What does it mean to be well read?

Is it a matter of quantity, like how many classics you’ve been through? Or is it a matter of quality, like what you’ve gotten out of each one? What if it’s something else entirely?

Most people default to the assumption that being well read means having checked a great many books off your reading list. But that’s only the start of it. Because while quantity is indeed a prerequisite to being well read, it’s far from the defining feature.

Today, we look at different ideas about what being well read means, and offer an alternative approach to these misunderstandings. More importantly, however, we look back to see what past titans of literature considered “well read” to really mean — their thoughts, as we’ll see, might surprise you…

Our next book club read has been decided…

We will read A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens next!

Our first discussion is on November 4 — now is a fantastic time to join us.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..."

Our news cycle is an endless procession of doom. There are a thousand reasons to despair. It feels as though our time is uniquely chaotic, that an old order is collapsing and what lies ahead is beyond control. But we have been here before.

Dickens takes us into the hysteria of the French Revolution and a society utterly consumed by vengeance. But he also shows how an act of self-sacrificial love can redeem it. Indeed, “Death may beget life”.

You must live now by refusing to be part of the cycle of decay. The counter to the mob is YOU, and the redemption of your own life. You are called to discover life even in the midst of terrible evil and death. The darkest times are the setting for the greatest acts of love.

This is one of the most powerful novels ever written. Please read it with us.

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How NOT to Be Well Read

We’ll begin by looking at the negatives, and what not to do. First on the docket: book lists.

You’ve probably seen these before: lists like “The 100 greatest books of all time” or “20 classics you should read before you die.” On the surface, there’s nothing inherently wrong with these lists. In many regards, they can be quite useful for introducing you to books you might not otherwise encounter.

But once you start treating them as checklists, that’s when it becomes a problem. This is because at its core, being well read is about far more than simply working your way through the right titles. It doesn’t even matter if they are considered “great books”. Why? Because the fact that a book is considered “great” doesn’t mean it’s good, much less true.

Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche all appear on various lists of essential reading. All of these men, however, disagree profoundly about some of the most fundamental questions of human existence. What is human nature? What makes a society just? Does God exist? What is the purpose of life?

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that you should never read authors you disagree with. But it does reveal one of the main dangers of treating the classics as a list of important books to get through: you might simply become a well read relativist.

Every great book — and indeed, every author — makes a claim about the nature of reality, whether you know it or not. Although one benefit of reading broadly is engaging with these different views, it is not the supreme one. A much higher goal of reading is to grow in mind, heart and soul to become a better person. But a book can’t make you better if it is not actually true.

“True” in this case doesn’t mean literally true, for that would rule out all of fiction, which is in many ways more true than dry and soulless non-fiction. A book is “true” if it accurately reflects the nature of the world and reality, in turn helping you see life for what it really is and what it really means. Mere knowledge of the world’s most famous thinkers and their opinions doesn’t do that for you. An understanding of where they were right and where they went wrong, however, does.

So, having established what well read isn’t, we must now ask the question: what is it?

How to Be Well Read

A better way to think about being well read is to shift the focus from the sheer number of books you finished to how well you understand the relationships between them. How well can you connect the ideas they contain, and the intellectual traditions from which they emerged?

This reframing shifts you from the abstract world of ideas to one of dynamic engagement with what you’re reading. When you begin to trace how different ideas evolved and influenced one another — and then expressed themselves in novels or treatises — you gain an understanding not just of the work in front of you, but of how it fits into the larger story of your culture.

One of the best ways to do this is to follow the intellectual influences behind the books you read. Start with each one’s bibliography. Study your favorite authors, and find out who their favorite writers were. Keep following the chain backwards, and find out which works influenced their influences. Now, with only a general overview of dates, you have a mental timeline of how an intellectual tradition organically developed.

For one practical example, take The Lord of the Rings. To get more out of this masterpiece, you must inevitably turn to the life of its author. Trace the thread of his interests for long enough, and you’ll encounter Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Norse mythology, and the great traditions of medieval literature. Once you turn to Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis, you’ll quickly be thrust into the world of classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the enchanted elements of the medieval world.

Before you know it, you’ve discovered an entire “family tree” of intellectual and literary ancestors behind a single book. When you inevitably read these works, you develop a broader, more comprehensive understanding of the subject matters you’re most interested in. Compare this with a typical “great books” listicle approach, which offers you a diverse collection of facts and opinions, but nothing to necessarily tie them together.

To be well-read, then, is not simply to have read a great many books, but to understand how they fit together, what they reveal about the world, and how they contribute to a deeper pursuit of truth. But this, of course, is just the beginning.

For someone like Dante, being well read goes so much deeper than being able to check the boxes on a list of great books, or even tracing the threads between them. Instead, his idea is that being well read consists far more of how you read than what you read.

And how do we know this? Because Dante wrote it down and told us himself.

According to Dante, there are multiple different “levels” to reading, and each mode of reading takes us further beneath the surface of a text and closer to its ultimate meaning…

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This is a guest piece by a great friend of the publication, historian and writer David Engels.

Millions of readers are familiar with The Lord of the Rings, sometimes through the movies, sometimes the novel. Yet most are entirely unaware of the profoundly Christian — or, to be more precise, Catholic — nature of the world into which they are drawn and which they usually come to cherish.

Some even regard Middle-earth as somehow essentially “pagan”: a universe of elves and dwarves, ancient kings, magic, sacred trees and polytheistic powers, all of which seem to be as far removed from churches, priests or biblical revelation as possible. And indeed, Christianity is never explicitly mentioned in Tolkien’s ‘Legendarium’; nevertheless, Tolkien himself left no room for doubt. In a famous letter, he wrote:

‘The Lord of the Rings’ is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like “religion,” to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.

The apparent contradiction disappears as soon as one understands Tolkien’s conception of literature. He cordially disliked allegories and had little interest in simply disguising Christian teachings as high fantasy, as was (rightly) attributed to C.S. Lewis’s heavy-handed Narnia.

But in contrast to the lion Aslan, Frodo is not the Christ, and the Ring is not simply original sin, Galadriel the Virgin Mary or lembas the Eucharist. Middle-earth is far more subtle, yet in a certain sense also more radically Christian, than such a simplistic system of one-to-one identification would suggest: a world conceived by a mind so deeply shaped by Catholicism that Christian notions of creation, evil, freedom, sin, sacrifice and redemption became part of its very fabric…

Don’t forget to join our book club…

Our final session on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is today, October 21.

This evening, we are voting on our next read-along!

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A Faith Bought at a High Price

Of course, Tolkien’s Catholic worldview cannot be separated from his biography. Born in 1892, Tolkien lost his father when he was still a very small child, while his mother, Mabel, converted to Catholicism; a decision that offended parts of her Protestant family and exacerbated the financial difficulties she faced whilst raising her two infant sons. When she died in 1904, aged only 34, Tolkien was twelve years old: he always regarded her as a martyr in the truest sense of the word, as she had suffered and even somehow died for her faith, and believed that his own Catholicism had been bought at the price of her sacrifice and should be cherished as his most valuable treasure.

Following the loss of both his parents, Tolkien came under the guardianship of Father Francis Morgan, an Oratorian priest associated with the circle of the great Cardinal John Henry Newman, the father of modern British Catholicism. The Roman faith thus entered Tolkien’s life not primarily as an abstract intellectual system, but as something closely linked to motherhood, self-sacrifice, loyalty, suffering and love, and also endured the trenches of the World War, the deaths of most of his closest childhood friends, the disappointments of his professional life at Oxford, and the tragic civilisational and industrial upheavals of the early 20th century which he witnessed first-hand when so many of the landscapes he had adored became prey to sprawling industrial estates. Until his death in 1973, Tolkien remained a devout, practising Roman Catholic who endeavoured to attend Mass daily, and one of his sons even became a priest.

This biographical aspect is crucial to understanding Middle-earth. Tolkien did not first create an imaginary universe and then somehow artificially insert Christian symbols into it. Rather, his faith formed the fertile ground from which this universe sprang. Reflecting precisely on this dynamic, Tolkien even described his own artistic creative process as a ‘sub-creation’: Man cannot create ex nihilo, as God does, but since he himself is created in the image of God, he can participate in the divine act of creation by creating secondary worlds; and it is not surprising that, in some of his more speculative writings, Tolkien even reflected on the impression that Middle-earth had not been ‘invented’ by him, but rather had been ‘revealed’ to him, so that he regarded himself as a chronicler rather than a creator (a point which, moreover, has profound transcendental implications when viewed from the Jungian perspective of ‘active imagination’).

A Christian Cosmos Without Christianity?

The Christian aspects of Tolkien’s Legendarium are most clearly evident in the countless legends collected by his son in the Silmarillion, the true key to understanding Middle-earth and doubtlessly his main work.

Tolkien’s mythology begins with a single Creator, Eru Ilúvatar, who remains the ultimate transcendent reference of the world until the end. At the beginning of time, Ilúvatar creates angelic beings, the ‘Ainur’ or ‘Valar’, and invites them to take part in a great music that somehow prefigures the history of the world to come. Melkor, however, the greatest of these beings, sows discord in the music because he seeks to impose his own will upon it and desires to acquire a creative power independent of Ilúvatar. Here, Tolkien reflects the classical Christian understanding of Satan and evil: Melkor’s fall is as much a consequence of his ‘non serviam’ as of his hatred for mankind, and the more he refuses to fulfil Ilúvatar’s will, the more he loses his creative power and can only corrupt, disfigure and parody what has already been created; orcs, trolls and the numerous other monsters of Middle-earth thus reflect this metaphysical barrenness of evil. Hence, in the end, even Melkor’s rebellion cannot ultimately escape divine providence, and the discord he sows makes the resulting music even more beautiful in a way Melkor himself, ‘that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good’, as Goethe once put it, cannot foresee.

The history of Arda thus unfolds in the shadow of a primeval Fall that is repeated time and again by the other ‘races’ of created beings as they all attempt to appropriate as their own that which they have received as a gift. Fëanor’s love for the Silmarils turns into greed and then rebellion; Men flee from an initial conflict with Melkor, which they prefer not to mention, but which implicitly alludes to the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden; Sauron’s original desire for order becomes a lust for total control; Saruman’s knowledge degenerates into manipulation; even the Númenóreans, blessed with extraordinary longevity as a reward for their loyalty to the Valar, rebel because they cannot accept mortality, etc.

