Cinemorphosis

Tag: bible

  • When Love Becomes Too Perfect

    When Love Becomes Too Perfect

    Carrère is captivated by Christianity’s vision of salvation, yet he recoils from its radical demands. The Gospel asks us to loosen our grip on the very things most people consider life’s greatest blessings. Marriage, children, wealth, reputation, and ambition all become secondary to membership in the family of Christ. Even love is transformed. Rather than reserving our deepest affections for spouses, children, and friends, Jesus appears to call us to a love that embraces every person without distinction.

    Here Carrère hesitates.

    Can love that is distributed equally still be called love?

    Or does it become so universal that it loses the very qualities that make it recognizably human?

    Perhaps love can become so perfect in theory that it dissolves in practice. I would call this Affection Dilution: the condition in which extending equal love to all people weakens the depth, intimacy, and preferential character that give love its meaning within families and close friendships. A love that refuses to distinguish between one’s child and a stranger risks becoming less an experience than an abstraction.

    Carrère contrasts this Christian vision with what he sees as the Jewish ideal of the good life. There, holiness is not achieved by retreating from the world but by inhabiting it faithfully. One marries. One raises children. One prospers through honest work. One celebrates weddings, feasts, and holy days. One delights in generosity, hospitality, longevity, and community. The covenant is lived not apart from earthly existence but within it. Family and flourishing are not distractions from God; they are among the ways God is honored.

    Christianity, by contrast, often appears suspicious of those very satisfactions. Earthly success fades. Family loyalties yield to discipleship. Wealth becomes a spiritual hazard. This world is not the destination but the waiting room for another kingdom.

    Carrère never fully resolves the tension between these two visions of the good life.

    My sense is that his temperament inclines him toward the Jewish embrace of earthly flourishing. He admires Christianity’s uncompromising moral vision, but he cannot surrender the conviction that family, friendship, beauty, and the ordinary joys of this world are not obstacles to a meaningful life. They are, in many ways, the very substance of it.

  • Hope for Those Who Betray Their Highest Convictions

    Hope for Those Who Betray Their Highest Convictions

    With fewer than one hundred pages remaining in The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère confesses that he has postponed writing about the apostle John. Of all the apostles, John is the one who unsettles him most.

    Luke is easy to love. He is congenial, eager to please, and recognizably human in his longing to belong. Paul can be abrasive, impulsive, and argumentative, yet he repeatedly exposes his own deepest flaws. His confessions make him accessible. We may not always like Paul, but we know him.

    John is another matter entirely.

    Carrère calls him “the most elusive, the most multifaceted.” He is the mysterious author behind the Fourth Gospel, the John who must be carefully distinguished from the many other Johns who populate the New Testament. This is John, the son of Zebedee.

    His story hardly begins with saintliness.

    Jesus nicknames him and his brother James Boanerges—”sons of thunder”—because both possess volcanic tempers. Luke recounts an episode in which John rebukes a man casting out demons in Jesus’ name simply because the man does not belong to their circle. His miracles, John believes, lack the proper credentials. Jesus immediately rebukes him: “Whoever is not against you is for you.”

    Later, after a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus, James and John ask permission to call down fire from heaven upon its inhabitants. Once again Jesus rejects their thirst for vengeance. Mark and Luke also portray the brothers as transparently ambitious, maneuvering for the highest positions beside Christ’s throne. Pride and wrath seem to flow through them as naturally as blood.

    Yet by the time we reach the Fourth Gospel, something astonishing has happened.

    John has become “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”

    As Jesus hangs dying upon the cross, it is John—not Peter, not James—whom he entrusts with the care of his mother.

    How does such a transformation occur?

    Carrère remains skeptical that the rough, impulsive fisherman could later have written the dazzling and feverish visions of Revelation. He imagines instead that decades of experience reshaped John into someone almost unrecognizable. The hotheaded youth slowly hardened into one of Christianity’s towering patriarchs.

    “The agitated youth has become a grand old man,” Carrère writes.

    Old age, however, did not soften his life.

