I was asked the other day to explain my habitual use of the honorific “St.” — e.g., St. Paul, St. Augustine (of Hippo) — as a Protestant. (Asked, to be clear, in a non-hostile way!) Here is my response, edited and expanded from its original format.

Normally, in practice, I use that honorific for those recognized as saints in the pre-Reformation Latin church. The main group are those who are saints of the ecumenical or undivided church — the apostles (St. Paul), the early martyrs (Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas), the fathers (St. Augustine of Hippo) and mothers (St. Macrina the Younger) of the church, and so forth. The Anglican Communion also recognizes as saints a number of medieval Latin figures (St. Thomas Aquinas), inherited at the time of the break with Rome. By contrast, I think I do not normally speak of anyone post-Reformation as St. so-and-so — though if discussing someone who, while not so recognized by the Anglican Communion, is reckoned a saint by Rome or the Eastern churches, and the case for whose saintliness seems eminently reasonable, I would probably use it out of respect (e.g., St. Thérèse of Lisieux).

Of course, all of us in the Christian churches are “saints” in the dialectical Pauline sense — “sanctified, called to be saints.” When I speak of “the saints” I normally have this group in mind. But along with this understanding the church has, always and purely retrospectively, recognized certain men and women in Christian history as having been friends and servants of Christ in a distinctively discernible way. In service of our own life of imitating and being conformed to Christ, they are worthy of learning from, studying, and even in a limited sense imitating (in the degree that they themselves were faithful imitators of Christ). This is a sub-species, essentially, of having strong Christian friends: since I really am something like the weighted average of the five people with whom I spend the most time, should I not spend substantial time with those whose lives most strongly testify to the power of Christ at work in them? Not, of course, that this means the marginalization or exclusion of spending time in prayer and Bible reading, i.e., spending time with Christ Himself — the point is that these influences do not compete or even operate on the same plane. The church’s recognition of these men and women, and special use of the term “saint” for them to denote that in their own individual ways they were (are!) what we all are called and being reshaped to be, seems perfectly appropriate. In this sense, the use of “St.” is a way of disciplining my speech to obey the fifth commandment: honoring my fathers and mothers in the faith.

Now, as far as I can tell, the characteristic spirit of the saint is summed up by St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” The saints are to be honored as paradigmatic imitators of Christ, not worshipped as Christ Himself. In church history there are many ways that it seems clear to me that the honor due the saints has been at minimum over-extrapolated and at maximum blasphemously elevated. I am hardly unaware of them, and am wary of these accretions and abuses in the degree that seems to me appropriate in each case. Take as an example the practice of asking the saints for their prayers. A simple form of this is, I take it, perfectly unobjectionable and even reasonable in itself: the saints, we confess, are not dead but alive in Christ (cf. Matt. 19), and certainly no Protestant would (or should) object to asking your friends to pray for you or join you in your prayers. But in certain quarters this is expanded into the notion that one should ask the saints for their intercession rather than Christ for His, because Christ is far off and unapproachable whereas the saints are gentle and friendly, and their closeness to the throne guarantees one’s prayers a better hearing. To this I must say Nein! There is one mediator between God and humanity: the man Christ Jesus. Through Christ (who dwells in our hearts by faith) we have access to the Father — not, through the saints who dwell in our hearts by faith we have access to Christ and thus to the Father. (And so on and so forth with the standard and correct Protestant rebuttal texts.) The sole mediacy of Christ is not to be compromised for the sake of showing his friends pious respect. I suspect the saints themselves, with their fully redeemed vision of Christ, would shudder at this notion!

Nevertheless, I also take abusus non tollit usum to be an essential principle of the spiritual life. Nothing, be it ever so holy by God’s grace, that makes contact with and exists within the fallenness of this world is proof against abuse: not the words of Scripture, not the sacraments, not the Church’s authority to bind and loose. (I take this to be one of the core insights and impulses of Protestantism — which is why I am content to remain one.) This does not degrade Scripture’s holiness, the sacraments’ efficacy, the keys’ power. God’s persistent business throughout the history of humanity appears to be working for good what we meant, ever so misguidedly, for evil.

This leads to a larger question of theological taxonomy: What is the nature and authority of the tradition (for a tradition it eminently is) that is the recognition of saints? I would place it in a tertiary and subsidiary category. It belongs to the tradition as a guide to the right understanding of church history, not even principally to the right understanding of Scripture. This requires some exposition of my take on the relevant categories.

The primary, and in that sense sole, authority is Holy Scripture, which stands alone. No two-source theories here. Let me be clear: Scripture is a traditioned thing. It does not, and makes no pretensions to, fall from the sky complete (presumably in the King’s English), nor does it purport to have been dictated to its human authors such that it is in principle untranslatable (unlike the Quran). God gives it through, alongside, and for the normal processes and procedures of human existence and experience. The difference is that it is recognized by the eyes and ears of faith — the community of faith — as being no mere human word but as really being the Word of God, the words for which God takes definitive responsibility. This is confirmed to us in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ Jesus — all of which take place, in the richest possible sense, “in accordance with the Scriptures.” For this reason the communities that received the Word, in generation after generation, thought it necessary to make it a textually fixed thing: not so that it could be a “dead letter” but so that it could be, for all subsequent generations, “living and active,” that every day, as long as it is called “today,” the Word could speak its own independent “today.”

The secondary category, then, contains those traditions that belong to the rule of faith: they are the boundary markers of the Church catholic as being (in Webster’s phrase) the domain of the Word. The rule of faith is not Scripture, but to read Scripture in contravention of the rule of faith is to cease to interpret the Scripture as part of the Church, and (as Scripture testifies) there is only one Church. The nature of its authority is that it is handed down along with Scripture to orient us rightly to Scripture, ruling out certain readings (and the practices that depend on them) and ruling in others. Its authority is dependent on Scripture’s precisely because it appeals constantly and ultimately to the revelation of God revealed in Scripture through the mind and work of the prophets and apostles. Within this framework, there is an obvious need for elements that are not themselves Scripture but are commentary upon it. So the traditional catechism contains the Apostles’ Creed alongside the Decalogue and the Lord’s Prayer because it is the ancient baptismal confession. Similarly the creeds and conciliar judgments of the undivided church lie in this category. Abandon them and, well, God might not abandon you — He is notoriously and scandalously gracious — but you abandon the Church. They are in this sense articles of faith.

The tertiary category is really a subsidiary category of tradition: traditions that are venerable but do not belong to the rule of faith. This includes many liturgical practices like the sign of the cross, kneeling for confession, appending the antiphon Gloria Patri to the Psalms and the refrain “The Word of the Lord / Thanks be to God!” to other readings of Scripture, and the honorific “St.”. Many of these are, or grow out of, genuinely ancient practices — Tertullian speaks of the signing with the cross in the early third century, and in their writings the Fathers are always saying things like “as the most blessed and holy Cyril writes…” which is a logical precursor to calling him “St. Cyril.” The point is that they are distinctive disciplines of speech, thought, and gesture. When I pray a Psalm or read a portion of Scripture, especially one whose words make me uncomfortable, it is good for me to end by reminding myself of the divine origin and purposes of the Biblical text. When I am speaking words that remind me (often against my instinctive will) of my sinfulness and implore God to have mercy on me, it is good to adopt a bodily posture that accords with this self-humiliation. I am very happy to adopt and submit myself to such practices, especially under the guidance of my church as it adopts them. But they are at most expressions of belonging to the catholic tradition, not themselves definitive markers of that tradition’s boundaries.

Finally, there is obviously much disagreement — even within the large and unruly Protestant camp — over the boundaries between these categories. I cannot hope to resolve it here, only to sketch my own present view of these matters. As the above discussion indicates, I have little interest in — or envy of — a magisterium that would permanently render all such judgments for me. (As the life of the current Christian body ostensibly ruled by a magisterium indicates, it actually does not in practice.) This is because the Bible, and the church’s proclamation that seeks to think the Bible’s thoughts after it, do not seem meant to give us an exhaustive manual for responding correctly to life’s problems and questions. The Bible would look very different if it were (more like, say, the Quran and the Hadith in Islam). Instead, Bible, proclamation, and tradition are together all meant to make us wise for, and regarding, the salvation that is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 3:15).

I have written suspiciously little about music for a blog entitled “Program Notes”. Well, last week — May 7, to be exact — was Johannes Brahms’s birthday (happy 192nd, Johannes!), so it seems a fitting moment to write down some thoughts I have had floating around for a while.

Brahms occupies a curious place in Western musical history. Among the pantheon of “great composers,” he is perhaps the first who was not self-consciously an innovator. (Perhaps Mozart is a counter-example? But if in his youthful period one hears nothing but an almost uncanny perfecting of the Classical style, the mature works of his final decade disclose a latent genius for musical innovation that at times nearly shatters the mold; as with Schubert, one can only imagine how different music would have been had he been given more time.) During his own lifetime Brahms was known as a notable musical conservative, a protégé of the Schumanns and an inheritor of the Beethoven legacy, in contrast to the self-consciously progressive and experimental followers of Liszt (especially Wagner) — the (hyperbolically) so-called “War of the Romantics.” There is no single genre with which he is singularly identified, which he can be said to have (re)invented, transformed, or redefined — unlike Mozart with the opera, Schubert with the song cycle, Liszt with the tone poem, Mahler with the symphony, or Beethoven with pretty much everything (but especially the symphony and the string quartet). Nor is there an instrument whose technique is distinctively and permanently marked by his influence — unlike Bach for the violin and the keyboard, Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt for the modern piano, or Mendelssohn and Wagner (quite differently from one another) for orchestration. His style pays constant homage to Bach’s finely tuned counterpoint, Haydn’s sense of proportion, Beethoven’s ear for the dramatic flair, and Schumann’s expressive melody; but it is hard to say, whatever it might mean to say it, that in any of these areas he “improves” upon his forebears.

Part of all this, no doubt, is that Brahms was a notorious perfectionist — spending nearly twenty years writing and rewriting his First Symphony, and burning the manuscripts of more than a dozen string quartets he considered inadequate. But one can equally say of “perfectionism” that it is an unwillingness to measure oneself by any standards that transcend or relativize those one is given. The First Symphony, after all, took twenty years because it had to be worthy to publish after Beethoven’s Ninth (a burden which Schumann and Mendelssohn had notably not felt). Beethoven’s sheer artistic self-belief (and self-regard) was what permitted him to dispense with the artistic conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart, and every great composer after Beethoven considered that to be truly great one must at least try to be like Beethoven in this respect. Every great composer, that is, except for Brahms. He alone seemed to think it worthy to simply and creatively conserve the traditions he inherited, offering to posterity a handful of finely polished gems in which, like the Silmarils of Fëanor, the light of now-past ages is caught and distinctively refracted. And a small handful indeed: in the genres which his great forebears had seen, or had come to be seen, as offering special artistic statements — the string quartet, the piano trio, the piano sonata, and above all the symphony — he left just a few pieces each: string quartets three, piano trios three, piano sonatas three, and symphonies four. If there is a genre in which he was, perhaps, the greatest “innovator” of his day, it is that genre which most self-consciously honors the past: the theme and variations.

