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We no longer see the world the way our ancestors did.

Not because the world has changed—
but because our way of seeing has.

What if meaning isn’t something we invent…but something revealed through the language of nature?

“See the world anew.”

After spending the past year finishing my Master’s degree in Humanities, I’m finally returning to this series on symbolic thinking and the recovery of enchantment. With Symbolic World Summit 2026 approaching later this month, now feels like the right time to continue the series I began last year on Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolism Masterclass. (See Part I and Part II for context.)

This essay picks up the conversation at the point where Pageau explains how to read the symbolic structure of reality itself—an approach that enables us to experience the world as our ancestors once did: charged with beauty, order, and meaning.

What This Essay Explores

• Why the modern world feels “disenchanted”

• How symbolic thinking restores meaning

• A simple framework for seeing patterns in reality

The Problem: Disenchantment

Much of Pageau’s work over the last decade can be described as a sustained critique of the materialist logic of modernity. His Symbolism Masterclass brings this critique into sharper focus. Lesson 1, How Meaning Structures the World, argues that modern philosophical shifts have fractured the relationship between meaning and reality, producing a disenchanted worldview. Lesson 2, Heaven and Earth, reconstructs the hierarchical cosmic pattern found across traditional cultures.

This essay synthesizes Lessons 3 and 4. Pageau contends that by reducing existence to matter and quantity, the modern worldview obscures the central symbolic structure of reality: the interplay between unity and multiplicity.

Pageau’s Claim: Reality Has Structure

Pageau teaches us to recognize the recurring fractal patterns found across Scripture, literature, fairy tales, and creation itself. He argues that symbolic perception allows us to recover a sense of order and enchantment lost in the ideological claims of modernity. To counter its reductive logic, we have to learn to reconstruct the lost hierarchies of meaning and identity.

The Goal: Learning to See Again

Building on Pageau’s framework, this essay outlines a path toward symbolic literacy:

• Perceive reality through recurring fractal patterns

• Recognize symbolic dualities (heaven/earth, head/body, center/periphery)

• Understand analogy as a mode of knowledge

• Apply symbolic interpretation to great literature and sacred texts

My aim in sharing this material is to help others become better readers—not only of texts, but of reality itself.

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Reality as Pattern: Microcosm and Macrocosm

In these lessons, Pageau unpacks his central claim that reality consists of fractal patterns—repeating structures that manifest across all levels of being. Recognizing these patterns allows us to understand how the world works and to clarify our place within it, as humanity serves as a microcosm of the macrocosm—the cosmos in its entirety. One of the clearest representations of this structure appears in traditional Christian architecture, where nested arches symbolize the connection between heaven and earth—a sacred space inhabited by humankind.

As the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed, recovering symbolic vision restores “forgotten truths about [our] inner nature.”1 By contrast, the defining ideologies of late modernity have diminished our capacity for symbolic perception—especially the strain of scientific materialism that seeks to reduce consciousness, value, and transcendence to mere quantity and matter. Seeing beyond the material requires active engagement with the world of meaning— attuning ourselves to the “vocabulary of symbols” present in both nature and ourselves.2

Analogy as Participation

Earlier lessons also examined how late scholastic philosophical developments—particularly nominalism and voluntarism—undermined confidence in universal forms. While these debates may seem arcane today, their cumulative effect was to narrow the Western understanding of reality, portraying it as merely material, immanent, and devoid of intrinsic meaning—a disenchanted world.

Symbolic thinking, by contrast, widens our perspective through analogy. As Pageau observes,

“Things are like other things—not in identical sameness, but in participatory likeness.”

For example:

• The sun is not God, but we associate its properties with divine wisdom—elevated, radiant, illuminating.

• Sunlight analogously reveals how truth enlightens understanding.

From this foundation, Pageau introduces the primary symbolic structure:

“In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1)

This duality is metaphysical as well as scriptural. Heaven corresponds to form, purpose, and intelligence; it’s traditionally the masculine principle. Earth corresponds to matter, multiplicity, and manifestation—the feminine principle.

Pairs and Patterns

The following are some of the key symbolic pairings that establish identity and hierarchy:

• Heaven / Earth

• Head / Body

• Center / Periphery

• Right / Left

In each pair, the first term represents unity—order, intelligibility, and purpose—while the second represents multiplicity—the diverse and particular. Keep in mind that their relationship is not inherently antagonistic; rather, multiplicity flows from unity and ultimately returns to it. When properly ordered, they form a “fruitful marriage” whereby spirit is wedded to matter.

Pageau points to the biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder—where the patriarch Jacob dreams of angels ascending and descending—to illustrate how unity and multiplicity are linked across levels of being: the stone beneath Jacob’s head symbolizes materiality rising toward the heaven of meaning and purpose.

This same structure appears in myths and fairy tales—for instance, Jack and the Beanstalk echoes the ascending pattern.

Symbolic Head and Body

Returning to the solar analogy:

• The sun symbolizes intelligence—the faculty of the head

• The head governs and gives identity to the whole

• The body comprises a multiplicity of parts unified in purpose

Thus, a healthy hierarchy depends on proper integration. For Pageau, the dynamic that holds unity and multiplicity together is “love”. Without it, the system collapses:

• Excess head → tyranny

• Excess body → chaos, anarchy

• Body without head → disordered power (the “giant”)

Pageau interprets the Tower of Babel as a symbolic failure of this balance: the concentration of material power and purpose in an attempt to rival divine authority. It represents the tyranny of the “head,” the result of too much emphasis on unity and uniformity. As Genesis reveals, such a structure necessarily collapses when it becomes too top-heavy to sustain itself.

Why This Matters Now

A culture that loses symbolic perception eventually loses meaning itself, because knowledge is communicated through symbol, image, and metaphor. Meaning-making is a shared endeavor.

When reality is reduced to matter alone, the basis for value evaporates: hierarchy collapses into power, beauty into subjective preference, and truth into utility. This does not result in liberation but in spiritual exhaustion. The train of progress continues to move, but it has no telos, no destination.

Recovering symbolic perception is therefore not an exercise of fantasy. It is the apprehension of reality in its fullness.

Reading Symbolically

These patterns aren’t just for metaphysics—they extend into any body politic:

• Social structures

• Political systems

• Narratives and archetypes

For readers of classic literature, this approach is transformative. Try reading any of Plato’s dialogues through a strictly materialist lens and you are likely to miss his main point. That is how some readers come to interpret The Republic as a blueprint for a communist utopia rather than a polysemous myth: a city that can only exist in imagination and speech.

I’ve previously written about Mortimer Adler’s approach to analytical reading, which asks four questions:

• What is the book about?

• What is being said in detail?

• Is it true, in whole or in part?

• What of it?

Symbolic perception adds another dimension:

• What pattern is being enacted?

• What hierarchy is being upheld—or subverted?

A symbol always points to something beyond itself—and we ourselves are symbols of a divine order. In future posts, I will explore how to apply symbolic reading to Great Books, sacred texts, and contemporary culture. To recover the language of symbols is not merely an intellectual exercise.

It is part of the work of renewing civilization itself.

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This essay was first published at The Firelight Library.

Russell Kirk once wrote that the purpose of great literature is “to teach us what it is to be fully human.”1 In one sense, to be human means that we are rational creatures singularly capable of contemplating our own deaths. This helps explain why mortality is such a persistent theme in literature, especially in medieval allegory, with its vivid depictions of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. In this post, I will explore how two works—one medieval and one modern—portray the inevitability of death and the soul’s preparation for its summons: the late medieval morality play Everyman and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Everyman is an allegory about dying; it teaches that life is a journey that leaves a soul either well or ill-prepared for judgment. At first glance, it seems to have little in common with the bestselling children’s books of all time, Rowling’s Harry Potter series. However, Goblet of Fire is in many ways a modern retelling of Everyman. In both stories, the hero embarks on an allegorical journey to meet Death, and only good deeds and a pure heart can save him.

While both personify Death to emphasize the urgency of spiritual readiness, the medieval dramatist imagines Death as God’s servant, whereas Rowling presents Voldemort as a figure of spiritual death—a soul given wholly over to sin and the spirit of Antichrist. By dramatizing the cosmic struggle between good and evil, Rowling fashions a modern myth that both parodies and subverts the contemporary cult of materialism.

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Everyman

Everyman is a late example of the medieval morality play, a dramatic form intended for spiritual instruction. Written sometime after 1485, it is one of the few complete examples of its kind to survive. The story follows Everyman, an allegorical character summoned unexpectedly by Death to stand before God in judgment. Death, however, is not the Grim Reaper of later imagination; instead, he is portrayed as a messenger of divine mercy. The play begins with God calling His servant:

GOD: Where art thou, Death, thou mighty messenger?

DEATH: Almighty God, I am here at your will,
Your commandment to fulfill.

GOD: Go thou to Everyman,
And show him, in my name,
A pilgrimage he must on him take,
Which he in no wise may escape.2

Death hastens to confront Everyman, and announces:

Everyman, stand still!
...On thee thou must take a long journay:
Therefore thy book of count* with thee thou bring...
For before God thou shalt answer and shew
Thy many bad deeds and good but a few.”3

*accounts

Everyman pleads for a delay, but Death refuses and commands him to make his soul ready that very day. Hoping to journey with a companion, he turns to various friends who quickly abandon him: Fellowship, Kindred, Cousin, and Goods. Only Good Deeds and Knowledge offer him any succor. Knowledge directs him to seek a priest for confession and the sacraments, through which he gains strength to complete his journey. In the end, Everyman firmly commends his soul to God, entering the grave escorted by Good Deeds alone.

To modern readers, the play’s allegory can feel like heavy-handed moralism, but this reaction often reveals more about our diminished symbolic literacy than about the play itself. As Vigen Guroian observes in Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (2023), young readers today often struggle to grasp metaphor, the native language of a literary and moral imagination. Everyman, through its evocative personifications, teaches two hopeful assumptions: first, that death is God’s merciful intervention to end the soul’s suffering and “wicked tempests”4; and second, that He provides every spiritual and sacramental grace needed to reach our final destination, if only we will accept it.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry is a modern Everyman appointed to meet Death (i.e. Voldemort) at the end of a year-long school tournament in which his courage, virtue, and love will be tested. John Granger, in Harry Potter’s Bookshelf (2009), describes the Harry Potter series as an “Everyman drama,” akin to the Canterbury Tales or Pilgrim’s Progress, highlighting its Christian themes of redemption and self-sacrifice.

All men and women, like Harry, are called to make a choice to confront the demons in their basements and to act sacrificially and lovingly for what is true, good, beautiful, and sacred. (p. 178)

Rowling signals her hero’s universality through his very name—Harry Potter—evoking the idiom “every Tom, Dick, and Harry.” Despite the fantasy setting, Harry’s experiences are remarkably ordinary: he struggles through classes, quarrels and reconciles with friends, and endures the usual challenges and humiliations of adolescence. His trials in the Triwizard Tournament also resemble Everyman’s spiritual pilgrimage: Harry is abandoned by friends, falsely accused of cheating, and reviled by most of his peers for a time, echoing Everyman’s betrayal by Fellowship, Cousin and Kindred.

Like Everyman, Harry’s journey is a moral as well as physical ordeal. Each of the three tasks in the Tournament tests and reveals his virtue. He warns his rival Cedric about the dragons; he forfeits first place to save another competitor’s sister; and he comes to Cedric’s aid twice in the labyrinth. Finally, in an act of humility and friendship, he insists they share the victory by grasping the Triwizard Cup together–a decision that seals Cedric’s fate when the Cup turns out to be a Portkey that brings them both to the Little Hangleton graveyard and Voldemort’s “rebirth”.