    According to Tertullian, John survived torture and even a vat of boiling oil before eventually settling in Ephesus. Throughout those years he faithfully cared for Mary, the mother of Jesus.

    It is in Ephesus that Carrère notices the profound difference between Paul and John.

    Paul, despite his notorious moods, remained approachable. You could seek him out, argue with him, receive instruction from him, even challenge him. His authority emerged through conversation.

    John’s authority emerged through absence.

    Carrère imagines him as remote, solemn, and almost forbidding.

    “When you saw him,” he writes, “you bowed as if he were a supreme pontiff: intimidating, inaccessible, floating on a cloud of incense.”

    John rarely appeared in public. He and Mary lived almost entirely in seclusion. People spoke of them in lowered voices. Their home acquired the atmosphere of a sanctuary. Everything surrounding them seemed wrapped in silence, reverence, and mystery.

    John embodies what might be called Mystical Distance: the condition in which a person’s rarity, silence, and withdrawal from ordinary life increase rather than diminish his perceived authority, causing others to experience him less as a companion than as a sacred mystery.

    This aura leaves Carrère uneasy.

    John’s lofty remoteness creates distance rather than intimacy.

    Peter does exactly the opposite.

    Carrère feels instinctively at home with Peter because Peter is gloriously, painfully human. He boasts that he will never abandon Jesus. When the moment of testing arrives, he collapses almost immediately. Jesus predicts the betrayal in advance, yet Peter insists with magnificent confidence, “Never, Lord.”

    Then he denies him.

    Again.

    And again.

    Carrère recognizes himself in that pattern.

    Indeed, he recognizes all of us.

    We spend our lives making solemn promises to our highest ideals only to betray them when comfort, fear, vanity, or self-preservation begins whispering in our ears. Whether we call ourselves believers or skeptics, we reenact Peter’s failure thousands of times. Every day presents another opportunity to remain faithful, and every day we discover fresh ways to compromise.

    Oddly enough, this realization comforts Carrère.

    Christianity does not pretend that Peter’s failures never happened. It remembers every denial in painful detail. Yet it also refuses to let those betrayals become Peter’s final identity. The disciple who failed most publicly becomes the disciple entrusted with the Church.

    For Carrère, this reveals something extraordinary about Christianity.

    Its deepest appeal is not its miracles.

    Nor its theology.

    Nor even its promises of salvation.

    Its deepest appeal is its startling willingness to embrace people who repeatedly fail their own highest convictions.

    Carrère remains an agnostic.

    Yet this vision of grace continues to haunt him.

    He cannot entirely believe.

    But neither can he entirely leave.

    Perhaps that lingering attachment is itself evidence of what he calls Christianity’s “pure goodness”—a goodness powerful enough to bind even those who cannot confidently call themselves believers.

  • The Meteor That Changed the Mediterranean World

    The Meteor That Changed the Mediterranean World

    As Emmanuel Carrère traces the rise of Christianity in The Kingdom, he depicts Luke and Paul moving through the bustling cities of the Mediterranean world, where three rival visions of human flourishing collided. They were not merely preaching a new religion. They were entering a crowded marketplace of competing moral philosophies, each offering its own answer to the question of what makes life worth living.

    The Romans offered the first answer.

    For them, religion was tolerable only so long as it remained politically harmless. Excessive religious devotion bred fanaticism, divided loyalties, and threatened civic order. The ideal citizen obeyed the law, fulfilled his duties, and refrained from allowing theological convictions to disrupt the smooth functioning of the Empire.

    This was Imperial Pragmatism: the tendency to judge beliefs and behaviors primarily by whether they preserve political order, administrative efficiency, and imperial cohesion rather than by their theological or moral truth.

    The Roman attitude toward sexuality reflected the same practicality.

    Sex was no great moral drama. It belonged in the same category as food or wine: a pleasure to be enjoyed in moderation. As Carrère writes, “The pleasures of the flesh were no more problematic than those of the table: you had to control them, and to be no more a slave to your desire than to your appetite, that’s all.”

    The Jews, therefore, struck the Romans as unnecessarily severe.

    Their sexual prohibitions seemed joyless.

