedom either to give help, and so ensure success, or by withholding it, doom us to failure. For Noval, “It follows therefore that no exercise of human freedom”—even, apparently, the free rejection of God—“can, from a Catholic perspective, be understood in disconnection from God’s impartation of grace.”[15] Since apart from God’s help we can do nothing, does it not follow, he thinks, that even our sins “are brought about by . . . the withholding of God’s grace,” the opinion he elsewhere (and approvingly) attributes to Thomas Aquinas?[16]

If God’s grace is the necessary and sufficient condition for conversion to God, is not God’s permission—that is, his decision to withhold the grace he knows would prevent it—the necessary and sufficient condition for the rejection of God? In every case, God might turn the sinner and prevent the sin. Does it not follow, in effect, that even our sins belong more to God than to ourselves, that is, that our failure is “ultimately explained” by his decree?[17] Should we not infer, therefore—although, again, we might expect Noval to quibble with our putting it so directly—that God, who by his permissive decree makes our fall inevitable, is somehow much more the owner or author or ultimate cause of sin than is the hapless sinner? And, to come to the point of his title, would it not be the most insidious Pelagianism to think that there is anything at all, even in the most radical perversity of our choices, that is ours alone, and not God’s, and, indeed, more God’s than ours?

In this way, Noval means to think the logic of Pelagianism all the way through to the end: it is, fundamentally, the assertion of primary or sole ownership of anything at all in ourselves. Noval’s version of a resolute anti-Pelagianism, then, follows the inverse logic to its completion. Everything we have, even our rejection of God, is more from God than from ourselves.

Noval is undoubtedly right to exalt the sovereignty of God, even over sin and sinners. Still, we cannot help thinking that he has treated sin as if it could be integrated into some logic when, in fact, it cannot. In effect, Noval makes God’s permission of sin into an explanation for sin. This, we think, is to be mistaken about sin, the goodness of divine permission, and the sufficiency of grace.

By publishing his opinions the author has invited the public to examine them.[18] While we share his antipathy to Pelagianism and his devotion to God’s sovereignty, and admire his commitment to think these matters through to the end, we find his particular construal of them extremely difficult to reconcile with Catholic doctrine and practice and the best traditions of theology.

As a doctrinal matter, the Church affirms that grace can be sufficient and nevertheless refused. It is condemned to say that sinners can never resist interior grace, or that, if they do, then the grace was not sufficiet. It is condemned to say that it is semi-Pelagian to hold that grace can be resisted. It is condemned to say that God’s endurance (permission) of our evil deeds effectively makes him the cause of our failure. It is condemned, finally, to say that the judgment of the Church can be disregarded because one claims to find something different in Augustine.[19]

We also find his exegesis of the authors he conscripts to his cause, particularly Augustine and Aquinas, somewhat disoriented. But while getting these authors right would be worthwhile and illuminating itself, the fundamental issues here are not exegetical but matters of basic principle and interpretive horizon. In brief: Noval expects that even sin has an ultimate explanation, and an ultimate explanation of anything can only be God. His universalism follows from the premise that only God ultimately explains why sinners fail, and is ultimately to blame if anyone should fail irrevocably. Ex falso sequitur quodlibet.

My Sin is My Own

Noval is right to think that we can learn a thing or two from Augustine on these matters. Augustine decidedly does not look to God as an explanation for sin. He constantly affirmed that sin is the one thing in all the world that is wholly our own.[20] If Noval is right on what makes a “Pelagian,” then, even Augustine had not thought the error of Pelagianism all the way through.

Augustine says in his Expositions of the Psalms: “You are nothing of yourself, call upon God; your sins are your own, but your merits are from God.”[21] Preaching on the same Psalm elsewhere, he remarks, “nothing truly belongs to me except my sins.”[22] So, he reads John 8:44—“Whoever speaks a lie, speaks from what is his own”—as teaching that the one thing we have as our own, apart from God, is to lie.[23]

In the same vein, Augustine’s response to the question posed by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:7—“For what do you have that you have not received?”—is not “nothing at all,” but “nothing, except sin.”[24] For Augustine, this passage reminds us that our every good is God’s gift, above all our desire and love for God. But while it is grace that frees us to cooperate with God, its absence does not oblige us to sin: “We have it in our power to sin, but to be justified is not in our power.”[25] He considers that, as a practical matter, the heirs of Adam’s Sin are unable to avoid sin consistently. But this inability is a consequence of sin and not its ultimate explanation, and it does not oblige us to choose sin.[26] Sin, then, is exclusively ours: not something we can attribute either to God or, with the Manichees, to a malevolent force outside ourselves and independent of God.

The Nothingness of Sin

If sin is something that human beings alone are responsible for, how does this not carve out some sphere in the cosmos independent of God’s sovereignty? Has Augustine merely shrunk the Manichean kingdom of darkness to fit the confines of the human heart, bestowing on each human will a principle of evil that lies outside of God’s control?

We would be mistaken to think Augustine insensitive to this problem. The origin of evil was one of the major intellectual obstacles in the way of his baptism. In his Confessions, Augustine famously recounts his realization that evil is not a substance demanding causal explanation but, rather, a privatio boni: “Everything that exists is good, then; and so evil, the source of which I was seeking, cannot be a substance, because if it were, it would be good.”[27] By speaking colloquially about sin as something humans “have” or an action they can “do” we may obscure the fact that what “sin” really names is a privation or defect in something we have or do—not something that is but rather an “is-not” in something that is.

One way to put the “is-not” of sin is to say that it lacks a proper cause, i.e., a proper “why.” Why do we sin? There is no why. If there were a “why,” a valid, true, sufficient reason, it would not be sin. There are only excuses and rationalizations for temptations that we ought, but fail, to resist.[28]

Augustine inquires into the cause of sin in his City of God while seeking the origin of evil in the human will. Since evil is a privation and not a substance, he concludes that one should not look for an efficient cause of its existence:

No one, therefore, should look for an efficient cause for an evil will. For it is not an efficient but rather a deficient cause, because the evil will itself is not an effect but rather a defect. For to defect from what has supreme existence to what has lesser existence is itself to begin to have an evil will.[29]

To seek a full causal explanation of evil is thus to make a category mistake, like “wanting to see darkness or to hear silence.”[30] As Jesse Couenhoven puts it, for Augustine “the Fall is fundamentally inexplicable, a matter of deficiency.”[31] And yet, even though “Augustine is left without an explanation [for the Fall itself] . . . he is able to provide an explanation for his inability to explain the Fall: if the primal sin made sense, it would not have been as bad as Augustine believed it was.”[32]

Even as we refer to human beings as alone the “cause” of their sinfulness, this is nothing more than to say that we do not need any help to fail. De facto, we can even fail to cooperate when God operates on the heart to change its deepest desires. The grace is sufficient; it changes the heart; but the changed heart falls back and does not persevere. Did grace fail? No. The sinner failed, despite God’s help. Why? If there were a sufficient reason, it would not be sin.

Hence, Thomas Aquinas says that the formal element of formal sin (malum culpae) is a deprivation of form, i.e., intrinsic intelligibility: sin is indefinable, lacks a ratio, has no due cause, is an objective falsehood in which there is nothing to understand. It is known and judged by God as a “false” fact, an absurdity.[33] Once we grasp that sin has no “why,” we realize that the sufficient grace and the efficacious grace are the same grace. Sin is an inexplicable failure, not of grace and not of God in giving it, but of the sinner. If the grace is given, the sinner is moved, because grace is always sufficient and its gift is the movement. Yet the sinner may be moved by God and refuse to move herself, to cooperate, to elicit the further acts required. There is, then, no intelligible or entitative difference between sufficient and efficacious grace.[34] The difference is just a brute fact: sin, and sin is unintelligible.

Someone might think this a subterfuge: there is always a still greater, a more sufficient grace God might have given; hence one might always find reason to blame the grace, or its Giver, rather than the sinner. To be sure, we are not saying that God must permit our failure, only that in fact he does; and the permission does not explain the failure, because nothing does. Or someone might say: being is completely intelligible; how then is sin a brute fact? We answer that sin is non-intelligible because the formal element in formal sin is a deprivation, a non-being.[35] Unless it is grasped that sin has no “why,” one will always think it can somehow be integrated into a synthesis with the divine will. It cannot.

To be precise, then, it is something of an abuse of language to say we are the “cause” of sin, because a cause is a reason “why.” As Lonergan observes, we wish to explain the “irrational privation” that is sin from a force of habit: “We are . . . accustomed to reducing intelligible beings to their causes; therefore, we likewise [expect to] reduce to their causes even occurrences that in themselves are not intelligible!”[36] Insofar as sin is a privation of being, it “lacks the intelligibility of cause” and so “cannot be reduced to God.”[37] He continues,

That is why when someone asks why people sin . . . no true reason can be given. Had there been a true reason, they would not have been acting contrary to reason; and if they had not been acting contrary to reason, they would have performed a voluntary act that was not evil but good.[38]

Iniquity and Divine Permission

Why is there sin? Why is sin permitted? Noval’s propensity is to treat these two questions as if they were somehow the same question. They are not.

Sin is radically evil and unintelligible: there is no “why.” Divine permission, on the other hand, is good and completely intelligible, although not to us in this life: why God permits sin is hidden in divine wisdom. (Augustine, as Noval notes, was persuaded at least of this: that God would not permit sin except to bring some great good out of it.[39]) There are, then, two different questions, one to which no answer at all may be expected, and another whose answer is hidden from us in the wisdom of God. The one is mysterious because it is utterly dark; the other is mysterious because its light is too bright for us. They cannot be synthesized.

Noval, however, wants an explanation: sin occurs, because God permits it; ultimately, then, sin results from God’s decision. If God withholds grace, Noval seems to reason, we are condemned to inevitable failure; and if God grants grace but not “enough” grace, still we are condemned; and God knows this. As God’s free liberality explains our success, so his parsimony explains—and ensures—our failure. The “why” of sin, then, for Noval, is God’s decision not to fulfill the conditions he has made needful for our success. In effect, permission, for Noval, amounts to prevention. The fix is in.

Noval effectively takes it that both the good and the evil have an ultimate “because” in God’s decision. Already we observed him to say that “the total explication of why any sinner is damned [must] account for God’s free choice.”[40] The expectation of synthesis is a recurring theme: “It is incoherent to understand a sinner’s rejection of saving grace as ultimately explained by that sinner’s throwing up obstacles in the way of grace;”[41] “No exercise of human freedom,” even sin, can be understood “in disconnection from God’s impartation of grace,”—i.e., God’s decision to give grace sufficiently or not—since, otherwise, the creature and not God would be the ultimate principle of explanation.[42]

Now, we appreciate the demand that all things be completely explained. Without it, there would be no valid proof for the existence of God. But sometimes the right answer to a question is that it is the wrong question.[43] It is, as a matter of fact, incoherent to understand a sinner’s rejection of grace as explained by anything at all. What has no why cannot be assigned a why and, therefore, God is not its ultimate why. Because Noval maintains that even sin must have an ultimate why, he seems to locate the mystery of iniquity, not where it belongs—in the radically unintelligible failure of created freedom—but where it does not belong— in the transcendent counsel of divine wisdom.

Noval insists he is not making sin “comprehensible.”[44] What would make sin comprehensible, he thinks, would be to relocate the mystery of iniquity from the inscrutability of God’s will into the failures of ours, to “reduce this mystery to manageable proportions and so to annul it, to revert to a Pelagian account of grace and divine causality” by denying that God operates directly on human freedom.[45] Blaming ourselves alone, Noval seems to think, is the wrong explanation, the Pelagian explanation.

For Noval, then, the incomprehensibility of sin is not because it has no why, but because its why is hidden from us in divine wisdom. Iniquity is mysterious to us, he suggests, because we do not understand why God permits it to occur. He reasons: we know that God’s will is the salvation of all; we know that “God’s will cannot be defeated by creatures”;[46] we know that sin can never occur without God’s permission, else his will would be frustrated; we know that sin nevertheless does occur. This can only be, for Noval, because God decrees that it occur: “To say God ‘permits’ but does not ‘will’ sin is not to communicate anything we actually understand. It is, rather, only to confess the mystery that God’s will is universally efficacious and yet moral evil exists.”[47]

The real problem, however, is that there simply is no proper explanation for moral evil. Conversion, no doubt, is a divinely operated, internal reorientation of human desire. But sin? They are not parallel; there can be no synthesis. “Your downfall, O Israel, is your own doing” (Hos 13:9).

Conclusion: The (Im-)possibility of Iniquity?

“Whom God passes over, he condemns,” says Calvin, “for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them.”[48] There is in Calvin’s thought no meaningful difference, save in outcome, between God’s will to save and his will to permit.[49] It is difficult to see wherein Noval would disagree. That is why Noval thinks it Pelagian to attribute our exclusion from divine fellowship to ourselves; everything, even this, is ultimately God’s. But unlike Calvin, Noval quite rightly finds it intolerable that God should create some only to prevent their flourishing. The only acceptable outcome, on these premises, is that all will be saved.[50] It would be one thing for God to let us learn a few lessons. It would be another entirely for God to damn us forever for a downfall that, in the final analysis, is not our doing, but his own.

Now, it is not our intention here to populate hell, define its torments, or even consider how it is compatible with the blessedness of God and the saints, except to say this alone: if any sinner is ever finally impenitent, it is entirely the sinner’s own fault and not at all God’s. With the Church, with Augustine, Aquinas, and Lonergan, we deny that the will to permit is a will to exclude or a predestination to evil.[51] It is an endurance of absurdity. To ask the reason for the absurd is to make a basic mistake. There is no final synthesis of the non-intelligible with the intelligible. There is only the “great enigma” I become to myself when I turn away from the source of goodness, being, and intelligibility: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.[52]

One of his works has not only won admiration but, on further study, has fascinated, puzzled, and even repulsed Christian admirers of his work, because it seems to violate a central doctrine of the Catholic Faith. This essay will consider that work, “The Dead Christ in the Tomb” (click here for a full photo of the artwork), and attempt to interpret it in the light of Catholic doctrine. It will begin with a brief overview of the provenance of “The Dead Christ,” then an analysis of the anatomical details of “The Dead Christ,” and proceed to notable reactions to it throughout history.

Finally, I will propose a way of valuing this masterpiece that remains faithful to Church teaching. This will involve some speculation regarding what the painting meant to Holbein, what it might express in terms of Holbein’s own faith. We have no commentary by Holbein himself about the image, so I will move from what I judge to be least to most probable based on the little we do know about Holbein and the time in which he lived. Although completely unverifiable from beginning to end, this part does serve the purpose of helping us think about what this work could mean for us today. That concluding part will have two sections:

1. What “The Dead Christ” can never mean for Catholics (if modern anatomical analysis is correct), i.e. it can never be taken by Catholics as a faithful representation of the verum corpus, the physical body of Christ in its state from Good Friday evening through Holy Saturday until the Resurrection.
2. What “The Dead Christ” could profitably mean for Catholics—the decay and decomposition of the fullness of Christ in the world, the death of Christendom. This is a work of art which demands not only our appreciation but our prayerful meditation. But to give it that requires reframing it (no pun intended) in our minds and hearts, perhaps even departing from Holbein’s own intention.