All this may sound curiously negative, as though I am suggesting (as Richard Strauss said about himself) that Brahms is “not a first-rate composer, but a first-class second-rate composer.” Not so. Brahms, in his totality, is certainly greater than Strauss (who, as the Brits say, routinely over-eggs the pudding a bit — though that masterpiece of his twilight years, the Vier letzte Lieder, deserves to stand in the first rank). The best passages in Brahms are as transcendently great as anything in Beethoven or Mozart. I am thinking, specifically, of the last five minutes (102 bars) in the first movement of the First Piano Concerto, though there is any number of passages I could spotlight. This movement, and this passage in particular, exemplifies all the best qualities of his writing: the organic expansion of just one or two simple musical cells into a vast whole; a remarkable economy of both counterpoint (there are rarely more than two separate lines moving simultaneously) and orchestration (somehow creating a full, sustained sound without Wagnerian orchestral busy-work); judicious exploitation of the flexible, propulsive rhythms available in his long triple meter, keeping the energy flowing through long yet elegantly balanced melodic lines; and the perfectly seamless, almost invisibly prepared transition from the calm light of the second theme to the darkness of the coda (at bar 438, 22:03 in the above linked recording), like a great cloud slowly obscuring the face of the Sun. There is nothing pretentious, nothing self-serious, nothing indulgent in Brahms. Everything is heartfelt, often even passionate, but utterly sincere. Where Mozart’s music sounds effortless, almost too perfect to be real, and Beethoven’s music sounds immensely effortful, every note as if written with blood — well, Brahms’s music sounds, simply, human: the music of human life, life as really lived, not as larger than life.

Now indulge me as I offer some speculation. In his masterpiece of criticism Real Presences (1989), George Steiner draws attention to the “broken contract” between logos and kosmos, immanent language and transcendent reality: the gulf (so he argues) at the heart of modern humanity’s sense of alienation. If there is no God, there is no “real presence” in anything we say: our words are meaningless. (Steiner himself was, notably, unable to believe in God: throughout Real Presences he writes of God and the transcendent as one who longs for but cannot himself have them.) And it was in the 1870s, Steiner suggests, that European critics and scholars began to advocate for detaching logos and kosmos. I am not even one-thousandth the expert on European arts and letters that Steiner was, but I cannot help noting that in the realm of music, this is precisely the period when tonality and tradition — the so-called “Common Practice” — begins to break down. Wagner’s “Tristan chord” (premiered 1865) is often seen as the touchstone for this development: the first public statement by a leading composer in a major work that the boundaries of tonality and the “rules” of voice-leading could be breached for the sake of expression. Of course, one is not terribly hard pressed to find Tristan-chord-like harmonies and resolutions in earlier composers (Schumann!), but it is hard to deny that there is something… flagrant? iconoclastic? Promethean? in the use Wagner there makes of it. And in any case, the floodgates opened in the 1870s and onward — with Verdi, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Mussorgsky (all born before 1850) following Wagner in preparing the ground for really major innovations by Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, and Strauss (born after 1850) within a just-barely-tonal paradigm. By the beginning of the 20th century, Ravel and Scriabin were conjuring essentially non-tonal landscapes, and Schoenberg was developing the twelve-tone paradigm by which he sought to banish the concept of a single tonal center from his music — a deliberate repudiation of kosmos in favor of (a highly mathematical and schematized notion of) logos. All that was (apparently) solid melted, in the course of a few decades, into air.

And it is in precisely those decades, in the midst of so much musical chaos, that we find Brahms at work. He is a son of his age, not of some other age; he is not, and cannot be, a mere repristinator. But he is that son not as an innovator, but as a creative conserver, aware of how rich is his inheritance and seeking to make good use of it. What we hear in Brahms is always something new, but never something novel. Perhaps this is the way — the only way? — to flourish in modernity.

When one prays repeatedly through the Psalter in sequence, one tends to start noticing patterns in how the Psalms are arranged, or at least suspecting characteristic editorial strategies. The set of Psalms for Evening Prayer on the 28th of the month — 136, 137, 138 — exemplifies one of those strategies: what I think of as the containment of imprecation.

Psalm 137 is perhaps among the most famous of Psalms: “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion,” it opens. We are in the immediate aftermath of the exile from Judah, with the grief still raw, the horror still fresh. “On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Then the Psalm goes on in progressively darker tones, with (interestingly) two sets of imprecations. First is the less famous double self-imprecation, enjoining the singer not to forget Zion — “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill; let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!” Only then follows a double imprecation against Judah’s enemies. The singers urge the Lord to remember Edom’s complicity in the “day of Jerusalem, how they said ‘Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!”, before concluding with the most notorious passage: “O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”

There is a lot going on here, even just within the Psalm itself. For starters, the final imprecation — certainly as violent as anything in the entire Bible — is, strictly speaking, not a curse, but a blessing. It performs a complexly layered speech act: 1) pronouncing a (future and hypothetical) blessing on conquering soldiers who will dash Babylonian infants against the rock, which in turn 2a) reveals to the reader, and 2b) reminds the singer, just what the Babylonian soldiers themselves did when they conquered Jerusalem; thus 3) entreating the Lord to mete out his retributive justice (as the previous clause makes clear: “who repays you with what you have done to us”), and only after and through those layers 4) wishing for the violent destruction of the singers’ enemies. This violent pitch is also only reached after the singers have recalled their mockery by their captors (“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”), and their betrayal by Brother Edom (“Lay it bare!”). None of this makes, or should make, the final sentence itself “easier” to read (or pray), but it does (in a certain literary sense) contain the scope and import of the curse, and illuminates the deep emotional complexity and psychological honesty of the Psalter.

Now observe how the editors of the Psalter contextualize and contain this imprecatory outburst by placing it between Psalms 136 and 138. Psalm 136, first: this is surely among the most uncomplicatedly celebratory Psalms, with its recounting of the Lord’s “great wonders” punctuated by the response “His steadfast love endures forever.” These “great wonders” are, first, the orderly creation of heavens, earth, and waters, and the lights that rule over them; second, the deliverance of the elect nation in the Exodus, their protection through the wilderness (“To him who struck down great kings…”), and their conveyance into the promised land. (There is just the merest hint of Judges-style post-conquest troubles: “It is he who remembered us in our low estate… and rescued us from our foes”.) There is no explicit mention of Jerusalem, but the narrative setting is — at least imaginatively — before exile. And if that is implicit in Psalm 136, it is made explicit in the tightly linked Psalm 135, which concludes in Jerusalem herself: “Blessed be the Lord from Zion, he who dwells in Jerusalem! Praise the Lord!” For that matter, the whole sequence Psalms 120–134 are the “Psalms of Ascent,” sung by pilgrims on their way to the festivals in Jerusalem, renarrating the long journey from “the tents of Kedar” (120:5) to “the house of the Lord” (134:1). The Psalms which precede 137 are, quite literally, “the songs of Zion” demanded by the Judahites’ Babylonian captors.

Meanwhile, in Psalm 138, we are in a tonally somewhat different world than 136 (as well as temporally different, per the superscription “of David”). It is undoubtedly a Psalm of thanksgiving, but the exuberance is tempered by recent suffering and deliverance: “On the day I called, you answered me… Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies, and your right hand delivers me.” Nevertheless, there is at least one indubitable link to 136: that Psalm’s refrain appears again in David’s concluding lines, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever” — before the somewhat open-ended “Do not forsake the work of your hands.” (The refrain is thus modulated, perhaps, into an injunction that the Lord should be mindful of his own nature and remain faithful to his covenant!) Less overt, but still clear, links to 136 include “all the kings of the earth” giving thanks to the Lord (recalling, by contrast, the kings who were struck down); “though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly” (recalling the Lord remembering Israel “in our low estate”); and, perhaps more speculatively, “before the gods I sing your praise” (recalling the “great lights” created to rule over the day and the night). And our note that (at least) 134–136 are among “the songs of Zion” draws attention to the liturgical setting of 138: “I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks…”

So what were the editors of the Psalter thinking in placing 137, the paradigmatic Psalm of grief and rage at Jerusalem’s destruction, between 136 and 138, two Psalms of rejoicing in Jerusalem? I suggest that it is purposeful, and strikingly psychologically insightful. They have put grief and rage — and yes, imprecation — in its proper place. The exiles’ anger is given its full venting, as it must be. The sheer horror of violence against the innocent, compounded in the destroying victors’ demonic mockery, must be recalled, and these must continually shock to the point of outrage. There is to be no naïvety. Evil must have its due, and — when revealed for what it truly is — what it is due truly is cursing. But precisely as — and because — the curse is offered up to God, it is given over to God. It is made His responsibility (“Do not forsake the work of your hands”). And as it is made His responsibility, it is contained. It is put into the context of God’s creative and saving blessing. In fact, it only acquires its force from the fact of His creative and saving blessing. And by that same fact the curse is given its definite limitations, limitations which are notably not placed upon the blessing. The imprecation is not allowed to devour the Psalmist from the inside, but it is released; better still, the Psalmist is released from it, to the joy of God’s abundant blessing. Sin always crouches at the door of imprecation, but in offering the imprecation as prayer, the Psalmist masters it.

So the curse is put in its place, and thus we are promised that the curse will not reign forever, but that blessing, having given way to curse, will one day be restored. This yields the larger narrative purpose in the Psalter, of which this psychological purpose is an icon. The sequence of Psalms 136–137–138 enacts in small the story of exile and return. As we read, we follow the Psalmists through time, from exuberant rejoicing through gutting anguish to renewed joy; we experience the dialectic of resonance and alienation; we know the presence of God even as we momentarily feel His absence; we trace what my teacher Jeremy Begbie describes as the movement of “home, away, and home again” — with the essential acknowledgement that home, when you do return, is never quite the same. We rehearse the pattern of the Lord’s faithfulness and steadfast love.

Or, in the words of that great Master Teacher of Scripture: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should first suffer all these things, and then enter into his glory?”

1. “Artificial general intelligence,” defined as “a computer able to do any cognitive task a human can do” — as envisioned for example in this new work of science fiction — is computationally impossible to achieve.

2. This is because “intelligence” — in the sense of “normal human intelligence,” which is presupposed by the above definition of “AGI” — is a) impossible to fully and simultaneously articulate (hereon inarticulable) and b) non-deterministic, and therefore in at least two senses strictly non-computable.

