Philosophy, Grace, and the Art of Excellence
Touching the Center of the World
I sat under the shade of a fully grown olive tree. Jordan Peterson sat directly in front of me. He wore shorts, an item of clothing few get to see him in. His brow was stern, his legs and arms crossed. He looked directly into my eyes. Just a few feet to my right was a rail guarding the twenty foot drop to the road. A hundred more yards from the road, the Aegean Sea stretched out like a transparent blanket on a bed of sprawling sand. The sea gently rose and fell. It glistened as if a million tiny crystals were floating on the surface, sparkling under the bright high noon sun.
My view from the patio overlooking the Aegean Sea, Samos, Greece, August 2022
My mind danced with the myriad images of sacred places I had already seen, ancient words I had heard, mountains I had scaled and mysteries upon which I had marveled. Sitting before one of the world’s most prominent — and controversial — intellectuals meant little to me in the moment. Here, now, under the shade of this Greek tree, Dr. Peterson and I were equalized by the sheer magnificence of what surrounded us. And that is how he spoke to me. Man to man, speaking not for his own amusement, but genuinely curious in what I had to say.
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“And what’s been the best part of this trip for you?” he asked me in that by now globally recognized voice that, unlike most voices, seemed to find its point of final departure not at his lips but at the back of his throat. His brow furrowed even more as he looked at me, awaiting a response.
I thought quietly to myself, comfortable to remain silent in the midst of a man who treasured and championed so passionately the spoken word. Two weeks before this interaction I had stood for nearly ten minutes silently gazing upward at the last standing column of the Temple of Hera. While the rest of the crew I was with jaunted around the swampland observing the fallen stones and chatting about topics innumerable, I gravitated, almost against my will, to the gigantic oblong structure somehow still standing in the low, marshy basin. The last remaining column of the 2500 hundred year-old temple rose prominently fifty feet into the air. I had never seen anything like it. For miles, the site of this single column drew eyes toward it, creating an orbit of observation.
Temple of Hera, Samos, Greece
I was awed by the sheer height of it. But I also felt a spiritual swelling of surrender, an overwhelming sense of my own insignificance washing over me. This now solitary column had stood silently for two and a half millennia. It was standing, surrounded by over a hundred other columns, when Caesar Augustus rose to the throne in Rome. It was standing when Jesus was born in a small barn a thousand miles to the southeast. The Roman Empire in the west rose and fell, but still this pillar stood. The Age of Enlightenment, revolutions, and modern nation states conceived, all old history to us now, happened thousands of years after this column was first made to stand on the coast of this small Greek island of Samos.
And now this single, solitary column remained. A reminder of the destructive ruthlessness of time and the graceful resilience of objects subjected to it. Chance, providence, fortune, randomness, luck — all of these words took turns dancing across my mesmerized mind as I stared upward to the peak of the pillar. This experience elicited no words. Only wonder. Only silent admiration and awe at the breathtaking heraldry of history.
But it was not this encounter at the Temple of Hera that I thought to share with Dr. Peterson. Something else had happened just days prior to this meeting on the patio overlooking the Aegean Sea that left an even deeper impression on me.
We were living for this month on the island of Samos, which is the farthest island east of Greece. From the east side of the island, you can see Turkey, their notorious red flag flying proudly in the wind on the mountainous coast across the sea. Samos is most known for being the ancient home of Pythagoras, one of the first ancient philosophers, whose ideas continue to influence the modern world. He was said to occupy a cave deep in the Samoan mountains, now accessible by extremely steep stairs carved out of the rocky hill. I would hike to this cave a short time after this meeting. But at this point, my Pythagorean adventure, which would be compromised by my rapidly swelling index finger that had been stung by a bee, had not yet commenced.
Amazing is the amount of early human activity that flooded this small cluster of islands in the eastern Mediterranean in the ancient world. One such human found his final home on a tiny mass of land just 100 kilometers south of Samos, on the island of Patmos. This man, John the Apostle, was someone with whom I already shared a deep, formative bond stretching back over a decade, when I first read his Gospel while lying comfortably on my living room sofa. What I read on that day as a teenager changed the entire trajectory of my life. I owe nearly everything I have pursued since then, both professionally and personally, to my first reading of that ancient Christian gospel. What it was that so dramatically impacted me on that day over a decade ago was not in fact the first and most famous words of that Gospel, which would later take on a new and powerful meaning for me. It was the words Jesus spoke to Martha at the death of her brother and Jesus’s friend, Lazarus. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
That question became the catalyst for my constant pursuit into the deeper mysteries of life, as I began to pore over ancient books of religion and philosophy, resolving to subject myself to discipline and discovery of the ideal ethical life. The footprint of that Gospel is found all over my twenties, as I bounded from one professional and academic pursuit to another, perforating my varying experiences with the words of Jesus that suggest the physical boundaries of life and death are only a small part of the human story.