Hans Holbein and “The Dead Christ” in Historical Context

Holbein lived from 1498-1543, when he died of the plague at the age of 45. He learned painting from his father, and in 1515, at the age of 17, he left his birthplace of Augsburg, Germany and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he lived for all but 2 of the next 17 years. Those two years, 1526-1528, were spent in England, where he joined the circle of St. Thomas More (with a letter of recommendation from Erasmus of Rotterdam, More’s close friend). In 1532 he would return to England where he would be officially appointed as the King’s Painter and paint his famous portraits of the Tudors, and where he would remain for the rest of his life.

“The Dead Christ” was a rather early work of Holbein during his time in Basel, and the only religious image that bears his signature. It was commissioned by his friend Bonifacius Amerbach, and bears the date 1521 in Roman numerals, resembling an inscription carved into the stone wall of the tomb above Christ’s feet (M D XXI / H H). During that year he was often in the company of Erasmus, of whom he painted many portraits and who lived in Basel for two periods of time overlapping Holbein’s time there. But Erasmus makes no mention of the painting, despite the fact that he frequently commented on art, books, and religious culture. No significant writings of Holbein survive, if he ever wrote anything, so we have no help from his own words.

Why did Holbein paint it, and for whom? There are two theories. One is that it was supposed to be used as a predella, or the base of an altar. But “The Dead Christ” has a low vantage point, which is not helpful in a predella and is more characteristic of a painting to be placed above eye level. The other theory is that it was painted to be an autonomous panel, perhaps for a family chapel in the Carthusian Charterhouse in Basel. Its width matches that of a stone memorial in a family chapel there, a memorial that Amerbach also commissioned, and its thin gold molding corresponds to a similar detail of the memorial molding. But the memorial was not installed until 1544, and Holbein’s painting was never installed in the chapel, adding to the mystery. It is currently in the Kunstmuseum in Basel.

“The Dead Christ”: Analysis, Commentary, and Speculation

Now let us consider the image. As is true of all Holbein’s paintings, it is very realistic, the image of a body that has been dead for at least 3 days. There should be no doubt that it is based on direct studies of corpses, and legend has it that the model for the image was the corpse of a dead Jewish man that had washed up in Basel and was then pulled out of the Rhine River. Notice that the head of Christ is missing both crowns—it is not adorned with a halo as it was always depicted in deposition scenes in Renaissance paintings, as we see in another famous deposition painting, Andrea Mantegna's “Lamentation over the Dead Christ,” to which I will return. Nor does it bear the marks of the crowning with thorns—in fact there are no wounds on the body except those in his side, his hands, and his feet.

The most important curiosity comes when we look at the one hand that is visible. Look closely at the nail mark, and a green pallor is evident, which could either be bruising or decay around the wound. In the only published medical analysis, anatomist Lovorka Grgurević confirms this pallor and other characteristics as a sign of body tissue decay.[1] One finger, the middle finger, is extended. You can see that it looks as if Christ has a long fingernail. Until the late nineteenth century it was assumed even by medical experts that the nails continue to grow on corpses (actually, the skin and cuticle recede, making the nail look much longer in death than it did in life). The body looks emaciated because the substance of the flesh has begun to shrink. In short, it is more probable than not that this is a body that is decomposing.

For this reason, even from the very beginning the painting provoked strong reactions, often of disgust, from its viewers. The very first record of the painting refuses to name it as The Dead Christ. Instead, it is catalogued as “Portrait of a Dead Man with the title ‘Jesus Christos Rex Judaeorum.’”[2] The most important commentator before the late nineteenth century was the Russian Freemason N.M. Karamzin who wrote, “Nothing divine can be seen in Christ taken down from the Cross; but as a dead man he is depicted very naturally.”[3] The Swiss writer Ulrich Hegner described the painting this way in 1823: “He lies on the board, stiffened, the color of corruption, dead as far as possible. This is probably how a crucified man might have looked, but no artist should have depicted the Savior so horribly disfigured.”[4]

But the greatest commentator was Fyodor Dostoevsky. In August 1867 Dostoevsky visited Basel and viewed the painting. In her memoirs, his wife Anna Grigorievna says that she left him before the painting, and returned fifteen to twenty minutes later to find him "riveted to the spot" before it. She wrote, "in his agitated face there was a kind of frightened expression, one which I had happened to notice more than once in the first minutes of an epileptic fit."[5] Afterwards Dostoevsky would declare to his wife that "one could lose one's faith from that picture." This cryptic comment is repeated by Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, where the character Ippolit comments on the painting:

The picture represented Christ just taken down from the cross. . . . In the painting his face is dreadfully disfigured by blows, swollen, covered with terrible swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes open, the pupils turned up, the large open whites of the eyes bright with a sort of deathly, glassy reflection. . . . As one looks at that painting, one conceives of nature in the form of some huge, implacable, dumb beast, or to be more exact, to be much more exact, though it may seem strange, in the form of some huge machine of the latest design which, deaf and unfeeling, has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up a great and priceless being, a being worth all of nature and its laws, all the earth, which was perhaps created solely for the advent of that being![6]

So—what was Holbein saying, or at least assuming, with this painting? What was he trying to say about Christ’s body in the state of death? Here we have a great dilemma. As we will see, there is no faithfully Catholic reception of the painting that can accept it as accurately depicting Christ in the tomb. But it is a masterpiece worth our respect. It is not something utterly disgusting and sacrilegious, like “Piss Christ” by Andres Serrano (1987), or “Elephant Dung Mary” by Chris Ofili (1986). As for Holbein’s meaning, I will give three possibilities, starting with the one I consider the least probable and ending with the one I consider the most probable:

1. The least probable: Holbein was ignorant of theology and simply wedded to his artistic realism, depicting Christ exactly the way any anatomist would tell him to describe a body that has been in the tomb for three days. He was certainly wedded to his realism; he is the greatest example of realism in painting of his day, and one of the greatest of all time. But he was also raised a Catholic and, thanks to his own father, had spent his childhood in religious and artistic instruction, which included visiting two masterpieces, Matthias Grunewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece,” painted only ten years before “The Dead Christ,” and Andrea Mantegna’s “Lamentation Over the Dead Christ,” completed just a generation before (circa 1483). From Grunewald he knew that to show a horribly wounded body was not in any way heterodox, and he also knew from Mantegna that to show the body at peace, bearing its wounds but still intact, not decaying, was the proper convention. He had to know that he was leaving both behind, and stating something that would not fit artistic convention or Catholic doctrine.
2. The more probable: Holbein was repudiating his faith in Christ. Remember—no halo, a body in decay, and that middle finger. Why the middle finger? From the time of ancient Greece until today, we know what the middle finger signifies. Could Holbein have been saying that Christ ended his life as a sinner, even an admirable one, and that this shows that he was not divine? Holbein could never have said any such thing in his day anywhere within the continent of Europe, nor in any Muslim Land, without risking arrest and execution.
3. The most probable: Holbein had become a Lutheran, and he depicted the Dead Christ according to Luther’s theology of salvation. Again, Holbein moved to Basel in 1516, and painted “The Dead Christ” in 1521. It was at the very same time that the Reformation had come to Basel, and especially through the circle around Erasmus. Erasmus remained a Catholic his entire life, but Protestant ideas were spreading rapidly through sermons, printing, and university circles. In February 1529 waves of iconoclasm had begun to spread through Switzerland, and many religious images and altars were destroyed. Holbein’s Dead Christ was held privately, so it escaped, but if it was known it could have been spared also because the absence of overt devotional spectacle in the painting may have made it somewhat less objectionable than traditional cult images.

Luther insisted that God does not appear in expected forms of strength or philosophical clarity. Instead, God hides himself in paradox: “God can be found only in suffering and the cross.” Any form of exaltation—say, a halo around the head of Christ—was considered by him to be a compromise of that principle. The painting removes every traditional sign of divinity and forces the viewer to confront Christ under the conditions Luther says reveal God most truthfully: suffering, death, and apparent abandonment. While the principle here is certainly Catholic—it is the suffering, wounded Christ that reveals God most truthfully—its extension to decay is certainly not, as shall be seen.

If he became a Lutheran, Holbein would never officially renounce his Catholic Faith. When he moved permanently to England in 1532, Henry VIII was still a Catholic, only declaring himself the head of the Church in England in 1534. We cannot be sure if my theory is correct. But consider this quote from Luther of which Holbein would certainly have heard echoes in Basel. It is from Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation in 1518: “He who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore, he who does not understand the cross does not understand God.”[7]

Theological Evaluation and Retrieval

To evaluate “The Dead Christ” in the light of Catholic theology, we can begin with Acts of the Apostles and the Pentecost speech of St. Peter, applying Psalm 16 to Jesus:

For David says of him: “I saw the Lord ever before me, with him at my right hand I shall not be disturbed. Therefore my heart has been glad and my tongue has exulted; my flesh, too, will dwell in hope, because you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld, nor will you suffer your holy one to see corruption. You have made known to me the paths of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence.” My brothers, one can confidently say to you about the patriarch David that he died and was buried, and his tomb is in our midst to this day. But since he was a prophet and knew that God had sworn an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that neither was he abandoned to the netherworld nor did his flesh see corruption. God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses (Acts 2:25-32).

Bodily decay is explicitly denied by Peter based upon Old Testament prophecy. The body in the tomb remained Jesus’ body, not alive but also not subject to decomposition. A corpse is not really the body of a dead person. It remains superficially in the likeness of that person for a short time, but that quickly passes. But Christ’s body was miraculously preserved by the Holy Spirit in preparation for his Resurrection. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes St. Gregory of Nyssa:

God [the Son] did not impede death from separating his soul from his body according to the necessary order of nature, but has reunited them to one another in the Resurrection, so that he himself might be, in his person, the meeting point for death and life, by arresting in himself the decomposition of nature produced by death and so becoming the source of reunion for the separated parts.[8]

And then it offers this commentary:

Christ's death was a real death in that it put an end to his earthly human existence. But because of the union his body retained with the person of the Son, his was not a mortal corpse like others, for "divine power preserved Christ's body from corruption” (ST III.51.3) Both of these statements can be said of Christ: "He was cut off out of the land of the living" (Is 53:8), and "My flesh will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption” (Acts 2:26-27; cf. Ps 16:9-10). Jesus' Resurrection "on the third day" was the proof of this, for bodily decay was held to begin on the fourth day after death.[9]

There are no conciliar decrees regarding this doctrine, but that is because it has never been challenged in any significant way in the history of the Church. But the message is clear—Christ’s body in the tomb remains his body; lifeless, yes, but uncorrupted until it is glorified in the hidden moment of the Resurrection.

If one wonders whether or not this is tilting at windmills, consider: if the Dead Christ accurately depicts Christ in the tomb, then that means at some point after the Incarnation, Christ had no body on Earth. A decaying corpse is not a body, it is nothing more than human remains. If Christ was subject to decay, the response of God to Mary’s “Fiat” to the Incarnation would be more total than God’s own. The Word became flesh, not flesh for a time, then not flesh anymore, then flesh again. But a creature can never be more faithful than the Creator.

I propose that perhaps we may consider the Dead Christ beyond Holbein’s own intention. Perhaps the image there can be taken by the faithful believer not as an image of the verum corpus in the tomb, but Christ’s pleroma, his fullness in society, withering away. Without a doubt, by the time Holbein painted this image, that fullness of Christ that we call Christendom was, for all practical purposes, decaying.

By this I do not mean the Church, which is Christ’s mystical body. Of that body, St, Paul says she is “the fullness of him (Christ) who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). Like Christ, she can, in her deepest essence, never be subject to decay. But her emanation into culture, her informing of a society affecting all forms of human life, has no such guarantee. The society which from the 800s was called Christendom, a term which first appears in Anglo-Saxon writings and literally means “the realm of Christ,” began to decay at the Reformation and only its bones remain. Christendom is not the Church herself but the cultural and geopolitical flowering of the fullness of Christ from her into the world. Just as the Church is the image of Christ, the society that she once gave birth to also resembled him.

And now we look upon that society in Holbein’s painting, and we see what so many refuse to see, even centuries later. Despite how many embrace integralism and the Tridentine Mass, Christendom is dead and can never be recovered, at least not as it once was. In a speech Walker Percy gave during the 1983 commencement exercises of Saint Joseph Abbey and Seminary College in Covington, LA (the transcript of which is displayed prominently, still today, in the seminary library), he said:

The time may come when the Catholic Church and the Catholic people, priest and layman, will have become a remnant, a saving remnant, and that will be both good news and bad news. The bad news is that the familiar comfort of the parish in which the Church was taken to be more or less coextensive with society in which we lived is probably going or gone. The good news is that in becoming a minority in all countries, the Church also becomes a world church in the true sense, bound by no culture, not even the West of the old Christendom, by no means triumphant but rather a pilgrim church witnessing to a world in travail and yet a world to which it appears ever stranger and more outlandish. It, the Church, will be seen increasingly as what it was in the beginning, a saving remnant, a sign of contradiction, a stumbling block, a transcultural phenomenon, a pilgrim Church.

There is no more Christendom and it may be just as well.

There is no more Christendom. All our nostalgic longing for it is sentimentality and is worth nothing. It is like embracing a rotting body. Only when we turn from it and re-encounter the living Christ, risen and imperishable within his Church today, will we begin to forge a new way, which will begin in diminution but result in new societal forms.

As for “The Dead Christ,” I will leave the final word to my Notre Dame colleague Jennifer Newsome-Martin:

To witness Hans Holbein’s painting . . . is to experience at once its strangest feature: ostensibly it is a work of religious art, an icon of faith and thus a communication of some element of transcendence. And yet the starkness and brutality of the image is buffered by nothing, ameliorated by nothing that would or could dilute the insistent finality of the death that it records so forensically and without consolation. Holbein’s painting forestalls all pieties and beatific assurances, hopes of resurrection. . . . Holbein’s image belies no evidence of things not seen and expresses no faith beyond the devastating certainty that Christ is dead. What is seen is just a solitary corpse who could be anyone, any one of us who must also face the inevitability of our death alone. It simultaneously represents an aesthetic of both faith and doubt, one in which faith and doubt are themselves drawn into indistinction.[10]

EDITORIAL NOTE: This paper was originally presented at the Joie de Vivre Louisiana Arts & Culture Festival on May 16, 2026 and was published in the Summer 2026 issue of Joie de Vivre.

As Erika Bachiochi points out in her excellent book, The Rights of Women, “Until the mid-twentieth century, women’s rights advocates opposed infanticide and abortion, often speaking of the two together; most also disapproved of contraception” (202). Bachiochi explains that these early feminists viewed “contraceptive methods and abortion as technological incursions into women’s bodies and facilitators of male oppression of women” (115). For instance, nineteenth-centurty feminist and female suffrage advocate Mattie Brinkerhoff wrote: “When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society—so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that . . . she has been greatly wronged” (214). On the question of contraception, early feminists “feared that, by attempting to separate sex from childbearing, these [artificial birth control] methods would embolden men to engage in infidelity, prostitution, promiscuity, or even marital rape” (109). Although these feminists “sought freedom from excessive pregnancies and childbearing, [they] also sought respect and authority for motherhood and freedom from male sexual tyranny.” And they believed that “the solution to both . . . was abstinence and a single sexual moral standard restraining both women’s and men’s sexual impulses” (110, quoting historian Tracy Thomas).

So how did we move from this vision of women’s rights as inherently bound up with respect for the rights of preborn children and the disciplining of both male and female sexual desire, to our contemporary culture in which the very term “women’s rights” is taken to be synonymous with a right to abortion on demand and unlimited sex without procreative consequences? How can we unmask the falsity of this narrative to a culture that seems to take its truth for granted? And what do we need in order to restore the cultural recognition that true respect for women goes hand in hand with respect for preborn children?