This last theme is particularly important, as in Tolkien’s work, death is not a punishment, but ‘Ilúvatar’s gift’ to humanity. Thanks to death, Men are not bound forever to the created world, as is the case with the immortal Elves who, even after dying, are reembodied. Yet, as the nature of death has been obscured by the Enemy, men begin to fear precisely that gift which frees them from the bonds of this world and places them even higher than the Elves, who are bound to Middle-earth for ever. To be sure, the desire for immortality is legitimate, but it becomes destructive when man attempts to attain through worldly power that which can only be received in a transcendent manner.

The same Christian framework also characterises The Lord of the Rings. Its central conflict does not lie between competing interests as in G.R.R. Martin’s Machiavellian parody of Tolkien, but between transcendent principles, though (contrary to an often-repeated prejudice) the boundaries between good and evil are never simplistic or Manichean: Boromir fails where Faramir resists, yet redeems himself through his willingness to make sacrifices; Saruman gradually succumbs to evil out of his desire to understand; Gandalf is fully aware of the limits of his own power to resist the Ring; Gollum wavers between remorse and relapse; even Frodo and Sam are not immune to temptation, though the former ultimately yields to a pressure far too powerful for him, etc.

What is most striking, therefore, is that redemption does not come about through strength or will-power alone as in the usual Hollywood movie, itself a late secularised offshoot of Pelagianism: Frodo voluntarily accepts his calling and carries the Ring further than one could reasonably have expected, yet at the decisive moment, he cannot help but fail, when, standing at the Cracks of Fate, he claims the Ring for himself. His mission is nevertheless successful, as Gollum seizes the Ring and plunges into the fire; a Gollum who is only still there because Bilbo, and later Frodo, had shown him mercy. Thus, what appeared even to the good-hearted yet short-sighted Sam to be ill-advised compassion becomes the instrument through which, ultimately, divine Providence accomplishes what human (or rather, hobbit) heroism cannot do.

This is the most obvious (but by no means the only) example of Tolkien’s famous concept of ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden reversal from a seemingly inevitable catastrophe to redemption – not a cheap and easy ‘happy ending’, and even less a vulgar deus ex machina, but the realisation that man must fight, choose, suffer and remain faithful, yet cannot save himself in the end. At the decisive moment, grace brings to completion what human effort alone cannot achieve – a perspective that stands not only in fundamental contrast to the self-sufficient heroism of typical blockbusters, but also to the heroic and often tragic worldview of pagan mythology.

For the same reason, Christological motifs are distributed amongst several heroes, rather than being concentrated on a single allegorical Christ figure: Gandalf experiences death and returns transformed; Aragorn is the hidden king who treads the paths of the dead and returns to heal and restore his kingdom; Frodo is the sufferer who takes a crushing burden upon himself for others and is thereby permanently marked – each of them reflects something of Christ without simply ‘embodying’ Christ, because the world of Middle-earth is not a copy-paste of the ‘historical’ world, but in many respects a ‘prequel’ whose (forgotten) history prefigures central elements of salvation history in the same way the deeds and the prophecies of the Old Testament announce the New Testament.

Chronology itself subtly underpins the Christian framework. The Ring is destroyed on 25 March, which is the traditional Feast of the Annunciation and, according to an ancient Christian tradition familiar to medieval scholars such as Tolkien, also the original date of the Crucifixion: the decisive victory over evil in Middle-earth, in which Aragorn offers up the entire army of Gondor as a conscious sacrifice of hope and in which Frodo collapses under the weight of the ultimate temptation, only for his sacrifice to be brought to fruition by Providence, takes place on that traditional date associated both with Christ’s entry into the world and with the fulfilment of redemption through sacrificial death.

The Marian dimension of Middle-earth is equally significant. Tolkien once associated his own perception of beauty ‘in grandeur and simplicity’ with the Blessed Virgin Mary and even translated the Ave Maria, the Sub tuum praesidium and the Litany of Loreto into Quenya, the language of the Noldorian High Elves. This sensibility is particularly evident in Elbereth, the Queen of the Stars, whose name the Elves and Hobbits invoke in the darkness in the same way as Christians invoke the name of the Virgin Mary as ‘Stella maris’, as well as in Galadriel, whose beauty, mercy, light and intercessory presence are also unmistakably reminiscent of Catholic Marian devotion. Tolkien himself confirmed the connection between these figures and Marian devotion when he wrote: ‘The invocations of Elbereth and the character of Galadriel, as described directly (or through the words of Gimli and Sam), were clearly linked to Catholic Marian devotion.’ Yet here, too, this is not a matter of allegorical identity, as of course, neither Elbereth nor Galadriel is the mother of Christ; rather, the Marian ideal of beauty – as something at once pure, powerful, maternal and transcendent – has flowed into the imaginative bloodstream of Middle-earth because it was present with the almighty and all-knowing God from the beginning of creation.

Even the apparent paganism of Tolkien’s world must therefore be understood within this broader context. The Valar are not ‘gods’ who compete with the Creator or somehow exclude him from everyday business, but angelic beings fully subordinate to Ilúvatar, who can only partially discern his intentions. Similarly, the heroic ethos inherited from Germanic and Norse mythology and so obvious in the Lay of Túrin or the history of the Rohirrim is not rejected, but rather, in a sense, ‘baptised’: courage, loyalty, honour and resistance to seemingly insurmountable adversity are integrated into a Christian universe in which heroism finds its fulfilment only through humility and grace, and even the ultimate tragedy of Túrin Turambar finds its sublimation in the prophecy that it would be his role to slay Morgoth at the last battle and re-establish the balance of justice.

Tolkien and the Renewal of Christianity

All this may explain why Tolkien is far more than just one of so many successful authors of fantasy literature. In an increasingly post-Christian society, many readers encounter realities in Middle-earth for which they may initially lack a theological vocabulary: good and evil, sacrifice, providence, sin, mercy, sacred kingship, beauty and the hope of a final victory beyond history. And very often it may not even occur to them that these elements are by no means merely a form of escapist archaism, since Tolkien never demands assent to a particular doctrine or imposes a specific interpretative framework on his audience. The reader learns to love the beauty of Rivendell, the sacrifice of Lúthien, Sam’s humility, the mercy shown to Gollum, Huan’s fidelity, Aragorn’s kingship or Frodo’s sacrifice long before they necessarily understand the theological assumptions that give these things a significance far beyond the mere inner workings of Middle-earth: the reader’s imagination is converted to a Christian sensibility even before the intellect realises that such a conversion has even begun.

And it is precisely here that Tolkien’s particular significance for a renewal of Christianity in the present day may lie. Christianity can never be restored solely through rational victory in theological debates or, even worse, political success, because a civilisation that understands neither the Christian vision nor its importance for its own identity must first regain the ability to perceive its omnipresence, beauty and coherence.

Tolkien offers precisely such an initiation by repeatedly showing what a world looks like in which creation is still enchanted, evil is real, freedom entails responsibility, beauty points beyond itself, and true heroism may lie in suffering rather than in heroic triumphalism — truths that are, of course, as valid for Middle-earth as they are for the ‘real world’, though we have lost the capacity to recognise them as such in everyday life and to recognise everyday life itself as a spiritual struggle as important for our own souls as Frodo’s journey to Mordor.

‘Aurë entuluva’ — ‘The day shall come again’ — is therefore more than a heroic battle cry; it expresses the deepest Christian conviction that darkness is real, and humankind cannot redeem itself alone, but that beyond the shadow, there remains a light that evil can never reach and that ultimately flickers in each of us.

This is a guest piece by a great friend of the publication, historian and writer David Engels. Please give his excellent work a follow! You can subscribe to his Substack for free, here:

David Engels - Memoria Mundi

This is the personal Substack account of David Engels. World history, civilisational studies, philosophical musings, traditionalist spirituality, occasional conservative rants and good old cultural pessimism.

It’s nearly time for our final discussion on The Idiot. We meet tomorrow, at noon ET. The discussion will be live streamed here for those joining via Substack.

For those joining our discussion group directly (available to all paid members), the Zoom link is at the bottom of this email.

Below are some key ideas to consider as we continue through the rest of Parts 3 and 4…

Recall that our last session ended in the wake of Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation,” where the consumptive boy on his deathbed condemns the universe for his illness and demise. He acts as the negative foil to Myshkin — whereas the Prince’s illness helped nurture his love for mankind, Ippolit’s illness only hardened his heart, as he now plans to commit suicide.

The contrast emphasizes the mystery of the human spirit. Both men have debilitating illnesses, and suffer much, and yet each has a drastically different decision in how their suffering will guide them; one towards love, the other towards hatred.

This leads us into Part 4, which follows all the threads we’ve been tracing — Myshkin’s mercy, Nastasya’s vengeance, Rogozhin’s wrath, and Aglaya’s pride — and brings the narrative to a point of crisis.

Specifically, each character faces the heart of their condition, and their greatest vice, which happens to be a disordered love. Nastasya must give up her vengeance, Rogozhin his wrath. Myshkin must sacrifice his idealistic adoration of Nastasya, Rogozhin, and perhaps mankind in totality. He must learn to account for the existence of evil in the human heart.

If these characters succeed, they have a genuine hope for redemption. If they fail, the potential for ruin, debauchery, and bloodshed may linger around the corner.

The final question, ironically, is not whether Myshkin the “Christ-like” character can save his fellow man, but rather, can he rescue his own innocence and beauty from the corresponding vice and depravity of the world around him?

Stated differently, can true Christian charity survive a godless modern world?

Below are some key questions to consider:

• Ponder Ippolit’s hatred of Myshkin. Why does he hate an otherwise kind and innocent man? What specifically does Ippolit demand, or desire, from Myshkin?

• Further consider why Myshkin’s inability to judge the evils in man constitutes an imperfect love. What is wrong with his blind acceptance and affirmation of his fellow man, despite their evils?