    Their exclusive devotion to one God appeared intolerant.

    Their refusal to worship other gods bordered on civic insolence.

    To Roman eyes, Jewish morality looked less like virtue than cultural eccentricity.

    The Jewish worldview, however, rested upon an entirely different foundation.

    Its highest aspiration was neither imperial order nor personal indulgence, but faithfulness to God expressed through ordinary human flourishing.

    Marriage was good.

    Children were a blessing.

    Prosperity was welcomed.

    Hospitality honored both neighbor and God.

    Carrère beautifully summarizes this vision: “Being happy meant growing and prospering, becoming rich enough to be generous, welcoming friends under your fig tree, growing old alongside your wife, and dying at a ripe old age without having lost a child.”

    Carrère admits that this is the ideal that speaks most deeply to him.

    It speaks to me as well.

    Unlike many later religious traditions that regarded worldly success with suspicion, Judaism sanctified ordinary life. It found holiness not by escaping the world but by inhabiting it faithfully.

    I call this Sacred Flourishing: the belief that material prosperity, family, longevity, and communal joy are proper expressions of a life lived faithfully under God’s covenant rather than distractions from spiritual life.

    Then Christianity arrived.

    It did not gently revise this vision.

    It detonated it.

    Its moral revolution crashed into the ancient world like a meteor.

    Love your enemies.

    Bless those who persecute you.

    The first shall be last.

    The poor are blessed.

    The meek inherit the earth.

    These teachings overturned assumptions that had governed civilizations for centuries.

    But loving one’s enemies was only the beginning.

    Jesus also dismantled the very architecture of Sacred Flourishing.

    He replaced it with something altogether stranger.

    Call it Sacred Withering.

    As Carrère observes, Jesus systematically inverted every conventional measure of success: “Love your enemies, take joy in being unhappy, prefer being small to being big, poor to rich, sick to healthy.”

    Nor did the reversals end there.

    Beware of family.

    Beware of wealth.

    Beware of reputation.

    Beware of self-esteem.

    Prefer solitude to applause.

    Humiliation to prestige.

    Loss to possession.

    Hold everything the world calls good with suspicion, and everything it calls weakness with reverence.

    This was not simply another ethical system.

    It was an assault upon common sense.

    That very impossibility became part of its persuasive force.

    If the teaching felt unnatural, perhaps it was because it originated somewhere beyond nature itself.

    Carrère believes Paul possessed precisely the temperament such a revolution required.

    Paul was a fanatic.

    He embraced Christianity not as one philosophy among many but as a total inversion of human values.

    Luke was different.

    Raised in “a province with gentle, patriarchal customs,” Luke seems to have retained a profound affection for the Jewish ideal of Sacred Flourishing—a stable household, abundant children, material security, and peaceful old age.

    Paul had little patience for such aspirations.

    Everything now belonged to the Kingdom.

    Whatever private reservations Luke may have entertained, he followed Paul anyway.

    By then, retreat had become almost impossible.

    He had crossed too many seas, shared too many dangers, and devoted too many years to the mission.

    He had entered what I call Narrative Captivity: the condition in which a person continues advancing a mission or worldview despite growing private doubts because abandoning it would require abandoning the story that now defines his identity.

    Carrère’s speculation is psychologically compelling.

    Yet another possibility remains.

    Perhaps Luke did not merely submit to Paul’s vision.

    Perhaps he gradually surrendered to it.

    Perhaps repeated companionship, shared suffering, and years spent watching Paul’s impossible faith reshape lives slowly transformed Luke’s own convictions until what had first seemed intolerable eventually became self-evident.

    If so, Luke’s story is not one of reluctant compliance but of conversion.

    He did not simply help write Paul’s revolutionary narrative.

    He became one of its true believers.

  • The Salvage Principle

    The Salvage Principle

    Emmanuel Carrère imagines a revealing contrast between Luke and Paul. Luke was intelligent, cultivated, and eager to please, but he lacked Paul’s ferocious intellect and, more importantly, Paul’s contempt for philosophical self-help. Carrère suspects Luke would have happily embraced the elegant wisdom of Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius. Paul, by contrast, would have regarded Seneca’s philosophy as little more than refined moral decoration—admirable perhaps, but powerless to accomplish the one thing that truly mattered: the transformation of the human soul.