In my remarks, I would like to consider each of these questions: how we got here, why this narrative pitting women against their preborn children (and indeed against their own reproductive capacities) is false, and what the solution is.

How We Got Here

So how did we get here? To simplify a complicated story—and here I draw on the excellent work of Carl Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—there was a three-part revolution in our understanding of the human person. First, there was a shift from a view of the person in which embodiment and social embeddedness are central to one’s personal identity, to what is often referred to as “expressive individualism,” a romantic view of the person as defined by inner psychological states, often in opposition to the societal demands of institutions such as family, church, or nation. This reduction of the self to psychological states goes hand in hand with materialism and the abandonment of a transcendent view of human nature. Second, this psychologized view of the self was sexualized, leading to what Helen Alvaré has called “sexual expressionism,” according to which one’s sexual feelings—and the freedom to express and act on those feelings—are at the core of personal identity and dignity. Finally, this sexualized self was politicized, as neo-Marxist and second-wave feminist thinkers identified political liberation with sexual liberation and the dismantling of traditional sexual norms.

The result of this tripartite revolution in our culture’s understanding of the human person was captured in the 1992 Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade’s claim that there is a constitutional right to abortion. Although both Roe and Casey have now been overturned, the understanding of the human person reflected in Casey nonetheless remains dominant in our culture. In one of the most notorious sentences in the history of American jurisprudence, the Casey opinion states: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." And central to that liberty to define oneself, according to the Casey court, is sexual expression. “For two decades,” says the Court, “people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”

Let us unpack in a bit more detail what this sexual expressionist view of the person—and the exaltation of sexual expression as the most fundamental of our political rights—implies. At the core of sexual expressionism is the assumption that the right to sexual expression requires the ability to express and act upon one’s sexual desires without any responsibility for the natural consequences of such activity—namely, children. Sexual expressionism attempts to sever not only the inherent connection between sex and procreation, but also the inherent connection between sex and marriage. On this view, sex could be a way of expressing love and commitment or of seeking to have a child, if that is what you happen to want, but it need not involve any of these things if you do not want it to. Philosopher Igor Primoratz exemplifies this view in his book Ethics and Sex, where he claims that there is no inherent meaning or purpose to sex beyond the attainment of sexual pleasure, and thus no special moral norms governing sexual activity. (As an aside, it is worth noting that Primoratz’s view—which is simply a systematic philosophical statement of the dominant cultural view of sex—cannot make sense of why the injustice of rape is different from or worse than non-sexual forms of assault and battery. This alone should reveal to us how deeply at odds sexual expressionism is with genuine respect for women.)

Of course, the pesky biological fact remains that sexual intercourse is a step in the process of human reproduction—that is what makes it sexual in the first place—and so the sexual expressionist culture must do everything it can to alter this biological reality and hide it from consciousness. Thus the “right” to “consequence-free” sex is made possible by hormonal birth control, with abortion available as a back-up when birth control fails—necessary since the only 100% effective method of birth control is abstinence. As the Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s research arm) reports, over 50% of women seeking abortions were using some form of birth control when they got pregnant. And we have already seen that the contraception-abortion connection was central to the Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v Casey decision—thankfully now overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson.

In other words, without the technological innovation of hormonal birth control and its widespread societal acceptance, it seems doubtful that the sexual expressionist view of the self would have ever achieved such cultural dominance. The implication is that a culture that sees sexual expression as the core of personal identity is necessarily also a culture that rejects women’s unique biological capacity for motherhood, both in theory and in practice. This rejection was clear in the work of second-wave feminists. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, argues in the Second Sex that “freedom from reproductive slavery” through effective contraception and abortion is essential to women’s liberation (139). For De Beauvoir, a key obstacle to women’s liberation is the female body itself, which—by contrast with the male body—is inherently in conflict with women’s transcendent “vocation as a human being” (723). As she says in an interview in the early 1970s, “women will not be liberated until they have been liberated from their children” (Simone de Beauvoir Today, 39). And in another interview she argues that it is not enough for women to hold positions of power in society, but that women’s equality will not really be attained until we “destroy the concept of motherhood.” Even more explicitly, Shulamith Firestone in the Dialectic of Sex argues that women’s social inequality is rooted in “the biological division of the sexes,” and thus that the only way to achieve women’s social equality is to eliminate “the sex distinction itself,” by replacing natural sexual reproduction with “artificial reproduction,” and in this way putting an end to “the tyranny of the biological family” (ch.1).

Thus we find ourselves in a situation in which women’s liberation is conceived of in a way that requires rejecting and manipulating women’s bodies to be able to have sex whenever we desire, while only taking on the responsibility of parenthood when (or if) we happen to want to. And even then, there is an attempt to eradicate biological sex differences in procreation through technology, thus rejecting women’s unique capacity to nourish a developing child within her body. This is how we have gotten to the place in which “women’s rights” have come to be synonymous with “reproductive rights,” which in turn is code for unfettered access to birth control and abortion, on the one hand, and—ironically—reproductive technologies on the other hand.

Unmasking the Falsity of the Sexual Expressionist View of Women’s Rights

But why is this a false vision of women’s rights? As with my answer to the question of how we got here, there is much more to say on this point than I can possibly cover here, but let me just highlight a few key points.

First, this sexual expressionist vision of women’s liberation requires manipulating women’s bodies by altering them hormonally in ways that many—including many who have no moral objections to birth control or abortion—are now recognizing to be harmful to women’s physical and psychological health in both the short-term and long-term. Indeed, the burden of achieving supposedly “consequence-free” sex is one that falls almost entirely on women. While there have been and continue to be attempts to make a male birth control pill, so far the trials have always been stopped because of the side effects—side effects like acne, mood swings, and decreased libido that women on the pill have been putting up with for decades. By contrast, early versions of the female birth control pill had lethal side-effects for some women—one woman died in early clinical trials—but trials continued and more women died after the pill was made widely available. While newer versions of the pill are a bit safer, they still increase the risk of heart attack and stroke—in some cases doubling or even tripling the risk—and high-estrogen versions of the pill are labeled Group 1 carcinogens by the WHO. Although the absolute risk still remains relatively low, we are talking about a drug taken by millions of women throughout their reproductive years, so that increased risk translated into close to 2,000 contraceptive-caused strokes per year in the U.S. alone. But the medical establishment deems this risk acceptable because there is said to be a direct “health benefit” to the woman. As one article puts it: “Women taking some versions of the pill increase their risk of conditions such as blood clots, but this is balanced by the risk that pregnancy would present to their health.” Note that pregnancy—i.e. the healthy functioning of a woman’s body—is treated here as if it were a disease. By contrast, the article says that even relatively mild side-effects of male birth control have been deemed unacceptable because there is no direct health benefit to men. In other words, since only women can get pregnant, they are the ones who are burdened with the results of unprotected sex, and therefore they are the ones who should be burdened with the side effects of hormones to control their fertility.

So much for calling on men to bear their fair share of responsibility, despite the fact that it tends to be men more than women who desire to engage in uncommitted sexual encounters. As Leah Fessler points out in an insightful article on the hook-up culture at Middlebury College, for women the desire for sex is usually more about emotional connection than mere physical pleasure. Fessler found that sexual encounters outside of committed relationships are dehumanizing and often not even pleasant for women, who are much less likely than men to achieve sexual climax outside of a committed relationship. Writing about her own experiences and that of her friends, Fessler comments:

My girlfriends and I were top students, scientists, artists, and leaders. We could advocate for anything—except for our own bodies. We won accolades from our professors, but the men we were sleeping with wouldn’t even eat breakfast with us the next morning.

She and her friends, she says, “were desperate to know what it felt like to be wanted; desperate for a chance at intimacy.” The men with whom they were hooking up, however, seemed not to care. Months after Leah had stopped hooking up with a classmate named Ben, he told her: “I didn’t think of you as a human being while we were hooking up.” If that is not an indication of the way in which sex without commitment—and the sexual expressionist culture more broadly—dehumanizes women and objectifies their bodies, I am not sure what is.

This points to an important but often overlooked reality that Erika Bachiochi calls “sexual asymmetry.” In other words, the risks of uncommitted sex are asymmetrical—for women those risks are very high, whereas for men the risks are low. Conversely, while ultimately I believe that neither men nor women actually benefit from uncommitted sexual encounters—indeed, the research of Fessler and others indicates that neither men nor women are satisfied with the hook-up culture—the benefits from those encounters at least in terms of sexual pleasure are much higher for men on average than for women, and the risks to them physically and psychologically are much lower. Hormonal birth control and legalized abortion as a “back-up contraceptive” make women more sexually available to men—also depriving them of the excuses that they used to be able to give to say no when being pressured into sex by their boyfriends—and then make women bear the whole burden of that sexual availability. And because abortion is the woman’s choice, the man also feels more readily absolved of any responsibility to support the child if she chooses not to abort. She is the one who has to deal with the side-effects of birth control; she is the one who has to make the heart-wrenching decision of whether to abort if birth control fails; and she is the one who has to either deal with the physical and psychological consequences of abortion, or with the responsibilities of parenthood.

The asymmetry here is unavoidable, because it is based on unalterable biological differences between men and women. But instead of calling on men to take full responsibility for the consequences of their actions—and to control their sexual desires until they are ready to do so—society tries to mask this asymmetry through manipulation of women’s bodies. But technical manipulation of women’s bodies does not change the fact that women are simply more vulnerable to the effects of uncommitted sex, both physically and emotionally. Instead, technology just places new and even more onerous burdens on women to manipulate their bodies and eliminates the cultural pressures that, in the past, pushed men to be responsible.

In addition to manipulating women’s reproductive and sexual capacities so that it is possible (at least for men) to have uncommitted sex without bearing the associated burdens or risks, the culture of sexual expressionism also treats a woman’s fertility as something extrinsic to her overall personal reality, as if it were a machine that could be turned off when children are not wanted, and then turned on again to produce a child in short order whenever one is desired. The reality, however, is that a woman’s fertility is not a machine that can be turned off and on at will without consequences. Many women find that when they do finally want to become pregnant, being on the pill for years has masked or caused problems that make it difficult for them to conceive or sustain a pregnancy. And when this happens, rather than trying to understand and treat the underlying problems contributing to infertility, the standard medical approach generally settles for a relatively superficial investigation of the cause and then quickly recommends another technological work-around in which the woman's body is manipulated yet again (in ways that involve serious health risks for both woman and child) in order to conceive via IVF. (Before saying more about the problems with IVF, it is worth mentioning that I know from personal experience how devastating infertility can be. And in most cases couples pursuing IVF are simply following the recommendations of their doctor without awareness of the ethical issues or of alternative approaches—discussed below—that are more respectful of both women and children.)

IVF involves a number of health risks for women—including the risks of hyperstimulation of the ovaries to produce multiple eggs that are then harvested for fertilization outside the body—and it instrumentalizes the woman’s body for its reproductive capacity, performing interventions that do not actually aim to restore her health, but rather place her health at risk and manipulate her body (or another woman’s body, in the case when an egg donor is used) in order to get the raw materials necessary to produce a child.

The failure to respect the dignity of the child in IVF is even more stark than the failure to respect the dignity of the woman. Children conceived through IVF are subjected to the logic of manufacture and production, in which efficiency and customer satisfaction are the paramount values. For the sake of efficiency, IVF is usually done in a way that attempts to produce multiple embryos at once. Those embryos are then subjected to “quality control” screening, in which embryologists rank the embryos according to a grading system, selecting the healthiest for transfer to the woman’s uterus, discarding low quality embryos, and cryo-preserving any additional high-quality embryos. The fate of these frozen embryos—of which there are estimated to be roughly five million in the United States alone—is uncertain; most remain in cryo-storage indefinitely. The quality control element of the IVF process is intensified when genetic testing is done on the embryos, making it possible to select embryos based on the presence or absence of certain traits or diseases. While IVF could be done using only one or two eggs per cycle and transferring all embryos produced to the uterus—thus avoiding the problem of what to do with excess embryos and minimizing the eugenic, quality control aspect of the process, as well as lowering the risk to the woman—the logic of efficiency almost always trumps these considerations about respecting the value of embryonic human life and the dignity of the woman’s body.

IVF’s approach toward the child as a product manufactured to satisfy the desires of the would-be parent or parents is also seen in the practice of “selective reduction.” Sometimes when an unwanted multiple-fetus pregnancy occurs (often because more than one embryo was transferred to the uterus to increase the likelihood of success), one or more of the “excess” fetuses are aborted in order to avoid the risks and complications of a multiple pregnancy, or simply because the parent(s) do not want that many children. A 2011 New York Times article discussing this practice recounts the story of a woman named Jenny, who became pregnant with twins through IVF, and chose to abort one of them. Jenny’s reflections on her decision reveal how IVF rests on an attitude toward children as products of manufacture made to satisfy the desires of the adults who commissioned their creation. She says:

If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner—in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me—and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.

Let me reiterate that last line: “This became yet another thing we could control.” This line captures the core of the prevalent cultural attitudes surrounding human sexuality and procreation, which is the presumption that we can and should have complete control over our reproductive and sexual capacities by manipulating those capacities at will to suit our own preferences and desires. And this can only be done by treating the human body—particularly the bodies of women and of nascent human beings—as an object of technical manipulation, rather than as an essential aspect of the human person that deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. What we see, in other words, is that the failure to respect nascent human life actually goes hand in hand with a failure to respect women, because in pitting women against their babies, the sexual expressionist culture ends up pitting women—and society as a whole—against their own bodies, leading to a relationship culture that gives men all the power and reduces women to sexual objects, and to a medical culture that treats women’s bodies as objects of technical manipulation.

I should add here that the systemic effects of all this in the medical field have been terrible for women’s health, because standard medical training teaches doctors, on the one hand, to view women’s fertility as a disease to be “cured” with hormonal birth control or abortion, and on the other hand to see procreation as a consumer choice to be achieved through technical means when desired; but in neither case is women’s fertility understood as intrinsic to health. And the result is that most doctors—including ob-gyns—receive inadequate training about how a woman’s menstrual cycle relates to her overall health, or about how to identify and treat the underlying causes of women’s health problems, including infertility.

As an aside, let me also note that the treatment of human embryos in the IVF process is perhaps the greatest pro-life crisis of our time, involving the wholesale destruction of millions of human beings, and the indefinite freezing of millions more. It is estimated that fewer than 3% of embryos created through IVF result in a live birth. But sadly many who are otherwise committed to the culture of life fail to recognize this, so this is an area in which more public education is desperately needed, in order to at least create public support for regulations like those in Germany and Italy, limiting the number of embryos created through IVF to the number that the woman can immediately gestate. And while there is no simple solution to the plight of the millions of embryos already in cryostorage, I do think that embryo adoption is the response that best respects the dignity of these most vulnerable and forgotten children, and that if done in the right way, the practice of embryo adoption involves none of the injustices to women and children that are inherent in IVF.[1]

An Alternative Vision

Now that I have explained how our culture has come to accept the sexual expressionist ideology that pits women against their preborn children, and why that ideology is false and harmful to women, let me now offer an alternative vision. And since the false sexual expressionist approach rests on driving a wedge between marriage, sex, and babies—three things that most cultures throughout history have considered to be, at least ideally, inextricably interconnected—it is unsurprising that the solution I propose will be a reunification of this triad. In other words, we will not be able to recover a culture a life that respects both women and preborn children without correcting our culture’s distorted understanding of sex. What we need is an alternative approach to sexuality that respects the dignity of the body as an intrinsic aspect of the human person, an approach that contrasts with sexual expressionism’s claim that sex has no inherent meaning or purpose and need not involve anything beyond the consensual use of one’s own or another’s body to achieve sexual pleasure.