• Why is Aglaya’s love for Myshkin so volatile? What does she demand from him, and is it a noble demand? Why or why not?

• Where do we see Rogozhin struggle against himself, and what does that struggle reveal about him compared to Myshkin and Nastasya?

• Ponder Nastasya’s temperament - how is her vengeance a risk to her own well-being? How can her vengeance lead to self-destruction, and what does her path of redemption look like?

• Does Dostoevsky present Myshkin’s Christ-like innocence as an ideal, a warning, or a more ambiguous middle ground?

Share your thoughts in the subscriber chat, along with any questions you have — we will incorporate them into Wednesday’s discussion!

Here’s the Zoom link for tomorrow:

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Yesterday marked the 233rd anniversary of Marie Antoinette’s execution by guillotine. To French revolutionaries, her death was a symbol of victory. But to those who know her story, it was something else entirely: one of history’s greatest injustices.

The revolutionary propaganda surrounding Marie Antoinette was so intense that even to this day, people still think she was a careless spendthrift who shouted “let them eat cake”. But the real story of her life is far more tragic, for it is the tale of an innocent young woman villainized by the media, and forced to endure unspeakable horrors at the hands of her enemies.

Today, we set the record straight on Marie Antoinette by showing how the media and public opinion turned an innocent wife and mother into one of history’s biggest scapegoats.

And the most shocking part? The tactics used against her are still eerily similar to those used today…

Join our pilgrimage through the Great Books…

We’re currently reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot together. Next discussion is on October 21 — see the full reading schedule here.

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An Attack on Innocence

Marie Antoinette was just 14 years old when she arrived in France. Her arranged marriage to the future King Louis XVI symbolized a new alliance between the formerly hostile powers of France and Austria, and at first the young girl expected to be received warmly. But while she found in Louis a genuinely loving husband, she could not say the same of the French court.

As a Habsburg archduchess, Marie Antoinette’s motives and intentions were viewed by French courtiers with constant suspicion. When she finally became queen four years after her marriage, paranoia exploded, and an all-out smear campaign was launched against her. Although the French people themselves were happy to welcome a foreign queen consort, many in power, it appeared, were not.

Marie Antoinette quickly became the target of vicious rumors, as pamphlets and caricatures depicted her as sexually promiscuous. These attacks served not just to discredit her personally, but to erode the respect and authority of the monarchy itself. Not for the last time, the young queen was made a scapegoat by those who intended to advance their own political causes against the Crown.

As the French Kingdom’s financial situation worsened (a problem that could have been resolved had Louis XVI actually possessed the absolute power his critics accused him of having), Marie Antoinette was targeted once more, and nicknamed “Madame Déficit” by the media. Although she enjoyed a relatively comfortable lifestyle as queen, the financial crisis in France was rooted in issues far beyond her spending, and her personal expenditures made up only a small fraction of the total royal budget. It certainly paled in comparison to the ballooning national debt, which had been inherited — but verifiably not caused — by the royal couple.

Then in 1785, the scandal of the Diamond Necklace Affair sent shock waves through French society. Incredibly, the centerpiece of the scandal — an astronomically expensive diamond necklace — had previously been offered to Marie Antoinette, who explicitly refused to buy it. Nonetheless, a con artist forged the queen’s signature to authorize the sale, and the resulting scandal provided aspiring revolutionaries with more ammunition against the monarchy.

Deliberate Dehumanization

All of this compounded to construct an image of Marie Antoinette as a vain spendthrift indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. In reality, these claims were (and remain) remarkably easy to debunk — even the phrase “let them eat cake”, which is still attached to her to this day, is a line from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1782 Confessions, published when Marie Antoinette was nine years old and had never stepped foot in France.

Anyone close to the royal family knew how fabricated these lies were. As French historian Hippolyte Taine notes in his Origins of Contemporary France, those least likely to buy into revolutionary propaganda were those who spent the most time around aristocrats — domestic servants, stablehands, etc. In other words, the working poor whom the French monarchs supposedly treated so awfully, were actually quite content.

For this reason, the propagandists had to take further steps against the monarchy, and Marie Antoinette proved once again the easiest point of attack. They jumped on her foreign origins and attempted to use even the most banal of letters to her family members as proof of treason. Quickly, this morphed into something darker, as political cartoons began to depict her as a beast and tyrant, the embodiment of all Ancien Régime corruption. This deliberate dehumanization made her later execution all the easier, as she was viewed no longer as a person, but as the face of an oppressive system that had to be overthrown.

All of this, however, pales in comparison to what the revolutionaries did next. After executing her husband, the revolutionaries then unleashed an even worse horror on Marie Antoinette and — tragically — her eight-year-old son.

What transpired before, during, and after her trial was nothing short of evil, which makes it all the more remarkable that in her final letter before her execution, Marie Antoinette wrote:

“I forgive all my enemies the injury they have done me”...

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Ever since the Civil War, Southern Gothic literature has captured the imaginations of millions. But while most depictions of the South win over readers with romantic depictions of quaint, countryside living, Southern Gothic takes an unexpected — and much darker — approach.

The one defining feature of the Southern Gothic genre is its grotesqueness. Horrifically violent crimes, deranged characters, and decidedly unhappy endings offer sharp juxtapositions to the idyllic portrait often painted of the American South. Yet the affection people have for Southern Gothic doesn’t lie simply in its shock value. Rather, it has to do with something far deeper, an exploration of the most raw elements of the human experience.

Today, we look at five defining works of Southern Gothic literature to see what makes this genre unique. What keeps readers coming back to it, despite all the bizarre characters, stomach-churning gore, and frankly weird plots?

The answer might surprise you…

Don’t forget to join our book club!

We’re currently reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot together. The next discussion is on October 21 — see the full reading schedule here.

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Study the Great Books as a member of our group, and you’ll get:

• New, full-length essays and articles every week

• Biweekly book club discussions and reading guides

• Access to our incredible community of readers

• The entire archive (200+ articles, essays, and podcasts)

1) A Good Man Is Hard to Find — Flannery O’Connor

Shocking violence, multigenerational conflict, and oddball, misfit characters: if you want a full taste of the Southern Gothic palate in one sitting, this short story is for you.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” depicts a family road trip gone wrong, and culminates in a dramatic meeting with an escaped convict. But what stands out most about this meeting isn’t the tension or violence. Rather, it’s how God’s grace suddenly appears at the most unexpected moments.

Georgia-born author Flannery O’Connor was a master at subtly depicting how God’s grace is found in the most unlikely places. So subtle, it might be argued, that some readers fail to see it entirely! But with O’Connor, you must keep in mind that what’s left unsaid is just as powerful as what’s written on the page, and nowhere is this more true than with this story.

At the same time, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” displays O’Connor’s talent for well-timed comic relief and her ability to make characters come to life in shocking, memorable ways. It’s a tale you can read on a Sunday afternoon, as are many of O’Connor’s short stories. We also recommend “Revelation” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

Editor’s note: I personally benefitted greatly from turning to analyses of O’Connor’s stories after reading them. These can help you understand the spiritual dimensions of O’Connor’s work, especially when it’s far from obvious.

2) The Fall of the House of Usher — Edgar Allan Poe

Widely regarded as the father of Southern Gothic literature, Poe developed much of his fascination with the macabre South as a young man stationed at a military base in Charleston, South Carolina. His most famous short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” tells the tale of two siblings whose ancestral mansion falls into decay alongside their own physical and mental health. The story exemplifies Poe’s genius for using physical settings to reflect the psychological condition of his characters, as the crumbling mansion mirrors the physical and mental deterioration of the family within.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is classic Poe, and draws on haunting themes like fear, madness, decay, and death. If you’re hungry for more Poe, try his poetry as a bonus: “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The City in the Sea” all color the Southern Gothic mood.

3) The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner

You’ll feel like an accomplished reader after working through this one! The Sound and the Fury is one of Faulkner’s most unique novels, and is told through unreliable narrators, fragmented sentences, and stream-of-consciousness prose. The story follows four siblings’ descent into devastation and disrepair in their relationships as they contend with each other’s sins and mental illnesses.

The grotesque is pretty significant with this one, as it includes brushes with incest, suicide, and castration. But perhaps what makes it most gripping to read is how Faulkner’s masterful writing makes you unable to peel your eyes away from this family — the consequences of their decisions are so horrific, so catastrophic that you can’t help but wait to find out what could possibly happen next.

You’ll find an additional layer of intrigue in your simultaneous pity, disappointment, and anger at the siblings’ treatment of each other, but this strong evocation of emotion is all part of the draw to the Southern Gothic genre. If you’re captivated by The Sound and the Fury, reach next for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Reivers, both set in his native Mississippi.

4) Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes Were Watching God depicts the South through the eyes of an African American woman coming of age in small-town Florida. Set at the turn of the century, the novel follows its protagonist with unabashed honesty into her experience in romantic relationships, finding personal freedom, and learning what it means to survive a fall from grace.

The book is unflinching in its explorations of human relationships for all their triumph and devastation alike, and will have you cheering for the main characters on one page and feeling shocked by their decisions on the next. For quicker reads by Hurston, consider her short stories “Sweat” and “The Gilded Six Bits.”

5) A Streetcar Named Desire — Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams was a master of developing well-fleshed, fascinating characters, and A Streetcar Named Desire displays his best of this skill. Through the story of two middle-aged sisters and a hot-tempered husband, Williams explores the psychological torment that can arise from clutching too ardently to a long-gone past.

Aside from its macabre nature, this is perhaps what much of Southern Gothic literature is best known for: hauntings not by supernatural apparitions, but by the ghosts of homes, lifestyles, and social circles that once were. Williams expertly homes in on this backdrop in almost all of his works, and it’s clear to see where he drew this inspiration from: as a Mississippi native who spent time in New Orleans, he spent a great deal of time around older southerners who remembered life both before and after the losses of the Civil War, World War I, and the Great Depression.

If you’re interested in reading something a little different from a classic novel, you’re in luck here – as a play in three acts, Streetcar proves to be a quick read that will uniquely engage your imagination as you rely on dialogue alone. For other works by Williams with equally larger-than-life characters, try his plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Vieux Carré, and Summer and Smoke.

