Category: fiction

Emmanuel Carrère may call himself an agnostic, but The Kingdom leaves little doubt that he believes Christianity possesses a terrifying kind of power. The tragedy, he suggests, is that many of us fail to experience that power not because Christianity is intellectually implausible, but because its demands are more than we are willing to bear.

Like Carrère, we have become deeply attached to a particular way of life.

We cultivate an identity that is worldly, ironic, sophisticated, and clever. We delight in demonstrating impeccable taste—not merely through the books we read but through the books we are seen reading. We proudly own the latest gadgets, make exquisitely informed purchases, and quietly enjoy belonging to that invisible fraternity of people who seem always to know what is worth buying, watching, and thinking. We mistake refinement for wisdom and discernment for virtue. We become connoisseurs of status disguised as connoisseurs of culture.

Jesus threatens that entire arrangement.

He insists that what we call power is often a counterfeit. Real power lies not in accumulating influence, wealth, admiration, or control but in relinquishing them. His invitation is not merely to improve our lives but to surrender them.

That is the problem.

Even if we admire Christ’s vision of humility and sacrificial love, we remain enchanted by the life we have painstakingly constructed. We love our comforts. We love our reputations. We love the illusion that we are directing our own destinies. We hesitate before following a God who has an unsettling habit of leading people into uncertainty, humiliation, danger, and, in the cases of Peter, Paul, and James, martyrdom.

Carrère recognizes this reluctance within himself.

With remarkable honesty, he contemplates his privileged life with melancholy, guilt, and unease. He is an acclaimed novelist. He travels the world. He vacations in beautiful places. He inhabits an aesthetic world polished by wealth, education, and artistic success.

His confession is devastating: “I live in perpetual worship of and worry about my person, but also that I strongly believe in this person. I know nothing other than my own ego, and I believe that this ego exists.”

Though agnostic about God, he is utterly certain of his ego.

That certainty, he fears, is precisely the problem.

The ego always asks the same question:

What do I want?

The Gospel asks a different one:

What is right?

The two questions frequently point in opposite directions.

I know this conflict all too well.

When I think about factory farming, I arrive at a conclusion I find difficult to escape. Morally speaking, I believe reducing or eliminating my participation in that system would be the more defensible course. The suffering involved troubles my conscience.

Yet my behavior tells another story.

I enjoy carne asada tacos. Family celebrations revolve around meat-centered meals. Refusing them would complicate relationships, invite awkward explanations, and separate me from customs that bind me to the people I love. Even if I located a sympathetic vegan community, meeting once a month to encourage one another would hardly replace the ordinary rhythms of family life.

So I continue with my non-vegan ways.

There exists a painful gap between my moral convictions and my daily habits.

That gap exposes what I call Lifestyle Captivity: the condition in which a person’s comforts, status, pleasures, and social identity become so psychologically indispensable that they prevent wholehearted commitment to moral convictions or spiritual transformation.

My attachment to pleasure proves stronger than my attachment to principle.

That is not strength.

It is weakness.

Jesus’ warning about the rich man and the eye of the needle has always sounded exaggerated—until one realizes that wealth is not merely money. Wealth includes every possession, pleasure, habit, reputation, and identity we cannot imagine surrendering.

This is the passage in The Kingdom that haunts Carrère most deeply.

It haunts me as well.

Reflecting on the story of the rich young ruler, Carrère writes with heartbreaking simplicity:

“I identify with the rich young man. I have great wealth.”

His wealth extends beyond money. It includes literary acclaim, artistic fulfillment, intellectual prestige, and the profound satisfaction of having discovered his vocation as a writer. He recognizes himself in an apocryphal saying attributed to Jesus: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Writing has become the means by which Carrère brings forth what is within him. It has given his life coherence, purpose, and joy.

Yet even this gift becomes suspect.

Whenever he takes satisfaction in his success, another voice interrupts.

He writes:

Nevertheless, a stubborn little voice persistently interrupts these moments of pharisaical smugness. It says that all the riches I enjoy—the wisdom I pride myself on, the confident hope I have of being on the right track—are what prevent real accomplishment. I never stop winning, although to really win I’d have to lose. I’m rich, gifted, praised, deserving, and conscious that I deserve: for all of that, woe to me!

No amount of psychoanalysis, meditation, or self-acceptance silences that voice.

Modern therapeutic culture encourages him to celebrate himself.

The Gospel asks him to lose himself.

Those are not the same project.

In one of the most moving passages in the book, Carrère finally admits: “Nevertheless, I think that the little voice of the Gospel is right. And like the rich young man, I walk away, sad and pensive, for I have great wealth.”

He may call himself an agnostic.

Yet somewhere beneath the skepticism, beneath the irony, beneath the literary sophistication and psychological nuance, an unmistakably Christian longing remains alive.

He longs to renounce the worldly attachments that have made him successful. He longs to exchange self-possession for surrender. He longs to discover whether lowering himself might, paradoxically, become the only path upward.