This alternative approach, based on natural law and in accord with the Judeo-Christian tradition, recognizes that sex does have an inherent meaning, and that meaning is marriage, a uniquely all-encompassing union of persons that is inherently oriented toward procreation and family life. The ability to literally become one flesh with another human being by joining the two halves of the human reproductive system in sexual intercourse is the biological foundation of the marital community, a community that is different in kind, not just in degree, from all other forms of human community, insofar as it involves a unity of persons not only at the level of mind and heart, but also at the level of the body. And because this bodily unity is possible only through the joining of the two halves of the reproductive system in an act that is part of the process of reproduction, marriage is also the only kind of community that is inherently oriented to procreation. Sexual intercourse is thus literally the embodiment of the marital community, the actualization and expression of the commitment a man and woman make to each other in their marriage vows. Engaging in sexual intercourse when there is no marital community to embody therefore fails to respect the inherent meaning of one’s bodily action and involves a kind of alienation from one’s bodily self in which one treats one’s body as a sub-personal object for the achievement of pleasure in isolation from any genuine human good. It also involves a failure to respect the child that might result from one’s sexual union, because it risks bringing a child into the world in the absence of a marital community that would enable the child to receive the united love and care of his or her parents within a stable family.

This alternative approach to sexuality is precisely the one proposed by Pope St. John Paul II. As he writes in Evangelium Vitae, “the trivialization of sexuality is among the principal factors which have led to contempt for new life” (§97). And this trivialization of sex is also, at the very same time, a special threat to the dignity and equality of women, as noted in Mulieris Dignitatem (§10). John Paul II recognized and spoke about this inextricable connection between sexual integrity and respect for both women and children throughout his ministry. In an insightful retreat talk directed specifically to male students, he warns young men against the temptation to let their sexual desires get the better of them and to “take” from a woman, “fall[ing] into the role of a primitive profiteer or exploiter,” and then leaving the woman to “take on the whole burden of [the] life” created through his action.[2] He criticizes men for failing to assume responsibility and for saying things like: “Go and find a doctor. I’ll give you the money. Why on earth did you let this happen? There is such a thing as contraception.” John Paul II here clearly shows his awareness of the ways in which contraception and abortion facilitate male domination and objectification of women, rather than liberating them as the sexual expressionist culture would have us believe. By contrast, when speaking to the female students he encourages them to cultivate “interior independence” by developing their relationship with Christ, and tells them, “The man must come to understand that the woman is a person, that she can be a mother, and that motherhood is a wonderful thing and a profound experience—and one in which the man cannot simply assume the role of spectator. With her motherhood she communicates to him the inestimable value of fatherhood.”[3] Notice here the inherent connection in John Paul II’s words between respecting the woman as a person, and respecting her capacity for motherhood. This truth is precisely the inverse of the lie propagated by our sexual expressionist culture. And this truth is emphasized by John Paul II throughout his pontificate. In Mulieris Dignitatem, for instance, he writes: “It is . . . necessary that the man be fully aware that in their shared parenthood he owes a special debt to the woman. No program of ‘equal rights’ between women and men is valid unless it takes this fully into account” (§18). In that same document he laments that all too often—as with the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel—the price of sexual irresponsibility is one which the woman “alone pays and she pays all alone! How often,” he goes on to say, “is she abandoned with her pregnancy” and left on her own to care for the child, or pressured by the man to ‘get rid of’ the child and then left to suffer psychologically as a result” (§17). The solution, as John Paul II explains while commenting on Genesis in Mulieris Dignitatem, is to order our sexuality “to the mutual relationship of man and woman in marriage,” the only situation in which “the woman’s ‘sincere gift of self’ is responded to and matched by a corresponding ‘gift’ on the part of the husband,” and in which “both of them, and in particular the woman, ‘discover themselves’ as a true ‘unity of the two’ according to the dignity of the person.”

This alternative approach to sexuality goes hand in hand with an alternative approach to fertility, one which recognizes the inherent connection between sex and procreation, and which calls for regulation of fertility or healing of infertility in ways that fully respect the bodies of women and children precisely by respecting that inherent connection. There are fertility-awareness-based methods like NAPRO (natural procreative technologies)—or, more broadly, the field of restorative reproductive medicine—that can help couples either avoid or achieve pregnancy by understanding and working with the woman’s body rather than manipulating it. Such approaches are gaining popularity even among those who disagree with the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality, simply because they make it possible to regulate one’s fertility without shutting down one’s menstrual cycle or taking health-disrupting hormones; instead, one can avoid pregnancy by tracking one’s cycle, noting the presence of certain biomarkers that indicate the approach of ovulation, and avoiding sexual activity within one’s fertile window. Although this is not without challenges and requires discipline from both spouses, tracking one’s cycle in this way, paired with other minor tests (such as bloodwork to determine hormone levels throughout the cycle or ultrasounds to monitor follicular development), also provides crucial information to help identify the underlying causes of infertility in couples struggling to conceive or to sustain a pregnancy. Once these underlying causes are identified, most of them can be remedied.

This approach is at least as effective as IVF in enabling most couples to have a child. But unlike IVF, restorative reproductive medicine heals the underlying causes of infertility, enabling couples to conceive naturally, and it respects the woman’s body—actually promoting the woman’s overall health—rather than manipulating the body and risking health to achieve a desired outcome. This general method of paying attention to the woman’s cycle as a crucial indicator of overall health—rather than responding to women’s health complaints by using the pill to mask problems while sometimes actually creating or exacerbating them in the long run—is also starting to catch on outside the Catholic world at least among more holistic medical practitioners, with books that speak of a woman’s cycle as a “monthly report card” on her overall health,[4] or as a “fifth vital sign.” Yet unfortunately standard medical training is woefully inadequate in this regard, because the standard model views women’s fertility more as a quasi-disease to be manipulated and controlled, rather than as an important aspect of women’s health to be understood and respected.

Conclusion

In sum, the widespread use of hormonal birth control with abortion as a back-up in order to support the “right” to consequence-free sex, and the manipulation of women’s bodies and commodification of children through reproductive technologies in order to be able to have children on demand, are both causes and fruits of the problematic cultural presumption that respect for women is inherently in conflict with respect for preborn human life.

This cultural presumption is in stark contrast to what we might call a vocational vision of sexuality and of human life more broadly, a vision in which we are called to recognize that, although we should make reasonable efforts to plan our lives (including our childbearing) responsibly, we need to do so not with a view toward being absolute masters of our lives, but rather with a desire to be responsive and attentive to the unique calling that God has for each us. And such responsiveness necessarily includes respecting the moral law that God has made known to us through both reason and revelation—a law that protects the profound and intrinsic dignity of every human person understood as a unity of body and soul, and that guides us toward genuine fulfillment. This vocational vision, in line with natural law, Judeo-Christian revelation, and the teachings of John Paul II, calls us to respect our bodies and their procreative capacities, rather than treating them as sexual objects or reproductive machines. And it calls us to recognize that children are gifts to whom no one has a right, but rather who deserve our unconditional love and care, even when their arrival is unplanned. Ultimately it is this vocational approach to life that is the key to respect for the dignity of both women and children, and to a cultural vision that recognizes the inextricable connection between the protection of nascent human life, and the true flourishing of women, men, and society as a whole.

When St. Thomas Aquinas set out to prove God’s existence in his Summa Theologiae, he articulated two objections. The first was the problem of evil: How can there be an infinitely good God if there is evil in the world? He answers it by positing the principle of o felix culpa, O Happy Fault, demonstrated by salvation history; though God is all powerful, he permits evil in order to draw out of it a still greater good.

The second objection Thomas considers is the apparent completeness of nature: What need is there to posit God when the impersonal causes of science and the personal causes of human nature are able to explain everything there is to explain about the world? He answers this objection with the five proofs themselves, which demonstrate that the world and its secondary causes is not self-sufficient and self-explanatory but stands in need of God’s primary causality.

Were Thomas to pen his five ways today, he would no doubt add a third objection to God’s existence, that of the scandal of God’s hiddenness. If God is not evil but loving and God is not a limited natural cause but an all-powerful one, why does he not make himself readily known to all those who sincerely seek him? Yet there are today and in history at least some instances of sincere seekers who fail to find God, despite their best efforts. Is God not all loving? Is God not all powerful? Does he not wish to be known? Or is the reasonable conclusion that there is no such God?

In what follows, I will sketch the details of a reply to this new objection and in doing so introduce the principal themes of my new book, Divine Hiddenness: God the Creator and Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

The Modern Genesis of the Problem

In the Pensées, Blaise Pascal calls attention to God’s scriptural name, Deus Absconditus, the hidden God, and blames us, the seekers, and our occluded hearts, for our lack of finding. On this analysis, there is always some hidden resistance on the part of every seeker who fails to find God. (However true Pascal’s thesis of hidden resistance to the hidden God may be, it is not particularly satisfying to explain one hiddenness in terms of another.)

Friedrich Nietzsche, picking up the thread from Pascal, underscores the enigmatic character of the available divine signs. Even before proclaiming the death of God, he points to God’s enigmatic hiddenness, likening God’s efforts to make himself known to “a deaf-and-dumb man making all kinds of ambiguous signs when the most fearful danger is about to fall on his child or his dog.”[1] It is hard to imagine a more pointed version of the phenomenon of divine hiddenness that this single sentence from Nietzsche.

The person who has done more than Pascal or Nietzsche to make this third objection to God’s existence known is the contemporary philosopher, J.L. Schellenberg. He reasonably grants that it is no objection to God’s existence if some people do not find God, provided those who fail to find God are halfheartedly seeking or are otherwise puffed up with pride (or in his terminology, “resistant”). It seems compatible with God’s being loving that he does not accept every advance. Rather, Schellenberg zeroes in on those who sincerely seek and yet do not find God, those he calls “non-resistant.”

Schellenberg reasons that if God were all loving, God would ensure that he was found by those who with a sincere heart and sincere intention seek him, but we know that at least some people with sincere hearts and sincere intentions have not found him. Schellenberg concludes that God does not exist. No loving parent would withhold himself from his children when they called out; if God does so, he must not be God. Schellenberg’s is a powerful argument, perfectly in tune with the sympathies of the modern mind, and it has yet to be adequately answered.

A Contemporary Opportunity

While some wish to deny that God is truly hidden and instead focus on the moral failings of would be seekers, I am inclined to think, with Nietzsche and Schellenberg, that God really is hidden. But I argue that this is no defect of either the seeker or the one sought; it is rather due to the very nature of the God in question. God is naturally hidden, and we moderns, unlike our medieval predecessors, don’t know how to handle such hiddenness, making it the vexing topic that it is today.

Wittgenstein pointed out that hiddenness is correlated with manners of discovery: “The word ‘hidden’ has as many different meanings as there are methods of finding. When no method of finding has been laid down, there is no point in using the word ‘hidden.’” The hiddenness objection, unknown as such to the medieval mind, has become today a dominant concern. Why? The turn from the cosmos and its causes to consciousness, its ideas, and its models, renders God the creator of all opaque to human inquiry. We can then say that medieval thought had many methods of finding the divine and therefore many senses of divine hiddenness.

Phenomenology’s rediscovery of intentionality once again renders divine hiddenness navigable rather than intractable. In rehabilitating our experience of truth and the appreciation for the interplay of presence and absence, phenomenology gives us the means to manifest divine hiddenness as such. We are not imprisoned in our own consciousness, making guesses about what’s out there in the machinery of the world; we are together with others in the midst of things and therefore able to ask questions about the ultimate cause of the cosmos.

Supposing “God” Were the Creator

We search for God against the backdrop of the world, as though God were just like any other thing. But if God is the creator, he is the cause of the world and not part of it. Hence, to direct ourselves to this sort of God we have to suspend the natural horizon of all searching. The medieval philosophical tradition realized that such a suspension involves not only deploying the right arguments but also inducing the appropriate change of attitude, to shift from regarding the world as ultimate to regarding it as penultimate.

In Isaiah, the original proclamation of divine hiddenness is put in the mouth of a pagan who has just discovered the vanity of every idol for capturing the reality of God. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isa 45:15). In the Gospel of Mark, the centurion who witnesses the death of the Savior discovers that he was no idol. “Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (Mark 15:39). Unlike the idol that is ever present before us, a familiar sight to pagan eyes, the God of faith is hidden, and reveals himself as such precisely in his eluding that very gaze.

Whenever we seek something we naturally do so against the backdrop of the whole world. We can see this implicit assumption very clearly in the presocratic philosophers and the first scientists who went out and sought the first and ultimate principles of things; it also continues to our own day in the impressive scientific progress and research of our top biologists, psychologists, and cosmologists, who look for what is ultimate within the horizon of the whole, the cosmic whole. Thales said it was water that was ultimate and so divine; Stephen Hawking points instead to gravity governing empty fields of force. To paraphrase Bertrand Russel, the cosmos just is: explanation starts from there.

But however natural this horizon or limit or presupposed term or context might be, it’s nonetheless the case that it is not self-evident, and that it can be challenged, and that reason can appreciate the challenge and even justify it with good reasons once it has already been proposed.

What I, following Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, call the “natural theological attitude” is the approach to the divine according to which we regard God as whatever is highest and best in the whole, and this is simply the default mode of human cognition. Against this, Christianity proposes that God is not one being among other beings but rather the cause of being, the source of all being. In Christianity, the natural theological attitude is upended in a way that reason can appreciate, once it is proposed.

By default, we think of God as whatever is highest and best in the cosmos. But to think of God the creator is to think of something that would be better than whatever is highest and best in the cosmos. Therefore, a kind of Copernican shift is necessary in which the cosmos moves from its implicit status as that which is first to an explicit status as that which is second to God the creator.

The medieval tradition experimented with novel literary and linguistic forms to pull of this transformation. Augustine’s Confessions involves a curious eavesdropping structure, which Anselm and Aquinas adapt and transfigure in the Proslogion and the Summa Contra Gentiles. These books are innovative, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of their form. To think of God the creator is not to think of there being new content to the world but instead to think of the form of the world in a new way.

Ostending Such a God

Suppose I visited the University of Notre Dame for the first time. You showed me the library, the stadium, the grotto, and classroom buildings (it was a thorough tour!). At the end, I said, “You’ve shown me the library, the stadium, the grotto, the classroom buildings and so on, but where is Notre Dame itself?”

A university and a universe, as their etymology suggests, are uni-versus, turned toward one. Both are constituted out of a variety of things so as to comprise a unity. Yet both only achieve that unity by being referred beyond their individual parts. In the first case, a university is a university only to the extent to which it is constituted by an alliance of those defined by the activity of uncovering truth. The joint pursuit of truth makes a university a one rather than many. In the second case, a universe is a universe only to the extent to which it is turned toward some unifying principle. Just as the library and the grotto point to the search for ultimate truth, so each and everything that is points to an ultimate cause. We need to avail ourselves of the right category to unlock the reference.