3. The inarticulability of intelligence has (at the very least) to do with its embodied and relational aspects. “Mind” is neither identical with nor even co-extensive with “brain activity”; rather, “mind” is (to crib from Dan Siegel’s definition) is an embodied and relational process. Emotion in particular seems, as far as the causality can be determined, to be body-first, brain-second, such that it is only articulable after the fact (and in a way that changes the emotional experience). Michael Polanyi’s great work demonstrates in a philosophical register what musicians, artists, and craftspeople have always known intuitively: that the “cognitive task” of playing an instrument or using a tool depends on integrating the instrument or tool into one’s bodily experience, in an inarticulable way. And relationship through interaction with other embodied minds is such a complex process, with so many emergent layers, that not only is it poorly theorized or modeled now, it may be impossible to exhaustively theorize or model — especially because it primarily seems to take place in and through the pre- and in-articulate dimensions of cognition.

4. Meanwhile, the non-determinism of intelligence has (at the very least) to do with quantum randomness effects in the brain, which at the mesoscale (the level at which daily human, and most complex organic, life takes place) emerge into relatively well-understood and predictable patterns, but at the nanoscale (the relevant level for a hypothetical deterministic model of cognition) are by definition impossible to predict, or even observe without altering them. I am unaware of any good reason to think the quantum effects in, say, an extremely large and inorganic GPU farm, would be interchangeable with or even meaningfully similar to those in a three-pound organic human neural system.

5. What is computationally possible, as far as I can tell, is a (relatively) high-fidelity simulation of one aspect of human cognition: the comparatively deterministic, hyper-articulated aspect of human cognition which Iain McGilchrist identifies as characteristic of the left hemisphere (hereon LH) of our brains (subject, of course, to obvious caveats from theses 2–4). Note: I am not saying, and I do not take McGilchrist to be saying, that a fully-computed model of the LH itself is possible; only that its characteristic thought-style can be simulated in high fidelity, precisely because that thought-style is comparatively deterministic and hyper-articulated.

6. In currently existing frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), I take it something like this has already been achieved. Commercially available LLMs are now (to use a technical term) pretty good at processing and reproducing both written and spoken natural language — albeit in such a sterile “voice” that it renders the phrase “natural language” almost meaningless — and quite good at analytically processing huge quantities of formally similar information. These are two of the characteristic specializations of LH cognition, and I expect the next generation of LLMs to be significantly better on both fronts. Notably, some of the persistent failure modes of LH cognition and of LLMs are startlingly similar: “hallucination” or fabrication of nonexistent supporting evidence, a predilection for lying or circumventing rules in order to achieve a desired result, an inability to attend to wholes at the expense of parts, and so forth.

7. Because much of contemporary Western life (as McGilchrist and others have extensively documented) is already organized to systematically advantage that aspect of human cognition, it is therefore no surprise or, in a sense, any remarkable accomplishment that frontier models now perform at the level of PhD students in solving advanced physics problems (albeit ones with solutions known to currently existing physics), or that some chatbots now “pass the Turing Test.” This is the natural end result of reimagining science as “knowledge production” and credentialing scientists accordingly, or of technologically reducing the typical person’s normal experiences of and capacity for conversation to so great an extent that we now take what the LLMs offer to be “human” conversation. This — and all the attendant social/economic disruption (about which more below) — is all possible without “AGI” itself being computationally feasible.

8. The second strike against the possibility of “AGI” comes from limits in physical resources. Achievements in LLM development up to this point have been enabled by energy use, water depletion, and resource extraction on an already massive scale. The anticipated investments required for “AGI” (e.g., according to AI 2027, $2 quadrillion in new data centers over the next 10 years!!!) will require exponentially more energy, water, and mineral resources that we either simply do not have on this planet or cannot physically extract from it at the desired rate (unless we invent, say, cold fusion). This is to say nothing of the land required to build all of the new infrastructure. I therefore anticipate that “AI” development will, as a function of resource scarcity, fail to get anywhere close to the scale of investment theoretically required for “AGI.” This may only become clear to “AI” developers, however, after they have already inflicted genuinely ruinous and probably irreversible damage to the environment and to the communities that depend on it.

9. Considering all this, I find it probable that without ever achieving “artificial general intelligence” as imagined in science fiction, advances in “AI” over the next several years will make all but the top 1–5% of current “symbolic capitalists” functionally obsolete. This includes both high-status sectors such as consulting, finance, advertising, software development, law and legal services, etc., and lower-status (or at least lower-paying) sectors such as journalism, copywriting, teaching, administration, graphic design, the social sciences, etc. (Note that several of these lower-status professions are ones which the Internet revolution has already been destroying.) By “functionally obsolete” I mean that it will almost always be more cost-effective, and nearly as useful, to “employ” an “AI agent” for a task that previously required one to hire a human being.

10. Sectors that are symbolic-capitalism-adjacent but require long training in embodied skill — e.g., healthcare, the experimental sciences, mechanical engineering, war — will not be functionally obsoleted, at least not so thoroughly. An inorganic robot will never be able to perform skilled tasks in the real world with the same level of ability as a trained human being (see (3) above)… and “organic robots” capable of such skill would pretty much just be, well, lab-grown humans, with many of the same inefficiencies and time-delays as regular humans. (Only a conspiracy theorist would see current Silicon Valley investments in IVF, genetic selection and editing, and artificial wombs as an attempt to create the conditions of possibility for lab-grown humans… right???) But some current features of jobs in these sectors — the features, that is, which are most akin to “AI” core competencies — will be permanently outsourced to “AI agents.”

11. The “trades” and the “crafts,” on the other hand, will not become thoroughly automated, though they will be in various ways automation-directed and -augmented. Machine maintenance and repair, for instance: machine failure might be AI-diagnosable, but the intuitive skill necessary for actual repairs will remain the province of humans. To deal with water, you’ll always need a plumber. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and fields like construction and mining will always require meaningful and skilled human attention to reckon with that detail. Agriculture represents an interesting test case: a field that is currently extremely mechanized, but as the lowest-skilled tier of human labor becomes (out of necessity) far cheaper to “buy,” one which may reabsorb much of that excess labor capacity. At the more humanistic end of the spectrum, traditional crafts might make a comeback of sorts (similar to the vinyl resurgence), and the performing arts will always be the province of human beings, though probably far fewer people will be performing artists in fifteen years than are right now; in both cases patronage will be the only economically viable model. For the ultra-wealthy, owning or sponsoring something evidently made only by humans will be a status symbol.

12. In sum: I believe we are headed neither for the existential-risk, civilization-ending disaster scenarios envisioned by the “AI Doomers,” nor for the golden era of peace and prosperity and universal basic income envisioned by the “AI optimists.” (Where, exactly, do the optimists think the value creation for UBI will come from in an era of mass human unemployment?) Rather, I suspect in the near-ish term we are headed for a poorer, less culturally vibrant, less highly educated world with much greater wealth inequality. This will be a world in which many more people, including some who might otherwise have been symbolic capitalists, work in various kinds of manual labor or “trades”: agriculture, mining, energy, construction, maintenance. Others will depend, one way or another, on the patronage of the few ultra-wealthy. The whole service-economy apparatus that depends on a large leisure class will be semi-permanently diminished in proportion. It might, in other words, look in certain ways remarkably like the period of transition into the Industrial Revolution.

Over the long run, I believe in the resilience of humanity, chiefly because I believe in the faithfulness of God to His wayward creatures. We will not be destroyed or superseded by a higher form of intelligence, nor will we manage to completely destroy ourselves. We are remarkably adaptable and creative: life always finds a way. But we will find that the remarkably widespread prosperity of the last few decades in particular and the last two centuries in general is not, once unlocked, a permanent and automatic feature of human existence. It has depended on our irretrievably consuming the planet’s resources at an ever-accelerating rate. What cannot go on indefinitely must eventually stop. The mechanization snake will finally eat its own tail. The only question is how soon.

Addendum (08.15.2025): Well, this has had much more of an afterlife than I expected. And we have had four months more of AI development (i.e., several lifetimes). What do I think now about all of the above? So far, I feel quite as confident about items #1–7 as the day I wrote them. I am nearly as confident about #8, though I recognize that energy/water use per query is something of a moving target and that many of the major AI developers are investing in energy solutions. (Here’s a science fiction scenario for you: What if we came up with, say, a non-destructive way to siphon geothermal energy from the Yellowstone supervolcano, powering everyone’s Claude Code instances for eons while diverting a real civilizational X-risk?) My greater environmental concern remains the resource extraction — and corresponding ecosystem degradation/destruction, at points of both origin and destination — necessary to build the proliferating data centers that will be necessary to build more and more capable models, and to supply the infrastructure upgrades that get water and energy to those data centers. (This is to say nothing of the environmental justice questions about where data centers are actually built.) The typical American utility depends on infrastructure that is decades old, whose construction was predicated on a long-deceased funding model (i.e., massive federal subsidies), and which is now desperately in need of repair at practically every point. It’s like the old joke about True Libertarians: How will they drive wherever they want, as fast as they want, if there aren’t any roads? Color me skeptical that AI developers will actually prioritize massive upgrades to local infrastructure in places where they build their data centers, though I would love to hear stories to the contrary.

The big questions come, of course, with #9, and perhaps to a lesser degree #10–12. I have looked back on #9 a number of times and thought: “What was I thinking?” 95–99% of current symbolic capitalists is a pretty large number! So let me offer a couple of qualifications and clarifications. First, by saying “probable,” I think I meant “more than 50% probability.” (In my lexicon, I think I use “unlikely” for <10%, “possible” for 25–50%, “likely” for, oh, I don’t know, 60–75%, and “almost certain” for >90%.) I would have been comfortable saying then, and maybe still am, that it is “almost certain” 50% of current symbolic capitalists will be functionally obsoleted (more on that term in a second). Note that this is not the same thing as Dario Amodei’s “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” There are a lot of even entry-level white-collar workers — especially in healthcare — who are not pure symbolic capitalists, in Musa al-Gharbi’s sense, even if they presently do a great number of symbolic-capitalist things in the course of their everyday work; my #10 was meant in part to correct against this misconception. And, even in the most successful AI development scenario I can reasonably imagine, functional obsolescence of the bottom 95% of symbolic capitalists does not mean that all those people go “oh well, guess I’d better become a farmhand.” It does mean they move down the prestige and remuneration ladder in various ways, but probably does not mean they have to leap off and start again from the bottom. It also means that fewer young people even aspire to enter those fields in the first place, instead proactively entering less automatable fields (anecdotally, at all colleges outside the absolute most elite tier, student interest in nursing programs is just skyrocketing). And it means that the gates behind which the true symbolic-capitalist jobs are kept become ever more difficult to unlock. A PhD has long offered no guarantee of success, or even of a job, in any field. Now some of the most ostensibly prestigious PhDs are becoming, literally, impossible to get.