Voldemort as Antichrist

Whereas Everyman’s Death is God’s servant, Voldemort (whose name means “flight from death”) personifies the spiritual death born of pride. He has lured Harry to this graveyard for a “rebirthing ceremony” that parodies baptism, replacing the invocation of the Holy Trinity with a blasphemous alchemy of bone, flesh, and blood. As he prepares the evil potion, Voldemort’s servant Wormtail recites the incantation:

Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son!
Flesh of the servant, willingly given, you will receive your master.
Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken, you will resurrect your foe.5

Rising from the cauldron with a hideous snakelike body, Voldemort dons black robes6 and summons his followers, the Death Eaters. Every detail of this grotesque rite inverts the Gospel and portrays Voldemort as an anti-Christ: he counts twelve “disciples,” including two who have abandoned or betrayed him; he withholds forgiveness and offers pain instead of mercy; and he is obsessed with conquering death—not sacrificially, like Christ, but with lust for self-exaltation. Voldemort’s desire is for his immortality alone; to accomplish it he seeks to destroy souls, not save them.

Against this demonic power, Harry must fight with courage and integrity. His ensuing duel with Voldemort becomes an allegory of non-violence vs. the “will to power”. Harry’s signature move, the disarming spell Expelliarmus, counters Voldemort’s killing curse, Avada Kedavra, and momentarily overpowers him long enough for him to escape. Harry’s flight through the graveyard to retrieve Cedric’s body and the Portkey mirrors the Tournament’s tasks in reverse.7 The story’s chiastic structure thus underscores its moral symmetry: death is routed by love and courage.

Conclusion

As Everyman teaches, the average person’s life is easily consumed by wealth, pleasure, and reputation. In time–often by middle age–our virtues and vices harden into our stable character, after which conversion becomes increasingly difficult. The suffering, loneliness, and deprivation of old age are for many a last invitation to turn from false goods toward eternal ones.

Throughout the series, Rowling juxtaposes Harry and his dark double Voldemort. Despite their surface similarities, the essential distinction remains their opposite attitudes toward death: Voldemort fears death and will commit any atrocity to evade it, while Harry learns that there are fates worse than dying. In the final novel, he will embrace the “death that destroys death” in a Christ-like sacrifice for others. In Goblet of Fire, he takes his first step toward that act by learning to face death with courage and rightly ordered love:

...he was not going to die kneeling at Voldemort’s feet…he was going to die upright like his father, and he was going to die trying to defend himself, even if no defense was possible…8

In an echo of Everyman, Rowling creates a timeless allegory of the soul’s pilgrimage of life through death, reaffirming the biblical message that dying in Christ to sin and self is the only sure path to eternal life.

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Originally published at The Firelight Library.

If you've been around the world of classical education for any length of time, chances are that you've heard the phrase "moral imagination" used in ethical discussions, especially by those who insist that story, poetry, and art play a key role in shaping our moral responses and affections. For years I understood the phrase only vaguely, and probably would have described it as something like the use of the imagination to make moral distinctions.

As part of my ongoing thesis research on Christian fantasy in children's literature, I recently delved into the intriguing history of the moral imagination, beginning with these questions:

• Are the “imagination” and “moral imagination” considered identical or distinct?

• What form did the moral imagination take under Enlightenment philosophy?

• How is it understood and used as a pedagogical concept today?

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A Brief Survey of the Imagination

To answer these questions, I first sought to understand what exactly we mean by the term "imagination". The Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as "the power of forming mental images or other concepts not directly derived from sensation."1 Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon: Index to the Great Ideas explores imagination and memory together, claiming that both rely upon sense perception and prior experience. Unlike memory, though, imagination is not limited by prior experience given its innate capacity to create new mental images.

The majority of philosophers from Aristotle to Kant considered the imagination a faculty related to knowledge or opinion, and therefore a vital component of the understanding. During the Enlightenment, the mental activity of combining ideas or images in fantastical ways became referred to as "the fancy," and serious-minded intellectuals tended to disparage it. Kant, however, believed that the imagination served as the "conjoining faculty" which synthesized our manifold sense intuitions with knowledge to aid the "pure faculty" of understanding.2

Edmund Burke and "Reflections on the Revolution in France"

Kant described the operation of the imagination in his major work, Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. Nine years later, Anglo-Irishman Edmund Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, and this is where the history of the moral imagination really begins. In this latter work—an anti-revolutionary essay now considered a classic of English philosophical conservatism—Burke introduces the phrase “moral imagination” and laments the destructive zeitgeist of the French Revolution. He writes,

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.3

As we can see, Burke is not using the phrase in its later literary context but in political protest to the trampling of tradition and the old aristocratic order. Burke deplores the loss of a system of civil and social manners, whose purpose was to hold society together:

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politicks the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.4

He calls the flattening, democratizing impulse of the new revolutionary society a "barbarous philosophy" that seeks to reduce even the revered institution of the monarchy to "mere" humanity on par with bestiality: "...a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order."5

What Kant perceived as a synthesizing function of the rational intellect became for Burke the refined capacity for preserving culture and tradition for the public good. Subsequently, Burke believed the moral imagination was shaped by a hierarchy of social distinctions in which, at that time, the monarchy formed the foundation of authority, and the aristocracy, the commonly-held ideas of nobility and gentle manners. Finally, he posited that the rights and liberties of free men were not the spoils of revolution but rather the "entailed inheritance"—the intentional transmission of society’s natural goods—by that nation's ancestors to their posterity.

Russell Kirk and "The Moral Imagination"

The concept of the moral imagination might never have gained traction in our time if not for the 20th century writer and intellectual, Russell Kirk. Kirk was a major figure of the modern conservative movement in America who wrote The Conservative Mind (1953), a monumental history tracing the development of modern conservatism from Edmund Burke to T.S. Eliot. In 1981, Kirk wrote an essay titled "The Moral Imagination" in which he draws our attention to Burke's novel articulation:

What is this “moral imagination”? The phrase is Edmund Burke’s, and it occurs in his Reflections on the Revolution in France...By this “moral imagination,” Burke signifies that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events...and aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.6

From Kirk's essay we can outline the following elements of the moral imagination:

• It is a power of ethical perception;

• it implies ethical standards that transcend "private experience and momentary events;"

• it finds its higher expression in poetry and art;

• it is sustained by religion and a system of civil manners;

• it protects society against vice, confusion, and disorder—products of the "idyllic imagination" and the "diabolic imagination".

I would argue that Kirk's singular and lasting contribution was to recast the political meaning of Burke's phrase in a specifically humane and literary light:

It is the moral imagination which informs us concerning the dignity of human nature, which instructs us that we are more than naked apes. As Burke suggested in 1790, letters and learning are hollow if deprived of the moral imagination.7

Kirk believed that the role of great literature is ethical, that it teaches us how to be human—which is also to say how to aspire to true nobility. "The very phrase 'humane letters,'" he writes, "implies that great literature is meant to teach us what it is to be fully human."8

Vigen Guroian and "Tending the Heart of Virtue"

Enter author and theologian, Vigen Guroian, whose book of literary criticism, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (1998), is now a pedagogical staple in classical education and homeschooling circles. Guroian attributes the inspiration for his book to a conversation he had in 1983 with the late Russell Kirk. He asked Kirk about his favorite children's stories. Kirk pointed to works by George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen, and C.S. Lewis...most of which eventually found their way into Guroian's book.

Guroian doesn't define the moral imagination in exact terms but describes it as a mental process or way of looking at life:

This way of looking at life that Chesterton identifies [as nurtured in him by fairy tales] I in this book call the moral imagination…The moral imagination is not a thing, not even so much a faculty of the mind, but rather the very process by which the self makes metaphors out of images that memory supplies.9

In this process, Guroian emphasizes the importance of conveying symbols to the imagination through narrative. This symbolic information shapes our understanding of the world and how we should respond to it. As such, the richer and more varied our experiences—especially our encounters with nature—the better our imagination and facility with the use of literary metaphor will be.

Sadly, Guroian's experience from the 1990’s onward demonstrated that his students’ capacity for understanding metaphors had steadily diminished, causing them considerable difficulty when reading great works of fiction.

I have found that many are perplexed when reading a novel or short story because they have not learned how to find and follow the inner connections of character and action, the narrative itself, and the moral meaning that is communicated. This is a failure of imagination, not of knowledge that can be tested.10

Guroian believes that fairy tales and fantasy literature are particularly good at teaching children this symbolic language and awakening young readers to the moral dimension of stories by transporting them into a world of wonder, danger, and enchantment. To this end, he calls for the reform of modern education, for new forms of moral pedagogy that are faithful to the "ancient and true vocation of the teacher—to make persons into mature and whole human beings..."11

Conclusion

Based on this research, I've developed the following statement as my working definition of the moral imagination:

I hope this brief history of the moral imagination will encourage readers to think about the imaginative associations linking tradition, story, and virtuous character. From my own reading experience, I firmly agree with Kirk and Guroian that imaginative literature has power to arouse our souls and shape our perceptions. To this point, the Scottish writer George MacDonald never fails to awaken in me a deep desire to be truly good. As I get further in my thesis, I'm eager to learn whether J.K. Rowling's immensely popular Harry Potter series has the power to do that for new generations!

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After nearly a decade of taking graduate courses at a leisurely, "when-I-can-fit-it-in" pace, I've decided to enroll full-time this year so I can finish my Master's degree in the Humanities by next summer. Taking a full course load also allows me to access more of the GI Bill's generous education benefits for military veterans.

Since I've completed the core requirements of Faulkner University's Great Books program, my remaining courses consist of independent tutorials. I personally design these tutorials to align with my research interests and prepare me for writing my thesis. For each tutorial, I develop the course objectives, reading list, and assignments. I then engage a professor from the Literature department to meet with me throughout the semester to discuss the readings. This professor will also grade my writing assignments and final research paper.

I don't know if this is a common arrangement in graduate programs like mine, but I consider it an exceptional feature. Where else would I get to read books that I'm passionate about and discuss them with a PhD professor who is personally invested in my intellectual formation?

And since I'm blessed and grateful to have the time and means to pursue this kind of education--what is called "leisure" in the classical sense--I'm making my entire experience available free to anyone who wants "audit" my courses or peruse my notes in my digital knowledge vault at The Fireside Library.

A quick word on my personal knowledge management (PKM) system: I use the free and powerful app Obsidianfor note-taking and as a writing editor. I find that its structural flexibility, linking features, and interactive visual graph really optimize my thinking for deep work. Although I still find value in having an analog Zettelkasten system--which I've written about hereand here--the speed and agility of well-organized digital notes for academic work is unbeatable.

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Harry Potter and the Re-enchantment of the Western Mind

In one form or another, I've been grappling with the problem of the desacralization of modern culture since discovering Charles Taylor's A Secular Age more than a decade ago. In this book—Taylor's magnum opus—he inquires into the causes of progressive secularization and loss of faith in the modern world, a process he calls "disenchantment".

Not surprisingly then, the popular movement to reverse this trend is called "re-enchantment" and it's getting a lot of attention presently. I've decided to focus my thesis on the work of J.K. Rowling in her massively successful Harry Potter series because I believe Rowling's work achieves two essential things that are necessary for re-enchantment:

1. Harry Potter acts as a "gateway to the literary tradition" of the West, connecting readers to the rich treasury of myths, stories, and literary allusions from our past.