Of course, Notre Dame’s iconic Golden Dome might be seen to be a privileged part of the university that unifies the whole internally, just as Aristotle thought of the divine as the privileged part of the cosmos, that around which all things turn, but if God is the creator, to think such would be to fall prey to what Gilbert Ryle calls a category mistake. Aquinas expresses this primacy as follows: “God is not a part of, but above, the whole universe, possessing within himself the whole perfection of the universe in a more eminent way.”[2]

Respondeo

Divine Hiddenness argues that God is hidden in virtue of being the creator, and it outlines a three-stage strategy for pointing him out.

First, because he is hidden to our experience in virtue of being the creator, God cannot be defined or described. All definition and description presuppose direct access to the terms of the definition or description. All is not lost, however, since God can be pointed out, not, to be sure, via a direct ostension that refers to something present but by what Quine calls a “deferred ostension” that points to something present in order to refer to something absent. We might refer to the person who wrote this screenplay, or the person that wrote this book. Similarly, we can point to the present things about us and refer to their ultimate cause.

So, on this analysis, the phrase, “God the creator” is a deferred ostension that refers to God as that which is the ultimate cause of these present things. A virtue of this approach is that it can use present things to refer to the hidden God in his hiddenness. Another virtue is that, unlike other appeals to a causal chain, to refer to God as creator is to fix a reference that anyone at anytime can renew for themselves. There is no worry of a semantic drift as in the standard account of reference fixing via causal chain, where one has to ensure that the reference is faithfully transmitted. Does Santa Claus still refer to Saint Nicholas? Kripke has his doubts, as do I. God the creator, however, is up for grabs right now rather than being buried in history.

Second, how can we make sense of such a deferred ostension, one that points us beyond the created whole? Divine Hiddenness takes a page from Plantinga’s classic God and Other Minds but shifts from the epistemological problem of other minds (how can I know whether my neighbor isn’t a metaphysical zombie?) to the phenomenological elucidation of other minds (how does my neighbor there appear as other and as yet similar to me here?). To make sense of the deferred ostension of God the creator is to make sense of an absent cause that is present in its effects, which parallels the attempt to make sense of an author in terms of the author’s works. A great writer writes carefully; a great writer writes on various levels to meet different kinds of readers. Creation, too, calls for the highest hermeneutic art to fathom. It’s less like a textbook and more like the work of Nietzsche, requiring careful skill in the art of reading to mine all that is there to be mined.

Third, a classic objection to ostension of any sort is that it is inherently ambiguous. If I point to a cat, do I point to its being-on-the-mat, its being a cat, felineness as such, the color black, something soft and cuddly, or what? Introducing “God the creator” as a deferred ostension, rooted in the things that are, and referring to that which is ultimate, leaves unaddressed this problem of ambiguity, even if the mundane parallel with absent authors and artists provide some light. Here the Augustinian idea of an inner criterion, a sort of second factor of authentication, helps ensure that the deferred ostension functions properly. Augustine, who in De Magistro showed himself to be an expert at minding the ambiguity of ostension, solves the problem in this case with his famous insight at the start of the Confessions: “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If I praise “God the creator” and find my heart unexpectedly leap in doing so, that is an indication that I have adequately directed my care toward God the creator, who is not only the origin of the universe but also the origin of me and my inclinations.

Alethic Theism or Aletheism

Divine Hiddenness: God the Creator and Phenomenology is an invitation to take the third objection to God’s existence seriously, and, in doing so, to work out a much more compelling and nuanced understanding of what it means, experientially, for God to be the creator. The method for finding such a God is going to have to be adjusted accordingly.

Replies to the hiddenness argument have up to the present come up short, because they have not availed themselves of the resources of the contemporary method of phenomenology, which is a method built from the ground up for coping with the interplay of hiddenness and manifestation. Moreover, attentiveness to phenomenology allows us to see that not only Aquinas but also Augustine and Anselm thematize divine hiddenness in central ways in their thinking.

Because God is the creator, divine hiddenness is real, a feature of the perennial phenomenology of the divine. But divine hiddenness is not an obstacle to affirming that God exists, as the contemporary mind imagines. Phenomenology and medieval authors surface strategies for referring to and seeking God in a productive manner, beyond the presumed ultimacy of both consciousness and the world of scientific objectivities.

The peculiar alliance of contemporary phenomenology and medieval philosophy I term “alethic theism” or “aletheism” for short, drawing from the Greek word for truth, a-letheia, which, as Heidegger ever reminded us, means un-hiddenness. God cannot be approached without countenancing how he must look just in order to be God the creator.

God is no conspicuous feature of the world to be affirmed or denied. Aletheism names the approach to God that keeps this constraint in mind and thereby undercuts the impasse between theism and atheism on this topic. If my book accomplishes nothing else, I hope it gives readers confidence that the contemporary conversation between theists and atheists is sorely in need of the mediating role of phenomenology and medieval thinking.

God is hidden. But the hiddenness can be navigated. First in virtue of a unique deferred ostension, which refers to the ultimate cause by means of pointing to the things caused, the creator through the creature. Second, by employing analogous strategies when we try to divine an author’s mind through the story he has written; to seek God is not akin to seeking another character but instead seeking the author beyond the horizon of the story. Third, by suspending the natural horizon of the world in terms of gratitude to God the creator for the existence of all, ourselves included.

Some have called for a Social Contract for AI, where signatories promise to abide by certain principles that might be able to manage the creation and usage of AI for good in the world. It has been suggested that the ethics of medicine might serve as a model for the ethics of AI (Hanna et al. 2024). Some have even suggested that something akin to an oath, not unlike that of the Hippocratic Oath, might be helpful in establishing an ethical ground for the usage of novel AI technology. In fact, several oaths or declarations have been created as a means to ensure confidence in data science and developer communities. Most recently, theologians, philosophers, users, and developers of Artificial Intelligence through the facilitation of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion gathered to create the Oxford Oath for AI Professionals. One might even imagine that by swearing allegiance to adhere to some ethical code, professionals might be able to hold themselves accountable for their AI creations.[2]

Taking inspiration from Magnifica Humanitas, I will explore the spiritual impulses that animate these calls for public displays of ethical piety. In fact, a spiritual impulse animated the traditions of medicine that resulted in the practice of oath-making, like the Oath of Hippocrates. Medicine has always been a spiritual endeavor, even if in its contemporary guise it imagines itself a merely naturalistic and technical field. The tools of AI, however, seem different than the tools of medicine. Are there spiritual longings in rapidly writing a letter for application to a job, or other of the menial tasks to which we put AI? It seems odd to think so. I shall argue that medicine—a technoscientific endeavor—has always been tied to human spiritual yearning.

By paying attention to the spiritual dimension of medicine, we can find something nourishing for our journey with AI. Human death, disease, disability, and frailty require medicine to think in a spiritual valence. Yet, the impulses to use AI seem more frivolous: a student using AI to complete an assignment, an employee using an LLM to write a memo, a scientist using AI to figure out how a protein folds; all of these uses seem far more mundane than sacred. Yet, AI tools do in fact mimic the human—human memory, reason, and agency—in ways that call us to think foundationally about ourselves. In fact, a spiritual valence has always been tied to human tool use; AI is no different in that regard.

The Crisis

The Hippocratic Oath is often imagined to have been a longstanding tradition in medicine throughout the Western world, but in fact it was not used very frequently (Ferngren 2014). In fact, it was only resurrected as a live option in various parts of Europe, usually only when there was a crisis of faith in medicine or medical doctors (Amundsen and Ferngren 1983). Many people feel threatened by AI’s powers, even if many others feel enthralled by its possibilities. Those that feel threatened have suggested that AI has the potential to marginalize or alienate us from our work, to make our work obsolete; others are concerned that AI and the rapid expansion of Data Centers might escalate the ecological crisis (Chen et al. 2025; Duvenaud 2025). Still others worry that AI might escape human control as depicted in many popular, dystopian science fiction-like movies, like The Terminator.

The optimists see all the same potentials but remain enthusiastic about AI’s usage to solve many problems. They remain confident in the human ability to master and control AI. What could be better for society than to free humans from risky or mundane work, opening the possibility that we can pursue more properly human goals? What could be better than to use AI to cure cancers, heal illnesses, overcome human frailties, and expand human cognitive capacities? The optimists imagine that when unsavory things fall out from AI, with transparency we will be in a position to tweak the system, to get the machines of society back on some “ethical” track.

Of course, both the pessimists and the optimists are wrong and right at the same time. AI will not inevitably usher in a new Ben Salem, nor is it inevitable that it will usher in a Terminator-like world. Even with humans in the loop, we must not assume that we will bring the hoped-for good effects without any detrimental effects. As in medicine, a therapy or a preventative not only ushers in the desired effects, but side-effects inevitably fall out from usage of the medication. In fact, it is best not to refer to the undesired effects as “side-effects.” After all, the consequences of the use of any medication or technology do not bifurcate into good and bad effects; to think in this way is too simplistic.

Thus, one cannot simply create social policies that seemingly set technology off on the right trajectory, assuming that all will be well. The morality of AI, then, cannot simply be a social contract, for what is at stake is much deeper.

Liminality and Birth of Medicine

Historically in the West, there have been many healing systems and they were for the most part linked to various metaphysical-moral systems. For instance, there was Pythagorean medicine—not as well-known as Apollonian medicine—which applied numeric and harmonic theorems to medical practice, including cultic practices like singing and dancing aimed at healing (Pesic 2022). Apollonian medicine found its apogee in Asclepian medicine, which often included liturgical practices around drinking substances and engaging in prayers and activities that might induce hypnotic states (Limneos et al. 2020). Cultic practices were continuous with medical practices; no hard and fast line of distinction between them existed.

There were also cultic practices associated with healing outside of the West as well. Mayan and Aztec cultures practiced ceremonial bloodletting believed to enact social goods, not just individual medical goods (Joyce et al. 1991). Ancient Egyptian medicine had practices that today we might call energy healing (Metwaly et al. 2021). Ayurvedic medicine also held to a kind of holism between body and mind and between the natural and the divine. However, it should be noted that in all these traditions, there was a thinner veil between the physical and the spiritual. The natural and the supernatural were flip sides of the same fabric (Harrison 2024).

Put differently, for many of these systems of healing, a conceptual distinction between what we might call the spiritual or supernatural and the physical or natural is already the result of early modern Western philosophical thought influencing how we in the late modern West interpret these ancient healing systems.

In fact, early modern thinkers seized upon Hippocrates because in his work, and in the later works on medicine from Galen, one can see a line that looks very much like the line between the supernatural and the natural, a distinction that is very important for Western thought since the rise of early modern philosophy.

Further, thinkers like Sydenhem and Locke pointed to Hippocrates as an ancient source of naturalism in medicine and thus placed Hippocrates on a pedestal. In fact, “father of Western medicine” is a label placed on Hippocrates in the early modern period. Oddly enough, the Hippocratic Oath itself appeals to the gods and goddesses, including Apollo (god of music, healing, foresight, and reason), Asclepius (son of Apollo and god of medicine and healing), Hygieia (goddess of heath and cleanliness), and Panacea (goddess of healing and universal remedy). Thus, the hard and fast distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural” is not quite as tidy as early modern physicians might have led us to believe.

Moreover, the Hippocratic Oath has a similar structure to other oath-making rituals from ancient mystery cults. The cultic gods and goddesses are invoked because the practices themselves brought their users closer to the gods and goddesses, thus they were dangerous. Illness itself was dangerous, and no one could master the work of gods and goddesses. Moreover, the use of the cultic practices might bring one closer to the gods and goddesses, but might also place one in a precarious position of dependence upon the often-fickle gods and goddesses.

Thus, those having been trained in the arts of medicine made an oath as part of their initiation into the mysterious knowledge of the cult. Making an oath binds one to a future way of acting and also binds one to take responsibility for what comes along. The oaths themselves call down judgement upon the oath-maker in the case that the initiand stray far from the path articulated in the oath. One binds oneself to a guild, with reverence for the master-teacher, because it was only those initiated into the mysterious knowledge of healing that could judge the activities of the initiand.

Whether it was the cult of Pythagoras, or the cult of Asclepius, and then the cult of Hippocrates, one bound oneself to the mysteries of the healing arts. The Oath of Hippocrates emerged from this milieu and has been passed down through the ages to us because disease, disorder, death—human frailty—place one in a liminal space. In fact, whenever there have been crises of trust or moral confidence in medicine, there has been a concomitant call for a new commitment to some moral core, often in the form of the Hippocratic oath (Ferngen 2014). The vulnerability of the human animal is the spiritual impetus for the practice of oath-making.

When one falls ill, one finds oneself at several mysterious liminal junctions: 1) between health and disease; 2) between community and isolation; and 3) between life and death. Those who suffer are in an asymmetric relationship between what they desire—health—and their ability to return or stay healthy.

Disability, disease, and disordered function often leave people alienated from their own bodies. Numerous phenomenological descriptions of persons suffering disease describe this uncanny form of alienation. S. Kay Toombs describes the uncanny loss of the ability to move a limb as a paradigmatic example of alienation from one’s own body (1992). Havi Carel describes the way that she loses her community when she is unable carry out the simplest of tasks (2018). Thus, disease, disability, and disordered function highlight the in-between state of illness. A person who desires to move her body but cannot due to paralysis experiences something odd—a disruption between the desire/idea/spirit to move and a body that cannot move. A person who is ill cannot fully participate in community, sometimes due to the limitations of their body and sometimes because the community ostracizes them, at times unintentionally and at other times intentionally. The spiritual feeling of belonging is disrupted. Thus, there is a kind of “in-betweenness” experience of health and disease and experience of belonging to a community and isolation. Each is a harbinger of death and loss. The suffering person finds herself in a situation suspended between the living and the dead.

It is into this space that doctors, nurses, and other health care providers step, placing them in a space outside the normal and mundane space. Practitioners of medicine step into these liminal spaces, with a kind of power that places them above those suffering. Those with power to heal must step into the breach to aid those who are powerless before their own human frailty.

In fact, the appeal to something like the Oath of Hippocrates requires the submission of those in power to the practices of the community. In binding oneself to the traditions of healing (the past), one also binds oneself to a future that the practitioner herself has only a modicum of power over. Thus, the act of professing an oath—of making the oath—is an act of acknowledging one’s place not as master of the liminal spaces, but as someone who has tools to navigate these liminal spaces with vulnerable patients.

There is a fourth liminal junction that the practitioners of medicine enact. Medical interventions are always both remedy and poison. Thus, practitioners of medicine and health care often find themselves as intermediaries in the liminal spaces—between life and death, community and isolation, and health and disease—deploying tools that become both remedies and poisons. Disease, disorder, and disability are echoes of death; and even our remedies are poisons. It is no wonder that ancient medicine committed itself to cultic practices, including the practice of oath-making.

Comparing Modern Medicine and Modern AI Technologies

There are some similarities between modern medicine and modern AI technologies. The complexity of modern medicine and its need for ethical research and practice guidelines resulted in a new form of ethics ushered into the West in the late 1970s. This new approach to ethics was called principlism. In fact, the Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence (cited above) doubles down on principles—formalized rules of thumb that should guide action. The idea behind principlism is that without commitment to a universal moral theory or to specific metaphysical moral traditions, medicine can, by appeal to four ethical principles—respect for autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence—adjudicate any ethical issue (Beauchamp and Childress 2019). These mid-level principles—midway between high-level theory and particular, low-level practical content—are in need of specific content. Filling in the content is referred to as a process of specification. Likewise, one must adjudicate between the different principles, a process referred to as balancing.