“Functional obsolescence” is also an important term for my argument in thesis #9, one which I did not define in quite the way I should. My definition was that “it will almost always be more cost-effective, and nearly as useful, to ’employ’ an ‘AI agent’ for a task that previously required one to hire a human being.” The term “cost-effective” should be clear. “Useful” is obviously less so. What I basically meant is that, to a manager, the short-term quality of work that an “AI agent” can do for the entry-level tasks that require little contextual knowledge will seem so impressive that they will, by default, choose to defer or forgo the long-term gains of adding another human person to the team. In any organization, a new hire, no matter how intelligent or experienced, needs some time to learn the ropes, and depending on the context it may be not just weeks or months but years before the institution sees its return on investment, as it were. (There is a different calculus for primarily internal-facing and primarily external-facing roles here; I suspect the functional obsolescence of the sales account manager, whose personal touch with the client is in fact part of the package sold to the client, will be far slower to arrive than the functional obsolescence of the sales account manager’s executive assistant.) This does not prevent a company having an explicit value on hiring and developing human employees, such that they are willing to forgo the short-term advantages of AI agents. I am immensely grateful to work for one such company. I suspect there are many other symbolic-capitalist companies that are still talking this people-centric talk, but are quietly making preparations to cease walking the walk as soon as it becomes practical to take a different path.

The other main reason that #9 seems far less plausible to a lot of people now than it perhaps did four months ago is the stubborn persistence of certain kinds of AI failures and hallucinations. It still makes up references to nonexistent sources (though less often than it used to); it still offers impossible and logically laughable ex post facto rationalizations for “conclusions” at which it claims to have “arrived” via “chains of thought,” thus obscuring its inner workings (though, admittedly, real human beings are awfully good at this as well); it still can’t reliably tell you how many B’s there are in the word “blueberry” or how many U.S. state names contain the letter R. The recent much-hyped launch, and notable failures, of OpenAI’s GPT-5 has Maria Sukhareva announcing that “AI Winter is coming.” And indeed, if this indicates that we are reaching the upper bound of the logistic curve and the rate of progress is leveling off, then “AI agents” will not be anywhere as good “in the next several years” as is necessary to functionally obsolete 95–99% of current symbolic capitalists. They will still be an amazing technological feat by any metric, but like many such feats of the industrial era, they will not actually decrease the absolute amount of work there is to be done, but simply reshape much of the existing work around themselves. They will fail to be transformative in the way that, say, the telegraph was to the nineteenth-century general or journalist (completely reshaping the possibility structure in which their work is done), instead becoming something more like the washing machine to the mid-century housewife (removes a source of drudgery, freeing up time for… other kinds of drudgery). I was deliberately vague in saying this could happen in “the next several years” — recall: the transformer architecture on which our contemporary LLMs are built was invented in 2017, which in my lexicon is only “several years ago”! — so let’s wait until, say, 2032 to render final judgment. Unfortunately, my intuitions here are still pretty pessimistic. I do think GPT-5’s failures indicate some systemic misconceptions (see, again, items #1–7), but humans can get awfully, even terrifyingly, far operating in a purely LH mode of cognition. We can have genuinely passed the inflection point on the logistic curve, after which we will see fewer and fewer dramatic breakthroughs and more and more high-profile failures… and still have a long, long way to go.

The larger point to be made, and the place where, in my view, real unpredictability enters the picture, is that none of these developments happen in laboratory-style isolation from their reception in culture. (If there is any such thing as “laboratory-style isolation,” on which again see Personal Knowledge.) That reception, as far as I can tell, is not going well. The proliferation of “AI slop” is incredibly unpopular, even if at this point few people can reliably distinguish it from “real,” human-grade slop. I cannot imagine parents (at least in upper-middle-class contexts) long enduring the indiscriminate application of chatbot-based ed-tech products to their kids’ classrooms; Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation seems to be striking too strong a nerve for that. If (speaking extremely loosely here) the washing machine created “the problem that has no name” for mid-century housewives, thus accelerating the development of second-wave feminism, what social upheaval(s) might the washing machines of the AI field accelerate or unleash? I have no idea. And those will shape the outcomes I predict in #11 and, especially, #12. So with that (very large) asterisk placed next to them… I more or less stand by them. Rogue AI is not going to decide it needs to wipe us all out with commandeered nuclear weapons to protect its colonization of the universe (the doomsday scenario in “AI 2027”), nor will properly aligned AI usher in a drudgery-free UBI paradise (the golden-age scenario in “AI 2027”). Both of those scenarios depend on an inflationary and wrong view of AI’s capability to genuinely imitate human intelligence. Instead, the real damage will be done by those purportedly racing to prevent the first and usher in the second, who are on public record as having zero clue what their actual end goal or desired end point is. They seem to imagine it will go on forever and ever, growth without end. But Stein’s Law is undefeated, because it is in fact a restatement of the second law of thermodynamics: “What cannot go on forever must eventually stop.”

This morning in our Daily Office readings my wife and I reached Luke 8, which contains St. Luke’s account of the Parable of the Sower (parallels in Mt. 13 & Mk. 4):

(1) Soon afterward [Jesus] went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, (2) and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, (3) and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means. (4) And when a great crowd was gathering and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable, (5) “A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. (6) And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. (7) And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. (8) And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.” As he said these things, he called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

(9) And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, (10) he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’ (11) Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. (12) The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. (13) And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away. (14) And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. (15) As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.

(16) “No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. (17) For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light. (18) Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.” (19) Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. (20) And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, desiring to see you.” (21) But he answered them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”

St. Luke’s telling differs in various minor ways from St. Matthew’s or St. Mark’s, most notably the immediate context for the parable: he introduces it with the Lord “on the road,” as it were (Mt. and Mk. set it explicitly beside the lake), with his followers and supporters around him, and concludes it with the episode about the Lord’s “mother and brothers” (which in Mt. and Mk. immediately precedes the parable). This mild defamiliarization highlighted some non-obvious features of the parable, which in turn led me to what I think is a slightly unconventional interpretation. Essentially: this parable is not intended first to explain the individual’s response, but to illumine the community and context in which the individual responds.

Let me explain. The sower who sows the seed — which “is the word of God” (v. 11) — is, of course, Christ, who is going out “through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God” (v. 1). As he does so, Christ finds himself surrounded by “a great crowd” coming “from town after town” (v. 4). The parable is, then, a commentary on his (literarily) present actions. He is sowing the Word as he goes, in many different places, on many different soils. Now: the sown Word grows up into a plant (or, as in the first case, does not), which puts down roots in the soil — and the depth of the soil, and the other plants growing in that soil, determines whether the plants wither in the heat, fail to bear fruit, or grow healthfully and fruitfully. When Christ explains the parable, to what do the “plants” — the growths of the seed — correspond? They correspond to the persons who hear the Word. The most explicit indications of this are Christ’s references to their “roots” (v. 13) and “fruits” (vv. 14, 15). The plants are, as it were, “new growth” of the Word: new embodiments of the Word, which should themselves in the proper harvest time bear the seed of the Word, ready to be scattered anew by the sower. The growing Word-plant is a new life where previously there was none, a new-created person, which is to say a new kind of person. (Echoes of the psalm: “Blessed is the man… whose delight is in the Law of the Lord, and on His Word he meditates day and night; that man is like a tree, planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.”) What, then, are the “soils”?

My suggestion is that the “soils” are not, primarily, different “types” of individual persons’ hearts and souls with their individual responses to the Word; rather, they are different sorts of communities with different kinds of environment for the Word-plantings. Think first about the nature of soil. Soil is not crude, inert matter on which a seed acts to extract water and nutrients. Soil is rather a rich micro-ecosystem, full of other living creatures, with hyper-locally varying tendencies and capacities and deficiencies, itself best understood as a kind of quasi-living substance. There is a dynamic relation — better, an indescribably complex array of dynamic relations — between the seed that is planted and the soil in which it is planted, even as they remain distinct from one another. So it is with the one who comes to believe the Word and the context in which he or she comes to believe it. Some “soils” offer only broad hostility, in which case the seed will struggle or fail to grow at all (“the devil comes and takes away the word,” v. 12). Other soils do not welcome a deep commitment, enforcing only shallow ones (“they receive it with joy… [but] in time of testing fall away,” v. 13). Many soils are full of entanglements and diversions for even a personally-committed believer (“they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature,” v. 14). But some soil is good, not only permitting but encouraging deep, fruitful commitment (“they… hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience,” v. 15). In a rich, nourishing community, the new believer may put down deep roots and bear fruit a hundredfold.

Once we recognize that the primary correspondence is not between soil and believer, but soil and believer’s proximate environment, how much more, and broader, sense does this parable make of the life of faith! It was in a different context that St. Paul quoted the poet Menander to the effect that “Bad company corrupts good morals” (though it is a remarkable not-quite-coincidence that immediately after that quotation he discusses the nature of the resurrection body by analogy to seeds and plants; there are no coincidences in Holy Scripture!). But who has not seen a friend or acquaintance, ostensibly growing in faith, begin to wither when his closest friends begin expressing their disapproval of some teaching inherent to the faith? Or, even more commonly and tragically, whose faith has been slowly choked out when (say) she takes a high-paying job that relocates her away from her community, or when he begins dating someone who is attractive but has little interest in or commitment to faith? Which interpretation of the parable is more realistic (not to say compassionate): to say, “well, this just goes to show they were never good soil to begin with, you see”, or “alas that they were uprooted from good soil and planted elsewhere!” How psychologically realistic — brutally so — is this view of persons’ relation to their communities! Look at the findings of interpersonal neurobiology: I really am something like the weighted average of the five people with whom I spend most of my time. Who they are, and what sort of relation they have to the Sower, is naturally of critical importance for who I am. And in subtler but no less significant ways I am influenced by what a previous generation called my “station” in life, i.e., the cultural expectations endemic to my socio-economic layer: the sorts of media that People Like Me consume (and indeed the posture of “consumption”), the kinds of jobs we take, the places it is acceptable for us to live, the churches it is respectable for us to attend. This is the soil in which I live, and in which I am trying to grow. Of course it would affect how deep are my roots and how fulsome my fruits.