    For Paul, Christianity alone possessed both the correct diagnosis and the only effective cure.

    Carrère himself is not so sure.

    Like Nietzsche, he finds himself drawn more naturally to Buddhism than to Christianity. Nietzsche admired Buddhism because it was, in his words, “colder, more truthful, more objective.” Carrère shares that attraction. Buddhism appeals to the modern temperament. It is psychologically subtle, emotionally restrained, and refreshingly free of theological thunderbolts.

    Yet he cannot entirely surrender to it.

    For all its serenity, Buddhism—like Stoicism—lacks what Carrère calls “something essential and tragic that’s at the heart of Christianity.”

    That missing element is Paul’s terrifying view of human nature.

    The Stoics and Buddhists begin with a hopeful assumption. Human suffering originates in ignorance. See reality clearly, discipline your desires, cultivate wisdom, and happiness will follow. The illness is intellectual. The cure is education.

    Carrère summarizes their confidence with admirable economy: “They think that human misfortunes stem from ignorance and that if you have the recipe for a happy life, well then, all you have to do is apply it.”

    Paul rejects that premise completely.

    His problem is not ignorance.

    His problem is himself.

    In one of the most psychologically penetrating passages ever written, he confesses:

    “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I hate.”

    The tragedy is not that Paul lacks the recipe.

    He already possesses it.

    The tragedy is that something within him refuses to follow it.

    His own will becomes an accomplice to his failure.

    His reason drafts magnificent plans while another, darker force quietly sabotages them.

    This is where Christianity parts company with Stoicism, Buddhism, and nearly every philosophy of self-improvement.

    The Stoic believes the soul can be retrained.

    The Buddhist believes desire can be disciplined.

    The self-help enthusiast believes the right habits, books, podcasts, and morning routines will eventually produce the better self.

    Paul is unconvinced.

    He advances what I call The Salvage Principle: the recognition that certain forms of moral or spiritual brokenness cannot be repaired through discipline, knowledge, or self-improvement because the self requiring repair is itself fundamentally damaged.

    Imagine three mechanics examining the same wrecked automobile.

    The Stoic opens the hood and reaches for his tools.

    The Buddhist recommends a different way of driving.

    Paul quietly shakes his head.

    The engine is destroyed.

    The frame is twisted.

    The damage runs all the way through.

    This car is not headed to the body shop.

    It is headed to the salvage yard.

    That, ultimately, is Paul’s scandalous claim.

    The deepest human problem is not informational but moral.

    It is not that we do not know the good.

    It is that we know it, admire it, and still betray it.

    Two thousand years later, that diagnosis remains unsettling precisely because it continues to describe us with uncomfortable accuracy.

  • Why the Rich Writer Walked Away

    Why the Rich Writer Walked Away

    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.

  • You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère revisits the three years in his thirties when he became an intensely devoted Christian. Looking back, he is both fascinated and bewildered by the man he once was. He cannot decide whether those years of fervent faith represented a genuine encounter with God or a desperate attempt to survive depression and a crippling creative drought. He wonders whether, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he underwent a kind of mutation—and whether his later deconversion into agnosticism is simply another mutation of the self.

    What is striking is that Carrère refuses to declare one mutant superior to the other.

    He does not write as the triumphant rationalist looking back with condescension upon his younger, credulous self. Nor does he portray his conversion as the last moment of authentic truth before an unfortunate fall into unbelief. He extends equal curiosity to both versions of himself, unable to say with confidence which one saw reality more clearly. The believer and the agnostic remain locked in an unresolved conversation.

    Carrère also discovers an unexpected kinship with Luke. Both are storytellers. Both understand that narratives do more than report events—they persuade, shape memory, create identity, and sometimes become civilization’s most enduring myths.

    For this reason, Carrère navigates the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters with impressive confidence. They invite historical investigation. They provoke questions of authorship, chronology, motive, and psychology. They reward the tools of criticism.