Thinkers like Raanan Gillon suggested that these four principles should be the guiding principles for all social ethics of technologically advanced countries (2003). Thinkers Luciano Floridi and Josh Cowls have suggested that Beauchamp and Childress’s four principles provide a strong foundation for the ethical guidance of ethical AI in society, adding a fifth principle of explicability (2019). By explicability, Floridi and Cowls mean something like epistemic and ethical transparency, such that AI can be evaluated openly and with an eye to modification. Still other thinkers, like Brent Mittelstadt, note that medicine is a very different sort of enterprise than is AI, and thus the principles governing medicine are not translatable across other domains (2019). Mittelstadt notes that medicine has historically derived professional norms that are highly particular to its domain of knowledge and practice (2019). It also has practical methods to specify and balance the principles relevant for particular kinds of situations (Mittelstadt 2019). There are also long established legal norms and mechanisms of professional accountability, unlike AI (Mittelstadt 2019).

Mittelstadt’s point is that the social place of AI is very different from that of medicine and thus, he suggests, a bottom-up approach is necessary because AI is typically aimed at very specific problems, the ethical dimensions of which are highly specific and particular. Attention must also be given to the social and political spaces within which AI develops. This bottom-up approach will require the private sector to acknowledge its role in the creation of ethical AI and require it to take on responsibility for the problems that inevitably will arise. The problem is, of course, one cannot see clearly into the future and taking responsibility for unforeseen problems is not something that business developers like to do.

While I find Mittelstadt to be correct, his interventions ignore a very prominent feature of AI, namely that any technology, however simple it may be, inevitably results in novel problems that fall-out from the usage of the technology itself. These unexpected consequences were often not even imagined and thus could not have been prevented. This problem of the uncontrolled fall-out of any technology is described in the very earliest writings we have about technology.

Take the Phaedrus as an example; Socrates points to the fact that the technē of writing is a pharmakon. Plato’s Phaedrus engages the novel technology of writing, which is both a memory aid and at the same time destructive of the human’s ability to memorize. Thus, as Jacques Derrida noted, a pharmakon is a tool that is both remedy—and it is desired as a remedy—and a poison—and it is undesired for this reason (1981). The point is that technology cannot be controlled completely. Once unleashed, it becomes an actor in the world, even if it has no agency of its own. It can still result in many unknown, undesired, and nefarious effects, the problems of which arrive too late to forestall them. Thus, a technology as powerful as AI creates liminal spaces: the space between the good foreseen and imagined, and the ill effects unforeseen and unbidden. And, as I noted above, oath-making binds one to an unknown and unknowable future set of commitments.

Covenant and the Spiritual Dimension of AI

Thus far I have shown that medical interventions arise from the alienation one feels in disease, disability, and disordered function, and a deep desire to return to flourishing. These liminal states—the in-betweenness one feels when faced with life-altering disease—prompt one to seek wholeness. This desire to once again flourish prompts medicine and healers to step into that marginal space with those that suffer. Medical practitioners and the technologies and tools that they create mediate between community and isolation, disease and health, and even life and death. These medical practitioners held certain beliefs about the nature and meaning of bodies, their moral duty to care for those suffering in these liminal states, and the mysterious knowledge they needed to mediate between life and death for the sake of the sufferers.

Thus, medicine has always been a discipline that sits and mediates between the sacred (set apartness) and the profane (everydayness). I have also suggested that the very use of the knowledges and tools of medical practitioners and the spiritual practices that guided the use of this knowledge and these tools is not fully mastered. Our knowledges and tools have a myriad of effects over which we have only a modicum of foreknowledge and control.

When we deploy the tools of AI, we typically are not doing so because we are trying to alleviate the existential angst that accompanies the liminal states between health and disease, in-group (health) and outgroup (disease) dynamics, and life and death. While AI devices are not always deployed into a liminal, sacred space in the way that medicine often is, there is something deeply spiritual about it.

Our tools are the linkages between our desires and the objects we imagine will sate those desires in the future. At their most basic level, our tools are relational devices. While they are sometimes mere afterthoughts, tools bind our desires to the objects of those desires. They are part of our commerce and conversation with the world around us. While our attention is mostly on the subject or the object of the subject-object relation, the tools themselves are the hyphen in the relation. Thus, they are never merely tools, and never merely means to achieve some goal. They participate in our subjectivity in that our tools sometimes shape our desires. They participate in the objectivity of the object of our desire because in the use of the tool, we gain something that is outside ourselves that may or may not sate the desires.
Tools are the means by which one reaches beyond oneself to that which one needs or wants. But the pharmacological effect—the poisonous effect that one does not hope for, or that one does not foresee—still flows from the use of the tool. It is the stuff of tragedy. Our tools are never merely neutral, nor are they merely dormant. They are active in the way that a baseball (or cricket) bat stirs in one the desire to play the game, or the way that a letter (a primitive tool of communication today) from a loved one is revisited with anticipation and joy. The tool mediates relation.

Thus, there is something altogether spiritual about tools. AI in particular mimics so much that is human. It mimics memory and it mimics anticipation; it mimics reason and it mimics our logic. It both is and is not human. Thus, AI sits in and even creates that which crosses over a liminal space. While most of our tools are part of the everydayness of our lives, AI has the potential to be the most expansive of our tools in that it is imagined that AI can intervene in every problem of human existence. It promises to sate not only every human desire for wholeness, but also every human desire to know or master the world. Moreover, something of the will of the makers of technology linger in the tools that they create. The hammer carries the memory of its creators and users in the very shape of its head and in the shape of its claw. Thus, something of the memory and will of human users linger in even our dumb devices.

AI is a memory device, as well as a processing device (even if not itself thinking), and it is a device that presents future solutions to problems. It carries the past, the present, and a possible future in its machinations. And just as writing, a memory device, both enables memory, it also disembodies memory and makes it possible for the human to forget.

Thus, we can say with both Socrates and with Derrida, that the most obvious feature of AI is that like all technologies, it is pharmakon (1981). It is remedy and it is poison. And as with all pharmakons, we should not valorize its pretension to remedy all the ails humankind, nor should we demonize it for the potential poisonous effects on society.

What I think this means is that the social contract model of thinking about AI and the deployment of principles that imagine that we can keep the guardrails up, is itself part of the valorization of the remedies that it promises. We desire the promised future so much that we think we can maintain our mastery over it, such that we can minimize the detrimental effects that inevitably fall from its use.

In the 1990s, the conversation around medicine had focused on the contract model of medicine, where the goods and services needed by suffering patients are exchanged for money (Veatch 1972). Money is imagined to be the bond, the glue of the social contract. It was imagined that market values would be able to make the partners in the contract equals. Patients who are suffering can trade money for health. (In this model, money is a kind of technology.)

William F. May stepped into this space with his book, The Physician’s Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics (1983). May argued that the social contract metaphor of the doctor-patient relation is not apt to what medicine is really about, or to what medicine is actually doing. May returned to thinking about medicine in more covenantal language—where the bond between the patient and the doctor (and other health care providers) is a bond of unequals—suggesting it was more apt to the asymmetry of the relationship. Drawing on the language of covenant, May argues that the relationship between God and the Hebrew people is not a quid-pro-quo contract. It is a covenant between non-equals, where one party has more to offer the other party than can be bought. The relationship is not transactional, but gratuitous.

The same holds for the relational dimension of patient and physician. It is a relationship of unequals. The physician has a kind of power that exceeds the patient’s capacity to enact, and in extending the tools of her trade to those who sit in liminal spaces—those that desire to once again be whole—the relationship is asymmetrical. But even the power of the physician’s tools is not one of absolute control or mastery over the patient’s illness or life, or even one of absolute power over her tools. For all technologies are pharmakons. They are both remedies and poisons, at one and the same time. At best what medicine has to offer is a gift, but it is a gift that can turn dark very quickly.

The tool of AI is no different. We ought to think of it in spiritual terms for several reasons. First, the all-too-human creators of these powerful tools only have a modicum of control over them. AI devices are powerful in satisfying many of our desires, but when ordered to desires for power and mastery, they can enact poisons in society, even while promising every possible remedy. The power to fulfill human desires means that it has a spiritual dimension. Second, while we imagine that we can keep the poisonous outcomes at bay, we also know that even the remedy can become poisonous, just as a cancer medication can cure the cancer, but leave the patient diminished. AI unleashes more effects than we can forecast, let alone control. More will fall from it than we imagine, even if some of what falls from it will be good and desired. Third, because AI devices mimic so much that is human (memory, reasoning, anticipation), we sometimes imagine that these devices can solve every problem that will arise. But AI, like medicine, elides its limitations. We remain somewhat ignorant in relation to it.

It is for these reasons that we must think of AI in spiritual terms, and all things spiritual remain somewhat ineffable to us. In the medicine of ancient mystery cults, there was a clear acknowledgement of the dangers that lurk both in the human condition and in our attempts to intervene on the human condition. It is not clear to me that in our contemporary world there is any real acknowledgement culturally (and cultically) that we are in need of humility and grace as we move through our world. Our public liturgies today are mostly celebrations of the power and mastery that we have over the world, and not the liturgies that call us to wait on the power, to pause before it, to marvel at the fact of our lack of control (Grimes 1982; Grimes 2013).[3]

We sit in an asymmetrical relationship between the whole of reality and the small amount of knowledge that we have about that reality. Our sciences and technologies carry traces of our beliefs about ourselves and our world in their structures and functions. We believe wrongly that the power of thought is adequate to the totality of all that there is in the world, and that it is adequate to master all that there is (Adorno 1931).[4] Our hubris is on full display perhaps most with AI mimicry of human memory, understanding, and willing.

The activity of oath-making in the ancient world was a public liturgy that enacts a humility before the actions are ever taken by the partitioner of the arts of healing. It bound the practitioner more tightly to the community; the practitioner vowed to take responsibility for a future over which there is no absolute dominion. It seems to me that the hubris sometimes entangled with our best intentions could stand to pause before the mystery and the frailty of our own being, the being of the whole, and that which exceeds our capacity to master. The Hippocratic Oath then is not about principles; nor is it just something to be affirmed as if affirming a social contract. It is more like a covenant. That is to say, the practices of oath-making were the public acts that pause before we even begin to act. It is an act of bowing the head, before lifting up the eyes to intervene. I am not sure that such public practices are enacted into today’s technocultures; but a public bowing of the head seems apropos.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. 1931. “The Actuality of Philosophy” Telos 1977: 120-133.

AI World Society. 2020. “Social Contract for the AI Age.” Accessed July 9, 2025. https://aiws.net/social-contract-for-the-ai-age/.

Amundsen, Darrell W., and Gary B. Ferngren, 1983. "Evolution of the Physician-Patient Relationship, Antiquity through the Renaissance," The Clinical Encounter: The Moral Fabric of the Patient-Physician Relationship, ed. Earl Shelp (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company), 26–29.

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2019. Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8^th edition. Oxford University Press.

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Augustine argues that some causes of sadness, a frequent response to grief, may be inappropriate for a griever who believes in the hope of the resurrection. This evolves away from his early beliefs, which were informed by Manichaeism (a heresy that promoted the view that the spiritual world was good and locked in a battle with the physical world, which was evil). Augustine left Manichaeism and wrote extensively on the relationship between the soul (spiritual) and the body (physical) as parts of one human person, which will be reunited at the resurrection of the dead.

His hope for this reunification leads him to conclude that some sadnesses may be an inappropriate response. Augustine’s grief journey through the losses of his friend, mother, and son leads us to consider how that belief ought to shape experiences of sadness.

Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Friend

Before Augustine’s conversion, a dear friend of his falls ill and is baptized, for which Augustine mocks him. The friend responds harshly, “[he] warned me that if I wished to be his friend I had better stop saying such things to him” (IV.8). Augustine plans to try to talk to him again a few days later about this reaction, but the friend worsens and dies while Augustine is gone. Some of the characteristics of Augustine’s grief for his friend include:

• Restlessness: “Within me I was carrying a tattered, bleeding soul that did not want me to carry it, yet I could find no place to lay it down” (IV.12).
• Overwhelming: “Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death. My native land was a torment to me and my father’s house unbelievable misery. Everything I had shared with my friend turned into hideous anguish without him” (IV.9).
• A loss of interest in hobbies or passions: “My eyes sought him everywhere, but he was missing; I hated all things because they held him not, and could no more say to me, ‘Look, here he comes!’ as they had been wont to do in his lifetime when he had been away” (ibid.).
• Identity Confusion: “I had become a great enigma to myself, and I questioned my soul, demanding why it was sorrowful and why it so disquieted me, but it had no answer” (ibid.).
• Personal Belief Confusion: “If I bade [my soul], ‘Trust in God,’ it rightly disobeyed me, for the man it had held so dear and lost was more real and more lovable than the fantasy in which it was bidden to trust” (ibid.).
• Disbelief over the world continuing: “I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I had loved as though he would never die” (IV.11).

Overall, Augustine’s response to his friend’s death is a grief of intense hopelessness and fear marked by instability.

In grief, what Augustine had come to expect is no longer sure to him. What he knows about himself (such as what he is passionate about, or why he feels the way he feels) has become unclear; what he knows about his community (where his friend is, and how he feels about reminders of his friend) has shifted; what he wonders about God (whether God is real or not) is emphasized; and what he fears about eternity (that it will not involve the reunification of body and soul) feels evidenced by the intensity of his emotional reaction.

What Augustine knows with certainty is that this death has impacted him severely. He speaks of how “as the dying lose their life, life becomes no better than death for those who live on” (IV.4). He not only loses his zeal for life; he also grows in fear of his own death (IV.11). Augustine retrospectively frames this reaction as due to his lack of hope in resurrection: “I was miserable, and miserable too is everyone whose mind is chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart by their loss” (IV.11). In reminiscing later, he refers to the “uncleanness of such affections” (ibid.). In other words, he attributes the severity of his emotional reaction to his belief at the time that death truly was the end, either for his friend’s body or for his friend entirely. His first sadness is for the death of his friend; his second sadness is for his belief that this death is a permanent end.

Given that Augustine had no hope of resurrection and experienced grief so intensely, one might well wonder how he coped with the potentially permanent loss of so dear a friend. He outlines three coping mechanisms that played an important role in this grief.

Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Like many people, Augustine found that crying helped him process his grief: “Weeping alone brought me solace, and took my friend’s place as the only comfort of my soul” (IV.9). He writes extensively about why he wept, wondering if his tears were comforting because of his hope God would hear him, but he names that more as prayer than as grief (IV.10). He also notes that the tears were not a plea for his friend’s immediate resurrection in this world (ibid.). Instead, he asks whether humans enjoy or feel a need to weep to “match the weariness we feel over what we once enjoyed” (IV.10). In contemporary grief terms, Augustine views his tears for his friend not as bargaining or as spiritual communication but as emotional release, and he finds solace in them.

Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine also benefits from social support after the death of his friend: “But what revived and refreshed me especially was the consolations of other friends” (IV.13). These consolations included doing the typical activities he and his friends had done before, even those activities that were not particularly godly—such as joking around and “trifling together” (ibid.). He explains that doing these activities with these friends, “emanating from the hearts of those who loved and were beloved in return . . . were so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of many to make but one” (ibid.). We see mirrored here a similar intensity in his desire for intimacy with his surviving friends as he had experienced with his friend who died. However, at this point he believes such intimacy can only exist in this life.