2. Harry Potter challenges and subverts the assumptions of the modern materialist worldview with what is essentially a sacramental Christian vision: a morally ordered cosmos in which “good magic” represents divine grace and “dark magic” reflects demonic disorder.

This reading situates Rowling within the broader Christian literary tradition alongside medieval writers such as Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and William Langland, and modern authors like George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis. In the spirit of these authors, I submit that Rowling's work weaves a rich tapestry of mythical, alchemical, and sacramental symbolism to render a riveting retelling of the perennial battle between good and evil, order and disorder.

I acknowledge that there are many readers out there who will disagree with my thesis—including a dear friend with whom I share much of my literary life and faith. I welcome their friendly and challenging questions and critiques. However, I am passionate about defending Rowling as a Christian author. I truly believe that myths, fairy tales, and good fantasy literature engage our moral imagination and imaginative vision better and more enduringly than almost anything else. Rightly understood, Harry Potter demonstrates the charity, justice, sacrifice, and redemption that are at the core of the Christian faith.

Course 1: Harry Potter and the Journey of the Soul

My first class explores the connection between medieval allegory and Harry Potter, with an emphasis on the journey of the soul and moral transformation. This will give me an opportunity to dive back into Dante as I read through the entire Commedia later this semester. Here are the planned readings:

Primary Readings: Classical and Medieval Texts

• Plato: The Republic (Book VII - Allegory of the Cave), Phaedrus (Charioteer Allegory)

• Augustine: Confessions (Book VII); On Christian Doctrine (Books II, III)

• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

• Hildegard von Bingen, Ordo Virtutem (morality play)

• “Everyman” (morality play)

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

• Geoffrey Chaucer, selections from The Canterbury Tales (“The Pardoner’s Tale” and “The Knight’s Tale”)

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Primary Readings: Modern Texts

• William Lynch, Christ and Apollo

• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter series (focus on Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix)

Secondary Readings

• Beatrice Groves, Literary Allusion in Harry Potter

• C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

Course 2: Harry Potter and the Moral Imagination

My second class is titled, "Baptizing the Imagination: Fantasy and Fairy Tales in the Christian Literary Tradition". It explores how works of imaginative literature by Christian authors George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling (among others) engage and shape the moral imagination of both children and adults. This course is inspired by Vigen Guroian's Tending the Heart of Virtue and will examine foundational essays on the moral imagination and fantasy literature alongside key imaginative works that portray the dramatic struggle between good and evil. Planned readings include:

Primary Readings

• Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue, (2nd Edition)

• Steven Alan Samson, “Edmund Burke on the Moral Imagination Study Guide” (pdf)

• Russell Kirk, "The Moral Imagination"

• G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, "The Ethics of Elfland" chapter

• J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories" (pdf)

• George MacDonald, The Golden Key (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967)

• George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

• George MacDonald, The Wise Woman

• C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

• C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

• Madeline L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

• John Granger, Looking for God in Harry Potter

Secondary Readings

• John Granger, Harry Potter's Bookshelf

• John Granger, The Hidden Key to Harry Potter

Plan for the Semester

I will meet with my professors on alternate weeks for our discussions throughout the semester and will update my reading and discussion notes weekly, posting the announcements in Substack for those readers who want to follow along. Additionally, I will post monthly topical essays of interest in Substack. Please let me know what you think of my research proposal and any other ideas I should consider. Thanks!

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Hello friends, I hope you all had a great summer! As for many students, this week marks the beginning of a new academic semester for me as I enter the thesis phase of my Master of Arts in Humanities program. I'll be sharing the details of my thesis and independent studies in a future post. For now, I want to invite you behind the scenes of my personal reading project this summer. For paid subscribers, please check out the bonus podcast of Girard’s book at the end!

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Summer Reading

For the last few years, a close friend and I have chosen a "deep-dive" theme for our summer reading, meeting online for monthly discussions from May to August. Last summer, we read several novels by Norwegian author and Nobel Prize winner, Sigrid Undset. This summer we chose to tackle the literary theory of the French-American philosopher and literary critic, René Girard, in his ground-breaking critical work, Deceit, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure.

Admittedly, this is not the kind of book you take to the beach! For a writer or student of literature, however, Girard's insights into human nature as revealed by great modern novelists is compelling. Published in 1961 during Girard's tenure at Johns Hopkins University, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel lays out Girard's theory of mimetic desire (also known “triangular desire”). This concept, along with his later development of the "scapegoat mechanism" in Violence and the Sacred (1972), solidified Girard's reputation as a pivotal thinker of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Girard's theory of mimetic desire postulates that human desire does not arise spontaneously in a subject but is typically mediated by a third party, a person whose very being the subject secretly envies or seeks to emulate. By mimicking the mediator's desires, the subject hopes to acquire a share of his or her status or perceived superiority. What predictably follows is an emerging rivalry between subject and mediator over the contested object(s).

Does this sound too mechanistic or removed from reality? Perhaps a personal example will help.

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My first experience with mimetic desire was in 1983. I was just starting the 5th grade when I saw Cabbage Patch Kids lining the shelves of a local department store for the first time. With their bulbous heads, yarn hair, and frozen expressions, I found them decidedly more ugly than interesting during that initial encounter.

Fast forward a few months and the Cabbage Patch Kids hysteria had taken the world by storm. Everywhere I looked, I saw the "cool kids" (whose wealth and popularity I envied) happily toting their "one-of-a-kind" adopted toy friends. By this time, I just had to have one but it was beyond my family's means—even if my mother would have consented to join the insane crowds clamoring outside department stores hoping to score a winning lottery ticket to purchase the prized doll.

Following Girard’s theory, what I desired was not actually a Cabbage Patch Kid but the mystique the doll represented: a sense of both uniqueness and "social belonging," of identifying with a group of children who seemed to have everything I didn't.

Desire and Delusion in Don Quixote

Almost 400 years earlier, the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes recognized this phenomenon of human behavior and captured it in the incomparable character of Don Quixote de la Mancha...or so Girard contends. Accordingly, our summer reading project began not with Deceit, Desire and the Novel but with Cervantes' fanciful tale about the aspiring knight errant, Don Quixote, and his stalwart squire, Sancho Panza.

Although its claim is contested, Don Quixote (1605) is famously considered the "first modern novel". For Girard, this means that Cervantes was the first writer to consciously reveal mimetic desire operating in the lives of his characters. Thus Girard begins his opening chapter on "Triangular Desire" with a quote from Don Quixote:

“I want you to know, Sancho, that the famous Amadis of Gaul was one of the most perfect knight errants (sic). But what am I saying, one of the most perfect? I should say the only, the first, the unique, the master and Lord of all those who existed in the world...Thus, my friend Sancho, I reckon that whoever imitates him best will come closest to perfect chivalry.”1

Girard claims that Don Quixote has abdicated to his hero, Amadis of Gaul (a fictional character from a best-selling 16th century romance), the fundamental act of his autonomy. "[H]e no longer chooses the objects of his own desire—Amadis must choose for him.”2 Don Quixote's delusions of knighthood are based entirely on the figure of Amadis, whose loves and exploits Don Quixote strives to imitate.

Girard calls this type of mediation external because the ontological distance between Don Quixote and his fictional hero prevents any contact or rivalry arising between them. With internal mediation—the stuff of more modern novels—that distance is "sufficiently reduced to allow these two spheres [subject and mediator] to penetrate each other more or less profoundly.”3

When internal mediation occurs, the result is almost always "envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred"—the psychological complex that Max Scheler called ressentiment.

Men Become Gods

According to Girard, the "ontological sickness" underlying mimetic desire originates in the loss of spiritual transcendence in a world that has rejected God. "The false prophets proclaim that in tomorrow's world men will be gods for each other.”4 He calls this "deviated transcendency," defining it as a caricature of the vertical element of Christian faith. It manifests mainly as the impulse to relocate divinity on a horizontal plane, particularly within the mediator.

Focusing on works by Stendahl, Proust, and Dostoevsky, Girard shows how the protagonists of his chosen novels yearn for nothing less than a metaphysical transformation by possessing their desired objects. This dynamic can also provoke a reciprocal response from the mediator in what Girard calls "double mediation": a copy-cat pattern that can reproduce indefinitely, with each imitation becoming more blurred and distorted than the last.

Once the idealized object is possessed, however, the protagonist fails to realize the interior transformation that he longed for. His disappointment typically signals the downfall of the mediator and necessitates finding a new one. This can lead to a "multiplication of mediators" as the protagonist's metaphysical desperation grows. “The atomization of the personality is the final stage" of this spiraling psychosis if it remains unchecked.5

My own experience bears this out, though much less dramatically. Having never acquired the coveted Cabbage Patch Kid as a child, I ordered one off of Ebay when I turned thirty. Red hair, green eyes, pig tails...she was every bit the doll I always wanted. I awaited her arrival with eager anticipation, fully expecting that she would somehow make me feel more complete: an adoption certificate-carrying member of the exclusive club of my childhood ambitions.

But just as Girard predicted, once the doll was in my possession, she failed to transform that part of my being that I thought was lacking. In the end, the doll just sat in the corner of my office as a mute reminder of my childhood folly until she eventually drifted out of my possession sometime during the ensuing years.

The Apocalypse of Conversion

While Girard's book is not especially easy to read, particularly if the reader is unfamiliar with his key literary texts, its main concepts can be sufficiently gleaned from an inspectional or first reading of Chapters 1-4. In the remaining 8 chapters, Girard examines the downstream effects of internal mediation, its hypocrisy, and the resulting "master-slave dialectic," which he sees manifesting frequently in novelistic characters as a psycho-sexual complex of masochism and sadism.

Girard's literary vision is admittedly dark at times and I don't think my reading partner or I would have made it through the entire book if it weren't for his occasionally startling revelations about human behavior. While his primary aim is to address literary criticism, his insights into the human heart are instructive for anyone desiring more authentic relationships or pursuing virtue.

To that end, Girard's concluding chapter is a gift; in it he gives us the key to stepping off the mad carousel of mediated desire. The hero must renounce his delusion of divinity—the feigned claim of spiritual autonomy which is actually a form of slavery. From Don Quixote to The Brothers Karamazov, the great novels in Girard’s analysis finally turn on a conversion—often a deathbed conversion—when for the first time, the hero has to “look his despair and his nothingness in the face. But this look which he has dreaded, which is the death of pride, is his salvation."6

“All novelistic conclusions are conversions," writes Girard, and every true conversion fosters a new way of relating to others and to oneself. In triumphing over our old self-centeredness, we are reintegrated into our former communities and restored to our own souls. Girard calls this "the crowning moment of novelistic creation."7

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This month, my Great Books group is delving into Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. [Paid Subscribers: access the study guide here.] One of early modernity’s most moving works, it unflinchingly examines humanity’s great paradox: our inherent dignity and pervasive misery in a vast, …

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This outline accompanies my essay of the same work and was produced in part with the assistance of my “Ask Adler” GPT. I’ve checked it for accuracy.

I. Classification of the Work (Elementary Reading)

Title: Pensées
Author: Blaise Pascal
Publication Date: Posthumously publish…

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Originally published on adhunt.microblog.com.

The story of “Caedmon’s Hymn” moves and delights me. As told by the Venerable Bede (673-735), Caedmon was an illiterate and unmusical cowherd of Northumbria. Whenever village gatherings turned to music, Caedmon would excuse himself from the festivities to avoid being asked to sing. One such evening as the lyre was being passed around, Caedmon left the feast early and went to the cattle shed for his nightly guard duty. After falling asleep, he dreamed that a man stood at his side and addressed him by name:

“Caedmon, sing me something.”

