But is this an effect that Mark Twain would have celebrated? The prevailing assumption is that he would, and with devilish delight. But his life and work contain meanings that stand in contrast, if not opposition, to the common perception of his irreverence. A few years before his death in 1910, Twain reflected that “humor is only a fragrance, a decoration” in what he called his “sermons.” He ­attributed his success as a humorist to one thing: “I have always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years.” Twain was a harsh critic of superstition and institutional religion’s doctrinaire tendencies, but at the core of his literary sermons (especially those he wrote late in life) is an earnest, ever-evolving, often erratic quest to discern what he called “the Deity.”

Throughout his career, religion was a favorite satirical target of Twain’s. As early as the late 1860s, as Twain’s popularity was rising, his dispatches from Europe and the Holy Land drew the ire of pious readers. The humorist’s irreverent jabs at the “imaginary holy places created by the monks” so offended one minister that he condemned Twain as “a son of the devil.”

After Twain’s death in 1910, The Mysterious ­Stranger: A Romance magnified this reputation. Published in 1916, the bleak narrative focuses on a satanic stranger who convinces the young narrator, Theodor, that God does not exist and that life is a grotesque dream. Scholars cite the text as evidence of the humorist’s late-life descent into pessimism and nihilism. It certainly seemed to reflect the mind of a man who had suffered bankruptcy and the deaths of his wife, Livy, and two of his daughters, Susy and Jean, during his final decade and a half.

As Twain’s last important work of fiction, The Mysterious Stranger came to be seen as the key to his last years, “a kind of Nunc ­Dimittis,” in the words of the scholar William Gibson. The critic Bernard ­DeVoto includes it among the “symbols of despair” he believes Twain had crafted near the end. Though it is inferior to Twain’s earlier works, DeVoto saw The Mysterious ­Stranger as having prevented the author from crossing “the indefinable line between sanity and madness.” Even so, he sees the story’s nihilistic ending as Twain’s literary detonation of the universe, by means of which he sought to absolve himself of guilt and responsibility.

Until the early 1960s, this dour view of Twain and The Mysterious Stranger was the scholarly consensus. Roger Salomon concluded in 1961 that, although in The Mysterious Stranger Twain had failed “to develop a coherent imaginative response” to life’s absurdity, at least he had succeeded “in making this absurdity vivid.” Writing a year later, the literary scholar Henry Nash Smith asserted that Twain had found a refuge from life’s futility only by identifying with Satan, a “supernatural spectator for whom mankind is but a race of vermin, hardly worth ­contempt. And this,” Smith ­concluded, “marks the end of his career as a writer, for there is nothing more to say.”

But the groundbreaking discovery in 1962 that The ­Mysterious Stranger was not the narrative Twain intended proved Smith’s report premature, if not greatly exaggerated. The literary detective work of John Tuckey found that the version published in 1916 was actually a patchwork of three different drafts Twain had worked on between 1897 and 1908, along with a bridgework paragraph he had not written. ­Tuckey also noted the alteration of characters’ names and the addition of an astrologer figure. Two of Twain’s drafts were unfinished: “Chronicle of Young Satan” (1897–1900) and “Schoolhouse Hill” (1898). The other, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, which Twain had worked from 1902 to 1908, was a longer work in multiple chapters and with a clearly marked conclusion.

In 1969, all three drafts were published for the first time in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, with William Gibson’s introduction untangling some of the mystery surrounding the 1916 publication. Gibson calls this version “an editorial fraud . . . that almost certainly would have enraged” Twain. The culprits? Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s literary executor, and Frederick A. Duneka, an editor with Harper & Brothers. Paine and ­Duneka had taken the bleak, unfinished “Chronicle of Young Satan” and added to it the concluding chapter of the arguably more theologically upbeat No. 44, thereby changing its meaning. In “Young Satan,” a malevolent stranger appears hellbent on destroying the moral sense of young Theodor (whose name means “gift of God”). In No. 44, Twain never identifies the mysterious stranger as satanic. If anything, this otherworldly visitor yearns to befriend its young ­narrator, August.

Among the many differences between the 1916 version and Twain’s No. 44, the most crucial disparity is theological. The concluding chapter in Paine and Duneka’s text leaves Theodor adrift in nihilistic despair. In No. 44, where the concluding chapter reflects Twain’s intended vision, it represents a more transcendent ending. The Stranger provides August with a surreal and apocalyptic experience beyond humanity’s “hysterically insane” religious fictions, one that empowers him to “dream other dreams, and better!”

And yet Paine and ­Duneka’s fraud continued to shape ­perceptions of the Stranger and of Twain. ­Tuckey declared as late as 1980 that “a false ‘Stranger’ has . . . been parading before the world while the real one has remained hidden and ­unknown.” Indeed, as Kevin Malone’s opera attests, the dark shadow cast over Twain’s religious outlook by the fraud endures into this century. Shortly before ­Dawkins and the other Horsemen of the New Atheism galloped onto the scene, an article in the Hartford Courant, the newspaper of the city where Twain lived with his family for two decades, dubbed him the “comic village atheist” who took “a one-way trip to the darkside” and became “a proto-existentialist bemoaning ­being and nothingness.”

Given the delight Twain evidently took in ridiculing religion while delivering increasingly angry invectives against the biblical God, does the convoluted history of The Mysterious Stranger even matter to our understanding of his religious sensibilities?

John Tuckey believed that in light of No. 44, Twain’s late writings and what they reveal about his frame of mind warranted reappraisal. At the very least, as he concluded in the 1960s, DeVoto’s “interpretation may now be seen to need some questioning.” Despite the conventional emphasis on “the ­despair-laden portion of Twain’s later work,” Tuckey argued in notes for an unfinished study that the late Twain “had his exuberances and enthusiasm” as well. These positive impulses, Tuckey asserts in notes from the late 1970s, culminated in No. 44’s transcendent concluding chapter, in which August “learns to extinguish time” and experiences “a remarkable breakthrough . . . [into] the void that non-exists before the creative act.” Tuckey came to see the “exuberances and enthusiasm” that informed this conclusion as “much more the result of normal and pervasive trends and movements and forces than has been appreciated.” In my view, Tuckey referred here to trends and movements that were part of the nineteenth century’s liberal religious ethos.

From his youth in Hannibal, Missouri, through his later years in Connecticut, Mark Twain engaged with many of the liberal religious trends and movements that were shaping his culture. Following the Enlightenment, religious liberalism emerged in the West as a way to preserve ancient faith claims in a world that was rapidly changing. Liberal Christians, hoping to sustain the vitality of their faith amid modernity, sought a middle path between atheistic rationalism and authority-based religious tradition.

Within America’s religious liberal spectrum were devout Christians, such as the controversial divine Horace Bushnell, who were open to what some saw as heretical reforms. Others, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, were religious radicals who wanted to liberate orthodox religion “from every sort of thraldom to irrational and merely traditional authority” (in the words of William Potter, founding member of the Free Religious Association). Contrary to the assumption that Twain’s criticisms of religion expressed mocking skepticism or hostile atheism, he possessed a religious sensibility that was deeply informed by these heterodox theologies.

During Twain’s boyhood in Hannibal, his father was a freethinker and his uncle a universalist. Though he attended a Presbyterian church as a boy, he read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason as a cub riverboat pilot and joined a Masonic lodge in St. Louis. Perhaps most ­significantly, he confessed his “powerful” ambition as a youth to be “a preacher of the gospel.” What thwarted that ambition was the profession’s “stock in trade—i.e. religion.”

Though some scholars see this split between the gospel and religion as informing Twain’s sense of irony, it also happens to be a key tenet of religious liberalism. The influential Unitarian minister Theodore Parker drew a similar distinction in his 1841 sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” Declaring that “real Christianity . . . is not a system of doctrines,” Parker distinguished the “Word of Jesus” from the institutional religion that had grown around it into what “men call Christianity.” Twain was likely familiar with this view, thanks to his friendships with leading Unitarian Christian ministers during the Civil War, including Thomas Starr King and Henry Bellows, both of whom were closely associated with Parker.

Though Twain was not to be ordained as a minister, he discerned his calling at this time as a humorist in religious terms. His vocation was not to shepherd souls to heaven; his calling, he said, alluding to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30, was to use his God-given talent “to excite the laughter of God’s creatures” in this earthly realm. His early writings were infused with liberal assumptions such as Starr King and Bellows would have preached in sermons against what “men call Christianity.” Defending himself against the pious minister who had condemned him as a “son of the devil,” Twain revealed his motive for ridiculing “imaginary holy places” in the Holy Land. He had wished to show

how much real harm is done to religion by the wholesale veneration lavished upon things that are mere excrescences upon it; which mar it; and which should be torn from it by reasoning or carved from it by ridicule. They provoke the sinner to scoff, when he ought to be considering the things about him that are really holy.

Around this time, Twain, commenting on the ephemerality of emotional revival conversions, observed that “a religion that comes of thought, and study, and deliberate conviction, sticks best.” In his breakthrough Innocents Abroad (1869), Twain wondered what kind of relationship Jesus had with his brothers when they were children, considering that Jesus “was only a brother to them, however much he might be to others a mysterious stranger who was a god and had stood face to face with God above the clouds.” While ridiculing the “clap-trap side-shows” he visited in the Holy Land, Twain nonetheless deemed the site of the Crucifixion as historically accurate, esteeming it as “grand, revered, venerable—for a god died there.”

Throughout the rest of his life, Twain befriended other liberal Christian clergy, including Horace Bushnell, whom he considered a “theological giant”; Thomas ­Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher’s ­unconventional brother; and ­Joseph Twichell, his closest friend and pastor. Even as he moved beyond Christianity, Twain’s friendship with the radical Emerson protégé and former Unitarian minister Moncure Conway led him to contemplate other paths, such as the esoteric Hinduism that Conway helped to popularize in the West.

In this regard, it is interesting to note the thematic similarity of Twain’s controversial conclusion in No. 44 to the insight of a Hindu ­g­uru he met in India in 1896. Twain’s Stranger declared that “nothing exists; all is a dream.” The guru likewise preached:

The world . . . is not real. It never existed, it does not exist, and it will not come into existence in future. We all dream. . . . We are sleeping in the lap of ignorance, and as soon as true knowledge will dawn on us we shall be able to know that the world is but a dream.

Twain likewise believed in an ultimate divine source beyond this world of illusion. As late as 1906, when he was still at work on No. 44, he dictated a meditation on “the real God, the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only,” over against the myriad false gods that infested the human imagination.

Few readers today are aware of the Mysterious Stranger documents, let alone of Twain’s thwarted ambition to be a gospel preacher or his close friendships with prominent liberal clergymen. Fewer still know of his extensive lifelong reading in theologically heterodox subjects, such as the apocryphal gospels and comparative religious assessments of Christ, Krishna, and Buddha. Even during his final decade, Twain’s library included W. H. Mallock’s Reconstruction of Religious Belief (which Harper’s Monthly recommended to “those who find in scientific truth an obstacle to religious faith”) and the esoteric Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism, a text derived from Vedantic Hinduism.

Mark Twain was hardly a grim harbinger of atheism. His surviving daughter Clara recalled that her father’s “natural inclination was always stronger toward more poetic and mystic subjects.” His last years were dark. Yet as Tuckey observes, a “time that is one of darkness, even of despair, may indeed lead on through to a new stage of enlightenment.” It’s a side of Mark Twain very relevant to our present dark and despairing times.

The post Mark Twain’s Religion appeared first on First Things.

There is no question that tunes such as “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and, of course, “Blue Moon”—each penned by Hart and scored by his chief collaborator, composer Richard Rodgers—kindle a kind of world-weary moodiness that can be enormously companionable. But it would be a disservice to Linklater’s fine, subtle film—and Ethan Hawke’s fully inhabited, courageously unvarnished, Oscar-nominated performance as the talkative, resentful Hart—to unquestioningly accept the numerous pronunciamentos that Hart offers over the course of its 100-minute run time.

Like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Blue Moon is, in a sense, recounted by someone no longer among the living: The prologue shows Hart, inebriated and unsteady, making his way through an alleyway amid a torrential rainstorm—the circumstances that led to his death, not long after, at age forty-eight. From here, the film flips the calendar back seven months to the opening night of Oklahoma!, a musical that had been dreamt up by Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and the man he had picked to supplant the unreliable, often intoxicated Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). Although he occupies a box seat with his mother and takes note of the vociferous applause that night, Hart spends the balance of the evening expounding on the many supposed deficiencies in Oklahoma!, one of the classic works of the American stage. Does he have a point? Is he meant to make a convincing case?

The film certainly shows us Hart giving Oklahoma! his best shot. Stationed at a bar in Sardi’s (the restaurant that has historically catered to Broadway’s movers and shakers), Hart marshals his abundant wit to eviscerate the emotional directness of the story, the name of the lead character (Curly), and the metaphor that judges corn to be as high as an elephant’s eye. “What’s an elephant doing in Oklahoma?” Hart asks to whomever might be listening, which—since everyone is still at the show—initially includes not many more than a good-natured bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), and a fellow sad-sack writer, future Charlotte’s Web author E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy). When Rodgers eventually puts in an appearance at Sardi’s, amid a crowd of worshipers and to a chorus of huzzahs, Hart tries to persuade his old pal that he is capable of more than what he regards as the treacle of Oklahoma!—whose titular exclamation point he mocks ceaselessly, too.