P.S. We recently published a piece on Flannery O’Connor on our sister publication, Ascend.

Many are turned off by the stories of Flannery O’Connor, as they see her tales as brutal, grotesque, and unsettling. And, well, all of that is true.

But O’Connor is a spiritual master — a teacher of the soul — and the brutality in her Southern Gothic fiction is not simply for shock value. It has a purpose, if you can stomach it…

The Violent Grace of Flannery O’Connor

Ascend Book Club

The Violent Grace of Flannery O’Connor

Can violence image God’s love…

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2 months ago · 59 likes · 4 comments · Ascend Book Club

Before C.S. Lewis was the English-speaking world’s foremost Christian apologist, he was an avowed atheist. For well over a decade, the Oxford professor argued against the Christian faith. To him, Christianity was just one mythology among many, a belief system the modern world had outgrown.

But then, one late September evening, everything changed. What began as a friendly dinner party with his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson quickly turned into a deep discussion on myth, metaphor, and the truth behind Christian claims. After dinner, the men carried their conversation onto the streets of Oxford, talking nearly till dawn the next day.

When the sun rose the following morning, Lewis discovered that his doubts about Christianity had given way to belief. Indeed, his conversation with Tolkien had changed not just his own life, but the course of history. From that moment on, Lewis became a fierce advocate of the Christian faith, writing thousands of words in its defense and inspiring millions of people throughout the world.

So what did Tolkien share with Lewis that changed his mind so dramatically?

Today, we travel back in time to discover what transpired that fateful evening, and how Tolkien turned Lewis’s understanding of the word “myth” completely on its head — because what if a myth could be true?

Don’t forget to join our book club…

We are currently reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot — the next discussion is on October 21.

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A Love of Mythology

Before diving in, we have to first take a look at Lewis’s longstanding interest in mythology. From his early high school days, Lewis was obsessed with Norse, Greek, and other pagan stories. In particular, he gravitated towards myths about death and resurrection, citing the stories of “dying and reviving god[s]” like Balder, Adonis, and Bacchus as especially drawing his attention.

At the same time, he recognized the similarities between many of these myths and Christianity. The mother of Apollonius of Tyana, for example, was told she would give birth to a God-become-man, Proteus. The Norse god Balder is killed through Loki’s treachery and returns to rule the world after Ragnarök, the Norse version of the apocalypse. The similarities with the Annunciation and the second coming of Christ here are easy enough to spot.

Lewis found these myths incredibly moving when they showed up in other religions — but not when he encountered them in Christianity. Writing to his friend Arthur Greeves after his conversion, Lewis explained:

…if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again that the idea of the dying and reviving god similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.

-C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 18 Oct 1931. Emphasis added.

In the end, it would be these myths that opened the door to Lewis’s eventual embrace of Christianity. But had it not been for his friend Tolkien, things could have gone quite differently…

The Addison’s Walk

Lewis and Tolkien first met at an Oxford faculty meeting in the spring of 1926. Initially, Lewis was wary of Tolkien: the latter was not just a Catholic, but a philologist, and Lewis was prejudiced against both. However, he quickly saw Tolkien wouldn’t cause much harm, and wrote in his diary after their meeting:

No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.

Over time, the two connected over a shared love of mythology and literature. They got together regularly at a pub named the Eagle and Child (which they christened “the Bird and Baby”), and these meetings eventually turned into reunions of the group they called the Inklings. Members shared and critiqued each other’s writing, and their feedback later played a major role in shaping works like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.

But while Lewis and Tolkien shared many of the same interests, they often differed in their conclusions about them. Lewis, for example, believed that the account of Christ’s death and resurrection was just one myth among many — another iteration of the dying and reviving god — while Tolkien took it literally. Furthermore, Lewis couldn’t understand “in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world.”

He couldn’t understand it, that is, until the evening of Saturday, 19 September 1931, when Lewis invited Tolkien and fellow professor Hugo Dyson over to dinner. As their discussion heated up, the three men spilled onto the streets of Oxford, and soon ended up on the historic footpath known as Addison’s Walk.

It was here that history changed, and after a long conversation unfolded on the topic of myth, Lewis became a Christian. But what exactly did Dyson and Tolkien tell him that changed his mind?

It all comes down to the idea that Christ’s resurrection is indeed, as Tolkien conceded, a myth — but not a human one…

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Mark your calendars…

The next discussion will take place in 2 weeks, at the usual time: Wednesday, October 21, at noon Eastern Time.

On that call, we will be covering Part III, ch. 7-conclusi…

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It’s almost time for our next discussion on The Idiot. We meet tomorrow, at noon Eastern Time — the discussion will be livestreamed via Substack here.

For those joining our discussion group directly (available to all paid members), the Zoom link is at the bottom of this email.

Below are some key ideas to consider as we read Part 2 of the novel…

Part 1 ended with a disastrous end to Nastasya’s party. Recall that Myshkin offered her his hand in marriage, but she rejected him for the dark and brooding Rogozhin.

Part 2 begins after six months have passed. In this time, Nastasya, Rogozhin, and Myshkin had all left Petersburg — the former to enjoy their life together as an engaged couple, while Myshkin settled accounts of his newfound inheritance.

Yet we learn Nastasya and Rogozhin’s relationship is ill-fated. Nastasya despises Rogozhin and is unfaithful to him. Twice already she has fled him, once nearly at the altar, but Rogozhin pursues her nonetheless, once beating her severely for her infidelity. Nastasya herself, it’s revealed, has run into Myshkin’s arms, but subsequently flees him before they can become a proper couple.

Despite all this chaos, one of the most revealing scenes is Myshkin and Rogozhin’s conversation in chapters 3 and 4.

Here Myshkin visits Rogozhin and asserts that, though both men are “rivals” for Nastasya, he does not consider himself an enemy. In fact, he thinks Rogozhin’s prospective marriage to Nastasya would be bad for both her and Rogozhin himself.

Even more surprisingly, Rogozhin reciprocates Myshkin’s goodwill. He reveals that he hates Myshkin when they are separated, but in each other’s presence, he cannot help but feel regard and warmth for the Prince.

It is also here that Rogozhin reveals a crucial truth about Nastasya: she loves Myshkin more than him, but embraces Rogozhin because she fears Myshkin more. Myshkin, likewise, reveals that he desires Nastasya, “not out of love, but pity.”

Thus we find this “love triangle” has only grown more complicated — the “loves” of these three characters for one another are not selfless and neat; rather, they’re a strange entanglement of goodwill, mixed with possessive desires, self-destructive impulses, and even hatred.

The key tension to track is whether or not this “entanglement” begins to unwind itself over time, or only increases in tension — making life miserable for all involved.

Below are some key questions for us to consider:

• What does Myshkin mean when he says he loves Nastasya “not out of love, but pity”? Is pity a form of genuine love here? Why or why not?

• Why does Nastasya repeatedly flee from both Rogozhin and Myshkin? What does each man represent to her?

• Why can Rogozhin and Myshkin feel genuine affection for one another despite competing for the same woman? What does this reveal about each man’s character?

• Is Myshkin’s pity for Nastasya actually selfless, or does it contain a desire to possess or save her?

• What does Nastasya’s attraction to Rogozhin tell us about her understanding of herself and what she thinks she deserves?

• Where, if anywhere, do we see genuine self-giving love in these chapters?

Share your thoughts in the subscriber chat, along with any questions you have — we will incorporate them into Wednesday’s discussion!

Here’s the Zoom link for tomorrow:

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Few plays are as iconic as Romeo & Juliet. The tale of these “star-cross’d lovers” is known the world over, and is easily one of Shakespeare’s most famous works.

But what if everything you thought you knew about it is wrong?

Shockingly, what most people take away from Romeo & Juliet isn’t just mistaken, but in fact the polar opposite of what Shakespeare intended to convey. That’s because at its core, Romeo & Juliet is far less a play about young romance than it is a cautionary tale for both children and parents alike. In the 200 years since the Romantic revolution, however, popular interpretations of the play have shifted so much as to completely obscure the play’s original meaning.

Both Shakespeare and his audience would be scandalized by our contemporary reading of the play, as well as our “understanding” of its moral lessons. Because far from celebrating the ardent passions of youth, Romeo & Juliet does quite the opposite. It offers an urgent warning that we have long ignored, and which we must desperately be reminded of:

That love can be just as irrational and destructive as hate…

Don’t forget to join our book club…

We just started reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

The next discussion is on October 7. Watch back the first session here.

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• New, full-length essays like this one every week

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A Cautionary Tale

To back up this claim, we must begin by turning to the inception of Romeo & Juliet itself. Shakespeare’s source for the tale comes from Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, itself a retelling of a novella by the Dominican friar Matteo Bandello.

What’s important to note is what Shakespeare changes from the source material. While most modern productions of Romeo & Juliet completely overlook the fact that Juliet is a child in the play, this was in fact a very intentional detail on Shakespeare’s part. He made Juliet younger, and Romeo older, than the characters in Brooke’s poem, thus accentuating their age difference. Juliet we know is 13, and Romeo is at least five years her senior.

The significance of this cannot be easily dismissed, because such a union would have been scandalous by Elizabethan standards. Contrary to popular belief, the average age for a woman to marry in Shakespeare’s time was 24; for a man, 28. Considering also that girls typically reached puberty later than they do now (14 or 15 was the norm) and suddenly Juliet’s age of 13 is far more significant — she is a prepubescent child being pursued by an adult man.

Add to this the fact that Shakespeare’s own daughter Susanna was 13 years old while he wrote the play, and suddenly the premise of Romeo & Juliet takes on a whole new shape. The father of a young girl is writing a cautionary tale not just about the dangers of predatory men, but about what happens when children are led astray by their emotions, and when adults fail to protect them.