Embarrassed, Caedmon admitted his inability to sing. “All the same,” insisted the stranger, “you have to sing for me.” When Caedmon asked him what he should sing, the stranger replied, “Sing about the Creation.” Straight away, Caedmon lifted his voice in the following verses:

The next morning Caedmon found that he was still able to recall the song from his dream and recited it to the foreman of the local monastery where Hilda of Whitby (614-680) was abbess. As word of Caedmon’s gift spread, he was asked to recite the song before Abbess Hilda and an audience of learned men. The Venerable Bede relates that,

“It was evident to all of them that he had been granted the heavenly grace of God. Then they expounded some bit of sacred story or teaching to him, and instructed him to turn it into poetry if he could…And when he came back the next morning, he gave back what had been commissioned to him in the finest verse.”

Convinced of Caedmon’s divine gift, the abbess urged him to give up secular life and take monastic vows, which he did. Thus received into the monastery, he spent his remaining days learning the stories of sacred history and putting them to verse. By this work, Bede tells us, the former cowherd “sought to draw men away from the love of sin and to inspire them with delight in the practice of good works.”

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Modern Criticism

Caedmon’s Hymn is believed to be the earliest extant poem of Old English. Notice its beautiful alliteration (e.g. herigean/ hefaenrīcaes; Meotodes/ meacti/ mōdgidanc) and its use of caesura, the pause in the middle of each line which results in eighteen half-lines. Eight of these contain epithets describing attributes of God: Protector, Measurer, Glory-Father etc. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Vol. A, Eighth Edition) notes that this formulaic style “provides a richness of texture and meaning difficult to convey in translation” (Greenblatt and Abrams, 24).

Sadly, I note that my Norton Anthology also imposes a critical attitude grounded in an Enlightenment bias of religious skepticism:

“Although Bede tells us that Caedmon had never learned the art of song, we may suspect that he concealed his skill from his fellow workmen and from the monks because he was ashamed of knowing, ‘vain and idle’ songs, the kind Bede says Caedmon never composed. Caedmon’s inspiration and the true miracle, then, was to apply the meter and language of such songs, presumably including pagan heroic verse, to Christian themes.”

In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye (1912-1991) tells us that “art [is] a communication from the past to the present.” He deplores literary criticism that seeks to reduce “cultural phenomena into our own terms without regard to their original character” (Frye, 24-25).

Ours is a skeptical and disenchanted age, little given to mystical or religious experience. The materialist framework that automatically rejects the possibility that Caedmon’s lyrical gift had a supernatural origin is antithetical to the literary spirit that animated his and Bede’s age. The result is that modern scholars would sooner suggest that our humble cowherd was duplicitous than entertain a possibility of miracles.

It’s attitudes like this that prompted writer and literary teacher William Gonch to advocate for a Christian critical tradition at Columbia University’s Moral Imagination of the Novel conference (2019), where he observed,

“We don’t have a Christian criticism. We lack an ongoing interrogation into the distinctive aesthetic questions that arise when writers attempt to represent experience in the Christian tradition.”

It strikes me that if Caedmon the cowherd could embrace his calling to write sacred poetry that has been venerated through the ages, more Christian writers today might make a conscious effort to revive a critical tradition that doesn’t shrink from questions of transcendence. I hope for my part that I’m able to do this, if only in a small way in the reflections I write here.

Now, for those who have “eyes to see and ears to hear”, please enjoy this original setting of Caedmon’s Hymn performed by musician Peter Pringle.

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In hindsight, I regret that my Great Books reading group chose Areopagitica as our introduction to the seventeenth-century poet and polemicist John Milton. Our selection of Milton’s prose treatise was determined by the Year 2 syllabus of Mortimer Adler’s 10-Year Reading Plan. Adler assigns his more renowned work—the epic poem Paradise Lost—to Year 3. Thus, I fear my impression of the celebrated poet may be prematurely colored by shades of Areopagitica’s Puritanism and polemical zeal.

Let me stress that I have no objection to Milton’s spirited defense of freedom of the press—the central argument of Areopagitica—and I suspect Adler’s intent was to pair it thematically with Hobbes’ Leviathan (our April reading). Still, I would have preferred to meet Milton as the “sublime artist” rather than the “noisome dissident” in my first encounter.

A Brief Biography

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, in Cheapside, London, during the heyday of Shakespeare’s theatrical career. His father, a scrivener (legal copyist), and his mother, the daughter of a merchant tailor, raised six children—of whom Milton was the third.

Theirs was a devout Puritan family but not necessarily puritanical: a Renaissance spirit of music and poetry flourished in their home. Religion was a serious matter, however. Milton’s paternal grandfather was once fined as a Roman Catholic during the English Reformation, and he disowned Milton’s father for abandoning the Catholic Church. (One wonders if this painful family legacy contributed to Milton’s lifelong hostility toward the Catholic Church?)

The family’s success in real estate afforded the young Milton a superb education. He studied under private Puritan tutors and then at St. Paul’s School in London. At sixteen, he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1628 and a master’s in 1632. He then retired to his father’s country estate near Windsor for six years of intensive private study in classical languages and the composition of pastoral poetry.

From 1638 to 1639, Milton toured the Continent, spending most of his time in Italy, where he met Galileo. Upon returning to London, he began working as a tutor and soon gained notoriety as a political writer. The tumultuous 1640s—marked by the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power, and the execution of Charles I—comprised some of Milton’s most turbulent and prolific years. During this time, he issued a flurry of impassioned and often controversial pamphlets attacking the episcopacy, advocating for the ability to divorce (amid his own troubled marriage to Mary Powell), and petitioning Parliament to protect freedom of the press.

It is this final cause that brings us to Areopagitica, Milton’s most enduring prose work and the subject of this essay. Paid subscribers can access a study outline here.

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Liberty and Licensing: Milton’s Areopagitica

Subtitled “A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing,” Areopagitica was published in 1644 as a response to the Licensing Order of 1643, which mandated that “no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed.”1 This order effectively reinstated some of the harshest censorship practices of the notorious Star Chamber court, including search, seizure, and pre-publication control.

Milton opposed the unpopular Order and wrote his pointedly unlicensed paper to convince Parliament “to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered.”2 He constructed his argument across four principal lines of reasoning:

1. Historical Precedent

   Censorship, Milton claims, was seldom practiced in ancient republics and arose only under imperial regimes—first in Rome, then later institutionalized by the Roman Catholic Church through the Inquisition and its Index of Forbidden Books. Milton warns Parliament not to emulate these precedents.

2. Ethical Argument

   Books contain the very soul and reason of their authors: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”3 To suppress a book is to extinguish a voice that could enlighten future generations. Even vicious books, he argues, can instruct by sharpening readers’ discernment of error.

3. Practical Objections

   Licensing is not only odious but also ineffective. If the government’s aim is to quarantine the “infection” of vice or sedition, then it must also regulate music, theater, conversation, and every other form through which culture spreads. Such an effort is both unenforceable and absurd.

4. Educational Consequences

   Licensing inhibits the growth of learning by creating bottlenecks to publication and insulting the judgment of England’s most learned minds. Milton calls this “a second tyranny over learning.”4 (He doesn’t specify which was the first, but I presume he meant the Inquisition??)

The Symbolism of the Areopagus

The title Areopagitica refers to the Areopagus, the council of Athenian elders which assembled atop the hill of Ares (Mars) to debate matters of justice and public policy.5 Milton borrowed the title from a speech by the Athenian orator Isocrates (436-338 BC) who spoke out against the moral failings of Athenian democracy.

Symbolically, Areopagitica warns of the political danger of overreach and the “head becoming too large for the body”—in other words, with the rise of tyranny. Though Milton is careful not to impugn the integrity of England’s legislative body, he worries that Parliament’s attempt to restrict the free press, ostensibly to prevent sedition and heresy, may usher in a regime even more oppressive than the one it overthrew.

Freedom and the Formation of Character

While the 1643 Licensing Order is now lapsed and obsolete, Milton's deeper question remains a universal concern: How much evil should a free society tolerate in order to preserve liberty?

That this question still animates public discourse today suggests why Adler may have included Areopagitica on his reading list. Whose responsibility is it to safeguard the public from vice and corruption? Is it the role of the government? The Church? An amorphous mob of “cancel culture” critics??

Milton believed—and I generally agree—that trying to impose a good society through force or regulatory coercion is a doomed project. Virtue isn’t cultivated in the absence of immorality or temptations, but in our conscious personal struggle against them. What Milton defends above all is the freedom to choose:

Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.6

Milton calls out as foolish those who would “imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.”7 Having said that, Milton does not advocate for complete tolerance of publications, believing that atheism, libel, and obscenity ought not be condoned.8

A Few Reservations

As I said at the outset, I would have preferred to read Milton’s poetry first. Though I found his arguments in Areopagitica persuasive, his rhetoric is occasionally marred by invective—especially against the Catholic Church and episcopal structures. For example, he refers to church leaders as “falsest seducers and oppressors of men” and “a wicked race of deceivers.” Even while advocating toleration—“that many be tolerated, rather than all be compelled”—he hastens to clarify, “I mean not tolerated popery and open superstition.”9

Milton’s sweeping condemnations suggest an inability to imagine the Church as a source of holiness or moral authority. Add to this the overblown rhetoric that some have called his “piously patriotic confidence in England’s destiny”10 and you begin to sense the bias of Milton’s political vision:

Now once again…God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself. What does he then but reveal himself…as his manner is, first to his Englishman?…Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection.11

To which I could only respond: Bleh. 😑

The Ironic Postscript

Ironically, just five years later, Milton would join the very machinery of state censorship he once so eloquently denounced. Appointed in 1649 as Secretary for Foreign Tongues under the new Council of State, he became a public defender of the English Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate. In that role, he helped suppress Royalist publications and justified England’s regicide of Charles I.

As historian Will Durant dryly observed:

The man who had written the most eloquent appeal ever made for freedom of the press was now looking at censorship from the view of the ruling power.12

Like his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Milton also engaged in the early modern equivalent of “Twitter wars”—extended, often vitriolic pamphlet battles with his political and ecclesiastical enemies. These scathing personal attacks could run to hundreds of pages and were anything but restrained. Here’s a snatch of one such dressing down of Claude Saumaise, a famous French classical scholar:

"O you venal and fee-taking agent!…O the sneak and turncoat! You, silliest of blockheads, are worthy of the fool’s staff itself…”13

The Enduring Challenge of Liberty

On the whole, Areopagitica is a worthwhile read for contemplating the inevitable tensions that arise in a political order striving to uphold freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and the common good—especially when these appear to be in opposition. Milton’s belief that freedom is the necessary condition for the formation of virtue and a just society still speaks powerfully today, even if his political blind spots and temperamental outbursts make us look askance at his character.

Study Outline of John Milton’s Areopagitica for paid subscribers available below.

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This outline accompanies my essay of the same work and was produced with the assistance of my “Ask Adler” GPT.

I. Classification of the Work (Elementary Reading)

Title: Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England
Author: John Milton
Publication Date: 1644
Genre: Political pamphlet / Oratorical prose
Subject: Defe…

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This is the inaugural post in my “Passport To” series (formerly known as “Study Guides”), where I’ll share a brief author biography, synopsis, and outline of a major work from the Western canon. Most selections are drawn from Mortimer Adler’s Ten Year Reading Plan, which I’m currently following with my reading group. We’re now in Year 2, working from a modified list—having already covered many of the ancient texts during our time in the now-defunct Online Great Books program, and adding an occasional work like this one. My aim is to make these guides a valuable resource to anyone exploring the Great Books individually or with a reading community.