Because Hart has so many characteristics that appeal to the modern sensibility—he is mean, sarcastic, and very, very quick—some viewers will reckon that he is right to diminish Oklahoma! for what he characterizes as its goody-goody God-and-country piety. Yet Linklater and Hawke are too savvy to permit such a superficial reading to take hold. Indeed, they work to reveal Hart’s prejudices and blind spots: Not only has his partnership with Rodgers been put on ice, thus casting doubt on the reasons behind his violent reaction to Oklahoma!, but his own notions of what would make a good Broadway show are made to sound ham-fisted. His alternative to the corn-pone humor of Oklahoma! is a four-hour musical about Marco Polo that he keeps pitching to a polite but disinterested Rodgers. Linklater lets his fluid camera linger on the monologuing Hawke, but when he cuts to others in the vicinity, it becomes obvious that while many take pity on Hart, they do not take him particularly seriously. Nor should they.

Hart’s contempt for Oklahoma! is plainly part of a set of self-delusions that govern his character. He attempts to initiate a romance with a young college student named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley). Hart, unmarried and, as he puts it, “omnisexual,” has anointed Elizabeth a mentee and possible romantic partner, but it is obvious from the first moment we see her that, for all her gracious kindnesses, she will decline both roles. When she talks to him, she talks down to him—literally, because she is quite tall and Hart is noticeably short. In one scene, when Elizabeth tells a long, sad story about a caddish man on whom she had (and still has) a crush, Hart actually sits at her feet.

On one level, Blue Moon is a showpiece for Hawke, who has soaked in Hart’s tortured, self-pitying psyche and nailed his physical characteristics, including his plastered-down hair. But while Hawke’s performance dominates the movie, his character is never allowed to. The real world is represented by the people cheering for Oklahoma!—these are the normies, not the lyricist sulking in the bar.

Rodgers is vindicated: Hart’s disappointment and disillusionment are no match for the winsome sentiment of Oklahoma! (and the future Rodgers and Hammerstein shows that are, on this night, but a twinkle in his eye, including Carousel, which is alluded to here). Elizabeth is vindicated, too: Hart is too needy, too self-involved, too weird to make anything more than a splendid dinner companion. Linklater does not pass up the chance to introduce into the mix a juvenile Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan), who, with prodigious self-assurance, offers something like the final word on Hart and his art. Accompanying Mr. and Mrs. Hammerstein to Sardi’s, Sondheim is clearly in thrall to Oscar and visibly unimpressed by Hart. In the world of this movie, young Sondheim is the smartest voice in the room.

Only in one instance does Linklater weigh the film unfairly toward Hart: Delaney has evidently been directed to play Hammerstein, Hart’s ostensible replacement, monosyllabically, and when he does speak, the actor misses his actual accent, which was captured by Rodgers and Hammerstein biographer Todd S. Purdum. In real life, Purdum wrote, Hammerstein would pronounce words like “‘fast’ as ‘fay-ast,’” but there’s no trace of that charming elocution here. Here, we feel the film straining to make us take Hart’s side.

We come to care for Hart, but we care for him as we might a boxer who has lost a bout or a candidate for political office who has gone down in noble defeat. All of this makes Blue Moon one of the sadder movies in memory: a eulogy that has no illusions about its subject’s goodness or rightness. It’s a very funny sort of valentine.

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Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their day—Alexandre ­Dumas, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who are no longer taken seriously, or for that matter read much, by most adults. However, the pleasures of reading adventure stories are not all guilty ones. The very best of such tales not only entertain but also teach—­reminding grown men and women of fundamental truths they took in when young.  

Stevenson relates swift-moving tales of high daring, with violent death narrowly averted by the ­herobut inescapable for the villains (and rendered with gruesome relish), profound male friendships forged in shared peril, and even the ­occasional—that is, really quite ­rare—first and only love for a young woman of exceptional mettle and bravery. 

In 1924 the Bloomsbury stalwart Leonard Woolf confessed to finding Treasure Island “a good story,” but in his estimation it was plainly kid stuff: “[Stevenson] appeals to the child or to the primitively childish in grown men and women.” Not just childish, but primitively so. That hardly sounds like the distinguished achievement of a well-spent artistic career, or even a worthy pastime for the bookish reader seeking unfamiliar literary territory. 

One is grateful, then, a century later, to see a scholar as accomplished as Leo Damrosch turn his attention to this neglected figure. Damrosch does not attempt to make more of Stevenson than he can legitimately bear, but this vivid biography helps one see what is essential in Stevenson’s life and perennially valuable in his art. 

Raised in Scottish Presbyterianism, Stevenson was subjected to Calvinist doctrinal severity at its most ­frightful—as he would later call it, the “dark and vehement religion,” with its ­forbidding mystery of predestination, which kindled “the great fire of horror and terror . . . in the hearts of the Scottish people.” A “very religious boy,” in the words of his nanny, who schooled him only too well in the grim basics of her own fervent belief, the child confronted nightly a merciless ogre of a God who dominated his awful dreams and made him fear life as much as he did death. In his nightmare world he would stand before “the Great White Throne”—the seat of the Godhead administering judgment and vengeance in Revelation—and when ordered to speak in defense of his soul would be stricken mute, and thereby condemned forever to the burning pit, which he saw with staggering clarity before he woke up screaming.

At twenty-two, a graduate of Edinburgh University trained in Scottish law, and convalescent from a serious lung illness that would return to plague him all his life, in the course of an ordinary conversation Stevenson answered too candidly a couple of his father’s questions about his faith. The young man instantly regretted his forthrightness, as his parents pronounced him a “horrible atheist” (which he was not) and a loathsome disgrace who had rendered their lives ­meaningless: Better his son had never been born or had died a spotless babe, his father wailed. The reciprocal shock would reverberate for years, but the deathly parental rage would abate in time—they loved their son too much to banish him from their hearts. After Stevenson married in 1880 an American divorcée ten years older than he, his parents welcomed his strikingly unconventional wife into the family. By then relations had thawed sufficiently that Stevenson could write to his mother, with affection and without fear, of Christ’s habitual joyous “affirmatives” as against the solemn prohibitions of the Ten Commandments. “It is much more important to do right than not to do wrong. Faith is, not to believe the Bible, but to believe in God.” 

It is obvious that Stevenson was never going to be an orthodox Christian of any denomination, but his early exposure to the divine “wrath and curse” visited ­upon fallen mankind, as the Scottish Presbyterian Shorter Catechism so memorably put it, and his growing belief in a loving Christ as the paragon of goodness, make themselves felt throughout his writings. His boyhood consciousness had been particularly seared by human ­depravity—principally the fear that his own would send him to hell—and his best-known works of fiction treat the eternal and elemental conflict between good and evil, as seen through the eyes of the innocent. At that time Nietzsche was declaring the Jewish and Christian standards of morality perverse and rightly obsolescent; Stevenson, by contrast, was reinforcing their ­inviolability, with an eye especially to the education of the young. Despite ­Stevenson’s renegade inclination to follow his own path, the uncharted territory that the atheist philosopher opened beyond good and evil was not for him. 

Treasure Island portrays an adolescent’s initiation into the depths of manly wickedness—and his boldness in fighting against it. The sinister forces that generally flee the daylight penetrate the peaceable life of young Jim Hawkins. A succession of seafaring ruffians, each more rotten than the previous—Billy Bones, Black Dog, Blind Pew—arrive at his father’s inn, and bring with them terror and bloodshed, as they pursue the notorious pirate Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Pelf, loot, plunder: That is what pirates live and die for. But this fascination with riches infects the good men whom Jim knows, and with Flint’s treasure map in their possession a select group of them heads out to sea in quest of a fortune. 

They are all innocents, with a lot to learn about the nature of evil. Squire Trelawney, the ringleader, unwittingly hires a crew of pirates who had sailed with Flint, among them Long John Silver, the peg-legged archvillain who has become the favorite buccaneer of popular legend. At first, they strike the Squire as virtuous men; but appearances can be fatefully deceiving, as Jim learns more quickly than his adult companions. Having climbed into a barrel on deck to get one of the few apples remaining there, Jim overhears Silver feverishly tell his fellow cutthroats of his plan to murder the good men—he imagines the most exquisite mutilations for the Squire—and take all the treasure for themselves. As Jim tells the story, “I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the ­extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.”

 One lesson after another in maintaining his composure will follow. The pirates and the honest men will go to war, and several will be killed. Perhaps the biggest excitement comes when Jim fights to the death with the malignant Israel Hands. In a tour de force of practical criticism, Damrosch captures perfectly, sentence by sentence, the intricate and unrelenting narrative movement that renders the violent action, right down to the killing blow. This tribute to Stevenson’s artistry also demonstrates the excellence of old-school close reading, a relic of Harvard’s glory days, before leftist politics had its way with elite literary education.

A long 1888 essay by ­Stevenson’s good friend Henry James (a Harvard man, albeit as a law school dropout) represents an even older school of criticism at its best. James catches the psychic interplay between the adult reader and the young one, which makes this “boy’s book” unique: The “weary mind of experience,” fascinated by the story, will “see in it . . . not only the ideal fable but, as part and parcel of that, as it were, the young reader himself and his state of mind: we seem to read it over his shoulder, with an arm around his neck.” Bloomsbury’s contempt for Stevenson’s primitive childishness seems fusty and churlish in light of this far subtler and more humane understanding. James recognizes the love this novel inspires the old to feel for the young—the protective tenderness for a soul yet unformed as it finds its difficult way through the thickets of the moral life. 

And for all that, it is a ripping good yarn, like Stevenson’s other most remarkable works of fiction. Each of these is singular in plot, but all are similar in their fundamental teaching: that righteous men must resist wrongdoers with all the courage they have, especially when the vicious have superior strength. 

In Kidnapped (1886), seventeen-­year-old David Balfour, another slow learner, narrowly escapes a murderous pitfall contrived by his malicious miserly uncle Ebenezer—yet still trusts the old reprobate enough to be suckered aboard a ship manned by evildoers, whom Ebenezer has paid to transport him into indentured servitude in the Carolinas. David, too, will have to fight for his life, and is fortunate to have at his side an expert ­swordsman who will become his fast friend. 

In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (also 1886), the scientific genius Dr. Jekyll’s experiment in the ecstatic release of the evil in his own being rings the death knell for Victorian hopes of moral ­perfectibility: Human wickedness is profound and ineradicable, and it will always have to be fought. 

And in The Master of Ballantrae (1889), James Durie, the titular villain, Stevenson was to say, embodies “all I know of the devil.” Charming, handsome, dashing, clever, he is the epitome of diabolical grace—the finest worldly gifts put to the foulest use, as he sows devastation wherever he goes. No one stands successfully against him.

Lest it appear that Stevenson was a cheerless scold, a font of ­unresolved Calvinist wretchedness, a look at some of his best essays dispels that supposition. (It is as an essayist—a brilliant and prolific one, as shown by a 2024 edition of his Complete Personal Essays, which is more than seven hundred pages long—that he currently enjoys a greater reputation than as a novelist. He does not write for boys here.) “Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters” identifies joyous pleasure as the root of all the best things. “No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has not been mirthfully conceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoyment.” “Pulvis et Umbra,” despite its dour title—Dust and Shadow, taken from a Horatian ode—and its reckoning with the shortcomings of religion on one hand and science on the other, closes with an energetic flourish of virile determination: “God forbid it should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable ­constancy: Surely not all in vain.” It is a memorable summons to the morally rigorous life.

The post Stevenson’s Treasure  appeared first on First Things.

The commentator George Weigel wrote a short book outlining the qualities conservatives wanted in the next Pope, and, in 2020, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, arranged for copies to be sent to all the cardinals who were expected to vote in the next conclave.

With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: How do I correct thee? Let me count the ways:

1) How does a book calling for the pope to recognize the New Evangelization as the Church’s “grand strategy” for the twenty-first century qualify as “conservative” Catholicism, rather than mainstream, living Catholicism?

2) By the same token, how does the trigger warning about Catholic “conservatives” and their alleged longings adequately reflect the content of a book that calls on the papacy to promote Christian humanism, deepen the Church’s appropriation of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, broaden the consultations through which bishops are selected, intensify seminary reform, empower lay men and women to be missionary disciples, undertake a root-and-branch reform of the Roman Curia, and deepen the theology of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue?

3) How is it “conservative” to urge the bishop of Rome to keep 1.4 billion men and women focused on the person of Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God and the answer to the question that is every human life?

4) As to specific fact-checking: If Paul Elie or his editors had bothered to contact me, Cardinal Dolan, or Mark Brumley, the president of Ignatius Press, he would have learned that my book, The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission, was sent to the members of the College of Cardinals by Ignatius Press; that Cardinal Dolan did not initiate that; and that the cardinal merely provided a cover note suggesting the book was worth reading. But no, one can only assume that the misrepresentations about this initiative concocted by Elie’s progressive Catholic contacts, which have been corrected more than once, were left unexamined. Why bother fact-checking when the facts, if ascertained, might get in the way of a good trigger warning or a slap at a leading American churchman?

There were numerous other problems with Elie’s article, including the usual, tiresome dismissals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as rigorists and authoritarians; the author also seems quite ignorant of the Vatican’s febrile atmosphere during the latter years of Pope Francis. I can’t quarrel much with Elie’s conclusion, though: that Pope Leo’s “mission” might be to be “an American in a position of great power who is decent and humble—a no-drama Pope whose very ordinariness is his message.”

Except to offer two more corrections.

First, Pope Leo has made it clear from the night he stepped out onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica that his “message” is Jesus Christ, not himself. Elie’s description of Leo’s pre-papal career contains some interesting information (as well as some unfortunate distortions about Catholic movements and personalities in Latin America), but it tends to elide over something crucial: that the pope is a man of God, a man of prayer, and an evangelist who wants the world to know the Lord he loves and serves.

Second, it was clear to those of us in Rome during the 2025 papal interregnum that Cardinal Robert Prevost was not thought of primarily as “an American,” for if he had been, his election would have been quite unlikely. The Latin American cardinal-electors thought him one of their own, given his many years in Peru; others considered him a prominent figure in the universal Church, with broad international experience. No one was focused on the fact that he was a White Sox fan from the south suburbs of the Windy City.