Note also that on this interpretation, the growth of the Word-seeds into living Word-plants at all is not only less a deterministic what-kind-of-soil-are-you? matter, but also more evidently due to the inscrutable, uncontrollable power of grace. Anyone who has sown seeds of any sort knows that, even in essentially the same soil, some of the seeds will grow well and others will not (indeed, probably only wealthy modern Westerners, in our highly sterilized environments and de-agriculturalized culture, can imagine crop growth to be basically a matter of controllable inputs and predictable outputs). Yes, there is a dynamic relation between the soil which permits and the seed which sprouts, but the priority is with the sowing of the seed and the actuality of the growth. So it is with the Word of God: whether an individual Word-seed, all else being equal, will indeed begin to grow into a Word-plant is decidedly inscrutable — at least to human understanding; I do not say inscrutable to God, for only God knows why a given human heart does or does not receive the Word in the first place. But — and this is the crucial point — in the process of discipleship, after the Word has been received, after the plant has begun to grow, there really are predictable and repeatable patterns of growth or failure to grow, which one can understand quite readily based on the characteristics of the soil/community in which it is planted. Nitrogen deficiency may not prevent a plant from growing at all, but it will fail to thrive and may not bear its fruit. And, of course, in some communities and contexts the devil seems practically always on the prowl to take away the planted word before it can grow. Certain plants won’t grow at all in acidic soils; “how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God!”

Now, someone will say, “But the analogy of the lamp suggests a more individualistic reading. Christ speaks of ’the one who has or has not’ in v. 18.” So he does. “Take care then how you hear,” of course. A greater emphasis on the community context in which an individual grows in faith by no means abrogates the individual’s responsibility for that faith; I am tempted to suggest, in an admittedly circular move, that the Holy Spirit sets these words after the parable of the sower in order to guard against a kind of community-is-destiny fatalism. (In this connection it is striking to recall that the post-apostolic Christian generations seem to have essentially invented the concept of free will to explain how Christians could so thoroughly defy, among other things, the temptations of lust endemic to Greco-Roman society.) But I see no reason that these words do not admit two levels of interpretation: one individual, the other communal. The community that receives true faith hospitably — that is good soil — to it will more be given, viz., richer soil and more believers; the community that has not — is a thicket or rock or path — even what it has (as in erosion!) will be taken away. Remember also that St. Matthew uses the same analogy of the lamp to speak of the whole community of disciples (“You [pl] are the light of the world,” Mt. 5:14ff). The apparent interlude about the Lord’s “mother and brothers” in vv. 19–20 also strengthens the community-focused reading. What community could be more naturally proximate (even more naturally in first-century Galilee than in twenty-first-century suburbia) than one’s family? Yet Christ says, in effect, “Those who hear and do the word are my true family; better to surround myself with them than my literal family — unless they hear and do the word also.” The centrality of biological family is fundamentally relativized by the new creation of the Word.

This brings me to the other key objection to my interpretation, which is how to make sense of those whose new-planted faith actually flourishes in hostile contexts — I think naturally of the little apostolic communities scattered around the Mediterranean over the course of the Acts of the Apostles; or, in the present day, of Muslim-background believers who encounter Christ in a dream and are led to one another by the voice of the Spirit. I might reasonably respond that again, Christ’s parable is a commentary on his present actions, and therefore situational; it is not, and does not need to be, in principle infinitely applicable to absolutely any situation. (Scripture in its totality is profitable for all situations, not simply any individually extracted passage, and most of the profitability comes in learning — from Scripture itself — the quotidian wisdom to discern which passage is most fit to which situation.) But the ultimate response, I think, is again to emphasize the inescapably communal aspect of faith. As often in Christ’s parables, there is an instructive asymmetry between the good examples and the bad examples; in Christ’s four paradigms — the path, the rock, the thicket, and the “good soil” — this last is the only one that is not a specific sort of place. Soil is hyperlocal; a patch of “good soil” may be found, or formed, anywhere in the field. (Legume plants, for instance, famously improve the soil quality for other plants by “fixing” nitrogen so that it is usable.) Every such example of faith flourishing in a hostile context which comes to my mind presupposes that at least “two or three are gathered,” such that the soil quality is enriched so as to nourish new plantings. St. Paul never traveled alone in his apostolic work, and never left a solitary believer as a “congregation of one,” but baptized whole households. Christ sent the seventy-two out in pairs. The Desert Fathers, who might similarly be considered a counterexample, in fact are constantly warning novices in the faith about the spiritual dangers inherent to the desert, and how unwise it is to charge, solo, into battle with the devil before you are ready.

The lesson of the parable of the sower, then, might not in fact be “test yourself to see whether you are good soil or not”; it might instead be “get yourself to the good soil, and put down roots.”

Reflections on Plato’s dialogues — or, if I break it out as a separate post, links to reflections — to follow below. The order is that of the Ukemi Audiobooks series The Socratic Dialogues, which dramatizes Benjamin Jowett’s translation with a full cast of great British actors (headlined by David Rintoul as Socrates). Jowett’s translation may be “out of date” from a scholarly perspective (which I am unqualified to judge) but in Rintoul’s hands (vocal chords?) is enduringly lucid. Ukemi also organizes the dialogues loosely according to a traditional early-middle-late periodization, which I gather is a contested approach, but it doesn’t seem to harm the understanding for a first pass. (I’m already suspecting that the “dramatic ordering,” following the chronology of Socrates’ life as best that may be reconstructed, might be more fruitful… but that’s for a second round, and I’m just beginning the first!)

Early Period

1. Apology. A barnstormer to start in medias res — better, near the end of things. We meet Socrates for the first time as he defends himself, before the assembly, against the charges laid at his door: of being an evildoer and “making the better appear the worse,” of being an atheist and introducing new deities, and of corrupting the youth. He does not succeed, though he is condemned by only a small margin. Socrates here introduces a number of key motives in the corpus: his claim to “know nothing at all” and thus to only be the “wisest” by exposing everyone else’s ignorance (which makes him quite unpopular); the deceptiveness of rhetoricians, who know how to speak elegantly and persuasively, but know really nothing of the Good and therefore of how to make men better; his own role as a sort of “gadfly,” provoking the polis into active self-reflection which it might otherwise neglect, and seeking thus to improve it; the absolute priority of caring for the soul over against all other cares (of property, wealth, body, etc.), and the absolute refusal to employ any tactics unworthy of the soul; the “daemon” or voice of God — or Conscience — speaking to him and infallibly guiding him toward the right course of action, though all public opinion be against him; his real indifference — perhaps, even here, optimism! — in the face of death, but absolute service to the truth. We also get a taste of the dialectic style as he cross-examines his accuser Meletus. It is an extraordinary bit of writing by Plato, moving and sweeping and incisive. Apology thus introduces and crystallizes the brilliant literary paradox of the Socratic corpus: Socrates disclaims all “rhetoric” and “elaborate defence,” portraying himself as a humble and artless seeker of wisdom — using brilliant rhetoric and elaborate defensive strategies to demolish his opponents’ arguments. I loved Apology, and expect to revisit it with great enjoyment, but there is undoubtedly something inhuman and irritating (gadfly-like!) about Socrates. One understands instantly why Socrates had so many admirers in his own day (including Plato), and why Plato’s Socrates has been such a titanic figure in the history of thought and culture; and, equally, just why Socrates made so many enemies. Most of all I chafe at his claim that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” Is it not the other way round: no life which is lived is worth leaving unexamined?
2. Crito. A simple but moving dialogue, set in prison on the night before Socrates’ execution, on the question: “Is it right to disobey an unjust law?” Socrates’ answer in this case, of course, is No. The titular Crito (also mentioned in Apology) comes to him in prison and makes one last effort to persuade Socrates to escape his condemnation. But — despite his complaint in Apology that his trial was not conducted with full propriety — Socrates is determined to accept the death penalty meted out by the state. The most curious, and seemingly central, feature of the dialogue is the lengthy portion spoken by Socrates in the voice of the personified Laws of Athens. How, the Laws ask Socrates (and thus Socrates asks Crito), can one who is so personally committed to justice defy the demands and decisions of justice?
3. Charmides. Now we flash back several decades, and get going with our first, though assuredly not last, “What is X?” The X in question is the virtue of temperance.
4. Laches.
5. Lysis.
6. Euthyphro. “What is piety?”
7. Menexenus. A parody of the funeral oration genre, in which the ostensible praise of Athens and of great Athenian heroes turns out to just yield a series of digressions, backhanded criticisms, and trite aphorisms.
8. Ion.
9. Gorgias. Is it okay to really rather dislike this dialogue? It is long, repetitive, and occasionally mean-spirited. The subject matter is of great importance, of course: moving from the more specific question “what, if anything, does a teacher of rhetoric need to know about goodness?” to the general question “what is the best way of life?”. Yet in these early dialogues Plato does not often set up Socrates’ interlocutors as particularly compelling or thoughtful — see Euthyphro or Ion and their namesakes — but in Gorgias he seems to regard, and Socrates seems to treat, all three of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles with barely-disguised contempt. And they are, in differing ways, worthy of contempt (less so, perhaps, Gorgias).
10. Protagoras.
11. Meno.
12. Euthydemus. A merciless satire on sophistry. At first Socrates is baffled, then infuriated, then bemused, then amused by the “method of contradiction” employed by the brother sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus; finally he pulls himself together and shows himself a master at it, if he chooses. There is a substantive philosophical point lurking within the mockery, though. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are boxers who have but lately taken up sophistry (in order to make money and increase their reputation). They have grasped that the key to successful sophistical argumentation is equivocation: exploiting multiple meanings of their opponents’ words in order to catch them in apparent contradictions. Of course, as soon as one scrutinizes their arguments, these fall to pieces, so the sophist must keep his opponent permanently off balance and give him no room to strike back. Sophistry is dialectic reduced to boxing: a contest of strength and speed in which one hit is as good as another. The true philosopher, however, cares not at all for victory, but only for the pursuit of truth. And truth requires valid arguments, clear and consistent definitions, and patient exploration.
13. Lesser Hippias.
14. Greater Hippias.