The same John who recorded those words died, exiled and alone, on the island of Patmos. Tradition holds that this same John who had walked and talked with Jesus received a vision from God, which he wrote down and which became what we now call Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. John lived atop a small hill on the island of Patmos, in a shallow cave, which was later fortified to become a church and place of worship.
Having arrived at Patmos from an early morning ferry, I ascended the paved road and stood before the door of the church. Above the door were inscribed in Ancient Greek the words which have so shaped the theology of Christianity through the ages: “In the beginning was the Logos.” The left wall of the interior of the church was built to create an enclosure where the opening of the cave of the Apostle John was. The opening faced west, so the light of the setting sun would have shed its light directly into the cave. The right wall of the church was a simple rock face, arching overhead until it met the constructed stone wall above. I stood in this makeshift church, sharing the ground upon which this man John, so loved by Jesus, would have eaten, slept, and lived out his final days. Like the column of Hera, this tiny space was a portal to the past, a splice of eternity, where time’s tyrannical power was made somehow obsolete.
The entrance to the Cave of the Apocalypse, Island of Patmos, Greece
Along the right rock wall there is a small divot about five inches deep and slightly wider than the size of a balled fist. Early Christian tradition believed John used this divot to bend to his knees to pray. It is likely here, upon his knees on the cold, rocky ground that the western sky split to reveal the vision that would become the Revelation of the Apostle John.
Most of the chatter and conversation that occurred on our hike up the hill was silenced now, as the surrounding walls announced the sacredness of the space. I slid my hand gently into the small divot. It was cold and smooth. I knelt onto one knee before the small altar that had been placed before the rock face in front of me.
“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Logos of life…” These are John’s words in a letter to one of the ancient Christian communities. I now, with my hand in that rocky crevice, touched upon the same rockface that John would have countless times used to lift and lower himself. The same hand that touched Jesus countless times in preceding years, gripped and grabbed this rock.
I closed my eyes, my hand still resting within the smooth cleft. I felt for a moment that I touched the center of the world. Time had no authority or presence here. Here I knelt, in the same position, on the same stony ground, with my hand resting within the same rocky indention, as the man who had written the sentence that would marry the two great ancient civilizations that would become the western world. When John wrote, “And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us,” he created an unbreakable bond that would birth the messy, but wonderful world of the next two millennia. A world we have inherited. A bond made up of two ideas, two cultures, superficially opposed, but divinely united.
Reason and revelation. The Greeks and the Hebrews. The originators of philosophy and the called-out people of God. The former who stated that man can achieve self-mastery by his use of reason, and the latter who stated that man is forever inclined to fall short of perfect self-mastery. That only by the grace of God can man ever hope to rise above his circumstances. The union of these became the fertile ground through which the revelation of Christianity was given to the world. In a word, they reached their shared apotheosis in Christ, the Logos made flesh.
Several weeks later, as I sat with twenty other people in a room in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, I asked the Bishop who served immediately under the Archbishop, Bartholomew I, a question that had been living rent-free in my mind for months. “What is the relation of the Greeks to the Gospel?” I asked.
After having discovered the rich, and all-too-often forgotten, ideas of the Ancient Greek philosophers, I found myself wondering how the Christian revelation could be harmonized with Greek philosophy. Through discipline and spiritual exercises, Socrates and others say, man can rein in his bad appetites, his sin, and subject them under the power of his reason. Aristotle is even clearer in his optimism about human beings. Man is meant to flourish. He flourishes by participating in the life of God through exercise of his reason, as he eliminates vice and practices virtue.
These men are often methodical and compelling about how man, through discipline and habit, can rid himself of bad habits and harmful appetites and enjoy a life free from the tyranny of sin. The greatest asset man has is his reason, the part of him he shares with the gods. If he can learn to use his reason effectively, then he can learn to live by his reason rather than being enslaved to his unruly passions. The word that the Greeks, from the earliest philosopher like Heraclitus onward, use for reason is logos. The word is rich with connotations, a kind of catch all that is used to explain the part of the world that gives it meaning, language, and logic. It is sometimes said to be a gift from the gods, the part of their life to which human beings have access. Through the exercise of the logos, man can ultimately defeat the parts of him that make him act against what he knows he ought to do.
The Hebrew Bible, capturing the winding history of the wandering Hebrew people, tells a different story. No matter how much man tries to correct his evil ways, he will always fall subject to them. Man is incapable of achieving mastery over himself and his bad habits. His logos is not enough to save him from his own destructive habits. So God reaches into the world and reveals his divine law to the people. Their reason alone is not enough to save them; following God’s divine law is.