Coping Mechanism #3: Time. Augustine writes that, “my hurt has been assuaged with time” (IV.10), which he says “disseminated in my mind other ideas and other remembrances, and little by little patched me up again with the former kind of delights, unto which that sorrow of mine yielded” (IV.13). In contemporary grief terms, time gave Augustine opportunities to reintegrate his own identity and practice restoration-oriented coping.

Overall, through the death of his friend, Augustine realizes his despair of resurrection and experiences great uncertainty and intensity in his grief. He copes with crying, social support, and time, but he does not have hope for his friend and has developed a greater fear of death himself.

Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Mother

The second major death that shapes Augustine’s grief story is that of his mother, St. Monica, who dies of illness in old age. Augustine had converted shortly before she died, which was something she had long hoped and prayed for. Augustine’s grief response to her death demonstrates a shift in his thinking on the reunification of body and soul and in how he practices his grief in an embodied way as a result.

Some of the characteristics of Augustine’s grief for his mother include:

• Silence: “I was silent, holding back my tears” (IX.27).
• Hiddenness: “With this salve of truth I soothed the agony that was known only to you; [my friends] were unaware of it, and though they listened attentively to my words, they believed that I felt no pain” (IX. 31).
• Sharp and painful: “What was it, then, that gave me such sharp inward pain?” (IX.30).
• A physically close loss: “She and I had grown accustomed to living together; an exceedingly gentle and dear custom it was, and its sudden disruption was like a newly-inflicted wound” (ibid.).
• Heaviness: “All day long I was secretly weighed down by sorrow” (IX.32).
• Desperation: “In my mental turmoil I begged you as best I could to heal my hurt” (IX.32).

Compared to Augustine’s grief response when his friend died, these characteristics of grief are more embodied and rely on more physical metaphors. Perhaps this is because Augustine is present at Monica’s physical death while absent for the death of his friend. Monica’s death may have been a more embodied experience for him, which could thus have been reflected in his grief. And, perhaps this is because Augustine had recently converted. His shift toward honoring the bodily and incarnate rather than villainizing them may have borne out in his telling of this story.

As with the loss of his friend, the loss of Augustine’s mother provides us with more insight into how intimately he experienced his relationships. He describes her loss in vivid terms: “Being now bereft of her comfort, so great a comfort, my soul was wounded; it was as though my life was rent apart, for there had been but one life, woven out of mine and hers” (IX.30). Once again, Augustine stresses his intimacy and the importance of relationship in his life, seeing separation in these intimate relationships as the result of death.

But, Augustine grapples strongly with other concepts in his thinking which have changed since the death of his friend. While we still see a sense of the Manichean emphasis on the soul as the good counterpart to the less-than-good body (“that religious and godly soul was set free from her body” (IX.28), we also see Augustine enter into deep questioning regarding how he lives out his beliefs about eternity in his grieving practices, and how his grieving practices reflect or do not reflect his beliefs about eternity.

Contrary to his thinking during the death of his friend, Augustine holds hope of the resurrection after the death of his mother. He and those around him even change their typical grieving practices in order to better align with this hope: “We judged it unfitting to mark this death by plaintive protests and laments, since these are customarily employed to mourn the misery of the dying, or death as complete extinction. But she neither died in misery nor died altogether. The evidence of her virtues and her sincere faith gave us good reason to hold this as certain” (IX.29). However, despite this decision about grieving practices, Augustine still struggles with whether his emotional reaction to his mother’s death belies a hypocrisy in his own thinking about eternity. He explains just a few paragraphs later,

I chided myself with weakness for feeling as I did, and dammed up the flood of grief, so that for a little space it receded from me; but then a fresh wave swept over me, and though it was not enough to bring on an outburst of tears or even a change of expression, I knew myself what I was suppressing in my heart. And since I was gravely displeased to find how powerfully I could be affected by these human experiences, which in the due order of things and as a consequence of our natural condition are bound to occur, the woe I felt over my woe was yet another woe, and I was distressed by this double sadness (IX.31).

In other words, Augustine’s sadness over his mother’s death prompts a second sadness over how sad he is, because he worries that his first sadness means he does not truly believe in the hope of the resurrection.

Augustine’s recognition and theorization of his double sadness complicates some of his coping mechanisms while simultaneously providing a new opportunity.

Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Augustine identifies crying as closely connected to his double sadness, but he also again finds comfort in his tears—just as he had with his friend’s death. He does, however, carefully caveat what causes for tears he thinks are acceptable.

Upon Monica’s death, Augustine says, “the tears welled up, but in response to a ferocious command from my mind my eyes held the fount in check until it dried up, though the struggle was intensely painful for me” (IX.29). He suppresses his immediate response of sadness, presumably because he does not know if it comes from a justifiable cause, he believes it is unjustifiable, or he does not wish to give the impression to others that he does not believe in the resurrection of the dead.

Augustine’s prohibition of public crying extends beyond himself. When Monica dies, Augustine’s son Adeodatus bursts out in tears. Augustine recounts, “he was restrained by all of us and grew quiet. By this means something boyish in myself, which was sliding toward tears, was also restrained by the man’s voice of my heart, and it too grew quiet” (IX.29). This phrase may strike modern readers, especially those accustomed to a Western Anglo-Saxton Protestant view of grief, as harsh. It is key to remember that whichever reason holds for Augustine’s concern of public tears (whether he is unsure if they are justified, he believes they are not justified, or he does not wish to lead others to doubt his belief in the resurrection), the same holds true for his son. In this grief-stricken moment, Augustine is trying to parent Adeodatus well by guiding toward what he believes to be the true belief through adjusting his bodily actions and grief practices. At the same time, he relates to the response Adeodatus has and has to parent himself toward hope, too.

Public and private weeping differ, though. Soon after withholding his tears publicly and reprimanding his son for failing to do so, Augustine weeps privately. He attributes this to his mother’s piety:

Little by little I recovered my earlier thoughts about your handmaid, remembering how devout had been her attitude toward you, and how full of holy kindness, how willing to make allowances, she had been in our regard; and now that I was suddenly bereft of this I found comfort in weeping before you about her and for her, about myself and for myself (IX.33).

This weeping brings him solace, much as his weeping did after the loss of his friend.

Augustine recognizes that his weeping, though effective as comfort, is considered socially unacceptable, noting that he cried freely because only the Lord’s ears heard him and no one else could “judge my weeping by the norms of his own pride” (IX.33). But, in the next breath, he becomes almost defensive in his analysis of his tears over his mother’s goodness: “Let anyone read it who will, and judge it as he will, and if he finds it sinful that I wept over my mother for a brief part of a single hour—the mother who for a little space was to my sight dead, and who had wept long years for me that in your sight I might live—then let such a reader not mock, but rather, if his charity is wide enough, himself weep for my sins to you” (ibid.). The key differentiation here is between Augustine’s potential pride (that is, not wanting to be seen acting in a socially unacceptable way) and potential sinfulness (that is, indicating through his tears a lack of hope in the resurrection). Augustine is arguing that some tears, though socially unacceptable, can be not sinful; other tears may be sinful, but he does not believe his sobbing over the loss of his mother’s piety qualifies as such.

Augustine later clarifies that he thinks he may have been “guilty of some carnal affection” in weeping for his mother, but that he also weeps because she may have sinned and there is a possibility that her eternity may not be spent in heaven (IX.34). He ends this passage with a reminder of God’s mercy, pointing once again to his growing hope of the resurrection (ibid.).

Overall, crying as a coping mechanism becomes much more fraught for Augustine after his conversion because of its implications as a bodily practice that potentially reflects (or even publicly promotes) certain theological beliefs. His double sadness complicates this grief practice that brought him solace and indeed brings him comfort again, as he navigates which causes for tears he finds acceptable and which reflect a lack of hope.

Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine has conversations with friends “who felt I should not be left alone” and listen to him attentively (IX.31), but he hides his tears from them for the reasons we have outlined. He does, however, find some solace in thinking about his mother and the responses she had when he performed acts of service for her (IX.30). In contemporary grief terms, he is receiving continuing social support from reflecting on his relationship with Monica.

Coping Mechanism #3: Time. As after the death of his friend, Augustine finds that time helps him process his grief over the death of his mother. But, now, he ties the passage of time specifically into his ability to remember her piety rather than simply to engage in activities with other friends: “Little by little I recovered my earlier thoughts about your handmaid, remembering how devout had been her attitude toward you” (IX.33). In contemporary grief work terms, he is using time for loss-oriented coping purposes rather than restoration-oriented coping purposes.

Coping Mechanism #4: Sleep. Augustine notes that after his mother died, he tried to take a bath (which did not change his affect; see sidebar) and then slept “and on awakening felt a good deal better” (IX.32).

Coping Mechanism #5: Hope. Augustine returns repeatedly to hope of the resurrection as a way to process his grief from his mother’s death, writing to God, “we trustingly hope for a place in your house” (IX.34). He also prays for his mother in an act of hope and asks all of us, reading his confessions, to do the same (IX.37).

Overall, after Augustine’s conversion, he takes hope in the resurrection of the dead. But, his old beliefs about bodies and souls, along with his former coping mechanisms, give him pause, as he contemplates his double sadness.

Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Son

Augustine’s son, Adeodatus, died around the age of sixteen. Augustine does not speak at length of his death in The Confessions. Indeed, only one full sentence is dedicated to the event of Adeodatus dying (for context, in the previous section, Augustine actually spends more words describing the characteristics of his reaction to a severe toothache than he does here on the death of his son). But, both the fact that the passage is included at all, and the fact that the passage is presented in the story of Augustine’s own baptism, provides powerful insight on his conversion.

This section begins with the news of Augustine’s coming baptism alongside Adeodatus, after which Augustine speaks highly of Adeodatus for his God-given gifts, insisting that the gifts did not come from Augustine. Addressing God, Augustine praises, “It was you, and you alone, who had inspired us to instruct him in your truth as he grew up, and so it is your own gifts that I acknowledge to you. . . . The brilliance he evinced filled me with awe, for who else but you could be the artificer of such prodigies?” (IX.14).

Augustine continues, “Very soon you took him away from this life on earth, but I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (ibid.).

While Augustine had demonstrated varied characteristics of grief in response to other losses, he describes his grief over Adeodatus’s death as more uniform. This grief is:

• Imbued with gratitude: “Very fair had you fashioned him . . . surpassed many educated men of weighty learning” (ibid.).
• Peaceful and confident: “I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (ibid.).

In his writing about his grief over the deaths of his friend and his mother—in both of which his grief has many characteristics he describes in detail—Augustine notes much less variety in his reaction to this grief, identifying only a very tranquil response written about through a lens of gratitude. Further, this instance of grief does not seem to attend separately to mind and body, as his descriptions of grief had in the past. This contrast is particularly stark in comparing his description of his grief over his mother’s death, which is very embodied, to this short passage about Adeodatus’s death.

The framing of this passage sets the stage for Augustine’s main coping mechanism: hope. By including Adeodatus’s death in the midst of the story of their baptism, Augustine contextualizes his grief, and his primary coping mechanism of hope, around his surety of Adeodatus’s salvation.

Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Augustine addresses crying in the sentences after he notes the death of Adeodatus, but the tears are not related to his son’s death. Rather, he describes his crying as caused by the beauty of God’s salvation:

And so we were baptized, and all our dread about our earlier lives dropped away from us. During the days that followed I could not get enough of the wonderful sweetness that filled me as I meditated upon your deep design for the salvation of the human race. How copiously I wept at your hymns and canticles, how intensely was I moved by the lovely harmonies of your singing Church! Those voices flooded my ears, and the truth was distilled into my heart until it overflowed in loving devotion; my tears ran down, and I was the better for them (IX.14).

Rather than naming crying as a source of relief in grief, as he had done previously, Augustine names tears as a piece of his hope of salvation even outside the context of grief. However, his description of this reaction here, immediately after addressing his son’s death, highlights how his hope allows his grief over Adeodatus to take the form it does. Crying here is also not simply a communication of his weariness or some lack of trust in salvation. Rather, the act itself, situated within hope, betters him.

Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine emphasizes in his praise of God’s design for salvation the importance of the voices of the singing Church in orienting him toward the source of hope. It is not on his own, as an isolated island, that his meditations bear fruit. Rather, his Church community provides him the opportunity and orientation to reflect further on hope.

Coping Mechanisms #3 and 4: Time and Sleep. Although the passage of time and getting sleep are both compulsory (and indeed often foster greater senses of hope), Augustine does not indicate that they may have contributed to his coping after his son’s death. They seem less impactful in this case of grief than they had been in former instances.

Coping Mechanism #5: Hope Itself. Through his emphasis on lack of fear because of his son’s baptism, Augustine demonstrates hope as his primary coping mechanism after his son’s death. At this point in his life, Augustine has internalized Christian teaching on salvation. Because Adeodatus dies soon after he and Augustine are both baptized, which opens a known path for their salvation, Augustine has no fear for Adeodatus’s salvation. This is both his main coping mechanism and the defining characteristic of his grief. In contemporary grief terminology, Augustine demonstrates here a sense of reorganization or reconciliation to the reality of his son’s death and eternal life.

By the time Adeodatus dies, Augustine has found surety. While his grief journey after the death of his friend started with a trademark of uncertainty, now he has confidence. His fear has been replaced by peace. We see in his grief response to the death of his mother how the hope of the resurrection began to change him; by the time Adeodatus dies, this change is complete. His primary coping mechanism is a sure hope. Body and soul will be reunited one day for all eternity.

Augustine’s son, Adeodatus, died quickly around the age of sixteen. Augustine does not speak at length of his death in The Confessions, but what he does say provides powerful insight on Augustine’s hope.

Adeodatus dies soon after he and Augustine are both baptized (which opens a known path for their salvation). Augustine writes, “I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (IX.14). There are few other details about Adeodatus’s death or Augustine’s grief response. The primary characteristics of this grief response are that it is peaceful and confident.

By the death of Adeodatus, Augustine has found surety. While his grief journey after the death of his friend started with a trademark of uncertainty, now he has confidence. His fear has been replaced with simple cherished memories. We see in his grief response to the death of his mother how the hope of the resurrection began to change him; by the time Adeodatus dies, this change is complete. His primary and sole-mentioned coping mechanism is a sure hope. Body and soul will be reunited one day for all eternity.

Overall, in his response to Adeodatus’s death, Augustine believes the realities he had grappled with during the death of his mother, as we see in his confidence in Adeodatus’s salvation. He does not experience double sadness but rather only comfort from the Lord in the form of hope for the resurrection.

Conclusion

Augustine describes to us how his relationship with the idea of death changes over time and what that means for his grief responses. After experiencing a very intense sadness over his friend with little hope, he converts and then experiences a similarly intense sadness over his mother. But his growing hope makes him reflect on the role of sadness in his grief response, to the effect that he determines only some kinds of sadness are appropriate or justified. When Adeodatus dies, Augustine shares with us only his new and most important coping mechanism: his sure hope of the resurrection.

What do the changing characteristics and coping mechanisms of Augustine’s grief teach us, centuries later?

Augustine grappled with the physical and embodied nature of humanity and of grief. For those of us who live in our minds and tend to ignore our bodies, we may find in Augustine an example of what grappling with being incarnate means, for our own deaths and for how we mourn the deaths of others. And for those of us who have been taught that tears are inappropriate—whether as a response to grief or to devotion—we may find in Augustine a companion in discerning the worthiness of tears.