    Luke’s Gospel is different.

    When Carrère arrives there, his confidence evaporates.

    He becomes, in his own word, “speechless.”

    He wonders whether his silence arises because so much of Luke is imaginative, because it overflows with piety, because too many of its characters seem to exist without obvious historical models—or because approaching such a text without “fear and trembling” renders the entire exercise meaningless.

    That question reveals something profound.

    Analyzing Luke’s Gospel solely as an academic artifact begins to resemble explaining Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony through harmonic analysis while ignoring the experience of hearing it performed. The music may be dissected measure by measure, every modulation cataloged, every motif traced, yet none of that explains why generations have emerged from it transformed. It would be like arguing for Beethoven’s artistic greatness by comparing chord progressions with Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Such an argument would be absurd. The argument may be persuasive, but it somehow misses the thing that made the work worth discussing in the first place.

    Luke’s Gospel confronts Carrère with what I call Reverential Limits: the recognition that certain works of art, literature, and religion cannot be fully understood through detached analysis alone because they also demand awe, imagination, and existential participation.

    This realization is one of the reasons The Kingdom rises above the familiar memoir of conversion or deconversion. It refuses the tidy architecture of books entitled Why I Became an X or Why I Am No Longer an X. Those books usually know their destination before the first page is written. They exist to prosecute a case and deliver a verdict.

    Carrère’s novel has a more ambitious purpose.

    It preserves wonder.

    The farther he investigates Christianity, the less eager he becomes to reduce it to a slogan, a certainty, or a manifesto. He discovers that the deepest encounters with great religion resemble the deepest encounters with great art. They resist summary. They refuse domestication. They leave us, not with the smug satisfaction of having solved the mystery, but with the unsettling realization that the mystery has somehow enlarged us.

    Sometimes the highest form of understanding is not another argument.

    Sometimes it is speechlessness.

  • The Seduction of Narrative Tidiness

    The Seduction of Narrative Tidiness

    Emmanuel Carrère finds Hyam Maccoby’s The Mythmaker intellectually stimulating but ultimately unpersuasive. Maccoby argues that Christianity is little more than history rewritten by its victors. In his telling, Paul is not merely mistaken but fraudulent. He is not even authentically Jewish. He hijacks Judaism, invents a new religion, and legitimizes it by claiming direct revelations from the risen Jesus, thereby elevating himself above the apostles who actually knew Christ.

    Carrère cannot resist responding with dry irony. “Then, finally, after two thousand years of darkness, Professor Maccoby appeared.”

    The joke exposes what Carrère sees as the weakness of Maccoby’s thesis. In attempting to strip Christianity of its myths, Maccoby constructs a myth of his own. Carrère writes, “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.”

    This does not mean Carrère dismisses Maccoby outright. He readily acknowledges that portions of the New Testament contributed to centuries of Christian antisemitism. But he rejects Maccoby’s insistence that Jewish authorities bore no responsibility for Jesus’ persecution. The historical record, however fragmentary and contested, still points to genuine conflict between Jesus and segments of the Jewish religious leadership. Likewise, Maccoby’s portrait of Paul as little more than a calculating “goy informer” strikes Carrère as psychologically implausible. The Paul who emerges from his own letters is conflicted, tormented, contradictory, and profoundly self-aware—a figure possessing, as Carrère puts it, a distinctly Dostoyevskian complexity. Such a man cannot be reduced to a cardboard villain.

    Carrère’s disagreement with Maccoby reveals a broader truth about conspiracy theories and overly ambitious historical revisionism. They are almost always too tidy.

    Reality is untidy. Human beings harbor mixed motives. Historical events emerge from tangled webs of personality, accident, conviction, fear, and unintended consequences. Conspiracy theories sweep away that complexity in favor of elegant explanations populated by unmistakable heroes, obvious villains, and a single hidden key that unlocks everything. They offer certainty at a discount.

    The appeal is understandable. Complexity exhausts us. Ambiguity frustrates us. We long for stories that snap together with the satisfying precision of puzzle pieces. Yet the cleaner the explanation becomes, the more likely it is that reality has been shaved down to fit it. Tidiness often comes at the expense of truth.