In full transparency, the message I discern in the Greeks is much more appealing at first glance than what I read in the Hebrew Bible. We have all we need in this world to live a life of flourishing. We have the right tools and resources at our disposal to rid ourselves of the disease that infects our lives. Our reason alone is enough. Aristotle, for example, sincerely believes that man can achieve perfection while on earth. Some later Greeks were certain Socrates had achieved this perfection. Because man has access to the life of the gods through his reason, which he shares with them, he can remove himself from his own detrimental cycle and welcome himself into the virtuous life of the gods who transcend him.
The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David
But when I leave the world of books and return to my everyday life, I am immediately reminded how weak I really am. The love of wisdom does not guarantee that I will ever fully acquire wisdom. The life of philosophy is a constant pursuit without a final destination. To think it is possible to reach a state of perfection by controlling my passion and my inclination to misstep is foolish. I need only live for a few hours to experience firsthand the foolishness of such optimism. Even with severe discipline and habit, I fail to fulfill even the standard I set for myself.
Thank God for grace.
This is, at bottom, what the revelation to the Hebrew people is all about. And it is what the revelation of Jesus Christ embodies and fulfills. Even the greatest efforts at perfection will end with fists full of dirt on the ground. But grace reaches into the depths of man’s heartache and failure and futility and says, “You fall because the heights of your destiny lie infinitely beyond this world. Your horizon is far beyond what you could ever imagine. Nevertheless, stand up and strive again for perfection. When you fall, and you inevitably will, grace will make up the difference.”
After I asked the Bishop this question, he cocked his head a bit to the side, unamused. “What do you mean?” he asked. I thought my question was clear enough. But I asked it again in a way he might understand. “What is the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem?”
He knew now what I was asking. Without pathos in his voice or face, he said, “The Greeks gave us the language through which the depths of the Gospel were communicated. Jesus was the Logos the Greeks so admired.” I was floored by the simple clarity and forthrightness of his answer. It supplemented the insight I received at Patmos with compelling authority.
The message of the Gospel breaks into the Hellenistic world announcing that philosophy is complete in Jesus Christ. Man’s destiny is far greater than the Greeks ever conceived. Left to his own resources man can only get himself so far. Even if he were to achieve perfection through the use of his reason — an idea that remains hypothetically possible — he would arrive only at the earthly paradise, far from the palace of God and the riches of glory God has planned for man beyond the boundaries of this world.
The Greeks gave us philosophy. The Hebrews, culminating in the revelation of Jesus Christ, revealed the true end of that philosophy. As Augustine would later say, you can believe the Christian message without the Greeks, but it will be greatly emaciated and undervalued. Augustine knew the Gospel is discovered most powerfully in the life of philosophy, the straining toward human perfection. Even Jesus is clear about how his Good News supplements a life aimed at perfection; it does not substitute it. “You must be perfect,” Jesus says at the end of his famous mountain sermon, “as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”
His message is clear. Strive for perfection. In other words, use your reason and practice philosophy. But receive grace when you fail, and you surely will! For your ultimate completion, your final perfection, transcends anything you could achieve here. Every step we take on the road to perfection, on the path of philosophy in this world, is a step up the mountain toward the earthly paradise, where the Logos of God in the flesh will continue to guide us beyond the limits of this world to meet the Father.
As the top of my hair graced the cold rock ceiling above me in that ancient cave in Patmos, I thought about the old apostle who saw the sky split open to the west. He had walked with Jesus. Befriended him. Watched him die. And then spent decades trying to comprehend and communicate what he had witnessed. He discerned that the revelation of God to the Hebrew people that culminated in the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to the world, was a fulfillment of the centuries-long exploration of the meaning and importance of the logos, of reason, in the life of man. Revelation, John knew, was an addendum and renewal of reason, not a replacement.
I left the cave that day with profound peace. Only in practice, in a life devoted to philosophy, but infused with grace, can we understand in all of its otherworldly majesty the mystery that is Christianity, the Logos made flesh.
Sitting on the patio pondering Dr. Peterson’s question, my answer became abundantly clear. “Patmos. It answered a lot of questions for me. I put my hand where John had countless times placed his own. I knelt for a moment in the steps of the man who united the seemingly disparate cultures of the Greeks and the Hebrews. The man who birthed the West. John, the Apostle and friend of Christ.”
Dr. Peterson looked at me with that serious glare he gives so many of his interlocutors. He nodded his head slowly. “Well, I’ve heard from a lot of you today that Patmos was a very powerful experience…” He droned off as he is wont to do. I looked off to the south, marveling again at the great expanse of the Aegean Sea before me.
“Philosophy and grace,” I thought to myself. “Their dance is the art of excellence.”