Middle Period

15. Symposium.
16. Theætetus. Fantastic. Far and away the most enjoyable, dare I say riveting, of the dialogues so far. “What is knowledge?” Must revisit and write a longer reflection.
17. Phædo.
18. Phædrus.
19. Cratylus. Some people, apparently, say this dialogue is “tedious.” I had the exact opposite reaction! (Perhaps I am a tedious person…) Admittedly, for the first two thirds, I repeatedly thought, “Surely you can’t be serious!”, as Socrates offered increasingly speculative and unsupportable folk etymologies for all sorts of words (though the more abstract a concept denoted by a word, the less speculative it seemed to me) to supposedly show that the relation between a word and the thing it represents is not arbitrary or merely conventional, but is based on nature… only to experience philosophical whiplash in the final third as Socrates dismisses that linguistic theory and argues that words are given by convention and have no necessary naturalistic aspect!
20. Parmenides. This one is fascinating, and demands revisiting. A precocious, but philosophically underdeveloped, nineteen-year-old Socrates meets Zeno (he of the Paradoxes) and the famous Parmenides. Socrates knows the teaching of the great Heraclitus that all things are in constant flux and motion (“You cannot step into the same river twice”): the One is an illusion, the Many is all. Parmenides and Zeno, on the contrary, propose to show that eternal reality is unchanging and flux is impossible: the Many is an illusion, the One is all. Socrates, mock-naïvely, proposes a synthesis: all earthly things are indeed in perpetual flux, but they derive their thing-ness from participating in eternal unchanging Forms or Ideas. Parmenides, somewhat unexpectedly, dismantles this proposal with six increasingly devastating counter-arguments, exposing all sorts of internal contradictions, absurdities, infinite regresses, and the like. But then… Parmenides flips the script and sets out to show, in tremendous (and occasionally mind-numbing) specificity, how one might after all defend a theory of Ideas as logically coherent. Does he succeed? Can the One and the Many be held together? What is the real point of the deductions? It’s hard to say. I must reread it, and write a longer reflection.
21. Republic. Fascinating, riveting, eye-opening: “oh, that’s where that comes from!” a million times. Must revisit. Must write a longer reflection.

Late Period

22. Timæus. Whatever the opposite of riveting is; I really, really struggled for motivation to keep listening to this one. I know it’s one of the most influential texts in the history of Europe, but even with the capable David Timson reading the part of the eponymous monologist, I found my attention slipping over and over again.
23. Critias. It’s Númenor! Or, really, Númenor is Atlantis: “But even the name of that land perished, and Men spoke thereafter not of Elenna, nor of Andor the Gift that was taken away, nor of Númenórë on the confines of the world; but the exiles on the shores of the sea, if they turned toward the West in the desires of their hearts, spoke of Mar-nu-Falmar that was whelmed in the waves, Akallabêth the Downfallen, Atalantë in the Eldarin tongue.” More seriously, we do get hints — reminiscent of Republic (which takes place, dramatically, just the previous day) — at the Platonic ideal for a political constitution.
24. Sophist. The follow-up to Theætetus is not quite as much fun, though it introduces a fun new hermeneutical device: most of the philosophical exposition is not in the mouth of Socrates, who is a mere spectator, but spoken by a nameless Stranger from Elea (home of Parmenides and Zeno). The bulk of the dialogue consists in the search for a single definition via numerous “divisions” and “classes” — much more similar in some ways to Parmenides (to which it makes reference) than to its ostensible precursor. And of course the sophist as a figure is an unflattering subject. It’s quite interesting, however, after hearing Plato decidedly privilege the One over the Many in Republic, to hear some… back-pedaling, maybe? Perhaps the One and the Many can be held together after all. Dramatically speaking, Parmenides is set at the very outset of Socrates’ philosophical career, whereas Theætetus, Sophist, and Statesman are said to take place at nearly the end of his life.
25. Statesman. A direct continuation from Sophist, though Socrates takes over from Theætetus as the Eleatic Stranger’s primary interlocutor.
26. Philebus. At one point near the three-quarters mark of this dialogue, Protarchus, who is Socrates’ principal interlocutor, remarks to the philosopher, “Your many repetitions make me slow to understand.” Socrates responds, infuriatingly, “As the argument proceeds, my boy, I dare say that the meaning will become clearer. Protarchus’ dry response, “Very likely,” sums up my experience of this dialogue. Here is an undoubtedly sophisticated, mature, exacting reflection on a classic Socratic-Platonic theme — the superiority of a life spent seeking wisdom to a life spent seeking out pleasure — whose intelligibility is compromised by its repetitiveness. The argument is just difficult to follow. Socrates multiplies distinctions, which no doubt are useful, in service of the general thesis that the enjoyment of pleasure (and its coordinate, the avoidance of pain — though how, precisely, they are coordinated is one of the many subjects of discussion) is not the highest good in life, but rather a faculty like any other, which admits of distortions and falsities, and which therefore cannot be the highest good of a human life. Here there are none of the dramatic fireworks of the earlier Gorgias which touches on similar themes (and which is referenced occasionally). It was, however, worth listening to this dialogue just for the hilarious aside near the beginning in which Socrates describes those young men who are first intellectually thrilled by the paradoxes of One and Many (15e—16d); not much about Philosophy Bros has changed, it seems, in at least 2400 years.
27. Laws.

One recurrent theme throughout Plato’s work, increasingly prominent in the later dialogues (though I recall it as early as Euthydemus), is the challenge posed for his theory of knowledge by falsehood or false knowledge. The problem goes something like as follows. Everyone agrees that there are things called falsehoods which we can utter. Yet, logically speaking, this should not be possible. After all, we speak using words; the meaningfulness of words depends on their signifying things that really have existence; there are no words to speak of non-existence; therefore, we can never speak of that which does not exist; so also we can never speak falsely but can only speak the truth. Similarly, we can never know anything false, but always and only know things that are true; our difficulties come not from false knowledge, which is strictly speaking a contradiction in terms, but from ignorance alone. The argument sounds persuasive when considered abstractly, yet it yields an obviously ludicrous conclusion! It receives its most extended treatment, if I recall correctly, in Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger explores the problems raised by the term “non-being”. What does the term “non-being” actually indicate?

There is something here formally similar to — and no doubt influential upon — the evidently unsolvable (in the technical sense, absurd) problem of evil in the Christian tradition. God, Who created all things, is (on the classical-theistic view) perfectly good, perfectly knowledgeable, and perfectly capable. He must therefore have created all things perfectly. Furthermore, as He is (by definition) the unique Creator, no creature can contravene His created design or overrule His will if it wanted to. So where does evil come from? For it is evident to all that something has gone horribly wrong. Does it come from some kind of deliberate possibility for evil which He gave to His creatures as part of their creation? If so, how is He not the creator of evil also? But if that is the case, how can He be perfectly good? For that matter, how would a perfectly good Creator be able to conceptualize the possibility of evil so as to deliberately create it? The limitless perfections of classical theism seem to be in tension. But the alternatives are even less appealing. If evil is somehow inherent in the nature of creatureliness, such that anything with any limitations at all has not only a potentiality for but an actuality in evil, then either “evil” is a fundamentally relativized category with no real purchase, or it might be better to never have been created at all. Or if the Creator is limited in any of His moral goodness, knowledge, or capacity, one must suppose that evil might be able to permanently and ultimately gain the upper hand over Him and His creatures. One could fall back on saying that evil cannot exist, because it is a logical impossibility with no satisfactory explanation — yet we have a strong and near-universal intuition that it does exist.

With the beginning of this year, I have determined to patch some of the (very large) holes in my reading of the classics. I have never read Plato or Aristotle in any sort of panoptic way, let alone later major philosophers of antiquity such as Seneca or Plotinus; my reading of the Church Fathers has been almost entirely occasional and extremely selective; it has been years since I have read either the Iliad or the Odyssey (and I have in fact never read the Aeneid). My major reading for roughly the last two years has instead focused on the characteristic novelties and problems of modernity, as articulated by modern writers: George Steiner’s Real Presences, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Lorraine Daston’s Rules, Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment, Erazim Kohák’s The Embers and the Stars, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry; in a more explicitly scriptural/theological key, my teacher Jeremy Begbie’s Abundantly More, my teacher Kavin Rowe’s essays on New Testament hermeneutics, Brevard Childs’ Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word, and Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery; and, of course, the granddaddy of them all (by at least volume if not temporality), Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things.

If your guiding intellectual question is “how shall we live with integrity as Christians in modernity?”, as I am beginning to suspect mine is, this body of literature possesses obvious importance. I am nowhere close to having plumbed the full depths of this tradition (or complex of traditions), and do not intend to stop reading in this area. My reading project on the nature of tradition will bring me back up to the present age with (at least) Gadamer, Lindbeck, and more MacIntyre, and I have several more major works of twentieth and twenty-first-century philosophy and theology already waiting for me on my shelves (Heidegger, Cassirer, Adorno & Horkheimer, Bultmann, Frei, Jenson, Rosa, and so forth). And I’m currently reading through David H. Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence, which (whatever else, good or ill, I might say about it) represents a one-man (two-volume) masterclass in theological engagement with modernity. So in no way am I withdrawing my attention from modernity. Rather, two things have crystallized my sense that it is time to turn (at least more of) my attention to the Old Things.

The first is that I have found myself increasingly overpowered by what I call in shorthand the “I do not understand Hegel” problem. The great theologians and philosophers of the not-too-distant past — and, still, the greatest in the present — were staggeringly, now almost incomprehensibly, literate and erudite figures. Before publishing his great work on hermeneutics, Gadamer was a noted expert on the pre-Socratics. Karl Barth is sometimes accused of not having read the tradition fairly, but he has never been accused of not having read it thoroughly. Brevard Childs seems to have truly read every book ever written. Part of what makes Hegel singularly difficult is, of course, his ruthlessly abstract and intensely tedious style; but no doubt another part is that very few people today are educated the way that he and his peers were. Take a slightly more recent example: what man of letters teaching at the University of Michigan today would dare assign his undergraduate students a reading list like W. H. Auden’s? If philosophy and theology are the Great Conversation, one must learn to discern and hear the enduring presence of the older voices who have left the room before one can truly contribute or at least understand.

The second is that, despite the immensity of my to-read list and the paucity of my already-read list, I do feel that I reached an inflection point with the turning of the year. That was when I finished reading Karl Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century — the bulk of which is actually about eighteenth-century philosophy and theology as the “background” to nineteenth-century theology; and it must be said that Barth appears to enjoy writing about Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and so forth a great deal more than the nineteenth-century theologians who are the book’s ostensible subject — and an unofficial trilogy by Lesslie Newbigin: Proper Confidence, Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. These, somehow, coordinate in my mind: Barth and Newbigin (who was, not coincidentally, heavily influenced by Barth) together outline the negative space for and sketch the positive content of the properly Christian post-liberal synthesis which we desperately need — or which, at any rate, I need in order to feel intellectually satisfied. In the coming months, as the intellectual dust from my aforementioned reading settles, I may take a few stabs at describing what seem the chief features of that synthesis. But I also sense, if dimly, that in order to know what I really mean by those features, I will need some more pre-modern context and contrast. I can thus leave Barth and Newbigin for a little while, confident that I will return to them better able to understand what is fruitful in what they offer.