Perhaps that is why The Kingdom refuses to become either an apology for Christianity or an argument against it.

It is the confession of a man who cannot silence the Gospel’s little voice.

Neither, I suspect, can I.

Damascus is the mother of all superhero origin stories. Before Peter Parker is bitten by a spider or Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, there is Saul of Tarsus riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart. He is not searching for truth. He believes he already possesses it. He is intent on hunting down followers of “The Way” and dragging them to their deaths. His path is one of certainty, violence, and righteous darkness.

Then, against every instinct and every intention, his story is hijacked.

A blinding light crashes into his world. The risen Christ—the very Savior whose followers Saul has dedicated himself to destroying—confronts him directly. “Why do you keep goading the ox?” the voice asks. Then comes the devastating revelation: “I am your Lord.”

The encounter leaves Saul shattered. Blind. Disoriented. Helpless. For three days he sits in darkness while a far greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The architecture of his soul has cracked beyond repair.

Then a stranger arrives.

The man claims to have been sent by the Lord. More unsettling still, he addresses him not as the man Saul understands himself to be but as the man history will remember: Paul.

The new identity feels like an insult.

Saul wants nothing to do with this strange future. He wants his old certainties, his old mission, his old enemies. Like nearly every great hero, he is reluctant. He does not answer a call to adventure with enthusiasm but with resistance. He loves the familiar darkness more than the terrifying demands of the light.

But the light proves stronger than his will.

He can no longer goad the ox. He can no longer wage war against the truth that has invaded him. At last he surrenders, becoming Paul the evangelist, whose letters would shape Western civilization more profoundly than those of any emperor, philosopher, or statesman.

Paul’s conversion reminds me of one of the strangest moments in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After exhausting himself trying to remove Bartleby from his office, the narrator presses money into Bartleby’s hand in hopes that he will finally leave. Bartleby lets the money fall to the floor. Then the narrator confesses:

“But it dropped to the floor, and then strange to say, I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.”

It is one of literature’s finest descriptions of divided desire.

Like Paul, Melville’s narrator longs for change while simultaneously resisting it. He wants liberation, but only on terms that preserve the person he already is. He discovers that the obstacle standing in his way is not Bartleby but himself.

Perhaps this is the hidden struggle behind every genuine transformation.

Each of us carries within us a pillar of salt—a hardened identity built from habit, fear, pride, resentment, and old certainties. We mistake this calcified self for our true self because it has been with us for so long. Yet the longer we cling to it, the heavier it becomes. Eventually it drags us beneath the surface, where it is no longer an anchor but a tomb.

Most of us never let go.

The pillar of salt sinks us.

But for the rare few who are not merely called but chosen, another possibility emerges. Their lives reveal what novelist Emmanuel Carrère sees at the heart of Paul’s Damascus encounter. Reflecting on Paul’s conversion, Carrère writes:

“Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

It is one of the deepest paradoxes of the spiritual life.

We usually imagine authenticity as self-expression, the freedom to become more completely the person we already believe ourselves to be. Damascus turns that comforting assumption upside down. It suggests that our deepest self may be buried beneath the very identity we defend most fiercely. Before we can become who we truly are, we must relinquish the person we cannot imagine living without.

Paul’s conversion thus reveals what might be called the Authenticity Paradox: the condition in which becoming one’s truest self first requires ceasing to be the person one believes oneself to be. Authenticity is not achieved by polishing the old self until it shines. It is achieved by surrendering the old self altogether, trusting that what feels like annihilation is, in fact, the beginning of a more truthful life.

The best-selling author Emmanuel Carrère is obsessed with what might be called narrative authority. He refuses to write in the third person. In fact, he claims he is incapable of it. He is drawn, as both writer and reader, to the intimate gravity of I. A first-person narrator does not merely present ideas; he presents the life that forged those ideas. Carrère follows such voices more willingly because they answer the question every audience silently asks before deciding whether to believe someone: Where are you coming from?

That preference draws him to the Gospel writer Luke. What captivates Carrère is not that Luke throws open the gates of the New Testament with fanfare. Rather, Luke slips inside “through a small, hidden side door.” Through Luke’s quiet, observant voice, the New Testament becomes not a monument demanding reverence but a human story inviting investigation.

Luke’s subject is Paul—the man who, more than any emperor, philosopher, or conqueror, shaped the moral and intellectual landscape of the West. Whether one reveres him or resents him is almost beside the point. In the marketplace of ideas, Paul won. His letters became the architecture upon which two millennia of Western Christianity would be built.

Unlike the Gospels, Paul’s epistles expose an astonishing amount of their author’s interior life. Their pages read less like polished theological treatises than like relentless self-interrogations. The most influential missionary in history repeatedly drags his own soul into the light, subjects it to examination, and then offers the resulting X-ray to the world in the hope that others might recognize themselves within it.