    As Carrère wrestles with Christianity—a religion that has fascinated, converted, disillusioned, and continued to haunt him over decades—he refuses to surrender to what I call Narrative Tidiness: the impulse to compress complicated history into emotionally satisfying stories with unmistakable heroes, villains, and motives. He is willing to question Christian orthodoxy. He is equally willing to question the critics who promise to explain Christianity away with a single master theory.

    For Carrère, intellectual honesty requires resisting myths on both sides. The moment history becomes too neat, it has probably ceased to be history.

  • Chronological Humility

    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.

  • The Gospel According to Common Sense

    The Gospel According to Common Sense

    I have feared eternity for as long as I can remember. My life has felt less like a spiritual journey than a protracted campaign in a war for my own soul. Much of that campaign has been chronicled in my collection of essays, The Theology of Biceps, where barbells, vanity, faith, mortality, and salvation wrestle each other beneath fluorescent gym lights. Lately the battle has intensified. I am approaching sixty-five, that age when abstractions begin presenting themselves as appointments rather than ideas, and I have reread, for the fifth time, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, his brilliant, maddening meditation on Christianity. Between Carrère’s relentless fascination with the Apostle Paul and my own inability to leave theological questions alone, I have spent months drowning in what I call Theological Vertigo: that state in which every answer generates three new questions until the mind becomes exhausted by its own seriousness.

    Our family vacation to Carlsbad interrupted the cycle. I read less. I wrote less. For the first time in months, my mind had room to breathe.

    One morning we ate breakfast at the French Corner. I ordered a savory crepe and drank coffee softened with milk, cinnamon, and honey. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most satisfying meals of my life. I left the table neither hungry nor bloated but suspended in that miraculous middle ground where appetite and satisfaction shake hands. For several fleeting minutes I experienced something approaching perfection. The meal did not merely fill my stomach; it seemed to quiet some hidden chamber of the soul that usually refuses to stop talking.

    Then we wandered into downtown Carlsbad. My family disappeared into a used record store while I remained outside. I have never liked the smell of old books or aging paper. To many people it evokes nostalgia. To me it smells like mildew wearing a tweed jacket.

    As I waited, I found myself contemplating the familiar inventory of deficiencies: the thirty extra pounds I continue to carry, my inconsistent discipline, and my growing realization that I need more daily companionship than I once admitted.

    Then I noticed two men walking toward me.

    They appeared to be in their early seventies. Both wore safari hats, T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. Their phones rested casually in their back pockets rather than monopolizing their attention. Their conversation flowed with the easy rhythm of men who had probably taken the same walk together hundreds of times. They laughed. They listened. Neither seemed in a hurry to dominate the conversation or perform for an invisible audience. Their calves were sculpted from years of walking rather than months of gym heroics. They looked younger than many men twenty years their junior because their bodies had quietly become advertisements for moderation.

    I envied them immediately.

    Not simply because they were lean, although I certainly noticed that. I envied the life their bodies implied. These were men who had discovered that exercise and friendship need not compete for time. They had fused physical fitness with social fitness into a single daily ritual.

    I doubted they spent evenings rereading Emmanuel Carrère or wondering whether Paul was history’s greatest religious genius or its most successful narcissist. I doubted they classified themselves as “religious,” “spiritual,” “agnostic,” or “secular.” They probably possessed something rarer than an ideology.

    They possessed common sense.

    You take care of your body.

    You walk every day.

    You eat reasonably.

    You cultivate friendships.

    You show up.

    You repeat the process tomorrow.

    None of these habits requires a bestselling self-help book or a sophisticated theology. They emerge from the accumulated evidence of ordinary life. They are conclusions reached not by speculation but by observation.

    Standing outside that record store, I began to wonder whether I had spent years practicing Existential Overfishing—casting my line ever deeper into the waters of ultimate meaning until I had forgotten the fish swimming near the surface. Had I mistaken depth for wisdom? Had I become so absorbed in metaphysical puzzles that I had overlooked the plain truths available to anyone willing to pay attention?