Various scribblers and talking heads (and, of course, churchmen) have been spinning Pope Leo from the day of his election, the direction of the spin being dictated by the spinner’s position in Catholicism’s ongoing debates over identity and mission. Enough is enough. The Holy Father has a very tough job, and no one trying to capture him for any particular party or agenda is doing him, or the Church, any good service.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

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When we admire, we are freed from thoughts of ourselves. The better we are at admiring, the less our egos intrude. And the more we know about the world, the more we find to admire. We can then look with pleasure not only on natural and human beauty, but also on more complex things, such as painting, poetry, philosophy, even moral ­conduct. The excellence of particular human beings is often the most affecting beauty of all.

I love to watch others at their best: the brilliant philosopher at work, the pianist who makes playing look effortless, the mother who patiently handles constant requests for her attention. I want to be like these people, unlikely as that may be. “Whatever is done skillfully,” wrote Samuel Johnson, “appears to be done with ease; and art, when it is once matured to habit, vanishes from observation. We are therefore more powerfully excited to emulation, by those who have attained the highest degree of excellence, and whom we can therefore with least reason hope to equal.”

Admiration is countercultural, especially in the academy. We are taught to be “critical” thinkers—always finding fault, identifying problems, exposing deficiencies. The academy is obsessed with status and ranking: Do professors publish in top-tier journals? Can our institutions keep up with their “aspirant peers”? It’s certainly true that most people are inclined to take pleasure in the faults of others. As Hazlitt observed, failure is consoling: At least I’m not as badly off as that guy. Insecurity and pride combine in judgments such as these.

I think, though, that it’s more valuable to admire. Everyone wants to be seen and understood; paying attention is a kind of care for another person. Learning to appreciate beauty and excellence is also the essence of liberal education. A liberal education isn’t so much character-building, but a cultivation of the receptive consciousness, a disposition of ­appreciation.

Admiration calls for at least three things. The first is candid self-examination. What talents and inclinations do I possess, and how might they be developed? I may be forced to admit, in my mental and moral stocktaking, that I’m not good at very many things, or that other people are more gifted than I. Others may have better memories, a subtler grasp of philosophical argument, greater insight into ­literature and life. I must tell myself the truth about these matters, and only then turn to admiration. Otherwise, the excellence of others feels like a threat.

This truth-telling isn’t all darkness and failure. It may become pleasanter as we age, for in taking stock of ourselves we mark our successes, too. Many human capacities can be changed, developed, ­perfected through effort.

This brings us to a second quality that is necessary for admiring well: Admiration requires us to become connoisseurs of a sort. Connoisseurship—whether of wine, art, movies, pop music, or a thousand other things—doesn’t emerge all at once. Becoming a master sommelier, for example, takes at least five years of intensive training, and usually many more. Sometimes connoisseurship comes unbidden. After eight years of living with one breed of dog, I immediately recognize its distinctive ways of jumping and running when I see the breed on the street. I can’t quite articulate it, but I know it when I see it. Something like this half-conscious expertise must characterize the highest levels of literary or artistic criticism, though to reach those levels would take a lifetime.

I recently became friends with the owner and curator of an art gallery. Alan is not a visual artist, but he is a gifted connoisseur—an admirer of other people and the works they produce. He has a finely honed vision of artistic excellence and a capacity to judge quality. Sometimes he will position a monotonal abstract painting next to a vibrant, colorful landscape, for contrast. Or he’ll group a set of works in some unexpected way. Or he might display a piece alone, starkly, on a white wall. The gallery is itself a work of art, which, to borrow words from Adam Smith, exemplifies “the acute and delicate discernment of the man of taste, who distinguishes the minute, and scarce perceptible differences of beauty and deformity.”

Alan admires his artists, and I admire his gallery. Admiration requires a degree of mutual understanding, a common standard of value, a sense that I can judge the quality of what I see, hear, or read. Understanding is the more necessary because many objects of admiration don’t reside on the surface of life. Physical beauty is easy enough to see, though it won’t be seen the same way by everyone—and thank goodness, or it would be bad news for the perpetuation of the human race. But admiration of another person’s intellect or character requires connoisseurship. It is a “coming to know” what is valuable, a seeing how a person embodies artistic excellence, or kindness, or humility, or any other good or beautiful quality. It constitutes the very pleasant task of becoming educated, in multiple realms of experience.

At least one more characteristic is essential for the admirer: a recognition of fallibility—both our own and that of others. If we are waiting for perfection, then we will find nobody at all to admire. I have noticed that my admiration of other people isn’t blind; it usually coexists with an awareness of imperfections, flaws, and deficiencies. I can observe a person’s brilliance while knowing that he is short-tempered and prone to criticism, or perceive that a friend is insightful in politics but tone-deaf to literature, or vice versa. This disposition may be indulgent, but it isn’t naive.

In the same way, if we wait for our own insecurities to disappear, then we’ll never be able to admire anyone. Excessive self-criticism is devastating for our sense of ourselves; it also prevents us from ­looking up to see the people around us. We coil ourselves up into balls of anxiety.

Many things are worthy of admiration, from art to literature to athletic excellence. But lately I’ve come to think that the most admirable qualities of all are excellences of character: the kindness, humility, piety, humor, and genuine goodness of people who may not be intellectually or artistically sophisticated. These people often go unadmired because they are not interested in—­indeed, have never given a moment’s thought to—their public image. They aren’t engaged in the kinds of things that garner widespread approval or praise.

Instead they are taking care of the church, cleaning up the service leaflets that accumulate at the end of Sunday services, or making the coffee early every morning. They are investing in the lives of others, quietly and unobtrusively. They talk and listen. They are ­introspective and extroverted by turns, but they possess a generosity of spirit that everyone can admire, if only we will open our eyes. The man of perfect virtue, wrote Smith, “the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others.”

In the Nicomachean Ethics, ­Aristotle notes that the great-souled or magnanimous man is “not given to admiration because nothing is great to him.” In other words, only less-than-great souls admire others. But how lonely this exalted ­position would be! A person who is so gifted or highly placed that he cannot admire others is missing out on one of life’s great pleasures: the self-forgetfulness of wonder and admiration, which may sometimes lead toward a profound Christian caritas.

In America we’re told that independence, self-sufficiency, and dogged hard work are among the greatest virtues. I would much prefer to throw in my lot with the admirers. Openness to the beauty of the world, and to the people around me, means that I can be receptive to the unmerited grace that may sometimes, surprisingly, appear. When it does, it is a great blessing—something not to be missed.

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In these texts, we read that Eirik the Red was the first European to settle in Greenland. The naming of his new home is presented as a shrewd piece of PR: “Eirik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favourable name.” We go on to learn about the lives of Eirik’s family and companions, including the repeated voyages undertaken by his children to North America. Like the current administration, the Vikings are explicitly pragmatic when it comes to assessing the usefulness of a land and its resources. One sailor, Bjarni Herjólfsson, after sighting a rocky and barren stretch of American coastline, refuses to make land, explaining that “this land seems to me to offer nothing of use.” When Eirik’s son Leif later undertakes wider exploration, he is pleased to discover a richly forested land that he names “Markland” (literally “Forest Land”). Further south, where they discover a rich abundance of wild grapevines, Leif calls the area “Vinland” (“Wine Land”). The Greenland Vikings were neither creative nor vainglorious in their naming practices, preferring to title new lands after whatever natural resources might sustain the Greenlandic settlement or yield profit through exchange with merchants. 

While exploring America, the Norsemen make the first recorded contact with indigenous inhabitants. Some of their meetings result in successful trades, in which dyed cloth and dairy products are exchanged for animal skins. But at other times this contact proves fatal. On one voyage, Leif’s brother Thorvald is wounded in a battle with the Native Americans and is accorded what may be the first Christian burial on American soil, telling his men: “You will bury me . . . and mark my grave with crosses at the head and foot, and call the spot Krossanes [Cross point] after that.” A later expedition led by Thorfinn Karlsefni also descends into violence when a Native American reaches for the Vikings’ steel weapons. Thorfinn has unequivocally forbidden his men from trading these. The reason is never explicitly stated, but he is presumably aware that their steel swords and axes give them a significant military advantage over their trading partners should things go wrong. He is proven correct when the Norsemen rout the natives in a subsequent battle, such that “they had no more dealings with them.” These episodes mark the beginning of the, now once again, brittle relationship between the inhabitants of America and Greenland.

Conflict also arises from internal betrayal. Eirik’s daughter Freydis heads a joint expedition to Vinland with two Norsemen, agreeing to split the profits of the voyage equally. Once arrived, she engineers their deaths and personally slaughters the women in their group so she can claim the spoils for herself. When Leif learns of his sister’s treachery, he says: “I am not the one to deal my sister, Freydis, the punishment she deserves; but I predict that their descendants will not get on well in this world.” The narrative adds that “after that no one expected anything but evil from them.” 

As well as navigating the high seas, making new discoveries, and trading with foreign peoples, the Viking settlers of Greenland also simply navigate the quotidian concerns of living and dying in a community. Issues of intergenerational conflict and how to bury the dead will be familiar across the millennia, although the details might seem a little bizarre to the modern reader. At one point, a disagreement arises between a pagan wise woman and a young Christian woman over whether the latter should participate in “heathen” rituals to divine the future. In another memorable episode, Thorstein Eiriksson temporarily rises from the dead as a draugr (a type of zombie revenant in Norse literary tradition) to admonish his wife for burying him in unconsecrated ground. 

Christianity became an important bridge between Greenland’s Viking inhabitants and the rest of European civilization. Far from isolationist, the Greenlanders understood that belonging required integration with the wider powers of their world. For medieval Greenland, that power was Christendom. Even with a population never exceeding a few thousand, they actively sought clergy, sending envoys to Bremen in 1054 to request priests. The first bishop, Arnaldur, was ordained in 1124 and began constructing a cathedral at Garðar dedicated to St. Nicholas, the ruins of which can still be seen today. Settling in Greenland was never only about claiming land or resources, but about building a life for its people and taking responsibility for their spiritual and social well-being. Both sagas conclude by noting that descendants of the settlers would go on to serve as bishops themselves, weaving this remote community into the fabric of Christian Europe.

We are told to learn lessons from history, but the reader must draw what conclusions he will from the sagas and what they might teach us about expansion, alliances, conflict, trade, and collaboration. Greenland formally submitted to the rulership of the Norwegian crown in 1261, and eventually came under the auspices of Denmark when the Norwegian and Danish crowns merged. Recording the former occasion, the Icelandic poet Sturla Þórðarson penned the following verses in praise of King Hákon IV: “It pleases you to increase your power . . . around the cold world, all the way north beneath the North Star; reliable men will welcome that” (Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar). Whether “reliable men” will voice a similar paean to the White House if the U.S. takes over control of Greenland remains to be seen.

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Boxing has long carried this symbolic weight. Max Schmeling’s fights with Joe Louis in the 1930s came to embody the struggle between Nazi Germany and democratic America. Geography mattered as much as the fighters themselves; Ali’s journey to Africa was as important as the punches he threw. Boxing’s stages have always amplified its myths.

Against that backdrop, the recent Jake Paul–Anthony Joshua bout, streamed live on Netflix, could be called The Madness in Miami, or, with equal accuracy, The Money in Miami. YouTube sensation Jake Paul was the star attraction. Crossover bouts have become a reliable financial mechanism, and this one was no exception. Netflix’s subscriber ambitions alone justified the investment. Boxing has always been blunt about economics; boxers are “prizefighters.” Unlike athletes in salaried sports, boxers negotiate their livelihoods bout by bout, so money talk never leaves the frame. Gambling promotions saturated the event. Paul gifted himself a custom Ferrari Purosangue before the fight. None of this was peripheral to the spectacle; it was the spectacle.

The athletic stakes were modest. Few doubted Joshua’s victory. The intrigue lay only in how long Paul would last, and whether he could survive the scheduled rounds. The matchup lacked the narrative tension of Ali–Foreman or Holyfield–Tyson. What was striking instead was the muted atmosphere in the city itself. The hype for Paul–Joshua existed less in the streets than online, signaling a transformation in how public events now circulate.

Geography matters here in another sense. Miami is not merely where the Florida Athletic Commission licensed the bout. It is a city that epitomizes flamboyance, glitz, and influencer culture. Over the past decade, Miami has become the unofficial capital of the social-media generation, a place where aspirants curate identities through nightlife, bayfront vistas, and highly Instagramable neighborhoods like Brickell and Wynwood. Visibility itself functions as currency. Miami fuses entertainment and finance in a distinctly twenty-first-century form of American capitalism.

Jake Paul is the exemplary figure of this new economy of fame. For those outside his generational cohort, his appeal can seem opaque. Juvenile videos, brand partnerships, and energy drinks nonetheless translated into boxing notoriety through victories over faded names and a shrewd grasp of algorithmic attention. Mocked by critics as “Fake Paul,” he embraces the label. “YouTubers run the world,” he insists. “We are the new modern-day A-list celebrities.” Paul’s self-myth also speaks to a changed world of work. When legitimacy is harder to inherit from institutions, it must be performed, narrated, and monetized. For young men facing narrowing pathways, Paul offers a seductive promise: relevance without apprenticeship.

Influencer boxing emerged from this logic. Paul’s brother Logan popularized the form through a rivalry with British streamer KSI, converting digital antagonism into a monetized physical contest. These crossover bouts reveal something enduring about boxing. Even in an era dominated by MMA, boxing remains the symbolic arena for resolving disputes. In a culture saturated with callouts and feuds, it functions as ritualized resolution. Boxing also retains an aesthetic language; Ali’s “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” still lingers in cultural memory.

Traditional boxers have had to adapt. Self-promotion is not new, but today’s fighters must maintain an entire aesthetic ecosystem. Anthony Joshua, despite emerging from a grittier North London milieu, has been drawn into this economy. 