Paul’s physical appearance only heightens the paradox. Unlike Jesus, whose appearance remains a mystery, Paul emerges from early tradition with surprising clarity. He is short, stooped from chronic pain, prematurely bald, heavily bearded, and distinctly unimpressive. Carrère notes that painters often portray him with “a bulging forehead and eyebrows meeting above the nose,” giving him less the appearance of a saint than that of an exhausted scholar worn down by relentless suffering.

His personality proves no less complicated. One moment he is magnanimous and disarmingly humble. The next he is blisteringly sarcastic, combative, or consumed by righteous indignation. At times he advances startlingly egalitarian ideas about spiritual equality; elsewhere he appears censorious toward women and eager to silence them. He can be generous, insecure, tender, arrogant, self-effacing, and overbearing—sometimes within the span of a single letter. If sanctity requires flawless likability, Paul fails spectacularly.

Luke, by contrast, remains almost invisible. We are told nothing of his appearance. He leaves behind no psychological self-portrait. Yet Carrère finds him irresistible precisely because of this restraint. Luke was an educated physician steeped in Greek philosophy, a man who seems less interested in religious ecstasy than in understanding the human condition.

Carrère imagines Luke arriving at the synagogue not as a pilgrim seeking salvation but as an intellectual searching for wisdom. He was fascinated by what Carrère calls “the long domestic quarrel between Israel and the God of Israel,” seeing in that struggle a metaphor for humanity itself: creatures perpetually sabotaging their own flourishing through laziness, vanity, impulsiveness, and moral confusion. Perhaps, Luke wondered, people trapped in this cycle could be redirected toward a life of discipline, aspiration, and virtue.

For Luke, religion initially resembled philosophy more than faith. Carrère writes, “For Luke, going to the synagogue was less like embracing a religion than attending a philosophy class—just as when we practice yoga or meditation we become interested in Buddhist texts without feeling obliged to believe in Tibetan divinities or turn a prayer wheel.”

Then Paul stood up to speak.

At first, nothing sounded remarkable. Another preacher announcing another Messiah hardly deserved attention. Messianic claimants appeared with enough frequency to become almost routine.

Then Luke noticed something extraordinary.

Paul was not proclaiming that the Messiah would come.

He insisted the Messiah had already come.

Carrère imagines Paul declaring to the synagogue:

“Jesus was the Christ. The inhabitants of Jerusalem and their leaders failed to recognize him, and by condemning him they fulfilled the prophets they claimed to honor. They mocked him. They condemned him without cause. They crucified him. But three days later God raised him from the dead.”

The effect was electric.

Every sermon seemed to split the audience into two irreconcilable camps. Some dismissed Paul as delusional or blasphemous. Others embraced his message with overwhelming enthusiasm, convinced they had witnessed history’s decisive turning point.

Luke belonged to neither camp—not at first.

Carrère imagines him lingering in the uncomfortable territory between skepticism and fascination. Paul’s claims offended his reason, yet they refused to leave his mind. Curiosity led to another conversation, then another journey, then another question, until skepticism slowly dissolved into conviction.

Carrère imagines the physician tending to Paul’s battered body after beatings and imprisonments, dressing wounds while their conversations stretched late into the evening like long discussions in a quiet café. Paul became less a patient than a mentor. Luke listened. Questioned. Objected. Returned the next day. Gradually he found himself inhabiting Paul’s vision of reality.

Whether any of these conversations occurred exactly as Carrère imagines is almost irrelevant. They reveal something equally important about Carrère himself.

The Kingdom is as much an autobiography as it is historical reconstruction. Beneath its investigation of Luke and Paul lies Carrère’s own confession. He envies Luke. What writer would not? Luke enjoyed what every biographer dreams of: direct access to one of history’s most consequential figures. He could watch Paul think, question him face to face, observe his contradictions, and transform those encounters into a narrative that would outlive empires.

Carrère recognizes another truth hidden inside Luke’s achievement.

Persuasion makes us significant.

Ideas alone rarely persuade. Before listeners evaluate our conclusions, they instinctively ask: Where are you coming from?

Every opinion emerges from somewhere—from childhood wounds, intellectual struggles, humiliations, triumphs, conversions, failures, and the slow accumulation of experience. Without that story, convictions float weightlessly above the speaker, untethered from any recognizable human life.

Paul understood this instinctively. He never merely announced doctrines. He told the story that produced them. He confessed his former persecution of Christians. He described his blindness on the road to Damascus. He recounted his imprisonments, failures, doubts, physical suffering, and relentless calling. His theology carried weight because it had been earned. Every argument arrived attached to a life.

He hid nothing.

He laid every card on the table.

That, Carrère concludes, is the essence of Narrative Authority: the persuasive force that emerges when ideas grow organically from a coherent life story rather than appearing as detached abstractions. We trust those whose beliefs seem purchased through experience instead of assembled from borrowed opinions. Long before we judge what they believe, we judge whether they have honestly shown us the life that made belief inevitable.