For a review of Mortimer Adler’s inspectional and analytical stages of reading, please see my post below.

Shakespeare’s Life and Works

In at least two respects, writing a biography of Shakespeare is a futile endeavor. First, the Bard of Avon is so universally known—both to a literary audience and the general public—that I could get away with introducing him simply as “the man who needs no introduction.” Given his legendary status, many readers might be surprised to learn how few biographical facts we actually possess. While biographies abound, they often rely as much on speculation as on verifiable evidence. For our purposes, I’ll simply highlight a few key facts.

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This space is for readers seeking to fill their souls with more than information—those who intuit that the Great Books of Western civilization are not relics of a dead past but living signs of man’s enduring quest for truth, meaning, and spiritual renewal.

In this series of essays—part reading guide, part intellectual pilgrimage—we’ll follow the poet Dante Alighieri’s threefold “itinerary of conversion” and explore his literary inspirations. It’s a journey that descends into the chaos of human brokenness, climbs the mountain of redemption, and aspires toward the radiance of the Beatific Vision.

📚 What to Expect

Here in Literary Pilgrim, you’ll find:

• Longform reflections on major themes—justice, pride, exile, mercy, resurrection

• Commentary on classical and Christian texts: Homer, Virgil, Scripture, Augustine, and more

• Connections to Dante’s Divine Comedy as a culmination of the Western symbolic imagination

• Personal insights drawn from my own reading, experience, and spiritual tradition

This is reading as pilgrimage—the soul’s emanation and return.

🗺 Notional Milestones on the Journey:

• “I Found Myself in a Dark Wood” — on getting lost and the beginning of conversion

• “The Rage of Achilles” — pride, anger, and the tragic hero in Homer

• “The Poetics of Descent” — Odysseus and the soul’s descent into Hades

• “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter” — Dante's descent into Hell

• “The Seven-Story Mountain” — Dante in Purgatory and the climb toward healing

• “In My End Is My Beginning” — the eternal return at the journey’s close

Each reflection helps orient us not only within the literary canon but within the moral and spiritual architecture of our own lives.

🧭 Ready to Begin?

Start with the most recent post, or return to the beginning of the series. If you’d like a self-guided reading plan, I’ve created the sample syllabus below. If you need a refresher on Homer’s epics and Greek mythology, I recommend Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

Literary Pilgrim Reading Syllabus

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Welcome, pilgrim. The road is long, but we never walk it alone.

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Hello dear readers, I’m back with a summary of the second lecture of Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolism Masterclass, which runs from April 23 - May 28, 2025. (If you missed my free post on Lecture 1, you can find the link below.) Over the course of six lessons, Jonathan will unpack the symbolic structures that shape our world but are often hidden or indiscernible to those who hold a materialist, nominalist, or reductive view of reality.

I’m taking this course to enhance my ability to interpret symbols and recognize universal patterns in literature and history. As you may recall from my discussion on the 4 senses of meaning in medieval exegesis, the second sense is allegorical—meaning conveyed through symbols or archetypes. This mode of interpretation allows us to think diachronically—across time through evolving language and ideas—when studying the works of the Western tradition (just think of all the symbolism in Dante!)

Jonathan’s aim is to help us recover a sense of embodied meaning and hierarchy in a world that modernism has flattened and drained of its purpose. I suspect I speak for most of his acolytes when I say we’ll never see the world the same again—rather, by means of symbolic thinking and its ability to unite heaven and earth, we perceive an enchanted view of the cosmos beginning to re-emerge.

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I'm very pleased to bring my readers this summary of the first lecture of Jonathan Pageau's Symbolism Masterclass, which started on April 23 and will run for the next 5 weeks. I've made this post a free preview but will reserve the following 5 lectures for my paid subscribers as part of the Study Guide series. Speaking of which: to celebrate The Occidental Tourist's third anniversary, for a limited time I'm offering 20% off paid subscriptions from now until May 22 to celebrate The Occidental Tourist's third anniversary:

If you're enjoying this or other Substack newsletters, please consider supporting one with a paid subscription—not necessarily mine, but any writer whose work you value. It's a small gesture that helps keep Substack an ad-free, reader-supported platform where thoughtful writing can flourish.

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Introduction to the Symbolic World

If you're not familiar with Jonathan Pageau’s work, here’s a brief introduction: Pageau is an Orthodox artist who initially gained critical acclaim as a liturgical icon carver, but has since become a leading voice in the revival of symbolic and mythological thinking. His work intersects with that of Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, and others who seek to recover meaning in an age of increasing cultural fragmentation.

The Symbolism Masterclass is a culmination of Pageau's work and philosophy: an exploration of symbolic thinking in Scripture, culture, and story. In this course, Pageau will guide modern audiences—habituated to the psychic oppression of materialist and literalist frameworks—toward an integrated apprehension of reality and symbolic cosmology.

Pageau’s course invites participants to "break free from a flat, meaningless, and disjointed worldview and embrace a life of depth and insight" by aligning with the vision of the ancients who regarded reality as richly-layered, participatory, and infused with purpose. The course objectives include:

• Learning to recognize symbolic patterns in history, culture, and personal experience.

• Developing the skills to interpret stories—biblical, mythological, or modern—with symbolic insight.

• Cultivating a purposeful approach to life by aligning with meaningful structures rather than chaos.

• Transcending reductionist thinking and adopt a richer, more integrated view of reality.

Summary of Lecture 1: Piercing through the Secular Mind with Symbolism

About 350 students attended the opening 3-hour lecture. Pageau began by situating the loss of symbolic thinking in the historical context of the last 500 years, coinciding with the Cartesian rift between mind and body: "You could say the connection between ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ has broken [along with] the relationship between facts and meaning...[and that this] has separated the world into opposites."

In this polarized state, the Tower of Babel becomes the archetypal metaphor for the fragmentation of meaning. As men reach "too high" in their totalitarian mania to "create a name for themselves," the teetering cultural structures topple into anarchy, with language (i.e. meaning) becoming confused. This swing from “high” to “low” brings about a deincarnation, a theological rupture dividing heaven and earth, which exposes the connection between tyranny and chaos. As Pageau observed:

The excess of chaos calls for the excess of tyranny. The excess of tyranny is fragile, and then it brings about [more and more] chaos.

An example of this dynamic, according to Pageau, is the recent trend among New Atheists of moving away from an epistemological foundation based on "science and common sense" toward an accommodation of postmodern meaning structures centered around identity politics. This shift includes the imposition of new naming conventions that uphold transgender ideology, as illustrated in the tweet below by New Atheist Matt Dillahunty. Statements like this reveal the inescapable—but often unacknowledged—hierarchy of competing values and facts underlying one’s worldview.

Medieval Origins of Deincarnation: Nominalism and Univocalism

A weighty but central part of Pageau’s thesis is his assertion that the Scholastic philosophies of nominalism and univocalism contributed to the modern excesses of arbitrary meaning and symbolic reductionism. Largely unfamiliar terms today, nominalism (also known as equivocalism) and univocalism were divergent schools of thought that rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Thomistic realism of the Middle Ages on questions of universal forms and God’s mode of existence.

In Pageau’s synopsis, nominalism’s denial of universal forms led thinkers like William of Ockham to posit only the existence of particulars—a world of concrete individual beings utterly contingent on God’s creative prerogative. Ockham’s ideas fostered a conception of God as totally “other” and remote. In time, this philosophical outlook engendered Deism—the idea that God kick-started and then withdrew from the universe. In the modern era, the “absent God” of Deism has given way to atheism.

On the other hand, univocalism’s conception of God’s existence as essentially the same as his creatures (though infinitely greater, to be sure), led to an understanding of God as merely one being among many. While early univocalists like Duns Scotus were faithful Christians intent on preserving divine sovereignty, their school of thought gradually eroded into a broader supernaturalism and a fascination with the paranormal. As supernaturalism itself gave way to materialism, this philosophical trajectory, too, culminated in atheism, though by a different path than nominalism.

In summary, nominalism denied any real connection between words and reality, causing a radical separation between heaven (meaning) and earth (fact). This is the chaos of Pageau’s Tower of Babel metaphor. Meanwhile, the flattened ontology of univocalism collapsed the heaven/earth hierarchy into a superimposed sameness, the tyranny of the Tower metaphor. Both distortions eroded the symbolic mediation between heaven and earth, spirit and body, signifier and signified.

Thomas Aquinas and the Analogy of Being

It’s important to remember that both nominalism and univocalism were late Scholastic reactions to Platonic realism and “the problem of universals forms.” This realism culminated in the brilliant synthesis of Aristotelian science and Christian revelation achieved by Thomas Aquinas in the late 13th century.1

Aquinas’s theory of the “analogy of being” is essential to understanding how symbolism functions. He teaches that finite beings participate in God’s existence according to the measure and proportion2 of their specific nature or essence. Their existence, therefore, is neither identical to nor wholly separate from God’s, but analogous to it. Similarly, symbolic thinking recognizes the universal patterns embedded in reality as manifestations of a shared relationship—one that interweaves unity and multiplicity, identity and difference.

Occupying a middle stance, analogy avoids the dysfunction of the Tower of Babel syndrome in which humanity reaches either too high or too low to represent meaning. Analogy neither imposes nor reduces meaning, but proposes that every created thing is truly symbolic: it truly reveals a dimension of God’s being, but never exhaustively or equally. And it does so fractally: by demonstrating the unities and multiplicities at all levels of existence, “simultaneously and always.”

Stories and the Hierarchy of Care

Pageau devoted the remainder of the lecture to demonstrating the logical and empirical arguments for symbolism across various intellectual domains, including religion, philosophy, and science. What resonated most with me, however, was his exploration of how symbolic meaning structures reality through the medium of storytelling.

He used the example of fairy tales and myths to illustrate how symbolic patterns are refined over generations. In the selective attention we give to certain stories by perpetuating them over time, a “hierarchy of care” emerges that communicates a deeper meaning about our humanity, not just random information. The stories that continue to be told are those whose patterns mediate important knowledge about our human experience, values, and understanding of the world. In this way, our identities become embedded in stories:

Who we are is not just a collection of facts, but a narrative that gives those facts coherence and purpose. Our identity is shaped by the patterns, hierarchies, and symbolic relationships we participate in.

In recovering the symbolic patterns that shape our stories—and thus our lives—Pageau invites us to step back into a world where meaning is not constructed or imposed, but revealed through love and memory.

This course meets on Wednesdays from 2-5 pm EST. I think you can still sign up here. The remaining lectures are:

• Lesson 2: The Architecture of Reality : Meeting of Heaven and Earth - April 30, 2025

• Lesson 3: Up and down the Holy Mountain - May 7, 2025

• Lesson 4: The Subtle Dance of Opposites - May 14, 2025

• Lesson 5: Garments of Skin - the Fall of Man and Civilization - May 21, 2025

• Lesson 6: Living Symbolically Today - May 28, 2025

Lecture 1 Reading List

In addition to the course reading list, these are the primary sources Pageau referenced in his lecture per my best conjectures. Starred (*) works indicate those included on Adler’s Ten Year Reading Plan.