On fight night, the Kaseya Center revealed how spectacle has changed. Audience members filmed themselves. The event was as much about being seen as seeing. Influencers dominated ringside. Strangers shouted for selfies. The bout itself was anticlimactic. Joshua dismantled Paul with ease, sealing the mismatch with a trademark straight right. The crowd’s response was not triumph but relief. Seriousness briefly returned the moment violence asserted itself, and just as quickly dissipated. Yet the knockout was not the end of Paul’s story. He emerged with a broken jaw, titanium plates, and an X-ray proudly displayed online. Defeat became content.

That, finally, was the madness in Miami: a spectacle in which money does not correct irrationality but fuels it, and where what mattered was not the fight itself but its digital afterlife. The fight was over. The content, it was clear, had only just begun.

Sipa USA via AP

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In his dedication to The Last Westerner, Chilton Williamson Jr. remembers his friend Edward Abbey and hopes that he “would have enjoyed this book.” Abbey died in 1989, but if he had lived, he would have loved it. Not since Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, which I read several years ago, have I experienced this keen a sense of the American Southwest—both the characters suited to it and the land itself as a sculptor of souls. The descriptions in The Last Westerner are extraordinary, never static. Williamson has an acuity of observation that brings the mountains and deserts of the American Southwest fully inside the spell of romance. The pressure and anxiety of contemporary civilized time drop away as the story of fifty-one-year-old Jeb Stuart Ryder—a man not driven by vanity or epic ambition—begins to unfold at the pace of his romance with a beautiful rancher in her thirties, Jody James.

And romance is the word. Williamson takes his epigraph from the twelfth-century writer Chrétien de Troyes, whose Lancelot establishes the ideal of this novel: “He fares well who obeys the commands of love, and whatever he does is pardonable, but he is the coward who does not dare.” A few pages in, Jeb and Jody interrupt a workday to descend a sheer cliff face—the valley floor a thousand feet below—to a marvelous cave that she knows. On his way, Jeb takes his bearings without haste:

The cliff formed the headwall of a narrow box canyon arranged in levels of opposing terraces with box elder, scrub oak, and ponderosa pine growing close against the sheer rock walls. The canyon, cutting raggedly west, became lost in the maze of red and purple slickrock, swales and domes of yellow and white sandstone, and the wilderness of wild forms carved from the level plateau stretching along the horizon.

The reader must slow down to see as he sees—in fact, slow down enough to acknowledge, if only for a moment, the long epochs of wind and weather that did the carving in that “wilderness of wild forms” that also makes men like Jeb Ryder. 

A month or so into his romance with Jody, Jeb begins to hope for marriage and children, a desire that she dodges. But just as the disagreement surfaces, someone at a horse show steals Jody’s prize stallion, a Peruvian Paso that Jeb has nicknamed Tortuga because of the odd, tortoise-like gait characteristic of the breed. Formerly a range detective in Wyoming, Jeb offers to find the horse and bring him back, a task complicated by the fact that she never branded the animal. Jeb quickly figures out that two Navajos whom he saw around the pen stole Tortuga, and it does not take him long to find the younger of the pair, the sixteen-year-old John-Wayne Bilagody, with whom Jeb immediately and unexpectedly bonds. Through John-Wayne, Jeb meets Shorty, the older and more criminal of the two, who knows what Jeb is after and spirits the horse away. Jeb recruits John-Wayne to help him find Tortuga, and the two set out together. 

It’s part of the wry humor of Williamson’s novel that the young Navajo is named for the iconic hero of movie Westerns, because the real John Wayne’s greatest role as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers loosely maps onto the action of The Last Westerner: Instead of the girl (Natalie Wood) kidnapped by the Comanches, Jody’s show horse is stolen and sold and resold, eventually becoming part of a wild herd that gallops across the desert. A good romance needs a wandering knight, and the quest to recover Tortuga occupies Jeb and John-Wayne for the entire summer of 1999 and well into the fall. Jeb rides a borrowed horse, “a tall white gelding, part Arab, named Quixote.” As they navigate between rattlesnakes (Jeb talks to them, like Ike McCaslin in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses), Jeb and John-Wayne are, in one sense, the chivalric idealist and his canny sidekick. 

Jody calls them Tonto and the Lone Ranger. But the parallel that most appeals to me is between Williamson’s Jeb and Twain’s Jim, between John-Wayne and Huck. The Last Westerner often reminds me of Huck and Jim in their great, lyrical descent of the Mississippi on the raft. After Tortuga escapes from confinement and joins the herd of mustangs, Jeb and John-Wayne track him for weeks, camping out at night under the stars, making coffee on the fire, frying up whatever they have to eat, bathing in the shrinking river, refilling their canteens wherever they can, drinking whiskey, telling stories, and talking about their girlfriends. During the chapter when Jeb is recovering from a particularly quixotic attack on some huge satellite dishes (a long story), Williamson gives us John-Wayne’s own Huck-like voice, misspellings and all, to keep the story going until Jeb recovers.

Jeb is escaping like Twain’s Jim, escaping from a culture that he finds increasingly repellent with its consumerism, its shallowness, its judgmental ideologies, its reduction of the wilderness to commodity. Though he does not acknowledge it, he is also escaping from Jody herself, whose modern assumptions and predictable infidelity he has begun to glimpse, though his chivalry—learned from the Arthurian tales he read as a child—will not let him abandon his duty to her. His Guinevere, whom he discovers midway through the action, is a beautiful, strong-willed, upper-class revolutionary named Carmen, whose band of followers has Tortuga in its possession. 

Carmen and Jeb fall in love—yes, at first sight. Her beauty and ferocity, not to mention her flamenco-dancing, evoke Bizet’s opera, Federico García Lorca’s duende, and the world of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in the Spanish Civil War. Slowly and unobtrusively, in good time, through respectful delay in the developing romance of Jeb and Carmen, the deeper themes of the novel develop: the efficacy of politics and institutions, the nature of courage and loyalty, the roots of hatred, the power of love, the difference that a border makes. For much of the second half of the novel, Carmen and her band of revolutionaries try to get back to Mexico from Arizona—that is, to escape from the United States (dodging the border patrol) and cross the border into Agua Prieta, where new rules and other liberties come into play. 

The beauties and pleasures of this novel are deep. Alcohol, shall we say, does not fall under reprobation: Hardly a page goes by without a little whiskey to enliven it, and Jeb does not hesitate to share his bottle with John-Wayne after discovering that the boy has been drinking “ever week” with his cousin. The descriptions of music are moving, from Jeb’s harmonica-playing and singing to the wild performance of a strange, hare-lipped, mentally damaged young man named Albert Orsino. Albert plays his guitar and sings to a young girl named Doe, a wild, beautiful thing who appears out of the mountain woods like a nymph and turns out to be his lover. Albert’s singing is “full of defiance and lamentation, brave and joyful and at the same time achingly sad and tragic, with all the suffering of unredeemed nature in it as well as the agony of man.” Doe, deaf and dumb, sits on the bed through it all, “her hands folded decorously in her lap,” before she strips off her smock and lies back “in the altogether.” As Jeb later explains to John-Wayne, “It isn’t that she’s shy or not shy, she’s simply innocent. Completely, utterly innocent.” 

Other characters lodge just as vividly in the reader’s memory: a white preacher, utterly corrupt, who runs revival meetings on the reservation; a giant Wild Man who lives alone in the ancient stone houses at the back of a shallow cave and tells the searchers his story; a politician named Quantrill (part of the “Confederate” theme of the novel that includes Jeb’s namesake); the bruja or witch, whom Jeb sees at least three times, though John-Wayne never does. 

And rattlesnakes. John-Wayne calls Jeb “the One Who Talks With Snakes” because—well, because he talks to them, even addressing one of them as “Grandfather,” as Ike does in Go Down, Moses. The danger, though, is part of the romance. Albert dies from the bite of a huge rattler that crawled into his sleeping bag. 

It’s a rare thing in my experience of contemporary fiction to find myself wanting to reread a novel, but with The Last Westerner I look forward to deepening the first experience, even dipping at random into sections of it. Why “Westerner” instead of, say, “cowboy”? Williamson points to themes that go deep into what we mean by “the Western world.” Allusive and wry, both funny and deeply serious (like Don Quixote), it reaches back through converging traditions to the roots of the novel in medieval romance, while treasuring the world as it is. Who would think that crossing Interstate 10 on the way to Douglas, Arizona, could be full of high drama and chivalry? Williamson mourns our departures—from grace, from decorum, from the respect of form—but even more, he revives what we had taken for lost.

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By the time we traveled to Washington, this painful preoccupation had faded. Georgetown was a disappointment, but we visited the museums and monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial on our last night in the city. It was late when we visited, the grounds were deserted, and the solemn grandeur of the perpetually illuminated memorial was a revelation. But even more revelatory was my reaction to the chiseled writing on the limestone wall. With my sensitivity to the problem of schism seemingly behind me, I was unprepared for the devastation I felt when I read the dedication—IN THIS TEMPLE / AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE ­PEOPLE / FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION—and realized there had been no comparable person in Christendom.

In the year 1500, in Stourton Castle in Staffordshire, England, a third son was born to Sir Richard Pole and his wife, Margaret. A Plantagenet like his mother, and cousin to the reigning Henry VIII, young Reginald stood almost as close to the throne as the king himself, a double-edged privilege that would prove fatal to the Poles in the future. But in the early years of Henry’s reign, which augured stability and peace, the two families were bound by strong ties of affection. ­Reginald’s mother was a close confidante of the queen, as well as Princess Mary’s godmother and governess, and Reginald, whose father died when he was five, regarded his vigorous cousin with something like hero-worship. As for the king, he treated his young kinsman with indulgent affection, subsidizing his education at Oxford and later in Italy.

From an early age, Reginald was intended for the Church, but though he showed aptitude in that direction, he was a long time committing himself. His was a prolonged adolescence, underwritten by royal patronage and prestige. Despite the strong influence in his early life of men like John Colet and Thomas More, and despite the ominous contemporary challenges to the unity of the Church in Germany, Pole in his twenties was the kind of young Italian dilettante Erasmus dismissed as “more interested in literature than piety.” This began to change, however, when Henry, having showered his young protégé with the usual ecclesiastical preferments, looked for payback in the form of support for his divorce.

Playing for time, or perhaps genuinely unsure, Pole acceded to the king’s initial demands. In ­Paris, he was part of a successful diplomatic effort to enlist the faculty of the Sorbonne on the side of the king’s “great matter.” But Henry wanted more. In 1530, having recalled Pole to England, he offered him the archbishopric of York on condition that he declare his support for the divorce. A decisive meeting followed, during which Pole found himself literally speechless—an impediment he later attributed to divine Providence—and then, contrary to his intention to propose a compromise, he blurted out his opposition to the whole affair. Both men were shocked—the intensity of their shock testifying to the strength of their bond—and the king quit the room in a cold rage, leaving Pole in tears.

A few years earlier, testing the pliancy of the aristocracy, Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s ­notorious enforcer, asked Pole what he considered the most important quality in a statesman, to which Pole earnestly replied: concern for his sovereign’s honor. Ridiculing Pole’s idealism, Cromwell told him to read Machiavelli, which Pole did and pronounced the author of The Prince “an enemy of the human race.”

Now Pole put his idealism to work. He wrote a long, carefully reasoned letter to the king, explaining his opposition and buttressing his concern for Henry’s honor with politically astute observations and predictions. The letter was eloquent enough that Thomas Cranmer, when he read it, said that if it were shared with the people, “it were not possible to persuade them to the contrary.” In the same letter, Pole asked permission to resume his studies in Italy, but the king, uncertain how best to neutralize Pole’s influence (keep him close, or send him away?), delayed his decision for almost a year. In the end, he let Pole go, and even reinstated his allowance, perhaps with an idea of buying his silence.

So Pole returned to Italy, to Padua where he had been happy in his youth, and eventually to Venice. He would not set foot in England again for more than twenty years.

In Italy, in the 1530s, Pole was increasingly drawn into the great theological debates of the age, including the controversy over justification, or the right relationship between faith and good works. It is important to remember that ­Martin Luther was not an anomaly in his generation, but only an extreme interpreter of a question that was preoccupying the whole of Christendom. If, in the history of the Church, there have always been individuals who suffer from scruples, agonize over moral choices, and even despair of their salvation, in sixteenth-century Europe this was a collective condition, a general crisis of spiritual anxiety set in motion by a Church that for too long had emphasized works at the expense of faith—the agency of the individual at the expense of an interior dependence on God—as if men had not only to earn but in some cases even to buy their salvation. The pressure this distorted theology placed on the individual Christian, a pressure aggravated by the same Church’s catastrophic dereliction of her pastoral duties, triggered across Europe a determined search for reassurance, and effectively opened the door to Protestantism. But committed Catholics, too, suffered the same anxieties and sought out the same remedies. Encouraged by John Colet and ­Erasmus, Lefèvre d’Étaples in Paris and Juan de Valdés in Spain, concerned individuals gravitated to small groups to pray and read the Scriptures together, with a special emphasis on the letters of St. Paul.

When Pole moved to Venice, he became part of just such a small group, a circle of ­reform-minded Catholics which included Gasparo Contarini, the Venetian statesman who would become the point man for Catholic reform in Italy; Gian Pietro ­Carafa, the future Pope Paul IV; and the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in whose gardens the group gathered. The intellectual stature of these clerics and laymen notwithstanding—picture a small, contemporary Bible study, half of whose members would shortly be made cardinals of the Church—the goals of the group were less intellectual than spiritual. Fundamentally, what Pole and his contemporaries were seeking was personal assurance of the saving mercy of Jesus Christ, the one sure solvent for the anxieties of the age. In the case of Contarini, who had undergone a crisis comparable to Luther’s, relief had come at the hands of a sensitive priest in a confessional, a resolution that explains Contarini’s unshakeable devotion to the sacraments, and his firm conviction that the Church could be reformed from within.