    Questions flooded in.

    Is common sense enough?

    Is common sense superior to profound religious contemplation?

    Have I submerged myself beneath a sea of fascinating but largely irrelevant abstractions?

    Have I mistaken intellectual complexity for spiritual maturity?

    Have I, after all these years, simply lost the plot?

    Perhaps the life of the Common Sensalist is the wiser path.

    A Common Sensalist believes that flourishing depends less upon elaborate theological systems or fashionable self-improvement programs than upon the quiet authority of ordinary experience: daily exercise, enduring friendships, moderation, meaningful work, simple pleasures, and habits repeated until they become character. Such a philosophy does not reject transcendence. It merely insists that the road toward it may begin with putting on walking shoes instead of opening another theological treatise.

    As I stood there waiting for my family to emerge from the record store, I felt strangely melancholy. I had spent decades wrestling angels while two elderly men had apparently settled for walking with friends.

    I still wasn’t sure who had chosen the better path.

    But I knew exactly where I wanted to eat breakfast the next morning.

  • The Inversion Gospel

    The Inversion Gospel

    Largely because of Paul, Christianity leaves no room for self-help.

    There is no Stoic program of disciplined self-mastery. No Epicurean search for tranquil pleasure. No rationalist confidence that reason can perfect the soul. No wisdom tradition promising that enough insight, meditation, or self-examination will unlock your hidden potential. Paul sweeps every human technology of self-improvement into a single heap and sets it ablaze.

    Discipline.

    Reason.

    Philosophy.

    Human flourishing.

    All of it belongs, in Paul’s estimation, on the rubbish pile.

    There is no meditation to anchor you in your inner self. No koan to awaken your latent divinity. No carefully engineered life-hack to elevate your consciousness. Instead, Paul reaches back to Isaiah and delivers a stunning declaration of war against human wisdom itself: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the intelligence of the intelligent I will reject.”

    Yet Paul does not stop at dismantling humanity’s ladders to self-perfection.

    He demands something even more astonishing.

    You must embrace what the world calls foolishness.

    The crucified Messiah is not merely an inconvenient truth. He is a scandal to the Jews and utter absurdity to the Greeks. The path to salvation does not ascend through brilliance, eloquence, status, or virtue. It descends into humiliation, weakness, dependence, and apparent defeat. Those whom society considers lowly and contemptible are nearest the Kingdom, while the celebrated, accomplished, and admired stand in greatest danger.

    Paul thus proclaims what might be called the Anti-Flourishing Doctrine: the startling Christian paradox that human excellence, self-improvement, wisdom, and personal achievement can become obstacles rather than pathways to salvation. The more impressive you become in your own eyes, the less likely you are to recognize your need for grace.

    Emmanuel Carrère, however, wonders whether theology is the whole story.

    He suspects Paul was also engaged in a struggle for authority.

    Hovering in the background is the gifted preacher Apollos, renowned for his eloquence and learning. Paul never launches a direct attack on him. Instead, he accomplishes something far more ingenious. By portraying eloquence, rhetorical brilliance, and worldly wisdom as spiritually suspect, while elevating weakness, humility, and apparent foolishness, Paul quietly transforms his greatest rival into an example of precisely what Christians ought to distrust.

    It is a rhetorical masterstroke.

    Without naming Apollos, Paul changes the rules of the contest.

    The polished speaker suddenly appears spiritually compromised. The awkward, unimpressive apostle becomes the authentic messenger of God. Those standing high are brought low; those lying in the dust are lifted up.

    Carrère is astonished by the originality of this move. Whether Paul’s motives were entirely pure is almost beside the point. He had written something the ancient world had never encountered. Like Jesus himself—whom Carrère describes as a hapax legomenon, a phenomenon without precedent—Paul seemed to create an intellectual and spiritual category all his own.

    He proclaimed what might be called the Inversion Gospel: the revolutionary conviction that every conventional measure of greatness—wisdom, eloquence, status, strength, success, even virtue—is overturned by the logic of the Cross, where weakness becomes power, defeat becomes victory, and what appears to be foolishness becomes the deepest truth of all.