• Biblical Sources
  - Genesis
  - Book of Revelation

• Theological/Philosophical Sources
  - Dionysius the Areopagite: Divine Names, Book 1
  - Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica*
  - St. Maximus the Confessor: On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ and On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy

• Philosophical/Historical Sources
  - Plato: The Republic*
  - William of Ockham: Summa Logicae, Part II
  - Dun Scotus: Ordinatio
  - François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel*
  - René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy*
  - John Locke: Two Treatises of Government*
  - Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan*

• Modern Thinkers/Writers:
  - Carl Jung: The Undiscovered Self
  - John Vervaeke: "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" lecture series
  - J.R.R. Tolkien: "On Fairy-Stories" essay
  - Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World

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This week marks the third anniversary of The Occidental Tourist! I want to take a moment to thank my readers and the wider Substack community for accompanying and challenging me during this intellectual and creative journey. Your interest, your questions, your engagement and support—these have been the steam that keeps my writing engine moving forward. I appreciate you!

How It Began

Three years ago, when I began to write, I was seeking to accomplish two things:

• To process what I was reading and learning in my Online Great Books reading club.

• To share the Great Books with a wider audience, doing my part to “preserve and pass on” the Great Tradition of the West.

But something more wonderful and unexpected happened along the way. Since 2016, I had been aware of the cultural attitude now widely known as disenchantment (a term borrowed from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age). This is best described as a flattened, demystified sense of the world and of humanity’s place in it.

It wasn’t until I read the following passage from the court transcript of Joan of Arc’s heresy trial that I began to sense how vastly different the pre-modern worldview was from our own:

Joan was interrogated repeatedly about this tree:

Question: “Did you not, in your childhood, play or dance around the Fairy Tree at Domrémy?”

Joan: “When I was a child, I sometimes saw the maidens and children dance there, but I sang more than I danced with them... I heard that people said fairies came there, but I do not know if it is true.”2

There is something disarmingly innocent and earthy in Joan’s response. Recall that she was a young woman of exceptional piety and simplicity who nevertheless held supreme command of France’s armed forces during a national existential crisis—leading them single-handedly to victory against a vastly superior English army.

What stirred me wasn’t whether she believed in the enchanted tree—it was that the possibility of such enchantment, the world of Faerie, existed for her in a way it rarely can for us today, regardless of our religious, philosophical, or scientific beliefs.

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Recovering the Enchanted World

In On Fairy Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote:

“Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”3

That idea redirected my reading and writing. I began to focus on recovering a sense of enchantment—not as imaginative nostalgia, but as metaphysical reality. And the only way to do that faithfully and rationally was to ask:

• Does the cosmos have meaning—an inherent structure of purpose and givenness for the good of creation?

• If so, what are the obstacles erected by modernity that prevent us from accessing that meaning… meaningfully?

Modern Obstacles to Meaning

Reading the Great Books has offered many clues. I don’t intend to reconstruct a complete historical narrative here, but in general, I found the following intellectual trends converging as early as the 15th and 16th centuries and gaining momentum during the Enlightenment: skepticism, rationalism, cynicism, empiricism, materialism, scientism, atheism, pragmatism, and scientific determinism.

While some of these frameworks boast real achievements—empiricism, for instance, laid the groundwork for the scientific method—our cultural tendency to elevate them into standalone epistemological paradigms has contributed to modern secular reductionism: the flattening of our worldview and the escalation of the so-called “meaning crisis.”

Three Practices That Helped

How have I begun to find my own way out of this mindset? Through three primary practices, which I hope are more or less evident in my writing:

1. Reading with a Hermeneutic of Charity

Reading chronologically through the works of Western literature has helped immensely, though it has meant setting aside modern prejudices and being willing to “stretch” my understanding in uncomfortable ways. I call this reading with a hermeneutic of charity—giving a dead author my full attention and striving to understand his meaning before evaluating or dismissing it.

2. Learning to Think Symbolically and Hierarchically

This is the project of Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolic World, with which many of you are likely familiar. What do things mean? Well, they mean themselves, of course—a rose is a rose—but they can also signify other things, and these patterns of symbolic meaning are nested within a Great Chain of Being. This is the important lesson of all mythology, poetry, and religion. The trick is realizing that it’s also the lesson of creation. Learning this requires time, silence, and direct engagement with reality—the opposite of screen time.

3. Recovering the Union of Form and Matter

In traditional metaphysics, this unity is called hylomorphism. It’s a simple concept you naturally encounter everywhere, and its rejection is one of the great losses in the modern world, especially in art and storytelling.

Take poetry: once dominated by structured forms like the sonnet or ballad, modern poetry now favors free verse, which dispenses with rhythmic discipline and formal constraints. Free verse has become the preferred modern soul of the poem, but by throwing off form, it has sacrificed something essential to poetic experience. To my mind, restoring the union of form and matter is one of the first steps in the process of re-enchantment.

Looking Ahead

So what’s in store for the coming year at The Occidental Tourist?

• I’ll continue developing my series on Dante’s Divine Comedy and its literary antecedents as an itinerary of spiritual conversion. Next up: Biblical influences, followed by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

• This fall, I begin final coursework and thesis preparation for my M.A. in Humanities, where I’ll argue that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series subverts the assumptions of the modern materialist worldview through a sacramental Christian mythos. This will involve research into the genre of Christian fantasy, literary alchemy, and medieval motifs—all of which I plan to share here.

• I’ll also continue to publish a monthly study guide and post-discussion recap for paid subscribers following my Great Books reading club. We’re reading (more or less) along Adler’s Ten-Year Reading Plan, and will be covering the following works through year’s end:

Shakespeare’s Macbeth • Milton’s Areopagitica • Pascal’s Pensées • Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels • Voltaire’s Candide • Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals • Mill’s On Liberty • Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil • Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World

Once again, thank you for being part of this journey.
Please share any feedback—I'd love to know how I can make this a more rewarding experience for you.

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In my previous post on Homer, I explored the theme of mênis—Achilles' rage—which dominates The Iliad’s foreground and fuels its tragic action. The Odyssey, in contrast, is the epic of nostos: the hero's return. In this post, I want to reflect on a related motif found in both Homer and Dante, one of the most intriguing and enduring images in the ancient imagination: the nekyia (νέκυια), a journey to the underworld.

Literary critic Northrop Frye notes that the gods of the traditional epics act in a continuous present, influencing events by the immediacy of their will.1 To obtain knowledge of the future, however, the epic hero must typically travel to the kingdom of the dead. This descent to the lower world is never merely geographical; it is a descent into liminality, the domain of memory, prophecy, and otherworldly wisdom. For the questing hero, the underworld reveals mysteries that can only be obtained through a confrontation with death itself.

The nekyia in Homer’s Odyssey (Book 11) establishes the archetype. Odysseus, after an extended sojourn on Circe's enchanted isle, must travel to the underworld to consult the blind prophet Tiresias, whose counsel he needs to arrive safely in Ithaka and avoid rousing the already irate gods who oppose his nostos. Odysseus and his men depart Circe's island, sailing for the distant shore where Persephone’s black poplars hide the portal to the House of Death. There Odysseus performs a necromantic ritual: digging and filling a trench with libations of honey, milk, wine, and blood to summon the shades of the dead.

When Tiresias appears (whose name can be translated as "the weariness of rowing"),2 he instructs Odysseus on how to reach Ithaka and gives details of the impending showdown with his wife's suitors. But then the blind seer delivers an enigmatic prophecy: Odysseus must make a journey at the end of his life to a remote inland country, where he will plant his oar in the ground to appease Poseidon's wrath, concluding

And at last your own death will steal upon you...
a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes
to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age
with all your people there in blessed peace around you.3

After consulting with other shades, including his mother and fallen comrades, Achilles and Agamemnon, Odysseus returns to his ship by the same route and resumes his journey home.

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Dante’s Descent

Other classical examples of nekyia include that of the Trojan hero Aeneas who goes down to Hades in Virgil's Aeneid. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno imitates Virgil’s thematic descent but transfigures it with history and Christian symbolism. Dante (the lost pilgrim) and his guide Virgil descend into the spiraling circles of Hell, which become successively more narrow as the horror of human dysfunction on display expands. Here, the architecture of Hell itself is a creation of divine justice whose sometimes mystifying penal logic Dante must assimilate before he can ascend again.

Unlike Odysseus, who returns to the upper world by the same route, Dante must pass through the lowest pit of Hell where Satan lies immobilized in ice, and there—by gravitational inversion—begin the long climb out the other side, emerging with Virgil's help at Mt. Purgatory. Dante’s path, then, is a reorientation: he comes out at the opposite end, having passed through the hellish depths of dysfunction. Before he leaves Hell, however, he encounters his famous forerunner, Odysseus, in one of the most memorable interviews of the Inferno (Canto 26).

The Dual Character of Ulysses

Traditions about Odysseus abound in Greek and Roman literature, with as many unflattering depictions as admiring ones. Even in Homer, wily Odysseus is never the purely virtuous hero. His character boasts of metis (cunning intelligence) marked by ambiguity. He succeeds by deception as often as by craft, usually blurring the boundary between them. In Dante’s Inferno, this ambiguity earns him condemnation. The poet places Ulysses (his Latin name) in the eighth circle of Hell among the fraudulent counselors, as punishment for his stratagems in the Trojan Horse affair and the theft of the Palladium, the sacred image of Athena.

The poet does not treat Ulysses simply with disdain, however. He raises him into a kind of tragic figure whose native nobility is undone by the same yearning that animates The Divine Comedy: the intense desire to know. Dante's Ulysses is consumed by an unbounded “lust for knowledge” that imitates our first parents' transgression.

Departing from Homer's storyline, this Ulysses tells Virgil and Dante how, after leaving Circe’s island with his men, he turned the ship’s bow westward toward uncharted seas, "making wings out of our oars in a wild flight"4 from the duties and consolations of home and family.5 Racing towards the other side of the globe, Ulysses spied mystical Mount Purgatory rising from the ocean, but a divine whirlwind caught the ship and sank it before they could approach the shore.

This recasting of the Odyssean myth is not simply poetic license. In Dante’s moral universe, Ulysses’ fate serves as a warning: unmoored from humility and the order of love, even the noblest yearning becomes destructive. This insight is intensified in Purgatorio 19, where the pilgrim is reminded that Ulysses embodied a specifically intellectual form of incontinence—gluttony for knowledge and experience.

Tennyson’s Ulysses: The Romantic Refashioning

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “Ulysses” takes up Dante’s story and embellishes it with Romantic flair, embracing the hero's wanderlust as virtue. Written in 1833 while grieving the death of his friend Arthur Hallam (of “In Memoriam” fame), Tennyson’s poem portrays an aging and restless Ulysses at home, the burdens of kingship and domesticity weighing heavily on him: “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees.”

This Ulysses feels the pinch of time. Scorning his quiet life in Ithaka and wearing his crown like a yoke, he aches to recover the vitality of youth. “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” One's life, like a sword, must be continually tried in contests—not left to tarnish in disuse. And though diminished by age, Ulysses exalts the enduring spirit of man:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…

Rather than seeking wisdom from below or above, Tennyson’s Ulysses looks past the horizon. He dreams of sailing “beyond the sunset and the baths / Of all the western stars,” hoping to meet Achilles in the Happy Isles. Where Dante's Ulysses is punished for transgressing human bounds, Tennyson’s hero transforms that same longing into a defiant, noble hope: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

His is not the way down, but the way out.

The Ultimate Descent: Christ’s Harrowing of Hell

Tennyson's "Ulysses" has rightly earned its laurels in literature as one of the great tributes to the human spirit, but it belies a modern conceit: that we can somehow leap towards infinite vistas of fulfillment by casting off the familiar ties that embed us in a particular place, family and community.