Pole’s breakthrough experience was less obviously ecclesial. A monk known to us only as Mark facilitated “a release from bondage,” “nurtured [Pole] in Christ,” and “[separated] human works from divine, redirecting everything to its one source.” If one wishes to make sense of Pole’s approach to Church reform in the future—his idealism or naivete, depending on one’s point of view—one has only to refer back to these watershed, charismatic experiences. From this point on, the ­Holy Spirit was never an abstraction for Pole, but a living, breathing Person capable of reinvigorating and redirecting an entire life.

Meanwhile, in England, Henry had annulled his marriage to Katherine, married Anne Boleyn, and broken with Rome, setting himself up as head of the English church. Never rash in his judgments, and concerned for the safety of his family, Pole remained silent on these developments. But privately, it was impossible for him not to compare the so-called reformation in England—a cynical power grab motivated by lust and greed—with the idealistic, soul-searching movements he was familiar with in Italy. Whether the men he now spent time with were committed to reforming the Church or tempted to leave her, all seemed to him motivated by genuine consternation over her condition, as well as by sincere, urgent questions about salvation and the true means of obtaining it.

It probably didn’t hurt either, as Pole’s disillusionment with Henry intensified, that Contarini and Carafa, both of whom were old enough to be Pole’s father, were filling a place in his emotional life that had long been occupied by Henry himself.

But if Pole, in his thirties, was finally growing away from the king, the king was not done with Pole. Maddened by his silence, Henry demanded again, through intermediaries, Pole’s approval of his affairs, and again Pole delayed, until the news came that changed everything: the beheadings of John Fisher and Thomas More. In the aftermath of the murders, Pole’s temporizing came to an end. Horrified by Henry’s butchery (“You have destroyed the best men of your kingdom, not like a human being, but like a wild beast”), he wrote a letter to the king that turned into a three-hundred-page book, charging Henry with his crimes, urging him to repent, and, if he should not repent, threatening to petition the pope to excommunicate him and the English nobility to rebel.

But the letter was not only a personal attack on the king. It was also a trenchant analysis of Henry’s politics and a passionate defense of papal primacy, issues Pole had been turning over in his mind for a long time. It is no accident that the common title of the missive is De Unitate, or De Unitate Ecclesiae (On the Unity of the Church), given that, from this point on, concern for the unity of Christendom would become the defining passion of Pole’s life. Whether or not he was familiar with the patristic adage that schism leads to heresy—an adage borne out in England when Henry’s son, Edward, succeeded him—Pole would have agreed with it. The Church, he now believed, needed to be ­united as well as reformed, and indeed, only in unity would real reform be possible. The dedication in the Lincoln Memorial makes the same case, ­prioritizing Lincoln’s preservation of national unity over his opposition to slavery. Because if the American South had successfully seceded, by what authority could the North have prohibited slavery in her territories? Similarly, if men leave the Church, how can she preserve them in truth? Once schism has been accomplished, the time for persuasion is past. When Henry separated his people from the Church, even before outright heresy came to power in his country, he opened the door to every kind of lawlessness, from the plundering of the monasteries to the undermining of the succession itself. The truth of these matters, Pole insisted, had been manifested by the deaths of Fisher and More. Martyrs to Church unity and the papal authority that guarantees it, they were God’s letter to England: “Writings from the finger of God . . . written not with ink but with blood.”

Once the letter was sent, ­consequences swiftly followed. Within three months, Pole and his Venetian companions were called to Rome, where the newly minted Cardinal Contarini charged them with producing a seminal document on Church reform. A month later, with the pope overriding his objections, Pole himself was made a cardinal and a legate to England, where a serious challenge to Henry’s schism was gathering momentum in the North.

The legation, for the time being, turned out to be a dead letter, as the Northern rebellion was put down and Pole tried and failed to return home, prevented by European politics and the necessity of eluding Henry’s kidnappers and cutthroats. When Cromwell read De Unitate, he swore he would make its author “eat his own heart,” and when he failed to lay hands on Pole himself, he and Henry took their revenge on Pole’s family. Pole’s oldest brother and a brother-in-law were beheaded, accused of plotting to marry Reginald to Princess Mary and put Mary on the throne. Pole’s mother survived Cromwell, whom Henry executed 1540, but in 1541 she, too, was beheaded, accused of the same intrigue as her son. Short of a martyrdom like More’s, the price Pole paid for his principled stand could hardly have been higher. An orphan now as well as an exile, he was also, so long as Henry lived, a hunted man.

Increasingly, in the years that followed, the Church was Pole’s home. In 1541, he was made governor of a papal state and moved to Viterbo, where he and his circle became known as the spirituali, a group that saw no contradiction between loyalty to the institutional Church and a radical, Pauline understanding of grace. The outcome the spirituali prayed for and worked toward was the integration of the orthodox elements of Lutheranism into the life and teaching of a purified Church, an eminently reasonable outcome in their view, given that, in Pole’s succinct phrase, “heretics be not in all things heretics,” or as Contarini had written as far back as 1537, many vehement Catholics, “­believing that they . . . contradict Luther, actually contradict St. Augustine, Anselm, Bernard [and] St. Thomas.”

When Contarini died in 1542, Pole became the group’s de facto leader and a spiritual counselor to many, including wavering individuals whom he persuaded to remain in the Church. A conciliator by nature, whose mind worked in syntheses (fides in caritate, “faith expressing itself in good works,” was a favorite phrase), in the years leading up to the Council of Trent he came up with his own mediating formulae. He counseled one troubled mentee, for example, “to believe that she could only be saved by faith, but to act as if she could only be saved by works.” Ploughed up by his own sufferings, and all too familiar with the tragic consequences of schism, Pole was both a respecter of consciences and a loyal son of the Church. But though he was beloved by those closest to him, and revered by many at a distance for his integrity and virtue, he was also, as positions hardened and the rupture in Christendom deepened, regarded with suspicion by a potent few, a minority that eventually included his friend and mentor, Carafa.

It was in Viterbo that Pole’s leniency first came under attack, with some in the College of Cardinals accusing him of harboring heretics and others muttering that too few people had been put to death during his governorship. In the verdict of one historian, it was Pole’s misfortune to be a conciliator in an age increasingly uninterested in conciliation. But to be fair to his detractors, by the 1540s in Europe there were strong reasons for concluding that a reunion of Christians was no longer possible. At an ecumenical colloquy in Regensburg in 1541, Catholic and Protestant delegates actually came to an accommodation about justification, but then failed to agree about everything else: the priesthood and the sacraments, the saints and the contemplative life. To an observer capable of reading the writing on the wall, it was not doctrine per se but the Church herself that was the real sticking point—the question “of whom this doctrine should be learned.” Here, Pole lamented in ­hindsight, “begins the greater trouble and dissension in religion.”

A year after Regensburg, the spirituali suffered an even more devastating blow: the apostasy of two of their own, popular preachers whom they had trusted to hold the line against heresy in ­Italy. When Peter Martyr Vermigli and ­Bernardino ­Ochino abruptly fled over the Alps, anyone less idealistic than Pole would have been forced to reconsider his position. But Pole, still committed to the soft ­power of patience, refused to relinquish his dream of unity. The Inquisition may have been reestablished, with Carafa as its head, but until the Church officially decided the disputed issues, surely the question of heresy remained open? Between hardline Catholics and rebellious Protestants, with individuals on both sides suspecting him of disingenuousness, Pole remained noncommittal. Unwilling to back a solution that excluded the Lutherans, he was waiting for the Church to speak, on the record, at a General Council.

The wait was long. Not until December 1545 did the first session of the council on which Pole had fastened all his hopes finally assemble at Trent, and when it did, simply getting there posed the usual challenges for Pole. With Henry’s assassins still on his trail, he had to send a decoy ahead, disguised as a cardinal, while he himself took an alternate route.

On arriving, Pole was disheartened by the size of the gathering. Trent was supposed to be an assembly of the universal Church, to speak on momentous matters, yet here were only four cardinals, four archbishops, and twenty-six bishops! More to the point, where were the Lutherans? In Pole’s view, to address the issue of justification without first listening to the Lutherans was to court catastrophe. But in the meantime there was an even more fundamental problem he was determined to address. As one of the three papal legates in charge of the council, Pole presided over its opening, and in January a speech he had written was read aloud by a secretary, a speech that deserves to be as famous as ­Campion’s Brag.

The council’s first order of business, Pole had written, must be repentance, “an unveiling of our sins,” with the assembled leadership taking responsibility for “the very evils we have been summoned to mend.” All of the evils in question—the spread of heresy in the untilled fields of the Church, her scandalous pastoral failures, and even the endless, futile wars between the emperor and the French king—Pole laid at the hierarchy’s feet, blaming all on “our ambition, our avarice, and our cupidity.” Judgment had begun with the house of God, he warned, and without heartfelt repentance, the council would end in failure. Why? Because only on a penitent Church would the Holy Spirit descend, and bring about the reforms and reunion they were incapable of bringing about by ­themselves . . .

Expecting the usual platitudes and blandishments, and certainly not expecting such a passionate exhortation from the usually reticent Pole, the council was transfixed. There was silence, and then all stood and began to sing Veni Sancte ­S­piritus (Come, Holy Spirit), and for a brief moment, Pole must have allowed himself to hope that his warning had been heard. But the moment passed, business as usual resumed, and his appeal went unanswered.

In the weeks that followed, Pole persevered in the council’s business, influencing an important early decision on the interdependence of Scripture and tradition. But as the time approached for the question of justification to be taken up, with the Lutherans still absent, his health broke down. He carried on a little longer, imploring the council in June to consider the issues impartially, to listen to the Lutherans or at least read some of their works, and to pray ever more earnestly for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But after this last, desperate appeal, having received from the Vatican permission to withdraw on account of his health, he left Trent and did not return.

Some historians, treating of Pole’s illness, have taken it at face value. Others have accused him of feigning and peevishness. Still others, while acknowledging the reality of his collapse, have used words like “psychosomatic” and “nervous breakdown.” But if Pole’s illness was psychosomatic, it was psychosomatic not only in the usual sense of the term. In Pole’s sensitive constitution, larger disturbances than personal disappointment were clearly at work. It might be most accurate to say that what was happening in Christendom was expressing itself in Pole’s person, even as the sin of schism­—in Christ’s words to St. Faustina describing his suffering on the cross­—“tore at [Christ’s] Body and Heart.” Whether Pole and his circle were right about the possibility of reunion is beside the point. Undoubtedly they were wrong, and things had gone too far to be retrieved—even if the Lutherans had been invited to the council, they would probably not have attended—but that would not have made the inevitable outcome any less devastating. Whatever was making Pole sick, it affected his heart, and left one side of his body—his left eye, shoulder, and arm—virtually paralyzed.

Interestingly, Pole’s close friend Alvise Priuli ­also suffered a breakdown at this time, leading one to wonder whether there were others who were similarly afflicted. Were there many ordinary Christians, in other words, caught between men like Carafa and Luther, who suffered, in their unrecorded lives, the traumatic disintegration of Christendom? One of the many reasons for becoming acquainted with Pole and his circle is the visceral reminder they afford us of the momentousness of schism: what it was like to live through it and, for some, like the spirituali, to have to find a way to go on living, on its other side.

The years following the council were difficult for Pole. His health improved but was never the same. Always obedient to the Church, he submitted to her decrees and ­eventually embraced them wholeheartedly, but the process of interior reconciliation cannot have been easy. Meanwhile, close friends died and opponents flourished. At the conclusion of a papal conclave in 1549—a conclave during which Pole came within one vote of the papacy and could have accepted the office by acclamation if he had not, characteristically, refused “to come in by the back door”—Carafa violently attacked him for his supposedly heretical opinions, an attack Pole easily refuted, but that left him shaken and depressed. His essential loneliness, he wrote later, was strongly brought home to him during that conclave, where he found himself surrounded by men with whom he had little in common, “neither country nor kindred.” Henry had died in 1547, but with Edward on the throne, a militant Protestantism was in power in England, and in any case, an attainder for treason and a warrant for Pole’s arrest were still in force. Relieved of the Viterbo governorship in 1551, and increasingly distant from the Curia, he disappeared for a time, only to turn up eventually at a Benedictine monastery on Lake Garda, where he is believed to have been discerning a vocation.

Only then, when his worldly career seemed to be coming to an end, did the unthinkable happen: Edward died, and Mary came to the throne. It was an outcome so improbable that Pole and many others judged it inexplicable apart from God’s will. After Edward’s death, his circle in London controlled the Tower, the Armory, the Treasury, and the Great Seal. They had put the Protestant Jane Grey on the throne and had the resources to defend her, while Mary, fearing for her life, had fled north with a few household servants. She was essentially alone in East Anglia, as the central government assembled an armed force of more the six thousand men to apprehend her.

Only the English people, at this point, could have put Mary on the throne, which they did, in a breathtaking reversal. At a time when the crime of sedition was punishable by the cruelest of deaths, gentry and commons alike rallied to her cause. The details of the shift in fortunes make for exhilarating reading, but for our purposes, the point is that Catholicism was not dead in England. On the contrary, in the country at large, Protestantism had failed to take root, and the joy that greeted Mary’s accession—the crowds that followed her to London, the feasting and the bonfires in the streets—were “hardly credible,” in the words of one ambassador. “From a distance the earth must have looked like Mount Etna,” another wrote. “I am unable to describe to you, nor would you believe, the exultation of all men.”