It is with good reason, then, that Romeo & Juliet is labeled a tragedy and not a romance. But incredibly, the age difference between the two protagonists is far from the most scandalous aspect of the play. Indeed, the tragedy only compounds from here…

The Problem With Romeo

Romeo & Juliet is best known as a love story, but closer inspection reveals the “romantic” motivations of its titular male character to be dubious at best. In the opening act, Romeo is repeatedly jibed for his (unrequited) love of Rosaline. This “love”, of course, is quickly forgotten the moment he finds someone new to pursue.

The play’s Chorus makes it clear that Romeo’s infatuation is primarily surface-level, describing him as “bewitched by looks”. Even Friar Lawrence, who has a warm relationship with Romeo, is shocked by the speed at which he switches up his romantic interests. When Romeo asks Friar Lawrence to officiate his wedding with Juliet, the priest exclaims:

Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!

Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear,

So soon forsaken? Young men’s love then lies

Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.

For her part, Juliet moves (almost) as fast as Romeo, though she expresses hesitancy at how fast the relationship is developing. Her declaration of love in the balcony scene doesn’t help, for what she intended to say in private, Romeo secretly overhears. From that moment forward, Juliet struggles to resist Romeo’s advances, which are more emboldened now that he knows her heart.

The balcony scene is a pivotal moment for many reasons, not least of which because it reveals one of the most cutting moral insights of the play. In asking Romeo to “deny thy father and refuse thy name”, Juliet effectively demands that he abandon his identity. Here, Shakespeare demonstrates how nominalist philosophy, or the idea that “a Rose / By any other name would smell as sweet”, results in an individualistic approach to love and a destructive rift between family members.

Such emotionally driven and self-centered ardor leads not just to the dissolution of bonds between kith and kin, however, but also to the destruction of the lovers themselves. Friar Lawrence puts it best, warning Romeo that:

These violent delights have violent ends,

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

Which as they kiss consume.

But why is it, then, that we overlook all of this? What about Romeo and Juliet make them such sympathetic and compelling characters?

Interestingly, our judgment of this young couple says far more about us than it does them. It holds a mirror up to our modern-day notions of love and helps you understand the root causes of many of your own failures in the realm of romance.

So what can Romeo & Juliet teach you about what you keep getting wrong about love, and how you can get it right? Whether you struggle to find happiness in the relationship you’re in, or want to help your children find good partners for themselves, Shakespeare’s 400-year-old wisdom proves as insightful as ever.

It all starts with understanding what love actually is…

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Plato’s allegory of the cave is arguably the most famous allegory in the history of philosophy. It inspired everything from George Orwell’s 1984 to The Matrix, and it illustrates the journey of the soul from ignorance toward truth.

Yet for as popular as the allegory of the cave is, most people still don’t heed its warnings. Even worse, they might think they understand it, while continuing to make the same mistakes the allegory warns against.

So how do you know if you really get it? How do you know if you’ve actually escaped the cave, or if you’re still trapped inside it, mistaking lies for the truth?

Today, we look at one of the most relevant examples of Plato’s cave in our modern culture. But unlike the dystopia of 1984, this isn’t a cave people are trapped in against their will — rather, it’s one most gladly choose to remain inside, willfully foregoing the truth and beauty that awaits them just beyond the shadows…

Plato Read-Along… LAST CALL TO JOIN!

Our slow read of the Republic is about to begin on our sister publication, the Ascend Book Club!

We start next week. See bottom of this email for details (+ a discount)…

Join the Ascend Book Club!

Shadows on the Wall

But first, let’s quickly recap the actual allegory itself. In Book VII of Plato’s Republic, the character of Socrates asks you to imagine prisoners who have spent their entire lives shackled inside a cave. They are able to look only at the wall in front of them, and behind them burns a fire. Between that fire and the prisoners, people pass back and forth, carrying puppets and other objects while speaking.

The fire casts the shadows of these objects onto the wall, and the voices of those who carry them echo throughout the cave. Having never seen the people or objects behind them, and not having known any other world, the prisoners believe that these shadows and voices are reality itself.

Socrates suggests that if a prisoner were forcibly removed from this cave, he would be painfully blinded by the sunlight outside. Reasonably, he’d want nothing more than to go back inside the cave because it’s comfortable — the only world he’s ever known. But if the prisoner were introduced to the light of day slowly, he’d eventually adjust to it without shock, and come to appreciate the unveiled reality of the outside world for what it is. Indeed, he’d soon grow dissatisfied with the shadowed life he had known before, seeing it now for what it really is.

The 21st Century Illusion

But what does Plato’s cave look like for us today? Historically, the allegory has been used to describe dystopian worlds in which shadows of reality are impressed upon the public against their will: think Fahrenheit 451, 1984, etc. In our modern world, however, the danger is quite the opposite: that the public, preferring the comforts of the cave to reality, chooses to impress shadows of reality upon themselves.

Social media is the prime and most immediate example. Rather than showing you a chronological timeline of posts from the people you follow, social media algorithms are mathematically designed to show you more of the content you are already interested in seeing. At first glance, this doesn’t seem all that bad — if you’re renovating your kitchen, coming across videos of others who are doing the same can provide some useful insight.

The real danger, however, is subtle. If you’re seeking parenting advice, the algorithm doesn’t actually expose you to diverse ideas about parenting. Instead, it presents you almost exclusively with the strands of advice that confirm and justify your preconceived notions. The more people go down these paths, the more their vision of reality becomes progressively narrower. They begin to think their way is the only way, that their ideas are more widespread than they really are. Or, in other words, they begin to think the shadows on the cave wall are what constitute reality.

At least, that’s the argument critics make. But how much of what they say is really fair? Are modern-day algorithms really that bad, or is the allegory of the cave misapplied here?

The Comfort of the Cave

It’s natural, of course, for human beings to seek like-minded friends with whom to share discussions, hobbies, and interests. From book clubs to local pubs, enthusiasts of everything from Anna Karenina to Arsenal Football Club have always gathered together to be surrounded by their own kind.

But there’s a critical difference between a world you build for yourself in choosing a handful of interests out of many, and a world you build for yourself in which all you ever see are your own interests. Consider, too, the implications of what happens when the scope of your worldview consists almost exclusively not only of your favorite pastimes, but also of ideas about core values, human worth, politics, and societal ideologies.

In Plato’s cave, the prisoners are so engrossed by the shadowy images before them that they fail to look both at themselves and at their fellow prisoners shackled beside them. In the same way, algorithmic social media risks robbing you of introspection and of relationships with those closest to you. At the same time, it also makes it so that the world “out there” feels increasingly foreign — indeed, even painfully blinding — the more time you spend online.

As Plato’s allegory reveals, the cave becomes increasingly comfortable the more time you spend inside it. The light of truth becomes more harsh on the eyes, and you become more reluctant to face all that comes with the freedom of the outdoors: different ideas, beliefs, points of view, etc. The good news, however, is that you can leave the cave. You’re not actually shackled to the wall. Mind-forged manacles are all that hold you in place, and they can be readily unlocked by the key of conscience.

The world outside the cave, Socrates warns, is not an easy one. It is, however, the true one. Are you prepared to see it for what it really is?

Read Plato With Us — LAST CALL TO JOIN

We are about to begin our slow, attentive read-along of the Republic on our sister publication, the Ascend Book Club. We kick off next week.

If you’re ready to have some of your deepest assumptions about justice, freedom, politics, education, and the good life overturned, there’s far more to Plato’s Republic than the allegory of the cave. A close, careful read of this will change your life.

To celebrate the start of the read-along, Ascend is running a 24-hour discount.

20% off full book club membership:

Get 20% off!

We've been working on this for over a year: a week-by-week curriculum, gathering 20+ scholars and 30+ episodes to guide you through it. We start on October 6 and end on August 31, 2027 (with a break for Lent). To see the full reading schedule, click here.

All paid members of Ascend will gather once per month for the live discussions, hosted by Dcn. Garlick and guest scholars. Along the way, there’ll be plenty of discussion inside the Ascend chat room, so please join the dialogue!

We are so excited to get started. Here are just some of the scholars joining us between now and Christmas:

First up, some key questions:

• Why should we read Plato?

• How are we supposed to read his dialogues?

• Why is the drama important?

• What is the Socratic method?

• Why is it said that all of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato?

Yesterday, we posted this podcast on Ascend to address these questions and more before we get started…

Join our group for this epic read-along by becoming a subscriber of Ascend here:

Join the Ascend Book Club — 20% off!

Note: nothing is changing here on The Culturist. Our own book club continues to function as usual. Don’t forget, our next session on Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” is on October 7, at noon Eastern Time.

Few topics are as controversial as AI. For some, it is the harbinger of a new utopia; for others, of the apocalypse. Debate rages over whether artificial intelligence will save or destroy humanity — so where does the truth lie?

“Somewhere in the middle” is an attractive answer, but one that misses the point entirely. This is because the truth about AI isn’t simply the average of its pros and cons. Rather, it is a double-edged sword. In other words, the critics and proponents of AI are both largely right.

But what does this mean in practical terms? On the one hand, it means that the dangers of AI, and specifically those dealing with its impact on your own mental and relational capacities, cannot be overlooked. On the other, it means that AI does genuinely present a revolutionary new opportunity to improve your life and make the world a better place. But everything hinges on how you use it.

Today, we take a bird’s-eye view at the pros and cons of AI to help you better understand which aspects of it threaten to destroy your humanity, and which aspects might enhance it. The next decades, if not centuries, of human life will be defined by how you choose to engage (or not) with AI right now in the present.

Whatever you do, you can’t afford to get this wrong…

Don’t forget to join our book club…

We’re reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot together over the next 6 weeks!

The next discussion is on October 7. Watch back the first session here.

Subscribe now

We are 100% independent, funded only by our incredible community. Become a paid member and get:

• New, full-length essays like this one every week

• Access to our biweekly book club and reading guides

• Access to our incredible community of readers

• The entire archive (200+ articles, essays, and podcasts)

The Atrophy of Thought

Let’s begin by addressing the negative aspects of AI, many of which will be familiar to our readers. For this, we’ll focus mainly on the ways AI use affects you personally, as we previously discussed broader societal impact like job loss and decreased trust in our article comparing AI and the Industrial Revolution.