Between the ages of Homer and Dante, a new nekyia emerged in Western tradition that surpassed every other in heroic measure—its unlikely hero not resisting but yielding to the instrument of death…and paradoxically defeating it. Christians everywhere are observing it liturgically this week in the Paschal Mystery of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, culminating in the Easter celebration.

The Church traditionally commemorates this nekyia on Holy Saturday. This event is known as the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ descended to the dead following his crucifixion, to free the souls of the righteous awaiting their redemption. Its historicity is affirmed doctrinally in the Bible, but the imaginative details are elaborated in the Gospel of Nicodemus, an apocryphal text from the 4th or 5th century A.D. In this narrative, Christ breaks down the gates of Hades and liberates a host of saints from the Old Testament, including Adam, Abraham, and David. Dante preserves this story in Inferno 4, when Virgil recalls “a Great Lord” who entered Limbo and carried off many souls “making them blessed”.

Unlike Tennyson’s Ulysses, Christ does not flee from mortality but embraces it in obedience to his Father who ordained his death for the salvation of souls. The Catechism of the Catholic Church declares: “Christ went down into the depths of death so that ‘the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live’” (CCC §635). His descent is not an evasion of suffering but its transfiguration. By descending in obedience and ascending in triumph, Christ unites the “way down” with the “way up.”

Three Modes of Descent, Three Modes of Life

What emerges from this meditation on the nekyia are three archetypal paths of descent, each offering an ethical vision of the way down into finitude as the way up into liberation.

• Odysseus’ descent is the path of gnosis. He enters the shadow world to learn hidden truths, reckon with death, and navigate his return. It is a ritual of memory and grief, undertaken for prophetic guidance.

• Dante’s descent is the path of conversion. He goes down into Hell to confront sin and dysfunction so he can turn away from error and find his way back. He emerges not by his own heroism, but by grace and a guide.

• Christ’s descent is the path of oblation. It is not self-seeking but self-emptying, a journey into the depths of God-forsakenness to offer oneself for the redemption of others.

Tennyson’s Ulysses, by contrast, rejects the nekyia altogether. Rather than adapt to the tragic level of existence—aging, suffering, finitude—he leaps into the unknown. It is a bold gesture against fate—Beethoven shaking his fist at heaven, if you will—but ultimately an ineffective escape from the vicissitudes of time. William F. Lynch, in Christ and Apollo, notes that the Romantic hero, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, “shut[s] himself off in solitude from man and God in order that he may stand brilliantly on his own.” But this leap toward infinity ends not in transcendence, but in a “tenuous, unreal dream that has no roots in the earth.”6

During this Holy Week, especially, it’s a good reminder that true transformation comes not by refusing the downward journey, but by embracing it. The nekyia teaches us that only by facing the reality of death, failure, and finitude with courage and patience, can we hope to rise—not as gods, but as redeemed and reoriented human beings.

Bonus Audio: “The Harrowing of Hell” read by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick on The Lord of the Spirits podcast.7

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My Great Books reading club met this past Wednesday to discuss Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’ 17th century treatise on man, politics, and power. This is the work that brought him into disrepute with Royalists and Parliamentarians alike during the tumultuous age of Oliver Cromwell, but also ensured secured his lasting place in the history of philosophy. You can access my study guide here:

Leviathan begins with an exploration of human psychology, language, and social behaviors before mounting a pessimistic argument for the political necessity of the social contract. Hobbes describes an account of reality defined by “a condition of war of every one against every one.”1 Only by entering into a covenant with an absolute sovereign—invested with both legislative and protective authority—can human beings ensure mutual peace and security. The cost of this arrangement, however, is the forfeiture of certain rights and freedoms.

Readers today may be drawn to, or repulsed by, Hobbes’ hard-nosed political realism. But I think there’s something more insidious at work in Leviathan—his metaphysical nominalism.

Hobbes bluntly denied the existence of universal forms, claiming that only the names we assign to things are universal, while the things themselves are “every one of them individual and singular.”2 In other words, terms like “man” or “tree” refer not to shared essences, but merely to verbal conventions that group isolated particulars. Each man or tree, in Hobbes’ view, is an atomistic being, essentially unrelated to every other.

Compound nominalism with empiricism—the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense experience, which Hobbes also affirmed—and centuries later you arrive at what journalist Mary Harrington describes as “an anthropology that rejects human meaning and human purpose, for one that sees only cause, and effect, and materiality to be engineered.”

Mary Harrington

Truth Seeking Is Not A Pathology

Originally delivered on 2 April at the Family Formation and the Future conference, at the Danube Institute, Budapest…

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a year ago · 226 likes · 63 comments · Mary Harrington

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Truth Seeking and Human Telos

Harrington’s insights about the collision of truth, technology, and human relationships reveal just how calamitous the adoption of bad metaphysics can be. “The most destructive progressive policies today,” she writes, “have their grounding in the idea that there’s no truth, and no normative nature to anything – even, or especially, people.”

“What is truth?” a Roman governor once famously inquired of his prisoner. Ask a classically-trained metaphysician and you’ll hear something like: truth is the agreement of an object with its corresponding idea in the intellect. This definition presumes a normative relationship between thought and being—a shared ontology.3

This is exactly what Hobbes denies, along with his post-modern successors, who—as Harringtong notes—have revolted against human nature and telos (purpose) in order to engineer their vision of reality governed exclusively by material cause and effect. Harrington concedes that this ideological shift has enabled “potent discoveries” in science and technology, but it has also yielded catastrophic outcomes like the atomic bomb. More broadly,

…when you scale this kind of applied technicity up to the level of societies, and the governments that order them, this blind spot in the shape of meaning and relationships begins to look like many of the challenges we are discussing…The collapse in family formation; the bleeding away of rightly ordered sexuality into hedonism or apathy; the inability to grasp why mass migration is widely unpopular and highly volatile at scale; the disintegration of religious faith.

A Tyranny of the Univocal Imagination

What most unsettles me about Hobbes and his intellectual heirs is the hidden contradiction at the heart of their nominalist worldview. It doesn’t quite emerge in Harrington’s post, focused as she is on the downstream effects of human and social re-engineering. It has to do with the kind of imagination they apply to reality, and how their ideas gain transmission and authority.

As we have seen, Hobbes roundly rejects Aristotle’s metaphysics—things like form, incorporeal substances, and final causes—insisting that reality relates only to univocal terms, not to essences. Yet at the same time, he attempts to impose a tyrannical uniformity on reality through the lens of his “master idea,” the belief that all men are in a state of war with each other and perpetually competing for power.

Though Hobbes denies objective categories such as good, evil, justice, and injustice, relegating them to expressions of individual appetite or aversion, he nonetheless posits a universal equivalence among human beings. But this equality is not grounded in dignity or nature; it is merely a rough parity of strength and cunning that leads inevitably to violent conflict. In this way, Hobbes prefigures what Harrington calls “the central postmodern claim”: There is no truth, only power.

Author William Lynch, S.J., describes such philosophical incoherence as the result of what he calls the “univocal imagination.” In Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination, Lynch writes,

[T]he univocal mind often poses as the exclusive organizer and interpreter of a highly concrete, pluralistic, and individuated world. What was a legitimate process as it rose out of this world to create its own forms of sameness…now becomes not only illegitimate but dangerous as well. Now it not merely isolates and externalizes; its whole temptation is to reduce everything, like and unlike, to a flat community of sameness—all in the name of an intelligibility and type of order that does not and cannot belong to the real world.4 (Emphasis mine.)

This, perhaps, is the ultimate irony of Leviathan: a project that denies transcendent order in order to enforce a totalizing one of its own design. In fleeing metaphysical reality, Hobbes helped pave the way for modernity’s most misguided illusion—that science and politics can liberate us from our own limited and defined natures.

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My Great Books reading club is discussing the first part of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan this month, the monumental 17th century treatise on power and the Commonwealth which is said to have originated modern political thought. We’ve read authors of a similar bent in the past year, including Machiavelli, Locke, and Rousseau. It will be interesting to compare Hobbes’ political views with theirs, especially as pertaining to power, the state of nature, and the social contract.

A Brief Biography of Thomas Hobbes

He was described by historian Will Durant as “the boldest heretic of his age,” yet upsets in Thomas Hobbes’ early life left him a timorous and bookish young man. He arrived prematurely on April 5, 1588 in Wiltshire, England—his mother blaming her untimely confinement on the imminent threat of the Spanish Armada. This prompted Hobbes to reflect later that she “gave birth to twins: myself and fear."1 His pugnacious father, an Anglican clergyman, later abandoned his anxious wife and three children after a brawl at the front door of their church. Hobbes was subsequently raised by an uncle.

At the age of fifteen, Hobbes entered Magdalen College, Oxford to read philosophy; but he quickly developed a distaste for Aristotle and turned his attention to other classical authors, and also fed his wanderlust on tales of famous English explorers. He would soon satisfy his desire to travel while employed as a tutor for the powerful Cavendish family of Devonshire, eventually completing four tours abroad, including his final eleven-year sojourn in Paris as a political refugee of the English Civil War—and a supporter of the doomed king, Charles I.

Hobbes’ first biographer, John Aubrey, describes his discovery of Euclid’s Elements at age 40 as a turning point of his intellectual life, sparking a lifelong interest in mathematics and a particular passion for geometry’s “art of reasoning.” His written achievements after this time are impressive. In 1629, Hobbes published a translation of Thucydides, followed by more than forty works of rhetoric, law, philosophy, optics, physics, and mathematics. Of these, Leviathan (1651) is considered his magnum opus and “one of the landmarks in the history of philosophy.”2

At the time of its publication, however, Leviathan met with widespread criticism and controversy. Although Hobbes advocated for absolute monarchy, his stance on the social contract was thought to undermine the divine right of kings as well as parliamentary authority. This cost Hobbes the support of Royalists and Parliament alike, while his overt materialism and attitude toward the Church incited accusations of heresy. As a result of these controversies, Hobbes was forced to retire to private life but his characteristic obstinacy kept him in continuous quarrels with political and academic opponents until the end of his life in 1679.

Analysis of Hobbes’ Leviathan

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Last week, I wrote about the curious reference in the lectionary readings for the 3rd Sunday of Lent to a “spiritual rock” that followed Moses and the Israelites during their desert wanderings. According to St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:4, “the rock was Christ.” It’s a concise Christian interpretation but it left me wondering: what is the full story behind this mysterious rock, and how ought we to understand Paul’s claim today?

In this post, I’ll share what I’ve since discovered about Moses’ miraculous rock and offer you some interpretive tools to unlock not only the full meaning of this passage, but also the symbolic language of many great works of imaginative literature. To do so, we’ll turn to the fourfold method of medieval exegesis—hilariously rendered by my phone’s voice-to-text feature as “medieval eggs of Jesus”. 😂

Rock of Moses, Part Deux

This week, I immersed myself in rabbinic interpretations of the events at Horeb, where water sprang—twice—from an ordinary rock, according to the biblical accounts in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20. While the Jewish Midrash offers various interpretations, the basic storyline is this: God provided the Israelites with a miraculous source of water from a rock struck by Moses at the beginning of their desert exile. This source sustained them throughout their forty years of wandering1 and came to be known as “Miriam’s Well”, flowing, it was said, on account of the goodness of Moses’ sister Miriam until her death in the fortieth year.2

With Miriam’s passing, the water dried up—which is subtly suggested by the sequence of events in Numbers 20:1-2—and once more the people quarreled with Moses. Entreating God to intervene, Moses received divine instruction to speak to the rock. This is where the rabbinic commentary becomes somewhat muddled: apparently, the original rock rolled away and concealed itself (!) among the other boulders.3 Moses attempted to address it but—whether through a case of mistaken rock identity or a lapse in pious trust—he failed to produce water. In frustration, he struck the rock twice. This time water flowed, but Moses’ disobedience triggered God’s displeasure and a hefty penalty: he was barred from entering the Promised Land.