It was a joy that embraced Pole, too, when he finally made his way home. When he landed at Dover, more than a year after he was reappointed legate to England—the emperor was orchestrating Mary’s marriage to his son and feared Pole’s ­interference—his progress to London resembled a triumphal procession. As he traveled, Parliament repealed the Act of Attainder against him, and within days of his arrival a delegation representing “the whole body of the realm” declared the country “repentant of the schism” and asked to be received again “into the bosom and unity of Christ’s Church.” Accordingly, on the feast of St. Andrew, with the new king and queen and a representative assembly kneeling before him, Pole formally absolved England of “all heresy and schism . . . in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

This happened at night, by torchlight, and again, the surging crowds in the streets, the tears and the joy, strained credulity. For Pole personally, the ceremony was undoubtedly the high point of his life. Not only had his country returned to the Church, he himself had been the instrument of her return. Moreover, his very instrumentality was the kind of ecclesial, sacramental charism he had sacrificed home and family to defend. If he had died that night, he would surely have died a happy man.

Instead, with the sacrament of reconciliation behind them, Mary’s and Pole’s real work began: the work of reversing the damage ­done to the Church under Edward. In his six years in power, in one of the largest government confiscations of private property in English history, churches and cathedrals had been stripped, altars pulled down, statuary and stained glass shattered, crucifixes and books ritually burned. The entire repertoire of sacred music had been swept away, vestments and consecrated vessels destroyed. The task of ­reconstructing the ­material world of Catholic worship was overwhelming, but there were political challenges as well—what to do, for example, about Church properties that had passed into private hands under Henry—and spiritual challenges above all, especially the need to educate and rehabilitate a demoralized clergy. Ever mindful of the scandalous capitulation of the episcopate under Henry, Pole wanted a new kind of bishop—­resident, pastoral, loyal to the pope, and orthodox—and a new kind of priest. He wanted sound preaching and ­effective catechesis, ­especially on issues dividing ­Catholics and Protestants. He wanted seminaries and vocations, and a return of tithes and First Fruits to the Church. Most of all, he wanted England’s return to orthodoxy to be an inspiration to a Christendom in disarray. If he had failed to prevent the breakup of the Church as a whole, he hoped to reverse the effects of schism in his own country. This was the opportunity England had been given, he exhorted Parliament in his first address: to be an example to other nations and a beacon of hope in discouraging times.

Indeed, what he and Mary accomplished in four years—with her Spanish husband often abroad, Mary met daily with Pole—was nothing short of astonishing. By the end of the reign, all of Pole’s projects were in hand: seminaries established and universities recalled to the faith, new bishops appointed and Catholic worship everywhere restored. The material restoration alone—the ­refashioning of crucifixes and books, vestments and sacred ­vessels—was an impressive achievement, if ­largely concealed from us by subsequent iconoclasm. Even the public burnings of outspoken heretics, the one horrifying stain on the regime, were effective, viewed as part of a larger, multi-pronged campaign to discourage dissent. In his revisionist history, Fires of Faith, which refutes dismissive assessments of Mary’s reign, Eamon Duffy goes so far as to call the burnings inevitable, since, with good reason, the regime identified hardline Protestantism with sedition.

But then why, if everything was going their way—hardcore heresy in retreat and vocations to the priesthood surging—did Pole and Mary fail? The simple answer is that Mary died, and ­Elizabeth reversed the restoration. But if Mary alone had died, Elizabeth, when she attempted to overturn what Mary had done, would have faced a formidable opponent in Pole, a man of sterling virtue who enjoyed widespread support, and in 1556 had been made archbishop of Canterbury. Not even Mary’s poor health and childlessness discouraged Catholics in those days, with Pole regarded as a strong defense against future reversals. It was not simply Mary’s death, in other words, but Pole’s death, coinciding with hers, that spelled the end of the Catholic restoration in England.

But there is more to say on the subject, because not only did Pole and Mary both die, they died on the same day. Secular historians pass over the ­startling coincidence as a curiosity, but for the Christian, believing as he does that God’s providence is the true driver of history—“All times belong to him and all the ages”—it is impossible to avoid an impression of divine judgment. Those burnings, in other words, that we are sometimes encouraged to excuse—280 all told, in less than four years—are we really to suppose that God approved of them? And even if it is true that no ruler of the time countenanced competing religions in his realm, and no pastor doubted that his first duty was to protect his flock from contagion, might not Reginald Pole have turned out to be the exception to those rules? Pole, after all, had resigned from the Inquisition because he could not approve of its methods. He was ­famous—notorious in some circles—for his patience and gentleness. He was a man who knew how to keep his own counsel and resist the pressure of his peers—a man of sorrows, accustomed to loneliness and misunderstanding. Moreover, like the Protestants whose strengths he appreciated, he was a man of the Scriptures, his thought permeated by the Bible, who might have countered the conventional wisdom that one brazen heretic can pollute a whole polity with the parable of the yeast in the dough, which proposes an opposite, if slowly fermenting, triumph of orthodoxy. He would have been familiar, too, with the parable of the wheat and the tares, which forbids premature uprootings and assigns the burning of the tares—the burning!—to the angels at the end of the age. Alone among his contemporaries, Pole had qualities that might have enabled him to rise above the brutal exigencies of the age, and when he did not, it is as though God simply said, No, not in this way will my Church be restored. Indeed God, who always takes the long view, was content to wait three hundred years for Catholicism to return to England, and then only as a minority religion.

Some early commentators, beginning with John Foxe, portrayed Pole as a bystander and blamed the burnings on Mary alone, but subsequent scholarship rendered that position untenable. More recent historians, while acknowledging Pole’s complicity, insist that there is no real contradiction between early and late Pole, and attribute the apparent discontinuity to the different responsibilities assumed by Pole along with hard power. Others have pointed out that the heretics Pole confronted in England were very different from the anguished waverers he had been accustomed to counseling in Italy. By the time he came home, English Protestantism was organized and defiant, publicly blasphemous and often violent: Animals dressed as priests were strung up in the streets, a preacher was knifed at Paul’s Cross and a priest attacked with a machete during Mass, and there were widespread outrages against the Eucharist. Horrified by the violence, and the belligerence that seemed to him devoid of all humility and charity, Pole may have judged his earlier self naive, and so resigned himself to the harsh measures the times prescribed.

But there are other possible explanations, which are part of a larger story. In the years following the first session of Trent, as the Inquisition gained strength, it turned its attention to the remnant of the spirituali. Ever since Viterbo, Pole had been suspected by certain clerics. But once the Church had officially spoken on the issues, at a time when “development of doctrine” was a formula far in the future, individuals who had come to the council with views the council subsequently condemned, found themselves subject to a retroactive, intensifying persecution. Rumors about Pole multiplied and spread, malicious fictions probably fanned by Carafa. On the advice of the pope, Pole chose not to defend himself, until, one Lenten evening in 1553, he and Carafa unexpectedly crossed paths in a church in Rome. A two-hour conversation followed, at the end of which Carafa declared himself convinced and confessed that he had been mistaken. Afterwards he assured his colleagues on the Inquisition that Pole was blameless.

In the aftermath of the reconciliation, it is Pole’s emotional reaction that is revealing. From the ­poignant intensity of his joy and relief—relief at being exonerated, and joy at being received again into the good graces of Carafa’s friendship—we can infer how great his suffering had been. Clearly, years of defamation and loneliness had taken their toll. In England a year later, when he found himself in an unaccustomed position of power, there may have been many reasons for his pursuing the policies he did, but psychological and emotional reasons were surely among them.

Pole was no coward. He had lived for years under a sentence of physical death. But after a lifetime devoted to promoting the unity of the Church, his own unity with her was now seriously imperiled. In 1557, after Carafa had become Pope Paul IV, he turned on Pole again, in a half-crazed, murderous frenzy reminiscent of Henry VIII. Revoking Pole’s legation, he tried to extradite him from England in order to feed him to the Inquisition, and failed only because Mary refused to let Pole go.

For Pole, the situation would have been unbearably familiar. (“Two men,” he wrote incredulously, in a long letter to Carafa, “I worshipped . . .”) But this time the sordid drama was playing out in the Church itself, with the reigning pope—the earthly father above all earthly fathers—determined to excommunicate him. And how did he defend himself? In the same letter to Carafa in which he compared him to Henry (a letter he never sent, because “Thou shalt not reveal the nakedness of thy father”), Pole defended his orthodoxy by pointing to his campaign against heresy in England, a campaign, in his words, entirely devoted to the protection of the faithful.

No longer, in other words, was Pole the person standing in the breach, trying to mediate antagonisms, accused by Protestants of being a Nicodemus (one who acknowledges the truth only by night) and by Catholics of being a secret Protestant. After long years in exile, he was home, with his own people: a late-life experience of belonging that may have affected him, and his decision-making, more than he knew. Certainly, in England, he became more like everyone else, not by choosing sides exactly, because in fact he had always chosen the Church, but by pursuing policies that made it perfectly clear which side he was on.

The irony is that when he became more like everyone else—when he set limits to what would be tolerated and pursued the worldly strategy of the burnings—he died. In this conclusion, there is something reminiscent of Moses, who, for a far less significant failure of fidelity—yet a failure of the same kind, a failure to manifest God’s holiness to the people in his charge—was prevented from entering the Promised Land. Pole, too, in England, died on the near side of a metaphorical Jordan, prevented from seeing any of the fruits of his labors.

He did not live to see, for example, the exemplary fidelity of his bishops, who, at the price of their freedom, exactly reversed the arithmetic of the episcopacy under Henry. When Henry ­demanded fealty, all but one bishop apostatized; under ­Elizabeth, all but one stood firm.

Nor did he live to see the influence of his reforms in England on the future of the Church as a whole. Ideas that were first entertained in a small Bible study in Venice ended by inspiring the final sessions at Trent. So many of the hallmarks of post-Tridentine Catholicism that we take for granted—seminaries above all, but also a strong papalism and an anchoring reverence for the ­Eucharist—were nurtured under Pole, in a country Eamon Duffy called “a laboratory for counter-­reformation experimentation.”

From subsequent generations, too, Pole’s achievements have been concealed. Compared with the posthumous notoriety of Henry VIII—a main character in an endless churn of Tudor ­entertainments—Pole’s posthumous reputation resembles an unmarked grave.

In fact, he is buried in Canterbury Cathedral, in the chapel of Thomas Becket, another saint like Thomas More who, for speaking hard truths to power, went out in a remembered blaze of ­martyred glory. Though he spoke truth with the best of them, Pole was not martyred. His ­assassins having missed their mark, he had to live on and on in the very different, fractured world his king bequeathed him. If he had been murdered, he would probably be counted a saint, having been spared the difficult decisions he faced in England.

But if he died an apparent failure, his legendary charity compromised and his dream of a Catholic England indefinitely postponed, he died at peace. Not even the news of Mary’s death and all it portended disturbed the tranquil resignation of his departure. In the anonymity of his afterlife—the quiet obscurity to which he has been consigned—there is something like the contemplative life he might have chosen, had the choice been his. Instead, in obedience, he tried to do what was asked of him. Now, at leisure, he contemplates what followed, in the strong light of the just judgments of God.

The post The Lonely Passion of Reginald Pole appeared first on First Things.

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Sneer-Free History

As a forty-eight-year-old who graduated from high school in 1995, Trevin Wax’s “We Were Jesus Freaks” (December 2025) was pure nostalgia. Reading the article, I was struck with the impression that Wax and I grew up in the exact same evangelical subculture. What I appreciated most was Wax’s ­evident affection and gratitude for his 1990s evangelical upbringing. 

Further, it was refreshing to read an article about the culture and era that wasn’t full of sneers—we live in a world of C. S. Lewis’s chronological snobbery. We struggle to look at the past with gratitude. Criticism is the currency of our discussions of the past. I was waiting for the cynical, sneering ball to drop in the article, and it never did. As a recent convert to the Roman Catholic Church, I am deeply concerned about my own attitude toward my evangelical upbringing. I want my little Baptist church—where I was first exposed to CCM, mission trips in vans, and heavy doses of purity talk—to know how deeply grateful I am. It was that little church that showed me Christ. 

One note, I am not abandoning my evangelical upbringing. In fact, it was my evangelical upbringing that brought me to a fuller understanding of Jesus. As Wax put it: “that world shaped a resilient faith among young believers in a secular age, and many of us have benefited greatly.” Indeed.

Joe Gerber
meridian, idaho

Rationalizing Suicide

Thank you for publishing J. Mark Mutz’s probing inquiry (“The Death of Daniel Kahneman,” December 2025) of one man’s choice for assisted suicide in the face of the “pain and indignities of old age.” His analysis exposed the unreasonableness of such a decision, which is sometimes sought on the grounds that we want to leave for our posterity an image of us as happy and hale, “free from the deterioration associated with aging.” 

I would like to offer an ­experience that may help encourage us to withstand those pains and indignities. My grandmother was born in the early 1920s and taught me history from her many first-hand impressions. But she also taught me, from her deathbed in the mid-2010s, a philosophical truth that haunted me and shaped my attitude as a young man. On my last visit, soon before her death, she could no longer speak but could look knowingly at whoever was with her. She could not respond to what we told her, but she clearly received what we had to say and had a silent appreciation. In her quiet suffering, she bore witness to the fact that the quality of one’s interior life is one’s only sure property. I doubt I am unique in having such an experience, but my point is that the image we leave behind and the things we teach others are often beyond our conscious control. This fact is both humbling and relieving. Those in the last moments of life are still in God’s hands and can unconsciously teach us many valuable lessons. I share this experience because I think that in the face of normalizing euthanasia, more Americans will have to be vocally grateful about the great lessons those with little control over their image have taught them.