The most immediate personal impact of AI is an atrophy of thinking. This is abundantly clear in the scientific literature, as even at this early stage, studies repeatedly show that increased use of generative AI correlates with a decline in critical thinking skills.1 Just as your muscles atrophy when they go unused, so too do your cognitive abilities.

A large reason for this is that, just as muscle growth occurs via the tearing and regrowth of muscle fibers (weightlifting tears the fibers, rest allows them to regrow), learning happens only when your brain faces genuine difficulty. Simply reading an analysis of Plato doesn’t mean you retain the knowledge; rather, you must actually wrestle with his ideas in order to fully understand them. This phenomenon has been labeled by neuroscientists as “desirable difficulty,” and is a prerequisite not just for learning, but for the development and maintenance of your critical thinking skills.

But what’s more, AI use also correlates with increased homogenization of output. To put it another way, it results in a leveling out of the unique qualities that make you you. A 2025 study, for example, revealed that “while LLMs can produce creative content that might be as good as or even better than human-created content, their widespread use risks reducing creative diversity across groups of people.”

But what does this actually mean? In practical terms, it is not dissimilar to findings on the nature of human beauty. When researchers combine pictures of different faces into a single composite image, for example, people generally find the resulting “average” face more attractive than the individual faces from which it was made. However, that composite never competes with faces people deem “exceptionally attractive”, because the most attractive faces have features that depart significantly from the mean.

With AI, this phenomenon is much the same: it allows you to produce work that is better than the population average, but which is too homogenous to ever stand out as something truly exceptional. It takes into account none of your unique background, interests, or forms of expression. Throw Tolkien and Hemingway into a blender, and the result is not a superior third author, but a destruction of what makes each man’s unique style his own. Generative AI does the same to your own human touch, which leads us to our next point…

The End of “Friction”

In a previous article, we explored how and why, for many people, AI is replacing God. To be fair, most people are completely unaware of the ways in which they render to their unassuming chatbot friend the status of divinity. Yet their deference to AI’s output reveals a form of reverence previously reserved exclusively for the Godhead.

If AI is already beginning to replace the relationship between God and man, therefore, how much more will it replace the relationship between fellow men? While it is true that the comprehensive access to knowledge that AI offers makes it a powerful tool, human relationships are not built by efficiency. They are instead built through adversity, confronting a mutual enemy and carrying a shared burden.

This dynamic manifests in any relationship that asks “how do we solve this problem?”, and can look like high-school students studying for a test, SpaceX engineers designing a rocket, or parents helping their child figure out how to deal with a bully. In any case, progress is almost never linear: heated debates rage as to the best course of action, and feelings are often hurt along the way. But as these hurdles are overcome, relationships are formed and strengthened.

In this regard, one of the greatest dangers of AI is that, in presenting you with an outlet to voice and resolve your problems in private, it deprives you of the friction necessary for human relationships to thrive. What’s more, it trains you to perceive that friction as a problem (as opposed to a normal element of humanity) whenever you encounter it in the real world. In this sense, it is definitionally dehumanizing, in that it increasingly causes you “to address or portray (someone) in a way that obscures or demeans that person’s humanity”.2

For these reasons and more, increasing numbers of people today define themselves as AI-abstentionists. They are intent on living in ways that never threaten to compromise human dignity in themselves and in others, and their contribution to the discourse on AI is invaluable.

At the same time, however, abstentionism is not the only route. Nor, perhaps, is it the desirable one. Because for many, the opportunities presented by AI actually offer the potential to create a world that is more human, not less. These extend far beyond the realm of personal efficiency and present opportunities to restructure even the most foundational economic and communal aspects of society.

If you care about making the world a better place for both you and your neighbor, these opportunities are too substantial to ignore. However, they all hinge on your ability to use AI as your servant, without it inadvertently becoming your master.

So how do you tread that fine line?

It all starts with learning to use AI to break free of institutional constraints, and use it as a tool towards winning your independence…

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Mark your calendars…

The next discussion will take place in 2 weeks, at the usual time: Wednesday, October 7, at noon Eastern Time.

On that call, we will be covering Part II + Part III, ch. 1-…

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It’s the beginning of a fantastic week… time to start our read-along of The Idiot.

This is a tremendously powerful novel and one of Dostoevsky’s great works. An excellent one for us to tackle together.

We meet on Wednesday, September 23, at noon ET. The first discussion will cover the background context to the work, and what to look out for when reading Part 1. Of course, you don’t strictly need to have done any reading yet — we’re reading this over the next six weeks, together.

As a reminder, we’ll discuss the novel in three parts:

• Session 1 (Sep 23) – Background context + Part 1

• Session 2 (Oct 7) – Part 2 + Part 3, ch. 1-6

• Session 3 (Oct 21) – Part 3, ch. 7-conclusion

The first discussion will be live streamed via Substack at this link.

For those joining our discussion group directly (available to all paid members), the Zoom link is at the bottom of this email…

To begin, below are some key ideas for us to consider ahead of the first discussion.

Part 1 introduces protagonist Prince Myshkin returning to Russia, after years of treatment in a Swiss sanatorium for epilepsy, and a related condition which Dostoevsky calls “idiocy.”

Myshkin is not an idiot in the traditional sense of the term (in fact, he can be quite perceptive and intelligent), but he lacks the normative social instincts of adult life in late 19th century Russia.

Thus, this is a story of the “positively good man,” as Dostoevsky called it. He created Myshkin as a Christ-like figure of sainthood who maneuvers the chaos, vice, and dangers of the hardened, modernized Russian world of the day. As such, Myshkin’s innocence introduces extreme reactions from his neighbors — at times his neighbors are induced to kindness, as if remembering their lost innocence of youth, yet at other times they lash out, scorn, and mock the kind Prince.

The primary action driving the plot early is a series of love triangles between Myshkin, Roghozin, Nastasya, and Aglaya. Roghozin is the opposite of Myshkin — a dark and brooding man who desires the heart of Nastasya. Nastasya, meanwhile, is beautiful but prideful. Having been abused in childhood, she now embraces a self-destructive power over the men around her, whom she manipulates for purposes of vanity. Finally, Aglaya is young, proud, and beautiful — a woman who loves Myshkin, yet mocks the strangeness of his kindly nature.

The underlying question is not merely whether any of these romances will lead to marriage, rather, it’s a meditation on the souls of these characters and their relation to love itself. Besides Myshkin, none of these characters are currently capable of a proper, virtuous love, though they desire it deep within their hearts. The drama is whether or not these characters can draw out the best parts of their nature, and recover a good-natured virtue like that of Myshkin.

At its heart, then, the novel poses the ultimate question:

Can a genuine, Christlike goodness survive a modern world built upon pride, power, money, and vanity? Can a love like Myshkin’s heal the world, or will the world simply devour his goodness?

Additionally, below are some questions to consider as we read along:

• Among the first anecdotes we hear from the Prince, he shares his memory of watching a man prior to his execution at the guillotine in France, and his friendship with a consumptive woman shamed by her village, whom the prince alone treated with kindness. Why does Dostoevsky front-load these two stories before Myshkin even enters Petersburg society? What do they tell us about how Myshkin understands mercy and human dignity?

• Roghozin is introduced at the same time as Myshkin. The two sit beside each other as opposites in the same train carriage in chapter 1. Is Dostoevsky’s framing of these two polar-opposite characters intentional? What is the significance drawn from the comparison of the kindly Myshkin and dark, brooding Roghozin?

• Money plays a dominant role in Part 1. It’s the main topic of conversation amongst the intelligentsia, and the main driver of social status. It’s also prominent via Roghozin, who uses money as an attempt to “buy” the love of Nastasya. What does this materialism suggest of the state of the soul of Russia at the time? Also, what is the significance of Prince Myshkin being broke and destitute by contrast?

Share your thoughts below or in the subscriber chat, along with any questions you have — and we will incorporate them into Wednesday’s discussion!

Here’s the Zoom link for Wednesday:

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You must make of your life a work of art…True superiority is found in this.

-Gabriele d’Annunzio

Of all the advice I’ve received in my life, none has been so impactful as the following:

Live your life as art.

At first, it sounds compelling. But the more you dwell on it, the more abstract it becomes. What does it mean to live life as art? Does that not entail a certain degree of selfishness? Decadence? Detachment from reality?

Not so. In fact, quite the opposite. When conceived of properly, living life as art makes you more grounded in reality, not less. It makes you more rooted, more loving, and more charitable to those around you.

Today, I want to share what it means to live your life as art, and practical tips for how to begin doing so. Because, in the words of Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players”.

To play your part well, therefore, you must understand that you are indeed a character in a grand performance…

Our next book club read is starting…

We’re about to begin Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The first discussion is on September 23, at noon ET — join us!

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Scripts, Scenes, and Storyboards

There is much confusion as to why you should live your life as art in the first place. Fundamentally, it is not something you do for others, but for yourself. At first glance, though, this seems to be at odds with Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” — because isn’t the whole point of theatre to perform for the audience?

Yet just as method actors bring their characters to life by becoming as opposed to performing them, so too does living your life as art make your life a gift to others. It’s not about LARPing for the sake of your ego, but embracing an internal transformation that spills over into the real world. In other words, by doing it for yourself, it becomes something you do for others.

The biggest mistake people make, though, is to focus on the physical: on clothes, food, decor, etc. While these are important (and we will address them in the next section), they are completely insignificant if you do not first pay attention to the theory, or what I like to call the “scripts, scenes, and storyboards” of life.

Taken together, these elements compose the heart of who you are on the world’s stage. The script, for example, defines your character, the stakes, your voice, and your limits. It makes an actor ask: Who is this? What would they never do? What would they always do? Applied to your life, the script translates to your personal canon. It defines non-negotiable principles and moral red lines just as much as the virtues you are trying to embody.

The storyboard, on the other hand, is what helps you visualize scenes in advance, so as to prevent improvisation from going too far. Way too many people ruin their lives by acting as though they’re perpetually in the grand finale of their life’s drama. But what if it’s just Scene 1 of Act II? By conceiving of your life in “scenes”, and by recognizing that no one scene tells the full story, you can begin to look ahead to the rest of the storyboard to see how things play out down the line.

