Chronological Humility

Emmanuel Carrère once believed wholeheartedly in the Resurrection. During his years of Christian conversion, it was not merely a theological proposition but the organizing principle of his life. Today he sees it differently. He describes it as a bereavement fantasy born among a few dozen grieving followers that somehow spread across continents, converted nearly a quarter of humanity, and remains a phenomenon that still “intrigues, fascinates, troubles, and moves” him.

Notice what he does not say. He does not dismiss believers as fools. He does not congratulate himself for escaping religion. Nor does he portray his conversion as an embarrassing lapse in judgment from which his enlightened self has thankfully recovered.

That restraint lies at the heart of The Kingdom.

Carrère explains that he wrote the book to prevent his present, nonreligious self from assuming moral or intellectual superiority over his former believing self. He is suspicious of certainty itself. Rather than explaining conversion and de-conversion with neat psychological formulas, he treats them as mysterious human “mutations” whose causes and meanings remain partly hidden. He refuses to simplify either transformation into triumph or pathology. As he puts it, “I’m writing this book to avoid coming down too firmly in my favor.”

The book is animated by what I would call Chronological Humility: the refusal to assume that the latest version of oneself is necessarily the wisest simply because it arrives later in time. Today’s certainty may become tomorrow’s embarrassment. The present self has no automatic claim to superior vision merely because it occupies the newest chapter of the autobiography.

In that sense, The Kingdom is not merely an investigation of early Christianity. It is Carrère’s ongoing apprenticeship in humility, perhaps one of the lingering gifts of his years as a Christian. Humility keeps the mind porous. It reminds us that growth often requires surrendering convictions we once defended with absolute confidence. Every fundamentalism, whether religious or secular, begins with the comforting illusion that the journey has ended and certainty has finally been achieved.

My maternal grandfather, Richard Meyers, understood that illusion better than he realized.

Born in 1915 and dying in 2001, he devoted much of his life to Marxism. In his younger years, his politics possessed the unmistakable rigidity of religious fundamentalism. Competing ideologies were not merely mistaken; they were inferior. Religion was a collection of fairy tales, and those who believed in it were captives of childish superstition.

When I converted to Christianity as a teenager, he was deeply troubled. Eventually he resigned himself to what he considered my intellectual captivity. He once told a fellow Marxist, with genuine sadness, “It’s too late for him.” He believed he could see Christianity’s claws buried deep inside my brain.

His loyalty to the movement was so uncompromising that even Stalin, despite overwhelming evidence of his atrocities, could not be criticized because doing so, he insisted, “hurt the movement.” The cause demanded silence where conscience demanded speech.

Time, however, has a way of softening even the hardest certainties.

Of all the changes my grandfather made, one remains especially dear to me.

In 1990, while waiting for a play to begin in Hollywood, we wandered the streets looking for a place to eat. Along the way we met a homeless Vietnam veteran who said he was hungry. I bought him a meal at a nearby burger restaurant.

My grandfather disapproved.

Feeding one homeless man, he argued, did nothing to solve the structural causes of poverty. Charity was sentimental. Systems, not sandwiches, changed history.

“I don’t care about solving the future right now,” I replied. “I care about relieving his hunger today.”

The conversation ended there.

Or so I thought.

Two years later, while we were eating together at an Italian restaurant in San Pedro, he unexpectedly returned to the incident.

“I was wrong,” he said quietly. “You did the right thing.”

It was a simple sentence. No fanfare. No dramatic confession. Just an elderly man acknowledging that his younger self had been mistaken.

That moment warmed my heart far more than if I had won the original argument. I wasn’t moved because he admitted defeat. I was moved because he had demonstrated the rarest of human virtues: the willingness to become a different person without pretending he had always been one.

I suspect that is precisely what Carrère hopes to preserve in himself through The Kingdom. The book is less an argument for or against Christianity than a safeguard against the arrogance of believing that the latest version of Emmanuel Carrère has finally escaped the mistakes of all the previous ones. It is an act of Chronological Humility—a refusal to declare victory over his former self because he knows that someday even his present convictions may become another chapter in the long story of a mind still learning how to change.