Michael DeFelice
stamford, connecticut

J. Mark Mutz wonders how Daniel Kahneman, who committed suicide, could have reasonably stated that his life was complete: “This is a perplexing statement. Can a life be judged complete before it is over? . . . This judgment is especially perplexing given that [Kahneman] purported to believe that his life was meaningless. . . . If Kahneman’s life was meaningless, how could it be complete? Completion assumes a whole: a story with a beginning, middle, and end . . . Yet Kahneman believed his life was somehow both meaningless and complete.” 

Let’s assume that meaningfulness is multidimensional insofar as it is concerned with the following three questions: What, if anything, makes life worth living? For what, if any, purpose am I created? How, if at all, does my life ultimately make sense? 

Given these three questions, Kahneman might have reasoned as follows before committing ­suicide: Within the finite temporal framework of this life, my life is complete and meaningful because it has contained sufficient happiness from my life’s work, marriage, and friends that made it worth living. Nevertheless, because there is no God and unending afterlife, my life is incomplete and meaningless because it lacks the purposeful and sense-making created framework that is required for the fulfillment of my desire for everlasting happiness. In short, Kahneman could have reasoned that it was the impossibility of continuing (and perfecting) the happiness that made his life in this world complete that ultimately made his life incomplete and meaningless.

Stewart Goetz
st. peter’s college
oxford, united kingdom

J. Mark Mutz’s sympathetic ­analysis of Daniel Kahneman’s suicide misses a crucial issue: Kahneman’s decision to kill himself, motivated by a desire to avoid the suffering that comes with old age, sets a terrible example for those who admired him and rely on his moral thinking to determine how to respond to challenges in their own lives. Human suffering is not restricted to the elderly but is part of the human condition itself. By offing himself, Kahneman set a nihilistic and hopeless example that others will be tempted to follow in the face of their own suffering, regardless of its source.

Kahneman’s suicide was a ­public act regardless of his intentions, which is why Mutz’s corrective—­secreted away in the last ­paragraph—was necessary. Mutz expressed the hope that his readers “will have the courage to withstand the pain and indignities of aging.” Life itself brings with it pains and indignities of all sorts that we must endure with courage for the sake of others who come after us.

Dexter Van Zile
boston, massachusetts

Living Evangelistically

I was thrilled to read Peco and Ruth ­Gaskovski’s review of my book, The Tech Exit (“Become A Low-Tech Family,” December 2025). I’m encouraged every time I hear of a family who has lived out a Tech Exit lifestyle themselves, testifying to the fact that it is realistic and possible. 

They are right to point out that if anything is unrealistic, it is the conventions of contemporary parenting. It’s true that I don’t get into addressing these deeper cultural shifts in parenting, which certainly impact how parents approach technology for their kids. And while I understand that a low-tech lifestyle will resonate more with parents who are more traditional or authoritative, as the Gaskovskis suggest, I didn’t want to let “gentle parents” off the hook either. All parents, regardless of parenting style, have non-negotiables, and the book aims to persuade every kind of parent that cutting out interactive screens and smartphones should be added to their list of non-negotiables. 

As a Christian myself, I deeply respect and agree with how the Gaskovskis are looking to ground The Tech Exit in a worldview that gives primacy to the domains I am recommending, namely, real relationships and pursuits in the real world. And I wholeheartedly agree that the primary imperatives to love God and love others are what should motivate Christians to reject technological innovations that interfere with these imperatives. When I speak to religious ­audiences, I always conclude by saying, the “Tech Exit is not the end goal in itself. It is a means to pursuing true human flourishing, the end which is ultimately found in a relationship with God and with others. We were made to know and love God and to love others made in his image. This is our highest calling. Reclaiming true human flourishing is the far greater task ahead of us, of which the Tech Exit is just one critical step on this path to true joy and ­fulfillment.” 

Why, then, did I not explicitly write that statement in the book? Because while the Tech Exit is an opportunity for Christian people to exhibit a different way of life evangelistically, we must also remember that people of other faiths are no less suspicious of this new technology. In one sense, the technology is against any faith in the transcendent. I ­wanted to speak to people of all faiths and even no faith, while at the same time hoping that ­Christians would be able to fill in for themselves how The Tech Exit helps them live out the primary imperatives of their faith. The ­Gaskovskis’ review models perfectly just what I was hoping Christians would conclude and apply from my book. 

Clare Morell
washington, d.c.

México Superficial

As I read through Todd Hartch’s recount of the conflict between Mexico’s liberal and Catholic elements (“México Profundo,” December 2025), I was continually struck by the notion that the past is a foreign country. This was perhaps exacerbated by having spent almost my whole life in the Yucatán ­peninsula—perhaps the least Mexican part of Mexico—so in a way, even my country in the present feels foreign.

Back to Hartch. What triggered this notion of foreignness was the stark contrast in intensity between the history retold in the article and Mexico’s current condition. While the narrative that “good liberals beat bad Church” may be found in public textbooks to this day, and with more emphasized as of late, one can barely discern any true animosity from politicians or the secular public toward the Church. (A sorry sort of “white pill” for those who fear the liberal takeover of public schools is how bad those liberals are at teaching anything and having it stick.) At the same time, I have a hard time finding any kind of religious fervor in the Catholic population that compares to the past. There are always the old ladies that help handle church matters and organize prayers, and youth organizations seem to be booming, but you don’t have to scratch too deep to get past the religious veneer that covers the social dynamics really fueling the interest of the people involved.

A stark example of this lack of intensity came during the COVID shutdowns. Churches were lumped together with “non-essential” business as venues that had to shut down for months or have drastically reduced capacity. The government didn’t prepare for a religious blowback, there was no reason to expect one. I remember being sinfully relieved that I wouldn’t have to get up early on Sundays for a while, but at the same time I felt a profound sense of discouragement from watching the Church willingly comply with the mandates of liberal science and liberal public policy. It seems to me that, paradoxically, the history of the persecution of the Church by the Mexican state may have been a source of health and even growth for the former. However misguided the motivation, if I had known of a local church refusing to close its doors in direct confrontation with the state, I know I would have been there every Sunday.

Álvaro Molina
merida, mexico

Lost in Ideology

R. R. Reno, in his excellent essay “Rome and Immigration” (December 2025), points out that the Catholic Church, and ­specifically Pope Leo XIV—taking his lead from Pope Francis and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)—is lost in progressive ­ideology. The Catholic Church regularly fails to condemn the lawbreaking of illegal border crossings. 

The Church’s milquetoast response to lawbreaking originated with Pope Francis’s statement, which was reiterated by Pope Leo, that “our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote and integrate.” In other words, illegal aliens who broke the law, many of whom committed and were convicted of crimes in the countries from which they came, must be received and allowed to take the jobs of legal citizens and given the respect that is due most appropriately to the country’s current citizens.

Recently, the USCCB repeated similarly ideological statements that support illegal aliens over hardworking and law-abiding citizens. The USCCB tempered the Vatican’s ideology with a more informed approach, indicating that border security and human dignity are not mutually exclusive and can coexist. But why must the focus be on the country that is the target of migration of illegal aliens? Taking the ­USCCB’s approach allows addressing the symptoms, signs, and results of a problem without even mentioning the problem itself! Pope Leo and the USCCB need to get their heads out of the ideological ether and address the root causes of the migrant and illegal alien problem, rather than writing prescriptions on how to treat illegal aliens. The source of mass migration is from where the migrants come and not the country where they ultimately go.

John A. Budny
redding, california

Fear and Trembling

I appreciated R. R. Reno’s “While We’re At It” comments regarding fearing God (December 2025). One of the consequences of the modern age has been the tragic loss of this sacred fear. The word has been either lost in interpretation or neglected altogether, which is ironic given all the phobias that beleaguer us. We seem to be drowning in so many worldly fears that neither money, power, nor science can eternally remove. We can’t bring ourselves to fear God, the only power in all of creation that can save us with his mercy.
Fear of the Lord should shock us with trembling, not with a passive awe as it is so often interpreted. It has to wake us up and align our very being with our creator. Nor is it a relic of the Old Testament; as Mary exclaimed, “His mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation” (Luke 1:50).

Fear of the Lord is a gift of the Holy Spirit, like the other six: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, and piety. These gifts help us put God first in our lives, so we can love him with all our heart, soul and mind. What stronger gravitational force to this total love is there than the fear of the Lord?

Andrew Dymek
daniel island, south carolina

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My parents had taken me to Rome because I was in love with the classics, probably to an annoying degree. I had lain awake on my grandparents’ apartment floor in New York, ripping through Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Odyssey. I explained what the Iliad was to my elementary school librarian (o tempora, o mores) so I could ask her to order it for the yearly book fair. I loved ­Homer’s fabulous tales of war and adventure.

Still, nothing could prepare me for the first time I read the Aeneid, in translation on that trip and then slowly, doggedly, in Latin class. It is a poem that transformed Western literature. Even while its composition was in progress, the word went round in elite literary circles that it would eclipse everything that had gone before. “Make way, you Roman authors, make way, Greeks!” wrote ­Virgil’s admirer Propertius. “Some unknown thing is being born that’s greater than the Iliad.” It was a time when momentous deeds and epochal changes were very much expected. After a hundred years of gory civil strife, Julius Caesar’s heir, ­Octavian—later renamed Augustus—took control of the state and proposed to usher in a new era of peace. It was a point of pride with him that Roman arts and letters were undergoing a renaissance to match his new regime. The Aeneid, if it really could exceed the glory of Homer’s Iliad, would demonstrate that Rome had supplanted Greece as the cultural as well as political center of the world. Naturally Augustus requested—not to say demanded—a peek at some early drafts. There was a lot at stake.

In form, at least, Virgil certainly delivered. The Aeneid makes a show of doing in one poem of twelve books what Homer had done in two ­poems of twenty-four books each. Aeneas spends the first six books wandering painfully away from his destroyed homeland, trailing in the wake of Homer’s Odyssey. Then he spends six books fighting a war in Italy, like the Greeks who besieged Troy in the Iliad. Augustus would have been pleased to find this son of the goddess Venus, flatteringly related to him through Ascanius, matching the deeds of Homer’s Odysseus and Achilles almost point for point. So it is all the more astonishing that when Aeneas comes on the scene in book 1, he appears to be totally miserable in the role of an epic hero. He seems like he would rather do anything than found Rome.

Homer’s protagonists are notoriously flawed. Achilles flies off the handle; Odysseus lies through his teeth. But one thing they very rarely do is abandon themselves to self-doubt or despair. They are too magnificent for that—they belong to the glorious race of almost-gods, which is already a misty memory from Homer’s perspective. They can toss around boulders that two men, “such as men are these days,” would struggle to lift. Mortal though they are, they are superheroes. Readers of Virgil’s poem would have expected a Roman champion to rival Homer’s in stature. Instead, the first time he opens his mouth, it is to curse his fate and wish his own death.

The scene is a storm at sea, a mainstay of the epic genre. The goddess Juno, incensed that Rome will one day wipe her beloved Carthage off the map, sends a tempest in an effort to stop Aeneas from fulfilling his destiny. He seems inclined to let her: “All his limbs go limp with cold; / He moans, and gropes toward the stars with both his hands, / And cries aloud as follows: ‘three and four times blessed / Were those who died in Troy’” (all translations in this essay are my own). It’s not that no epic hero ever contemplated suicide before: Odysseus, confronted with similar weather conditions, briefly wondered “whether I should cast myself into the sea and perish there.” But his deliberation lasted for about a line and a half before he resolved to tough it out. Aeneas spends eight lines fantasizing in detail about how he could have joined the lucky corpses at Troy, then falls silent again. He really, truly does not want to be on this quest.

It goes on like that. Odysseus was famously driven through his many twists and turns by an overpowering desire for nostos,the return home. But Aeneas has nowhere to return to. The home he has known all his life is burned to cinders in a harrowing scene of carnage, thanks in no small part to Odysseus. The Greeks, recast from the Trojan perspective as a band of shameless marauders, lay waste to everything Aeneas loves. Even his wife, Creusa, gets caught in the mayhem and can only give her blessing to the journey as a ghost, evaporating as she does so into the smoke that streams from Troy’s citadel. Her last instructions to Aeneas are to “‘preserve the love we share by cherishing our son.’ / And after giving me these words,” Aeneas recalls, “she left me there / In tears, and longing still to say so many things, / But she receded on the wind.”

It is in this moment that Virgil starts to reveal what he’s up to, and what he’s capable of. ­Creusa’s son is Ascanius, the boy who has just been singled out in a burst of light from heaven as the future patriarch of what will become Rome. His grandfather Anchises, who was previously inclined to turn his face to the wall and let the flames take him, now brims with fresh vigor at the thought of such a glorious future for his progeny. But Aeneas, the man with the apparent honor of bringing all of this to pass, can only watch in speechless horror as his entire life is incinerated. When he reaches out to grab for the woman he loves, he finds what all epic heroes find when they try to embrace the dead: empty air.

Virgil’s indelible image of Aeneas in flight from Troy, with Anchises on his shoulders and Ascanius toddling along behind, is a picture of courage as gratifying to the Roman mind as one could wish. “Pious Aeneas,” the dutiful son, salvaging his ancestral gods and following his father’s guidance, carries the future with him in the person of Augustus’s own ancestor. And yet Virgil has introduced an unsettling note of melancholy into the poem’s first crescendo. It becomes clear that this will not only be a story about the valor it takes to found a great civilization like Rome. It will also be about how much must be lost, left behind, and even destroyed if something new is to be built. The vacant look that Bernini sculpted into Aeneas’s eyes is the look of a broken-spirited veteran. It’s the look we imagine him giving to Dido, the beautiful queen of Carthage, when she asks him to tell the story of his escape: “unspeakable, oh queen, the grief you now command me to relive,” he says.