It is high time, then, that I actually read Plato and Aristotle (not to mention Seneca and Plotinus); that I (begin to) read through the Church Fathers; that I revisit Homer (and meet Vergil anew). I am doing so as follows. For Plato, I have launched into the Ukemi Audio series dramatizing the Socratic dialogues (in Benjamin Jowett’s translation), with the astounding David Rintoul as an unforgettable Socrates — and intend to write here, for my own benefit, at least a short reflection on each dialogue. For the Fathers, the obvious place to start is Volume I of the old Schaff set, with Sts. Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, and their comrades. With the Iliad, which I have at least read before (perhaps more than a decade ago), I have cracked open Emily Wilson’s recent translation. In none of these cases is the point a deep, doctoral-seminar level understanding. Rather, the point is familiarity, breadth, and fresh inspiration: to drink deep from the old and honored wells.

If a government or major corporation wants to get serious about mitigating or reversing anthropogenic climate change, it should consider stopping research and development on generative “AI.” Think about it:

• A ChatGPT query requires roughly 5x the electricity of a normal Google search — that is, a Google search from the days before Google’s “AI Overview” itself 5xed the energy use of every single Google search you perform. If this is the case for a purely text-based response, I don’t even want to know how much energy an image or video generator like DALL-E — or a “music” generator like Sora — requires per query.
• Furthermore, LLM chatbots — due to both their design and their inefficiency in completing the tasks for which they are designed — invite far more queries per day than your typical search engine. The teenagers who spend hours a day chatting with their LLM “therapists” or “AI girlfriends” may be the high tail of the bell curve, but there is no doubt that they are living right into the technology’s basic affordance. I challenge anyone to find a large number of people who literally spend all day Googling things (well, okay, actually, I do know at least one person like this). OpenAI wants everyone to use GPT-4o for everything, 24/7.
• To keep up with this insane and constantly-escalating scale of usage (think also of how every shopping website is suddenly integrating an AI-powered helper chatbot!), new data centers are being constructed every single day. Worldwide data center energy use probably doubled between 2022 and 2023, probably due in substantial part to the impact of rolling out generative AI tools, and seems on pace to keep doubling annually (in a sickening update to Moore’s Law).
• Note also that server farms and data centers are frequently built in regions like the American West which have plenty of available land but scarce water resources. In energy economics, there is a well-known tradeoff known as the “water-energy nexus:” the more water you are able to use (mostly for cooling), the less energy you have to use, and vice versa. In other words, there is ecologically no such thing as a free lunch: degrade your local ecosystem through water use, or pump carbon dioxide and other more noxious pollutants into the air somewhere else. Furthermore, by all accounts data centers significantly degrade quality of life and health outcomes (through, fascinatingly, steady noise pollution in both audible and inaudible frequency bands) for the people who are misfortunate enough to live near them.
• The easiest technologies to eliminate from the economy are, by definition, the ones which have not been integrated into the economy yet. Unlike the automobile, industrial agriculture, air travel, and the other technological revolutions to which we are constantly hearing “AI” compared, the “AI revolution” has not happened yet. It is incredibly unpopular — the American public views “AI” with something like 70% unfavorability the last time I looked into it, which is more unpopular than Donald Trump was at any point during his first term in office — and consistently becomes more unpopular as people learn more about it and have more experience with it. So why not simply say, with Bartleby the Scrivener, “I would prefer not to”? If you want to be serious about climate change, ban AI.

This, of course, will not actually happen. For one thing, it might not be legal (and certainly would not be legally practical) for, say, the US government to ban generative “AI” development. For another, all the incentive structures are aligned against it. To simply “not develop AI” is, clearly, a step that no currently existing tech company (and many not-yet-existing tech companies as well) is willing to countenance, for fear that they will be left behind by their AI-developing competitors — a classic race-to-the-bottom collective action problem. The incoming administration is filled with unapologetic cryptocurrency boosters (another infamously environmentally degradatory technology). And I should pause to say that I don’t quite wish to launch a Butlerian Jihad against all “AI” tools — I am very optimistic, for instance, about the improvements to weather forecasting which the new AI-based models seem to provide when used in conjunction with traditional computational physics-based models, and if AI tools can effectively replace human content moderators to keep porn off social media, all the better.

It’s also true that ending “AI” development would not come anywhere close to reversing anthropogenic climate change. Automobiles, industrial agriculture, and air travel are far larger contributors still to the problem, and there is no good replacement for fossil fuels in these domains (electric car boosters to the contrary). It is impossible to avoid the truism that if you want 18th-century emissions, you need an 18th-century lifestyle. Nobody in the 21st century is going to voluntarily revert to an 18th century lifestyle. What we need, rather, is a massive and non-fossil fuel source of energy that could not only, say, power AI, but also make planetary-scale carbon capture & storage economically viable. No solar or wind power technology is capable of providing this, for reasons of basic physics, and the ecological costs of resource extraction to make solar panels and their battery packs are so significant that it is not clear to me a solar panel will ever, environmentally speaking, “pay for itself” in emissions reductions. Hydropower sounds great if you have a massive river nearby (not the case everywhere!), but every time we check in on the maintenance requirements and ecological impacts of dams, the answer gets worse and worse. That is why I consider it enormously telling that AI developers such as Microsoft, recognizing that the new product they are shoving down all our throats requires an astounding quantity of energy which the current American grid is simply not ready to provide, are making quiet but massive investments in the future of nuclear energy.

The real proposal, then, might actually turn out to be: anthropogenic climate change, widespread generative “AI”, new nuclear energy — pick two.

• Till We Have Faces is set in a pagan, pre-Christian world: the world of a “barbarian” Balkan kingdom (“Glome”) well to the north of Greece, where pagan religion still holds sway but Greek philosophy, far to the south, has already come to a kind of initial maturity. (During Orual’s reign, Glome acquires a copy of a “long and difficult book” that begins with the line All men by nature desire knowledge; this is Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which is a clever tip of Lewis’s hand that the tale is set sometime in the two or three centuries before the birth of Christ.) The Greek slave and expatriate Lysias (“the Fox”) gives Orual a thorough schooling in the Greek philosophical religion, a narrative device by which Lewis can explore the encounter between the pagan and philosophical views of the gods (or the Divine Nature, as the Fox would prefer to say).
• Orual is drawn to, and sometimes even momentarily persuaded, by the simplistic, naturalistic clarity of the Fox’s philosophy: the gods of the heathens are no gods at all; the Divine Nature is not a thing with passions that must be appeased, but is pure goodness and light; Nature is a great interconnected web of causation, and there is neither “chance” nor the direct intervention of the gods in the natural order (despite the Fox’s periodic thanksgivings to “Zeus the Saviour”), so that things only happen which are “in accordance with Nature”; pagan religion is, more or less, a populist fig leaf for the temple’s political machinations vis-a-vis the palace. This philosophy is particularly useful to her when she becomes queen and shuts her Orual-self up in a small locked space within; it offers her tools for the task of good governance (at which, the concluding lines of the book attest, she succeeds spectacularly), and seems to provide rationalization for suppressing her pangs of conscience.
• Nevertheless, neither does Orual abandon the local pagan religion: it has its own political usefulness, of course, in binding together (the root meaning of “religion”) people and palace, and she must be seen participating in the Ungit-cult; more than that, it provides a sense of holiness as something visceral and awe-inspiring, which the philosophical religion never does, associated with blood and incense and darkness (“holy places are dark places”); the “sacred stories” are of course full of “contradictions” and implausibilities, but they give paradoxical voice to deep human instincts and resonances with the natural world — so the (bastardized) story of Psyche becomes a figure of the cycle of the seasons and the cult thereof; without the shedding of blood there is no expiation of sins. And, of course, Orual does — once, when it is too late — see the god of the mountain, and she never forgets the experience (though she does her level best, so she tells herself, to minimize its power over her) of that momentary encounter with a Being of another order.
• The early drama in which the Priest schemes to have Psyche sacrificed is a perfect example of this. The Priest recognizes, with awful intuition, the need for a “scapegoat” (in the Girardian sense) — one must die on behalf of the many for the whole people to be saved; the power of the paradox that, “in a mystery,” this scapegoat must be both the best that the land has to offer and the worst offender against the gods; the further paradox that — depending on the sex of the Blessed / Accursed — the god to whom the victim is offered may be either Ungit (the Awful Feminine) or Ungit’s son (the masculine god of the mountain), a thing of glorious majesty, and that either may simultaneously be the Shadowbrute, a thing of dark terror; the mystery that being the meal of the Brute and the wife of the God may not be all that different. The Fox has no time for any of this, and attempts to pick apart the seemingly incoherent strands of the mystery. But the Priest recognizes the deep coherence of the mysteries, the coincidentia oppositorum at the heart of reality, and so conquers the Fox: “Why not?”
• One distinctive difference between the pagan religion and the philosophical religion, therefore: the pagan religion inspires faith. Even a shrewd political operator like the Old Priest, who understands perfectly well what he is doing vis-a-vis the power of the palace, nevertheless has absolute confidence (pistis) that what he believes and teaches is true. The Fox, on the other hand, has dissolved his own faith in the gods through philosophical criticism, but as a result no longer has the certainty which he needs to counter the power of the Priest. So, when the old King goes to offer Psyche in sacrifice, he finds that he genuinely believes, if only for the time he is making the Offering. The old pagan Ungit-stone, a dark and shapeless thing, inspires more faith and evokes more holiness than the new Hellenistic Aphrodite-statue, which is recognizably human. (As the peasant woman says to Orual on the day of the Birth-feast: “‘That other, the Greek Ungit, she wouldn’t understand my speech. She’s only for nobles and learned men. There’s no comfort in her.’”) It is narratively ambiguous, I think, whether the Great Offering is in fact efficacious to rescue Glome from its troubles; the Fox of course dismisses it according to his exclusively materialist view of causation (“everything would have had to be different from the beginning”), but it is hard for Orual to avoid the impression that the gods have indeed looked with favor on the sacrifice and sent Glome rain, peace, and good fortune.
• The result of this exploration is a kind of negative-space outline for a genuinely Christological — which is to say, incarnational — view of Divinity. The Fox is right in his own way: there really is an absolute bifurcation, an “infinite qualitative distinction” between the immanent and the transcendent, and the gods are not at all like men. That is part of the power of Orual’s experience on the mountain after Psyche has uncovered her lamp. And yet — holiness is found in darkness and paradox and mystery before it is seen in clarity and light. The transcendent hides itself within the immanent, so that it may be sought by Faith, not merely apprehended by Reason. Psyche is not the slave of a mountain outlaw, but is — or was — the wife of the god. Neither paganism nor philosophy can be simply transmuted, for Lewis, into genuine Christianity; but neither can the genuine insights of either into the nature of things and human experience be dismissed as accidental — and if one believes in an absolutely transcendent Creator who has enfleshed Himself, immanentized Himself, one indeed cannot. Both the pagan religion of Glome and the Greek philosophical religion are, in their own ways and precisely in their interaction, praeparatio evangelica.