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Unlocking the Meaning of the Text

This rich and layered story, spanning two great religious traditions, beguiles us with its interpretive possibilities. How should modern readers understand the ancient narrative, presented as part miracle, part mystery, part moral reckoning? If we resist the reflexive and, frankly, pedestrian urge to dismiss it as a tall tale or nursery story, we are still left with several hermeneutic options. Is it merely a historical account? A moral lesson? A veiled prophecy? Or something more transcendent altogether?

To approach such questions with theological and literary depth, I sought a method capable of attending to all these dimensions at once. In a flash of inspiration, I remembered William F. Lynch’s Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination (1960). I first read this work of literary criticism for a graduate course in Literary Theory nearly a decade ago. Grabbing it from my bookshelf, I opened it at random to the supplement on “The Fourfold Method of Exegesis”.

In the section quoting theologian John Cassian (ca. 370-435), I read:

Surely revelation refers to allegory through which those things that historical narration touches upon are revealed in a spiritual sense and meaning. It is as though we tried to explain how “our fathers were all under the cloud and all in Moses were baptized”…and “all did eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink of the rock that followed them4; and the rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:1-4).

Bingo! Here was the precise interpretive key I needed in the work of a venerable theologian tackling the selfsame passage in question more than a millennium and a half earlier. Nihil novi sub sole.5 I need only take my hermeneutic cues from the exegetical method he was expounding and apply it to my reading of the text today.

Layers of Meaning: A Journey Through Sacred Imagination

Central to medieval exegesis, which originated in the Patristic period and reached its peak in the Middle Ages, is its fourfold sense of Scripture: a way of reading that opens up the text on four levels of meaning, identified as literal (or historical), allegorical, moral, and anagogical. Far from being a relic of the past, this method remains a powerful tool not only for understanding Scripture but for interpreting the symbolic structure of much of Western literature.

So let’s take a closer look at how medieval exegesis works, and how we can use it to illuminate both the rock in the wilderness and the Rock “who followed them”. We’ll start by unpacking each interpretive layer as a progressively unfolding encounter with meaning.

• Literal: The literal or historical meaning is the basis for all figurative interpretations, according to the 12th-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor. It refers to the ordinary sense of the words or story taken at face value.

• Allegorical: Allegory is the spiritual sense “signified [when] the letter of Scripture symbolizes, in turn, another fact, present or future.”6 Traditionally, the events of the Old Testament are understood as figures of the New—frequently as types or manifestations concerning Christ or the Church.

• Moral: This is also called the tropological sense (think: tropes). It is the moral or ethical meaning that arises from the figurative sense of the text. Typically, this sense refers back to Christ whose example impels us to reform our own actions.

• Anagogical: The Greek word anagoge means “to lead up”, to ascend. Thus, this sense refers to the final or eschatological fulfillment of the previous senses—the glorious or heavenly destiny to which they all point in Christ.

As was his wont, St. Thomas Aquinas adds a systematic approach to this method. First, he says, it’s not the case that every passage contains all four senses. Everything written has a literal sense, of course, but not all passages carry every spiritual meaning. Furthermore, where spiritual meaning is concerned the reader must begin with a thorough understanding of the text’s literal sense. You cannot just apply any spiritual sense, which is not grounded in the literal meaning.

Subsequently, the symbolism of Christ present in the allegorical sense is meant to illuminate his mystical Body, the Church, while the moral sense applies the example of his life to the conduct of the individual believer. Finally, Thomas warns, nothing in Scripture is expressed in hidden meaning which is not clearly explained elsewhere. “Thus a spiritual interpretation should always be supported by some literal interpretation of Holy Scripture” to avoid any occasion of error.7

Understanding “The Rock That Was Christ”

Now we are ready to apply our interpretive prowess to St. Paul’s passage in 1 Cor 10:1-4:

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all of them were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ. (1 Cor 10:1-5)

This passage spells out the allegorical sense of the Old Testament stories of the rock at Horeb in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20. Paul attests to the rabbinic tradition that the rock (or the water) followed the Israelites during their sojourn. By concluding that the rock was Christ, he is pointing to the sacramental meaning behind the miracles of the Hebrew Exodus: baptism and the Eucharist, specified as “spiritual food” (symbolized by manna) and “spiritual drink” (symbolized by water).

The element of water, too, is rich with allegorical meaning, prompting us to recall the “living water” mentioned in such passages as John 4:10 (the “Woman at the Well”), John 7:37-38 (“rivers of living water”), and Ezekiel 47:1-12 (“I saw water flowing from the temple”). According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), water is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, not only in baptism but also in our souls: “Thus the Spirit is also personally the living water welling up from Christ crucified as its source8 and welling up in us to eternal life.”9

This image now calls forth the moral meaning for each believer. It includes an invitation to mental prayer, “the encounter of God’s thirst with ours.”10

The Holy Spirit is the living water “welling up to eternal life” in the heart that prays. It is he who teaches us to accept it at its source: Christ. Indeed, in the Christian life there are several wellsprings where Christ awaits us to enable us to drink of the Holy Spirit (CCC #2652).

These include the Word of God, the Liturgy of the Church, the theological virtues, and the sacramental mystery of the present moment (“If today you hear his voice…”).

Finally, the anagogical mystery prefigured by Miriam’s Well and the Rock of Christ points to the “river of life” flowing from the Throne of God and the Lamb in the New Jerusalem (Rev. 22:1). With this beautiful, Spirit-filled vision of the heavenly kingdom, the whole dramatic arc of salvation history is brought to its joyous completion…as is this very long post. Thank you for reading!

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A spiritual rock that followed them…

There was a curious passage in last Sunday’s lectionary reading from the epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, describing God’s providence towards the Israelites during their exile in the desert:

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all of them were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ. (1 Cor 10:1-5)

Wait…what?? A rock that followed them? I suppose I’ve breezed over this verse many times without ever registering its strangeness, but that day it caught my attention and I was curious to know what biblical commentators have made of it.

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Fortunately, I recently acquired a vintage set of Marvin Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament, originally published in 1887. I can get by with the Latin Vulgate but I know nothing of New Testament Greek, so it’s a useful reference for my study of Scripture. What’s more: Prof. Vincent is not only a minister but a Greek scholar whose scriptural exegesis draws on biblical scholarship and classical literature with equal facility. He’ll go from quoting theologians like Charles Ellicott and J. B. Lightfoot to literary giants like Homer, Aeschylus, and Dante without missing a beat.

So here’s what Prof. Vincent has to say on this passage from Corinthians:

Paul appears to recall a rabbinic tradition that there was a well formed out of the spring in Horeb, which gathered itself up into a rock like a swarm of bees, and followed the people for forty years; sometimes rolling itself, sometimes carried by Miriam, and always addressed by the elders, when they encamped, with the words, “Spring up, O well!” Num. xxi. 17.1 (Emphasis mine.)

He also reports that local tradition describes the Rock of Moses at Mt. Sinai as a large boulder about fifteen feet high with multiples fissures out of which water would have flowed, and that the story is also recorded in the Koran.2 I didn’t look up the Koran reference, but I found a similar account repeated in The Lord of Spirits podcast episode on the apocryphal Book of Jubilees. As Orthodox priest Fr. Stephen De Young was discussing the importance of Midrash—ancient Jewish commentary on the Hebrew scriptures—within the rabbinic tradition, he brought up the Corinthians passage above as an example of St. Paul engaging with Midrash.

Then he raised a reasonable question about the rock of Horeb, which Moses struck at God’s command to give the people water: if the Israelites are provided water from this rock at the beginning of their 40 years of wandering (Exodus 17:1-7), and again at the end (Numbers 20:7-11), “where did they get water for the rest of the 40 years?” The answer, according to Fr. Stephen, is recorded in the Midrash and echoed by St. Paul—the rock followed them the entire time!

Fr. Stephen: What you find in the Midrash is not only a whole story about the rock following them, but the complete text of a song that Israel sang every time they made camp to get the rock to pick up from where it was and to roll over to them and deposit itself where they were camped now—

Fr. Andrew: That's so amazing.

Fr. Stephen: —and all the rejoicing they did every time it happened. So it's like this whole developed story, but it's just incorporated into the [Biblical] text.3

By recalling this midrashic story, Fr. Stephen is making a point about apocryphal (i.e. extra-biblical) literature. Although it’s not on the level of inspired Scripture, both Rabbinic Judaism and the Apostle Paul appear to sanction teachings contained in it. “And by the way,” says Fr. Stephen, “St. Paul feels totally free to just reference these traditions. He doesn't feel the need to parenthetically say, ‘Oh, but that whole 'following [rock]' thing, that's just a tradition; that's not actually in the Bible.’”

…and the rock was Christ.

Returning to Prof. Vincent’s Word Studies, however, we encounter a different interpretation of St. Paul. From the last clause of verse 5 (“the rock was Christ”), Vincent concludes that St. Paul “does not believe the legend, but only uses it allegorically.” He then expounds in a footnote on the range of theologians’ reactions to the story: “Edwards, Meyer, Alford, Stanley, [sic] adopt the reference to the tradition. Ellicott is very doubtful; and Godet thinks it incredible that ‘the most spiritual of the apostles should hold and teach the Church such puerilities.’”4

This reinforces my general impression of 19th century theologians: that they were a well-educated and sober-minded bunch, predictably rational if not downright skeptical. Men like Vincent and Godet would have been enamored with the latest theories of textual criticism and hermeneutics, various views of historicism, or the proliferating discoveries of archaeology. I expect, too, that their tolerance of Christianity’s supernatural claims would have varied, with many striving to avoid the taint of too much “myth or superstition” in their personal beliefs.

After all, the decades that followed the Napoleonic Wars had ushered in a new age of industry, science, and global enterprise. Modernity was at its high-water mark, in terms of both cultural optimism and material achievements. A story about an ancient Semitic tribe passing through the Red Sea on dry land, followed afterwards by a “rolling stone” in the Sinai wilderness was probably a tad too much to swallow for the generation that witnessed its own Red Sea marvel—the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869.

For these modern men of letters or science, an “allegorical” explanation comes in handy—it’s suitably spiritual without making the embarrassing cognitive demands of the miraculous.

Understanding Literal and Allegorical Meaning

Which brings me to the crux of this quandary of scriptural (i.e., literary) interpretation: what is the real meaning of St. Paul’s statement that “a spiritual rock followed them”?

• Do I accept the apocryphal story of the self-propelled rock as historically true and incorporate it into the traditional biblical story for an even richer narrative? Or…

• Do I follow the modern Christian tendency to seek spiritual meaning first and foremost, knowing that ancient writers lacked the scientific knowledge and historical consciousness that we have today?

Another way of asking this is, simply, do I adopt a literal or a spiritual stance towards this story?

Does it need to be one or the other, though? Can or should it even be both? What does the long-standing Christian tradition reveal about how to read such texts profitably? I’ve found an exciting clue in my research to help solve this dilemma, but you’ll need to wait for Part II of this story next week!

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