He tells her the story anyway, since it is already plastered all over the walls of the temple she is building to Juno and (we are invited to recall) soon to be recited everywhere in the form of the Homeric poems. “Where in all the regions of the world,” asks Aeneas, “Is there a land not yet brim-full of all our toil?” As much as the Iliad and the Odyssey are the inspiration for the Aeneid, they are also the Greek shadows Roman literature can’t get out from under. Homer’s stories contain the grief Aeneas can’t escape. Homer’s genius made Virgil’s possible, but now Virgil has the impossible task of surpassing it. Aeneas, like Virgil, is charged with creating something dazzlingly new—a city to outshine Troy. But all he has to work with are the ruins of everything he once loved.

This must be why ­Anchises’s death, on the journey from Troy to Carthage, leaves Aeneas well and truly rudderless. His cry of dejection at the memory of this loss is one of the most pitiful moments in the poem, as he explains to Dido how his father’s breath finally gave out in the Sicilian port of Drepanum: “Here, so ­many ocean tempests in, / Oh, my sire—lightener of blows and burdens— / I lost him. Anchises! Here, oh best of fathers, / You abandoned me.” In some sense Anchises has to die for Aeneas to come into his own—as every son who grows to full stature must outlive his father, as Troy and Carthage must fall for Rome to rise, as ­Homer must be usurped for Virgil to succeed. None of those concerns can comfort Aeneas, though. History, fate, and the will of the gods are all converging to thrust him to the head of his household and his people. But at a personal level, he’s not remotely ready. He feels in this moment less like a father of nations than like a scared, abandoned little boy.

It is in this condition of vulnerability that ­Aeneas washes up on the shore of Carthage and finds Dido at the dazzling height of her powers. Virgil compares her to the untamable huntress Diana, virgin goddess of the moon. She is clearly modeled after the Amazons and the proud ­heroines of myth. Faced with the enviable progress of Dido’s fledgling city, Aeneas does something understandable and totally disastrous: He lets her take over. She, meanwhile, is inflamed with a wild attraction to him, thanks to the scheming of Aeneas’s mother, the goddess of love. By the time the pair abscond into a cave and consummate their union, Aeneas has become so passive that he’s not even mentioned by name. “They go astray,” writes Virgil, “the leader, Dido, and the Trojan / In a cave.” ­Aeneas lets this dux femina, this formidable leading lady, take total control. He melts into the background. Finally, the gods have to descend from on high to jolt Aeneas out of his funk, at which point he has to toss Dido aside and leave her weeping on the shore.

Ever since this doomed love story was written, it has struck readers as almost unbearably heartbreaking. It is a Greek tragedy in the midst of a Roman epic. Dido transforms from Diana into Medea, the raving woman scorned, and takes her own life in a scene that made the young St. Augustine weep. Among other things, the whole episode is an allegory for Rome’s battle royale, as a growing republic, with Carthage’s maritime empire. Carthage was powerful, wealthy, and ancient compared to Rome, which at that point still had a reputation a little like that of Australia at its founding—a rough and rugged land farmed and defended by ex-­convicts. Like Dido in her fling with Aeneas, Carthage was very much the senior partner in the Punic Wars that pitted her against Rome. And like Dido, Carthage ended up ruined.

Most Romans would have looked back on the victory in the Punic Wars with a sense of satisfaction and pride—as Cato the Elder relentlessly stressed, Carthage had to be destroyed. Carthago delenda est. Virgil, too, portrays the conflict and its outcome as necessary and inevitable for the formation of Rome. But what he adds to the picture is the feeling of profound regret with which ­Aeneas leaves Dido’s shores, knowing quite well how devastated she will be. Italiam non sponte sequor, he tells her: “It is not my will I am following to Italy.” This is one of the poem’s conspicuously unfinished lines. It has always been part of the Aeneid’s mystique that Virgil died without perfecting it, allegedly wishing it should be burned rather than survive in its incomplete state. Even so, it is at least extremely fitting, if not downright providential, that this particular line remains incomplete. There are six resounding beats of silence where there ought to be more syllables, but what words could Virgil or Aeneas possibly fill that space with? He has to go, and she has to die, much as Rome’s expanding republic was bound to collide with Carthage eventually. Dido’s anguish is riveting, of course, but it is Aeneas’s sorrow that expresses Virgil’s tragic vision most completely. Even history’s grandest acts leave destruction in their wake.

It’s in realizing this, and accepting it, that ­Aeneas finally begins to grow into his destiny. C. S. Lewis, who loved the Aeneid more than almost any other poem, wrote to Dorothy L. Sayers that its “effect is one of the immense costliness of a vocation combined with a complete conviction that it is worth it.” If ­Aeneas begins to feel that conviction as he turns away from Dido’s shores, then he comes to full stature as the man he has to be two books later, when he meets his father’s ghost in the underworld. Book 6 is the hinge point of the poem, the ­katabasis or descent into death that defines the ­hero’s journey. Anchises is at rest in Elysium, where the ­blessed wait for resurrection. The speech he ­delivers is history disguised as prophecy, the story of Rome up to Virgil’s day foretold as the destiny of Aeneas’s descendants. Its high point is a tribute to Rome’s distinctive achievements, set against those of other peoples:

Others will mold the breathing bronze with softer touch,
I’m sure, and coax out living faces from the marble,
Plead their causes better, chart the heavens’ motions
With a staff, predict the rising of the stars.
Remember: your dominion, Roman, is of nations.
These will be your arts—impose the ways of peace,
Show mercy to the conquered, crush the proud in war.

With these words, Virgil stakes out a claim to greatness for himself, for Aeneas, and for Rome. Greeks may excel in wordplay and aesthetic refinement; the astronomers of the eastern empires may trace the planets and the stars in their courses. Rome will never reach its full potential by imitating them, just as Aeneas will never fulfill his calling by rebuilding Troy and Virgil will never make his mark on literary history by reproducing Homer. Sad as it is to leave the past behind, the moment calls for something totally new.

What is that new thing? For Virgil, it is surely the Aeneid itself. The poem has often been dismissed as a pale knock-off of Homer, a way station between the Iliad and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács wrote that “the heroes of Virgil live the cool and limited existence of shadows, nourished by . . . blood that has been sacrificed in the attempt to recall what has forever disappeared.” But Virgil thoroughly anticipated this accusation and understood his place in history far better than his critics do. Precisely by seeing and acknowledging that the Homeric world of legend is dying away, he creates a gritty new kind of realist epic and a vividly human kind of hero. Surely that’s why Dante chose Virgil to lead him right up to the gates of paradise, and why T. S. Eliot saw him as the bridge between the fading pagan era and the dawning age of Christendom. To the greatest authors of the Christian West, the Aeneid has always represented the fullest literary consummation of what the pre-Christian world had to offer.

What the poem is to literature, Rome’s empire was to history—the sum and summit of antiquity. That is how Virgil portrays it: as the one power that can gather together the world’s nations and “impose the ways of peace.” Modern scholarship on the poem has often been preoccupied with a debate over whether Virgil meant to extol the majesty of Augustan Rome or covertly denounce the evils of imperialism. The catastrophes of the twentieth century made readers hypersensitive to moral ­anxieties about nationalist excess, and they sometimes ­project those anxieties onto Virgil. But it’s a poor fit. Virgil’s contemporary readers were certainly alive to the possibility that power could be abused. But they were also convinced that it could be wielded righteously, and they tended to believe they were the ones to wield it so, given their peerless martial virtues and sense of justice. Virgil portrays empire as Rome’s divine commission, but he is ­also more honest than any mere triumphalist about what it will take to shoulder that singular burden. Perhaps the Romans would rather not confront the moral complexities of their new regime; perhaps they would rather try to reconstruct the bygone age of the republic or escape to Greece and practice philosophy. Perhaps Aeneas would rather go back to Troy. It’s irrelevant—Troy is gone, and so is the republic. The moment calls for what it calls for.

So it is that Aeneas climbs up out of the underworld, through an ivory gate reserved for false dreams. This is one of the moments typically cited by “pessimists” as evidence that Virgil thinks of Augustus’s gleaming promise of peace as nothing more than a deceitful fantasy. But here Virgil is ­hearkening back one final time to the Odyssey, in which Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, can’t believe a dream she has that her husband has returned. It must be a dream from the ivory gate, says Penelope, and the point is that she’s wrong: Odysseus is in fact back. The reality of his return brings an end to his wanderings and her loneliness, as if they had woken up from the same bad dream. It’s possible that the dream Virgil means to dispel is the one Aeneas is leaving behind him, the lost past of Troy and the disoriented wanderings of his Odyssean journey. What comes next is hard, solid, and real: a war for control of Italy that takes its cues from the Iliad. It ends with the merciless slaughter of ­Aeneas’s rival, Turnus: “His life fled down beneath the shadows, moaning, in contempt.”

At least, that’s how the poem ends as it stands. There’s some possibility that Virgil intended to soften the blow by adding scenes of reconciliation after the war. But given the trajectory of Aeneas’s development, the ending we have is perfectly fitting. Virgil introduces his hero in a moment of abject disorientation and leaves him in a moment of grim resolve. The whole majestic future of Rome is sealed in the poem’s gruesome final kill. The greatness of Aeneas’s endeavor doesn’t cancel out the severity of what he has to do. Augustus’s autocracy doesn’t vitiate the blessings of his peace. In managing to see and honor all this, Virgil changed literature as much as Rome changed the world.

Commentaries on Bernini’s sculpture of Aeneas invariably point out that it depicts the three ages of man: childhood, adulthood, and old age. If so, then to come to full stature as an adult is to embark on a journey like Aeneas’s—to find yourself thrust into the terrifying position of building a life and a family while the older generation that once defined your world starts to pass away. I feel the truth of that when I revisit the sculpture, now that I’ve grown from ­Ascanius’s height to Aeneas’s. I also find myself wondering whether nations go through the same ages that men do. Virgil certainly seemed to think so.

America is now in a position rather like ­Aeneas’s at the start of Virgil’s poem. The republic is approaching its 250th ­birthday—its ­semiquincentennial or, for optimists, its quarter millennium. It’s a milestone that seems to call for projections of national confidence and displays of patriotic enthusiasm, much as the advent of Augustus’s reign might have seemed to call for a thumping expression of jingoism on Virgil’s part. And yet the lead-up to ­America’s 250th, like the lead-up to the Augustan era, has been marked by things falling apart. The social consensus that obtained after World War II has fractured into a bitter confusion of hostile factions, locked in a cold civil war that sporadically flares hot. The erosion of religious faith has left a void at the heart of the nation, to be filled with fanatical political movements and millenarian forebodings of a digital singularity or an economic revolution. And the uneasy balance of powers over which America presided in the wake of the Cold War has crumbled, taking with it the morality tale we once told about the steady triumph of freedom over authoritarians from Hitler to ­Stalin. Donald Trump’s intervention into the ongoing Middle Eastern wars and the severe disagreements it provoked among his followers typify the kind of harsh ­choices and moral ambiguities we face in a reconfiguring world. There is more to come.

If that’s the case, however, maybe it’s not a sign of America’s decline so much as of its coming to maturity. Maybe what’s ending is an age of innocence, and the task ahead is a little like that of ­Aeneas: to forge a new consensus and a new peace out of the wreckage of the old. The Aeneid can teach us that just because our calling is harrowing and confusing doesn’t mean it’s not noble or necessary. There is a moment, just before the war that wins Italy, when Aeneas hoists onto his shoulders a shield decorated with images of Rome’s future. “He delights in all these images of things / He does not understand,” writes Virgil. “He lifts the fame and fortune of his children’s children / On his shoulders.” That is what makes him a hero for our times: He is lost, bereaved, uncertain, and broken in the midst of the very acts that make him great. Even after he climbs out of the underworld, he must feel his way through a world he does not fully understand, taking each next step as manfully and honorably as he can. So must we.

The post In the Footsteps of Aeneas appeared first on First Things.

It dates to my time 
Of adolescence, 
And has the same near 

Emptiness, the same 
Lightness in the hand,
As those eclectic

Years do in my mind.
Still inside the box
(A gift, probably),

It appears never
To have lost the shape
That it was made in,

Never to have been
Broken in beyond
That first unfolding.

Deciding it’s mine,
Maybe the one thing,
Of all the jumbled

Things left behind here,
Still of some use, I
Take it down, empty

Out my overstuffed,
Ten-year-old trifold,
And begin the quick,

Unexpectedly
Mood-changing transfer,
Like a New Year’s kiss,

Of all its contents, 
Leaving out as much

As I can bear to.

I like the way it
Feels on my person,
Or, more precisely,

How it doesn’t feel—
Cramped, inflexible,
Full of so many

Unused bits that it’s
Constantly trying
To undo itself

In the dark—and how
Everything it holds
Flips open and shut

Softly, with a light
Flapping of its one
Leather wing, and fits

Easily inside
Any old pocket:
So pleasant a weight,

And of such softness,
That you feel it might
Simply slip away,

That you could lose it,
Having forgotten
It was ever there. 

The post The Wallet appeared first on First Things.

We would only work it all out much later:
that the glimmer of thin glaze over everything
was intended to represent her veiled vision;
to suggest the confusion creeping into her
consciousness, as she lowered her head, trying
to understand what must have been difficult—
almost impossible—to comprehend: this sudden
onset of the miraculous and how it would
come to such a glorious end—so unlike that
of the trapped rabbit, who had no way out.

The post Another Madonna appeared first on First Things.

warblers and sparrows, cranes and jays and gannets
cuckoos, grebes, and larks, waxwings, kinglets;

their tales of crouching, waiting, all their dense
conversations mostly made of silence.

The stories they like best, the ones they tell
and retell, are of failure: the common yellow-

throat whose scratchy song scared off the rare
woodcock, the white-tailed kite always elsewhere.

Truth is, I find it dull, and I despise
myself for that. How is it they can prize

so highly what’s not there, shape their lives
to welcome something that never arrives?

What grace is theirs, to know what silence means,
and see because of things they have not seen? 

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