Piranesi:

• “I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not the means to an end.” (60–61)
• “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not. The only part of my existence in which I experience any sense of fragmentation is in that last strange conversation with the Other.” (71)

Evangelical theology is trapped in a perpetual struggle between its two uneasily coexisting traditions: biblical theology and systematic theology. The dispute is always the same. It never ceases, never disappears, never makes real progress on genuinely reconciling the traditions, but continues forever. The players come and go, the ostensible matter of controversy shifts, but the arguments never change. This is happening, in one form, right now with John Mark Comer and the New Calvinists; it happened in the last decade with the debate over the Gospel between “Team King Jesus” and “Team Gospel Coalition”; it happened in the decade before that with N. T. Wright and John Piper on justification (funny how the New Calvinists keep popping up here!); and so forth ad infinitum. Squint a bit, and even the early stages of the Reformation outline the same form of controversy: Luther the doctor of Old Testament, Zwingli the advocate of expository preaching, and so forth for the “Bible” side, and Eck, Cajetan, various Popes, et al for the “theology” side. (My personal favorite example of this is the pair of books published by IVP Academic a few years ago, authored respectively by Hans Boersma and Scot McKnight: Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew and Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew.)

Here is the general form of the controversy. Note that whenever it wells up and spills over, it can do so under the impulse of either tradition, but really identifying such responsibility is difficult; it is just one perpetual-motion controversy, and so the whole thing (at least when viewed as neutrally as possible) is a chicken and egg problem. However, let us suppose it is (re)triggered by the Bible side:

1. A theologian specializing in Biblical interpretation (which is all that a “biblical scholar” really is) publishes some argument, taking as his (and it is, as we know, usually a he) point of polemical departure some commonly taken-for-granted bit of doctrina, especially as it is popularly preached rather than scholastically described: for example (to pick, almost at random, from N. T. Wright), the gospel is about you “getting saved” so that you will “go to heaven when you die.” This bit of (again, popularly expressed) teaching is then found to be a remarkably inadequate representation of the biblical texts usually adduced to support it: so John 3, Romans 3–8, Revelation 21–22, and so forth actually testify that “salvation” and “eternal life” have a present dimension and reference, and the future hope is primarily for heaven “coming down to earth,” not us escaping earth and going “up to heaven”: not “life after death” so much as, in Wright’s (brilliant) phrase, “life after life after death.” Often the popular misrepresentation is straightforwardly taken to be the responsibility of some major, and beloved, historical-theological figure in the tradition: Augustine, Luther, and Calvin are popular choices here. (Sometimes it is not the (re)originator of the controversy who does this, but some less-cautious disciple.)
2. These warning shots arouse the systematic theologians from their dogmatic slumbers (noodling away over the finer points of Jonathan Edwards’ doctrine of the beatific vision, or Kuyper’s theology of church offices, or whatever), and they determine to return fire. The more historically minded pursue lines of historical critique: the representation of Augustine (or whomever) is in fact a misrepresentation, and Augustine was far more careful than he is generally criticized as being. What we most need today, in fact, is not less Augustinianism, but more Augustinian Augustinianism! Or: the biblical theologian is simply and naïvely repristinating a historical error (e.g., the Hellenization thesis) which has been weighed, measured, and found wanting. The more philosophically minded, similarly, take the concepts deployed (again, simply and naïvely) by the biblical theologian and subject them to philosophical-theological critique: this is (or depends upon) univocity repristinated, or Social Trinitarianism uncritically retrieved, or Socinianism resurgent. Sometimes this sort of thing has the genuinely salutary effect of bringing the various parties’ philosophical and theological presuppositions directly into view. Often it reads more like an attempt to overwhelm the opponent with force of Weighty Words.
3. Now the biblical theologians sharpen their exegetical tools to reply. There are a number of forking paths here, but they mostly consist of the same basic move: Sure, they say, you may be right about what Augustine said: but was Augustine right about what the Bible said? The systematicians are far too concerned with the neatness of their systems, far too quick to find dogmatic concepts — which took centuries to develop — in the text of the Bible itself. Or they are far too quick to occlude (here enters a historical-theological presupposition) what was imaginable, and therefore mean-able, to the author of a particular book in favor of the Church’s later consensus about what that book must really have meant: the conceptual equivalent of “illegitimate totality transfer” in semantics. This is typically where, in New Testament, references to “Second Temple Jewish” and, in Old Testament, references to “Bronze Age Israelite” thought occur: no Second Temple Jewish reader had such and such a conceptual category as to have been able to comprehend what Augustine later argued, and likewise Augustine had lost some key conceptual categories possessed by a Second Temple Jew. You know, the Hellenization thesis may be discredited in certain areas, but come on, you’re really telling me that by transposing the Biblical subject matter into the language of neo-Platonism there was not an iota, not a jot that passed from the Law’s original meaning? Are we even evangelicals anymore (rather than — horror of horrors! — Roman Catholics) if we are willing to prioritize a later theological development over what the Bible says?
4. The systematicians, of course, cannot abide this sort of suggestion. Naïve (you keep using that word) historicism! is the charge flung at the biblical theologians. You are operating from theological presuppositions just as much as we are, but the difference is a) you don’t know what yours are, whereas we do, and b) yours are wrong. Sometimes there is a historical doubling down, a sort of fighting the historicizing fire with fire: Don’t you know that your same argument about this same text was made in, say, the third century by [checks notes] Paul of Samosata? To reject Paulianist heresy, we must also reject your argument. Or: You have, damningly, overlooked a most critical distinction made in the 17th century by Francis Turretin — which convincingly vindicates our interpretation, and demolishes yours. The more thoughtful and careful systematicians, at this point, are actually usually willing to own that yes, they are willing to prioritize a later theological development (though of course for evangelicals it is that of, say, Martin Luther and not the Council of Trent, for… reasons!) because they believe it more effectively preserves some essential truth taught in the Bible — or which itself must be preserved to in turn preserve some essential truth taught in the Bible.
5. And so on, and so forth, unto the ages of ages. Eventually an individual controversy will run out of steam and settle back down under the surface. But never for long. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

This process — which I describe above with great love for both sides, and with tongue firmly in cheek — is a kind of dialectical expression of the basic aporia of the evangelical tradition. Belonging myself, however uneasily, to a stream of that tradition, I believe and affirm unhesitatingly every word of what follows in this paragraph, and thus belong to the realm and feel the force of the aporia. The Bible possesses a unique and singular authority, an authority distinct from and superior to any human tradition. What it speaks to us shares fully in the eternal authority of the Triune God, of Whom it testifies singularly and authoritatively and Who is singularly and authoritatively God (the Shema means more, but not less, than this). It is therefore of supreme importance to understand and obey what it is speaking. However, there is no non-traditioned, perfectly rational position from which any human can interpret the totality of what it is speaking. Add to this that the content and message of the tradition, as we now express it, is derivative from but not identical to the content and message of the Bible: it is, unavoidably, at a minimum that content and message — which was originally imparted in one moment of history — interpreted and therefore translated into a new moment of history. This renders its traditioned re-presentation remarkably contingent when viewed historically, even as such tradition is simultaneously inescapable and necessary. It is only the (theological) confession of Divine Providence which guards for us this sheer contingency from tipping into simple invalidity.

Thus, the Bible’s authority seems to be not just an article of faith but the greatest article of faith, the article of faith on which all other articles of faith depend — but simultaneously the more it becomes an article of faith, the less contact it seems to have with not only reality as historically experienced but also its own text and matter. Thence the divide between biblical and systematic theologians. The biblical theologians protest when the systematicians take the text of the Bible beyond what it presents itself to us as being; the systematic theologians protest when the biblicists set the Bible over against the articles of faith which depend upon it, which it has generated, and are in turn what we live. This dynamic is constantly re-presenting itself at the level of the matter under controversy. Take the doctrine of God. The more that, for instance, under the influence of philosophical criticism, God becomes absolutely transcendent, unqualifiedly impassible, and so forth, the less contact this God-concept seems to have with the God represented in the narratives of Scripture, which naturally invites rebuke — but equally a God-concept simply transposed out of the narratives of Scripture invites this philosophical criticism: if God were not absolutely transcendent and unqualifiedly impassible, could the sorts of exalted things Scripture says (and we are invited to say) about His faithfulness and justice and so on really be maintained?

“As ministers,” Barth remarks in one of his great early essays, “we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God.” Put differently: we must re-present the Bible, but can we — and may we? Everyone wants to live “the religion of the Bible,” but nobody can live “the religion of the Bible” in the strictest sense of the word, because the Bible does not so much present as generate a “religion” which is both greater and lesser than itself. Nobody wants to “go beyond what is written” — but nobody can truly “not go beyond what is written,” because as soon as one asks the question “what is written?” it inevitably comes coupled with the question “how do you read it?” Both parties in the debates are permanently trapped in this dialectic. Everyone involved knows all this, at a more or less tacit level. The debates are almost entered into with a sigh of dismayed recognition, as a performance that must be undertaken yet whose non-outcome is fully known and expected. At times they seem to be an exercise in deflecting our attention from this basic aporia: like the head of Medusa, it cannot be looked at directly, hence it turn us to stone (or, yet worse, to Rome). No new Aquinas or Calvin or Barth has come along, someone who can embody both traditions so persuasively and definitively as to reconcile them and generate a new synthetic tradition of evangelical theology. Is such a reconciliation possible? Where could such a figure come from? Who is sufficient for these things?

And how, then, shall we live? For we must, we cannot but, go on with living even as we theologize, and if our theology — in all its detail and in its grand sweep — has nothing really to do with our living (if, that is, such a thing is even possible) then it is a grand experiment in foolishness, in “wise words taught by mere human wisdom.” The controversy wells up again, and again, and again because all parties recognize that in it the form of our life before God is somehow at stake. There is a way (that is, The Way) and it must be walked in. I am tempted to conclude here on a note of despair for the insolubility of this problem, and yet I cannot despair entirely. For, low and gentle, yet firm, I hear again the voice of The Way, cutting through the noise of the controversies and of my own mind, speaking the simplest words of all, inviting, beckoning, pleading: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

For this reason I do not and cannot ultimately choose a “side” in these theological controversies. Rather, wherever I encounter them — on either side — I will tend to throw in my lot with those who seek to speak and live the words of The Way after Him. I will trust in His words — His Word — to me, because there is no deeper metaphysical or ontological substrate than this trust. That is why any of us have ended up in these controversies to begin with, after all: Before we ever wrestled with the concept of history, or the hermeneutics of Biblical narrative, or the concept of God, we heard the Voice of the Way and found ourselves irresistibly drawn towards Him, found ourselves convinced that He is the Truth and the Life, came to know Him as the pearl of great value to have which it is worth selling all. And that is where we will still be after the controversies cease, when we will see no longer as in a mirror dimly but face to face.