Augustine was deeply concerned with how others perceived him early on in his conversion. For those of us who work to be perceived by those around us as holy or well-theologized, Augustine demonstrates that increasing our sure hope can go hand in hand with paying less attention to what others think of the sincerity of our hope.

And finally, Augustine found that losses prompted reflection. When his friend died, he wondered if life was worth living. When his mother died, he questioned whether his mourning for her was congruous with his belief in God. Although some might say that including so short a note about his son’s death indicates a lack of reflection on this loss, the fact that he includes his son’s death in the story of his own baptism demonstrates for us the importance of this moment in his own conversion and the importance of baptism to his assurance of his son’s salvation. Grief demands contemplation, even when we approach deaths with sure hope.

So, what can mothers learn from Monica’s story today? Much, I think, especially those who share her anxious tendencies. Indeed, the first time I read Confessions as a mother, her character sprung off the pages in a radically new way: here, I thought, was a woman I could identify with. She was not in any sense a chill or sanguine mother. Instead, she was fiercely protective and flooded with worries for her son. Overcome with maternal instinct, there were things she had to learn the hard way. At the start of my own maternal journey, I desired to take her wisdom into my heart. I knew I would need it. Carrying it with me, what I would like to offer today is the good news I have taken from Monica’s story. In short, I have found, it illumines a path to sanctity that both enfolds and purifies our love for our children. More than this, it reminds us that we are but co-operators with a Heavenly Father who loves them far more and far better than we do. This is the best news any mother can hear, and to dwell with it is a gift.

To read the Confessions as a mother, I have found, is to strain to hear Monica’s voice within it. So, while my students often come away from book one with complaints about Augustine’s cynical view of babies, I always come away in gratitude that I have heard his mother’s voice. Indeed, when Augustine says he knows he was welcomed into life with tender mercy, it is her word which serves as proof. Other hints of Monica hover in the background. Here is where I hear them most clearly. Listen:

My mother and my nurses did not fill their own breasts; rather you gave me an infant's nourishment through them in accordance with your plan, from the riches deeply hidden in creation. You . . . inspired in those who nurtured me the will to give me what you were giving them, for their love for me was patterned on your law, and so they wanted to pass on to me the overflowing gift they received from you. It was a bounty for them, and a bounty for me from them; or, rather, not from them but only through them, for in truth all good things are from you, O God (1.6.7).

This whole passage is full of Monica’s words, received by Augustine in trust and love. Put differently, her confessions shape his. When Augustine tells us of God’s plan, hidden deep within creation, it is Monica who taught him to notice it. It is she who discovered within herself the overwhelming desire to give to her child. And, it is she who found God within in that desire. Disclosing these discoveries to her son in loving conversation, Monica revealed that dawn of the love which defines their whole story. Coming upon her as an in-breaking, this love revealed the fatherly heart of God to her in a way that deepens her bond him and with her son. The overflowing gift of God’s love, poured as it is into Monica’s heart, serves as the anchor that preserves mother and son on their stormy journey to sanctity.

Signs of this storm appear early. At the same time that Augustine highlights Monica’s deep love for him, he also points to a rift between them because of his incapacity to receive this love in trust. Indeed, Augustine the infant is fallen Adam: we all were. Surrounded by bounty and love, he is already deeply distrustful. We see this reflected both in the jealousy of the nursling who “glared with . . . fury” at a fellow babe at the breast, and in the frustrations of the child who cried, fearing his needs would not be met (1.7.11). Monica, like many mothers, probably felt despondent in such moments, exclaiming, “I am trying to help you, trust me!” The trust so often associated with childhood is not, for Augustine, unwounded.

The feelings of maternal helplessness hinted at in these passages of course only come to a head when Augustine enters adolescence. Taking a break from boarding school due to his father’s lack of funds, Augustine loiters around his hometown with nothing to do—this, at precisely the age when inactivity is liable to get him into trouble. Falling in with a group of boys who embody what he wants to be—confident, comfortable with their themselves at a highly uncomfortable age—Augustine becomes unreachable. Monica knows he has great potential. For this reason, she has looked the other way as his teachers imposed harsh punishments on him, reasoning that they might be what it takes for Augustine to learn. She has felt confirmed as his teachers reported his remarkable talent. She has imagined his future. She has hoped in it.

Now, all that seems on the line. She hates watching her son, used to the discipline of the schoolroom, roam wild about town. She hates that he panders to foolish friends. She hates who he is with them. Word has gotten back to her what they do together, what they say together. She sees it in how he is at home with her. Of course, we get all this from Augustine’s perspective. Going through puberty, “the thornbushes of [his] lust shot higher than [his] head,” so that he was drawn to friends who bragged about their sexual antics (2.1.6). He longed to imitate them. Monica, we hear, did everything she could to talk sense into him. Describing “the intense earnestness with which she cautioned [him] against” unchastity, he recalls that “she urged [him] to keep clear of fornication, and especially not to commit adultery with any man's wife.” Augustine admits that he dismissed these warnings as “mere woman's talk” which he “would have blushed to heed” (2.1.7). I cannot imagine how intolerable this must have been for Monica. She must have lain awake at night fearing he was on the brink of making choices he had no idea were actually of consequence. His need for guidance and utter unwillingness to accept this guidance must have been infuriating. is

So, Monica had a heart bursting with the desire to help Augustine get things right, and a growing sense that she was out of her depth in trying to make that happen. And so, she watched from the sidelines as he first became sexually promiscuous and then joined a cult. It was then she really panicked. Overhearing Augustine torment less educated Catholics “with finicky . . . questions,” she must have thought all this cultivation of his intellect was for naught. She must have regretted not having had him baptized. We know she prayed for someone to show him the emptiness of his so-called truth. Encountering a bishop with the rhetorical chops to do it, she cornered him: “would [he] be so kind as to talk to [Augustine] . . . to . . . disabuse [him] of [his] harmful persuasions and teach [him] good ones?” (3.12.21). The bishop refused. The youth was still “too puffed up with the novelty of [his] heresy.” He was, as yet, “unteachable.”

It was, then, a dark period. Indeed, Augustine says that during it, Monica regarded him as dead (3.11.19). I think we see where he got his flare for the dramatic. But, in all seriousness, for those of us who look at our children and wonder how the kinks will iron out, this moment of grief—and Monica’s response to it—offer a real lesson. Monica could have succumbed to her sense of powerlessness. She could have kept trying to control the situation. She could have burned the bridge. She did none of these things. She stayed close to Augustine and handed him over to God.

Now, this is not something that happens perfectly all at once. Indeed, one of the reasons that I cherish Monica’s story is that it reveals what it is for an imperfect mother to become a saint. We all know she could be a little bit smothering. We also know she had expectations for Augustine that she needed to let go of. But, what matters—and why it is such a gift for us to have Monica as a role-model—is that God offers her and her son a path to salvation—and she takes it. Because she does that, Monica’s profound maternal instinct and her deep love for Augustine are caught up in the love of God in a way that ultimately gives her back her maternal agency. God provides a home for her love, and offers her a way to channel it so that nothing of it is lost.

So, how does this happen? Well, it starts with Monica’s tears. Augustine assigns remarkable power to these tears. Explaining why God had mercy on him, he exclaims: “You, [Lord], stretched out your hand from on high and pulled my soul out of these murky depths because my mother, who was faithful to you, was weeping for me more bitterly than ever mothers wept for the bodily death of their children” (3.11.19). Like the persistent widow, Monica moves God to mercy. Unlike the judge worn down by the persistent widow, God makes space for her to move him to mercy. He moves her to move him. Celebrating that God has built Monica’s tears into the economy of salvation, Augustine writes: “Thanks to your hidden providence, O my God, your hands did not let go of my soul. Through my mother's tears, the sacrifice of her heart’s blood was being offered to you day after day, night after night, for my welfare; and you dealt with me in wondrous ways” (5.7.13). God’s paternal love and Monica’s maternal love work together.

One remarkable instance of this dynamic can be seen when Monica’s prayers miraculously save Augustine from death without her knowing. Here is the story on Augustine’s telling: having just abandoned Monica on the shores of Africa, Augustine falls gravely ill in Rome. She, for good reason, is furious at his sneaking off, but soon resumes praying for him. Though she knows nothing of his illness—a mercy I think—God allows these prayers to be the reason he has mercy on Augustine: “you heard her in that land where she was, and took pity on me where I was.” Reflecting that, had he died, he would have died in his sin, Augustine remarks: “If a blow like that had struck my mother's heart, she would never have recovered.” Going on to describe how diligent she was in making her daily offering at God’s altar, Augustine again portrays Monica’s fidelity as his lifeline:

Would you, O God of all mercy, spurn the broken, humbled heart of a chaste and temperate widow who was untiring in her acts of charity, attentive to the needs of your saints and faithful in serving them? . . . Could you . . . whose grace had made her what she was, disdain those tears and rebuff her plea for your aid, when what she tearfully begged from you . . . was the salvation of her son? (5.9.17).

God cannot but hear Monica’s prayers and enfold them into his loving plan for her son. Her fidelity is caught up into the fidelity of a merciful God.

Here, I think, Monica’s story offers us great hope. Since God is the same yesterday and today, our prayers for our children go into his safekeeping, just as Monica’s did. Through Monica, God is calling us to entrust more, to entreat more. Yet, this is not the only gift Monica’s story offers us. It also liberates us from an ersatz idea of what it means to entrust our children to God. It is tempting to imagine that if we did this properly, we would not experience anxiety. But in Monica’s case, this is simply not true. As Augustine writes, “I can find no words to express how intensely she loved me: with far more anxious solicitude did she give birth to me in the spirit than ever she had in the flesh” (5.9.16). Or, again, “She who had given me life according to the flesh was very anxious, because in her pure heart, through her faith in you and with a love still more tender, she was bringing my eternal salvation to birth” (1.11.17). This idea that as mothers, we are given the privilege of birthing our children, not only in the flesh, but also in the spirit, is remarkable, but we have to admit that birthing is an anxious process. Monica teaches us to make peace with that anxiety. More than this, she shows us that we need not pretend to be different (or indifferent) mothers to become holy. We can be passionately intense, passionately ourselves, so long as we offer all the loves in our heart to God—and let God do the work of purifying them.

For this reason, I am tempted to say that Monica’s story is God’s pledge of fidelity to all anxious mothers. While our maternal instinct, like Monica’s, will need to be purified, the ongoing activity of placing our children—and our anxiety for our children—in God’s hands is that path to purification. Dwelling with Monica’s story reveals this. She too has a set of hopes for her son that prove to be wrongheaded. We have seen how she corners a bishop, expecting him to be the one to help Augustine see the light. She also expects academic success and a good marriage to be a catalyst in his conversion. Each of these hopes is dashed. And yet, they prefigure the better things within God’s plan. Ambrose eventually comes along, Augustine’s success leads to a self-reckoning, and celibacy provides the liberation from lust that Augustine needs. Thinking about this can inspire us to be more openhanded with our wishes for our own children; Monica’s story reminds us that God’s ways are not our own.

And yet, it is not a given that the disappointment of our hopes will purify our maternal loves. It is the fact that Monica never stops taking God’s promise of fidelity seriously that allows hers to be purified. It is also what allows her to receive that first bishop’s advice to leave Augustine alone and simply pray for him—and to take from that her maternal mission: as this bishop famously tells her, “it is inconceivable that a son of tears like yours should perish” (3.12.21). Augustine tells us that Monica “often recalled” how “she had taken these words to be an oracle from heaven.” Monica, in other words, teaches us to look for the ways God is trying to strengthen us as he purifies our desires, and to receive these consolations as gift. Indeed, when we read that Monica received prophetic dreams, we need to realize that Monica has become good at opening herself up to God’s nudges; she looks for them and so is able to draw strength from them. They are what allow her to do the difficult work of accompanying Augustine along the way.

Paradoxically, this habit of looking out for divine consolation is also what allows her to get better at distinguishing her own wishes from God’s will. We see this in her attitude as she goes about arranging a marriage for Augustine. For context, Monica had long desired to see Augustine married; as a catechumen, he began to desire it himself. And so, the mature Augustine writes:

In the light of my request and her own desire she besought you daily, with powerful, heartfelt cry, to show her in a vision something of my future marriage; but you never consented. She did have some illusory, fantastic dreams, brought on by the activity of her own human spirit as she busied herself about this matter, and these she related to me, but without the confidence she usually showed when you revealed something to her: to these dreams she attached little importance. She claimed that by something akin to the sense of taste, a faculty she could not explain in words, she was able to distinguish between your revelations to her and the fantasies of her own dreaming soul (6.13.23).

Monica, then, still has desires for Augustine that she hopes are part of God’s plan. This is human. And yet, her habit of attending to the ways God speaks to her loosens her grip on them. She still passionately offers them to God, but now with a confidence in the superiority of God’s plan.

How is such a confidence forged? In Monica’s story, one moment seems especially illuminative. This is when Augustine the Manichee has been offered a job in Rome, and Monica really does not want him to go, or if he goes, she wants to come with him. Augustine does not want this. With difficulty, he writes, “I persuaded her to spend the night in a place very near our ship, a memorial chapel to Blessed Cyprian. That same night I left by stealth; she did not, but remained behind praying and weeping. And what was she begging of you, my God, with such abundant tears? Surely, that you would not allow me to sail away. But in your deep wisdom you acted in her truest interests: you listened to the real nub of her longing and took no heed of what she was asking at this particular moment, for you meant to make me into what she was asking for all the time” (5.8.14). Writing that God was both using his lusts “to put an end to them” and chastising Monica for holding onto him too tight, Augustine reads the story as the act of divine mercy she soon discovered it to be—for, by the time she braved the stormy sea to follow him, Augustine had become a Catholic catechumen. Because Monica chooses to entrust Augustine to God every time that all seems lost, she gains personal knowledge of God’s fidelity that transforms her anxiety from the root. She discovers a deeper kind of confidence: one that is not feigned but graced.

Indeed, Augustine remarks how striking it was that when she heard the news of his becoming a catechumen, “there was no wild excitement or agitation in her heartfelt joy” (6.1.1). This could not but remind him of her reaction when he, as a Manichee, had attempted to reinterpret her prophetic dream—it was not he who would stand where she was, but she who would stand where he was—even then, Monica was eerily certain of what God had disclosed to her. He describes being disturbed by her confidence. When, now that he had abandoned Manicheism, “she told [him] very tranquilly and with full confidence that in Christ she would see [him] a faithful Catholic before she departed from this life,” he was again struck (6.1.1). She was, he reflects, certain that the God, “who had promised her everything, would grant what was still lacking.” And he did. Monica’s confidence stands as a divine sign for Augustine amidst his wanderings.

All told then, Monica’s trust in God is the golden thread that leads them both to salvation. It deepens, expands, and purifies her maternal love, so that when she does receive the converted Augustine in from the garden, her first reaction is to marvel that God has the power to do more than we ask or understand. Converting her grief “into a joy far more abundant than she had desired,” God had, Monica reflects, granted “much more than she had been wont to beg of [him] in her wretched, tearful groaning” (8.12.30). Dwelling with this good news, we are invited to draw strength from Monica as from one who has gone on ahead. Entrusting our children to God alongside her, we endure the anxiety of motherhood in hope, remembering that our tears and prayers are ways of bringing our children to spiritual birth. Embracing this labor in love, we can travel the path of graced confidence to joy that is open to even the most anxious of mothers.