While it’s easy to critique the vanity and excess of those with “main character energy”, there’s actually incredible value in casting yourself as the protagonist in a larger story. Why? Because we hate to suffer, yet the stories we love most are full of it.

Batman’s hero arc begins with him being orphaned. Joseph’s with being sold into slavery. Gladiator’s Maximus sees his family murdered, and Aeneas flees from Troy as it burns to the ground.

In all of these cases, the main characters experienced struggles that are objectively more difficult than the vast majority of the ones you face today. Yet you don’t pity them or lament their bad fortune to the same degree you would if the same things happened in your own life. Why? Because you know the ending.

By reframing your life’s difficulties as temporary scenes in early acts, you can begin to conceive of how you’ll rewrite your story by the end of the play. Engage the imagination as much as you like in order to do so. In a tough marriage and feel like you made a mistake? Pretend you’re an 18th century aristocrat in an arranged marriage, who eventually learns how to make it work and cultivate romance with his wife. The possibilities are endless.

In living your life as art, the script, scenes, and storyboards matter far more than the props you use or the costumes you wear on stage. That is not to say, however, that they are unimportant. The objects you surround yourself with, whether on your body or in your environment, make a world of difference in terms of how you view yourself.

But where do you start? And how do you make sure that you are always moving forward in a spirit of love, and not materiality? It all comes down to one thing: knowing what it means to enchant the ordinary…

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It has been said that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. A provocative statement, for sure — but is it wrong?

The Republic is Plato’s most famous work of philosophy, and by far the most impactful. Imagined as a conversation between his mentor Socrates and various members of Athenian society, the Republic has influenced everyone from Aristotle to Augustine, Mussolini to MLK. It ignited a conversation that is 2,400 years in the making, the various threads of which have helped build Western Civilization.

Whether you know it or not, you swim in the ideas contained in the Republic. From the Allegory of the Cave (which influenced everything from 1984 to The Matrix) to more complex ideas like those of justice, political legitimacy, and the tripartite soul, Plato tills the soil from which the Western intellectual tradition springs. To read his work is to explore the roots not just of your own culture, but of your own mind.

Today, we take a look at Plato’s Republic to better understand how it built the Western world and why, over two millennia since its writing, it’s still more relevant than ever…

A big announcement…

Our sister publication, The Ascent, is becoming the Ascend Book Club!

Over there, we are doing much slower, deeper read-alongs of the great books. We are starting with Plato’s Republic on October 6.

See the bottom of this email for details…

Join the Ascend Book Club!

The Eternal Questions

Despite the ancient origins of Plato’s Republic, the work is just as alive as ever before. This is because the questions it poses deal with the foundational elements of the human condition.

What is justice? Why should I be good when injustice benefits me? What makes a political regime legitimate? Who should rule? What is the purpose of education? All of these questions and more are put forward by characters in the Republic. But while you might expect them to be neatly resolved as in many philosophical treatises, they almost never are. Instead, Plato contents himself with leaving you to wrestle with these questions for yourself.

If you’re new to philosophy, this might feel frustrating. But the benefit of this approach is that it helps you identify the main struggles at the heart of any contemporary debate or political faultline. Behind every argument for or against abortion, for example, there is an appeal to justice — and that difference of opinion can’t be fully grasped without a discussion of the concept of justice itself.

That kind of discussion is exactly what Plato offers you.

Plato & Christianity

St. Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son”. But what is this “fullness of time”, and what does it have to do with Plato?

Traditionally, the fullness of time has been understood as the historical moment in which Hebrew faith coincided with Roman order and Greek reason. The inheritance of Jerusalem, Rome, and Athens sits not just at the heart of Western Civilization, but at the very core of Christianity itself. And Athens, of course, would be nothing without Plato.

Many of the ideas put forth in the Republic would later be absorbed into Christian theology, shaping the lives not only of countless believers, but of all those who grew up in the Christian West. Of course, not all of Plato was accepted by the Church — while concepts like the immaterial soul and the insufficiency of earthly pleasure were retained, others like eugenics and the transmigration of souls were cast aside.

Nevertheless, it is easy to trace a thread from Plato to Aristotle, Aristotle to St. Augustine, and St. Augustine to Dante. When you read the Republic, you’re able to see how much Greek thought influenced Christianity, and at the same time, how much Christianity influenced the world it grew up in. Many of Plato’s intellectual and moral instincts are not our own, and it is worth understanding why.

See Beyond the Modern World

This leads us to the final reason to read the Republic, which is that it serves to open your eyes to your own modern biases and presuppositions. Just as a fish can’t recognize the water it swims in, we as modern individuals can’t recognize our own assumptions about the world. Plato helps remedy that.

Many of the questions posed by the Republic challenge beliefs you might otherwise never think to challenge. “Democracy is good.” Why? “Equality is just.” In what sense? “Freedom makes us happy.” Does it? Many readers of Plato are shocked to discover just how un-modern he is, yet at the same time find a sense of freedom in this revelation.

Just like the teacher leading students out of the cave to discover a hitherto-unknown world, so too can Plato help you escape the cave of modern presuppositions to arrive at a more thoughtful and nuanced philosophy. Whether you love him or hate him, there’s no doubt you will be a better thinker after reading Plato — and there’s no better place for you to start than with the Republic.

Read It With Us…

In January, our own book club at The Culturist provided an introduction to Plato’s Republic. Now, we’re excited to announce something big…

We are beginning a much slower, attentive read-along of the Republic on our sister publication — because, as of today, The Ascent has become the Ascend Book Club!

We've been working on this for over a year now: a week-by-week curriculum, gathering 20+ scholars and 30+ episodes to guide you through it. We start on October 6, 2026, and end on August 31, 2027 (with a break for Lent).

All paid members of Ascend will gather once per month for the live discussions (hosted by Dcn. Garlick and guest scholars), and will receive a week-by-week curriculum of resources to guide the entire read-along. Click here to see the full reading schedule.

You can join this epic read-along by becoming a subscriber of Ascend right here:

Join the Ascend Book Club!

Why are we doing this?

A close, careful read of the Republic will change your life. It is easily one of the greatest texts in Western Civilization, though many do not read it because it can be difficult to understand. We are breaking it down into 30+ episodes to help you understand this life-changing book.

Plato uses the character of Socrates to explore virtue, the soul, immortality, education, metaphysics, democracy, philosopher kings, and much more. It has been said that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, and if that is true, then reading Plato’s most famous work, the Republic, is worth more than reading 100 other books.

Here are just some of the scholars who will be appearing on the podcast (or the monthly book club sessions) to take us through the Republic between now and Christmas:

Along the way, there will be lots of discussion taking place inside the Ascend chat room — please join the dialogue!

As a subscriber of the Ascend Book Club, on top of the usual articles, you’ll now receive a weekly podcast on the great books. Additionally, all paid members will receive in-depth, week-by-week reading guides, essays, and access to the live book club discussions.

Furthermore, Ascend has made its ENTIRE, evergreen library of content available on Substack for all subscribers. It is an amazing, deep well of resources to help you read the great books (from Homer to Dante and beyond) and live a more beautiful life…

Join the Ascend Book Club!

Note: nothing is changing here on The Culturist — our own book club will continue to function as usual. Don’t forget, our first session on Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” is on September 23, at noon Eastern Time.

What is the purpose of education? Is it to get a degree and find a high-paying job? Or is it something else entirely?

In today’s world, the phrase “liberal arts” is used by admissions directors to describe a course of study that comprises the humanities and an emphasis on critical thinking. But a brief glimpse at the etymology of the phrase tells a radically different story, and hints at what the purpose of education really is.

In Latin, the “liberal arts” — artes liberales — are “liberal” in the sense they derive from libertas, meaning “freedom”. In other words, the liberal arts are literally the “tools of freedom,” the subjects that make you free to think for yourself and navigate the world around you.

But what are these tools, exactly?

In the Middle Ages, these artes liberales were broken into seven main subjects. These seven were then divided into two groups, the Trivium and Quadrivium. Mastery of the Trivium and Quadrivium was considered essential for anyone to call himself educated, as together they form the backbone of a truly classical education.

Today, then, we look at the seven liberal arts to see how they can help you become truly free in a world that would happily see you anything but. Because unlike our modern system, the medieval world had a coherent vision of education — not as preparation for work, but as a means of shaping your mind and soul…

Our next book club read has been decided…

We have just voted to read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The first discussion is on September 23, at noon ET — join us!

Subscribe now

We are 100% independent, funded only by our incredible community. Become a paid member and get:

• New, full-length articles and essays 2x per week

• Access to our biweekly book club (and community chat)

• The entire archive (200+ articles, essays, and podcasts)

The Trivium

The three subjects that comprise the Trivium serve as the foundation of all learning. Not only do they teach you how to think, but they teach you about the very nature of thought itself.

Crucially, no student can move onto the Quadrivium before he masters these three subjects, for his studies would be fruitless without them. Indeed, before setting out, it is important to realize that these disciplines were understood less as distinct “subjects,” but rather as a connected web through which a soul was trained in its capacity to understand the order of reality.

1) Grammar

Medieval professors considered grammar to be the gateway to all knowledge. Since you think and express yourself with words, you must have robust knowledge of how words work.

Just as grammar imposes order on language, language imposes order on thought. The best way to express coherent thoughts is to understand the inner workings of language. You must master your own, of course, but it also helps to learn (as all medieval academics did) a classical one like Latin.

But for as necessary as grammar is, it only lays the structural foundations of the metaphorical house of thought. The roof and walls of that house are erected by the next discipline…

2) Logic

If grammar is the ordering of language, logic is the ordering of thought. Building directly on the analytical precision developed via grammar, logic trains you to critically evaluate ideas.

The point of studying logic is to make you invulnerable to lines of reasoning that sound robust, but are in fact flawed. Not only does it help you identify a hidden/false premise in an argument, but it also enables you to think through a philosophy to its real-world implications: what does this look like when taken to its logical end?

In the medieval era, students used texts like Aristotle’s Organon and Boethius’s commentaries to learn how to construct valid arguments and identify logical fallacies. Disputations were also a key part of the curriculum. As almost the entirety of fields like theology, law, and philosophy rests on premises established by logic, mastery of this subject is absolutely key to the formation and governance of a just society.

3) Rhetoric

Needless to say, simply knowing how to think rationally isn’t enough. You also need to be able to communicate your ideas to others, too. Rhetoric is the tool that helps you do so with clarity and force.

Unfortunately, the idea of “rhetoric” often gets a bad rap, conjuring up more visions of dishonest politicians than those of just leaders. But historically, skill at rhetoric was viewed as a virtue: given that the truth isn’t always easy to grasp, it requires skilled rhetoricians to help others understand it.

Viewed in this light, rhetoric isn’t just the hobby-horse of a select few, but rather the calling of all those who care about the truth. It’s also why it’s the final subject before you begin the Quadrivium, because no matter what you learn there, none of it makes a difference if you can’t effectively share your knowledge with others.

The Quadrivium, after all, is where your real learning begins. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are simply the prerequisites for meaningful thought and the pursuit of truth. But they mean nothing if you don’t have real knowledge to communicate.

That knowledge is precisely what the Quadrivium provides. It is the framework that shaped over 1,000 years of brilliant intellectual minds — and perhaps your own, if you’re up to the task. With the Trivium under your belt, you are now ready to understand and be formed according to the pattern of reality…

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The full recording is now available to watch back, and the discussion will carry on inside the subscriber chat.

Mark your calendars…

We are about to vote on the next book inside the subscriber chat! Keep an eye out and cast your vote when you see it!

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Film and television constitute the bulk of modern entertainment. An ever-decreasing portion of adults prefers reading, but most of it is confined to novels, non-fiction, or news. Whether as a source of entertainment or insight, plays are practically forgotten.

This is a terrible mistake, for the role of plays in shaping Western civilization cannot be overstated. Long before the founding of Rome or the invention of the printing press, there was the theatre. It shaped the minds of Ancient Greece and laid the foundation for all of Western art, politics, and philosophy.

But of course, the role of theatre doesn’t stop there. Today, we take a step back in time to look at how five of history’s greatest plays shaped Western culture, from the Ionian peninsula to Elizabethan England and the court of France’s Roi Soleil.

If you’ve ever wanted a “must-read” list of history’s best theatre, there’s no better place to start than here…

Don’t forget to join our book club!

We are currently reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

The next discussion is TODAY, September 9, at noon ET. Watch the previous discussions here if you missed them.

Subscribe now

We are 100% independent, funded only by our incredible community. Become a paid member and get:

• New, full-length articles and essays 2x per week

• Access to our biweekly book club (and community of readers)

• The entire archive (200+ articles, essays, and podcasts)

1) Antigone

Written in the 5th century BC by the playwright Sophocles, Antigone explores the ideas of divine law, political authority, family bonds, personal conscience, and the consequences of pride…just to name a few!

The central tension of the play arises from the character Antigone’s decision to bury her brother, despite King Creon ordering her not to. But don’t let this oversimplification fool you, for Creon is no petty tyrant. At the heart of his disagreement with Antigone is a real political dilemma that continues to shape politics to this day.

When you read Antigone, you get exposed to one of the foundational ideas of all Western civilization: natural law. You can trace a line from Sophocles’ play to the work of Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and today’s concept of “conscientious objectors”.

The play raises questions like: to what extent must the law be enforced in order for it to mean anything? To what degree do the “unwritten and unfailing laws” of the gods outweigh legitimate legal authority? And, most importantly, how do the answers to these theoretical questions impact real people in the real world every single day?

Antigone explores all this and more in thrilling fashion. It is not a play you can afford to ignore.

2) Hamlet

Hamlet begins with a ghost and a demand for revenge, but what follows is something far more profound: an extended meditation on death, duty, grief, betrayal, love, and the mystery of what comes after this life.

The only real problem with Hamlet is that (in some ways, like its protagonist) it’s a victim of its own success. It’s a play everyone “knows,” and because of this, few take the time to know it on its own terms. But the more time you spend with Hamlet, the more you get out of it. It asks far more questions than it answers, and offers one of the most far-reaching explorations of the human condition ever put to stage.

That said, arguably the entirety of Hamlet’s premise can be summed up in one line. It is a word of caution delivered to the eponymous character’s friend from university, but it is just as well meant for us:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…”

3) Life Is a Dream

Pedro Calderón de la Barca is known as “the Spanish Shakespeare,” and with good reason. He penned approximately 200 plays, and his Life Is a Dream is perhaps the greatest philosophical drama of Catholic Baroque Europe.

The surreal play kicks off with a prophecy about the king’s son, who is destined to become a tyrant and bring ruin upon the kingdom. Although the details of the plot differ quite drastically from that of Oedipus Rex (another play by Sophocles, which we wrote a breakdown of here), the main question at its heart is the same: can man escape his fate?

To answer that question, Calderón de la Barca blends together the classical outlook on fate with Christian ideas of free will and providence. The result is a play that inverts the tragedy of Oedipus Rex and demonstrates how human freedom can triumph over fate and circumstance. It does so by questioning the very nature of reality itself, and showing that even if “life is a dream,” that doesn’t change the moral basis for our actions…

4) The Misanthrope

No list of great plays is complete without at least one entry by Molière! The Misanthrope, one of his greatest plays, is about a man fed up with the world of polite society.

The character in question, Alceste, despises flattery and the seemingly harmless lies told in everyday conversation. When a man reads him a sonnet he wrote and asks Alceste’s opinion, he replies that it’s terrible. No polite head nodding or encouragement from him!

But while Alceste thinks himself righteous and honest for telling the truth, the limits and inconsistencies of his uncompromising approach eventually come to light. Not only that, but the play also explores the extent to which disingenuous compliments and polite phrases are actually necessary elements of any developed civilization.

If you’ve ever gotten upset when someone casually asks “how are you?” this play has your name on it.

5) Faust

Goethe’s magnum opus Faust is a classic tale about a deal with the devil. It begins with an aging scholar who, although he has studied all fields of human knowledge, realizes he still doesn’t know the secrets of the universe. He is so miserable he contemplates suicide, and into this context steps the demon Mephistopheles.

Mephistopheles says he’ll serve Faust in this life if Faust serves him in the next. After some negotiations, the two finally come to a deal: if Mephistopheles can offer Faust an experience so wonderful and transcendent that he wishes to remain in it forever, then he will die immediately and serve the devil in Hell.

But as it turns out, neither side fully knew what they were getting into. Mephistopheles is stumped by man’s inability to ever be satisfied, and Faust drastically underestimates the havoc his pursuit of pleasure wreaks in the world, not to mention his own life. The play ends with a dramatic reversal of fortune that leaves many of those onstage — and in the audience — asking whether or not Faust really got what he deserved.

Much like the work of Goethe himself, Faust is a wide-ranging play that covers almost every bit of the human experience, from desire to grief, gain, cunning, commerce, sin, and salvation. What becomes of the man who never stops striving? Goethe’s answer, whether right or wrong, might well surprise you…

Our read-along of East of Eden is coming to an end. We meet TOMORROW, September 9, at noon Eastern Time.

If you missed the previous sessions, don’t worry. You can catch up on the recordings here.

The discussion will be live-streamed via Substack at this link.

For those joining our discussion group directly (available to all paid members), the Zoom link is at the bottom of this email…

This final third of the novel focuses on Adam’s children — Aron and Cal.

We follow them through their youth, adolescence, and early adulthood, and notice that both boys mimic the character of Adam and Charles. Specifically, Aron is beloved, gentle, and an idealist (like Adam), while Cal is described as dark, brooding, and jealous (like Charles).

Yet these boys do have quirks of their own. Aron does have a capacity for violence that Adam lacks, and Cal has a heightened conscience/sense of guilt over his violent nature that Charles lacks. In other words, though both boys seem to inherit character traits that would continue the cycle of violence between Adam and Charles, Steinbeck suggests they also have agency to choose their own destiny.

Thus Aron is not obviously going to become a saint, nor is Cal doomed to become the next Cain.

Unfortunately, however, Adam shows favoritism, just like his own father Cyrus did. Specifically, Adam loves Aron more than Cal, and is more proud of Aron’s success in university than Cal’s success in business. Although Cal tries to donate his profits to his father — hoping to restore the family’s reputation — Adam rejects the money as the gift reminds him too much of profiteering off the war. Thus, we get “Cain’s rejected sacrifice,” all over again.

Cal, crushed by his father’s rejection, seeks vengeance on Aron. Specifically he takes Aron to visit their mother, knowing the revelation that she is alive, and evil, and that Adam had lied to Aron all his life (he told her she was dead) would destroy Aron.

Indeed, Aron’s meeting with his mother is too much for him to handle. He runs away, enlists in the army, and seeks to destroy himself at war. The last action in the novel — which we’ll discuss on the call — leaves the fate of all our characters up in the air:

What will become of Aron? Did Cal doom himself to become Cain? How will Cathy handle meeting both of her sons? Can Adam the father find redemption in light of his own failings as a father?

Additionally, below are some questions to consider:

• Consider again Adam’s rejection of Cal’s money, which once again repeats the “Cain and Abel,” cycle of violence. If timshel means Cal is free to choose good, why does the novel keep putting him in situations where his best effort is guaranteed to fail? Is Steinbeck undermining his own thesis from the last section?

• Cal’s revenge — showing Aron their mother — is framed as his “sinful,” Cain moment. But is it actually a “sin,” to show Aron the Truth? Does Adam stand to blame for lying? Or should Aron be responsible for his own moral agency? How do we balance this with Cal’s vicious intentions?

• Cathy has been the biggest challenge to Steinbeck’s thesis of timshel. He asserts all human beings have free will, yet Cathy continuously puts this idea under tension as she is monstrous to the end. And yet, do you notice any changes in Cathy during the final act of the story? Is there a semblance of a guilty conscience in her? Or does she remain adamant, monstrous, and unchanged to the end?

Share your thoughts below or in the subscriber chat, along with any questions you have — we’ll incorporate them into the discussion!

Here is the Zoom link for tomorrow…

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