Anno Domini

Posted on November 12, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Humans have latched onto dating systems and chronologies as the means by which we keep track of ourselves vis a vis others in time. We keep track of where we are in terms of our own passing, our own age, and the passing of our own time, our generation, and the passing of centuries, even millennia. There have been and are many different kinds of dating systems. The one universal dating system upon which governments, business, travel, and education are based is to measure years chronologically according to centuries and millennia. We date according to Common Era (CE) and Before Common Era (BCE) to provide reference of human passing over time. But what do these mean, CE and BCE? Upon what are they based? Where do they derive? The birth of the child Jesus—the incarnation. Time as we measure it today is linked to a religious, even a supernatural, moment.

The birth of God become man, the nativity of the Son of God, the act of the Word becoming flesh, the incarnation of Christ, the Messiah, is the central moment in human history if for no other reason than that the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem two thousand years ago has made such a profound impact on human expression, thought, and institutions. This statement should go without saying, but if it does not, then consider the following most obvious example of the continuing impact of the Incarnation. The year of this writing, 2023, is a numerical symbol for a solar year, the 2023th since some important event, so important an event that clocks, calendars, cell phones, governments, security agencies, world financial institutions, and more, base their systems, their very institutional beings, on an event that happened so long ago. How did this dating system emerge, and around what event? The answer to the former question is long and complex, covering centuries of attempts to erect chronological systems around the event, which was like so many other such events that occur everyday and have occurred everyday for the past thousands of years: the birth of a child.

One might assume that an event so important to world history would have been and is well known and celebrated around the world on its anniversary—and it is. One might assume that such a significant event would likewise be so well known in all of its details that the exact time, place, setting, time, and chronology compared to other events would be well known—but not so. Strangely, arriving at a correct date for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth has long been a perplexing, unsolvable problem. Jesus could have been born during any one of a range of a dozen years two millennia ago. Of these, the least probable year for his birth is the year 1. There exist only two sources, the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, which provide any information whatsoever about this central event in the history of humankind. Yet the two Gospels cannot be reconciled chronologically. Indeed, the four sources that purport to provide biographical portraits of Jesus–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–as a whole provide limited contradictory accounts of his birth. And yet the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is considered the central event in human history by the religion, Christianity, with the most adherents worldwide, and it has for centuries been the basis for the world’s most commonly accepted dating system: the linear system of Ante Christos (BC) and Anno Domini (AD), since euphemistically renamed to Before the Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE).

Time is so important to humans individually, collectively, personally, and institutionally. Yet what is known of time? What is it? Theologians, philosophers, and historians for centuries have tried to uncover the true nature, to comprehend, time. Is time an artificial measure, a tool by which humans trace their own existence? Or, does time have an independent existence, a phenomenon separate from human experience? Is time geologic, the earth carving a temporal path from its beginning to its end? Is time dependent upon human awareness?—hence without humans to know and trace it time is meaningless, nonexistent. Is time an absolute, a constant that can be measured with mechanical devices, a certainty that, as Newton believed, has very little fluctuation, hence allows humans the confidence to base our lives upon it? Clocks, chronometers, and calendars help us to safely trace the passing of years, days, months, which gives us meaning, helps us to know ourselves and our world. Or is time relative, as Einstein believed? Einstein argued in the theory of relativity that time depends on movement, that a person who travels at an extremely high rate of speed experiences time different than a person at rest. Since it depends upon the experience of an individual, time is inconstant and fluctuating, governed by outside forces, significant only insofar as it yields for each person a way to gauge personal movement. According to the theory of relativity, one person’s time is not the same as another person’s time. Although time appears to move quickly in the twenty-first century because humans move rapidly, coming and going, and information is quickly exchanged, seemingly in an instant, does this mean an individual perceives time any differently than someone from the past, say in first-century Rome? Does a person’s bodily movement, the movement of the mind, the aging process, change with changing technology, with rapidity of motion? Is it important to know one’s age or date of birth, to know the year, the month, the day, the hour, the minute, the second? What does it mean to regulate institutions, government, the most minute human events, according to the passage of seconds, minutes, and hours? Does an individual experience life differently by knowing the precise time according to satellites, cellular devices, computers, and atomic clocks?

The Gospel of Matthew records the birth of Jesus as occurring toward the end of the reign of Herod the Great, King of Judaea, who died in the year 4 Ante Christos/Before the Common Era. Matthew’s Gospel portrays the world as in need of a savior; then a star appeared, followed by visitors, the magi, coming from the East. Through the magi, according to Matthew, Herod learned of the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem, which led the desperate king to order the murder of all children in Bethlehem under the age of two years, according to the period during which the child was purportedly born. Matthew’s account has little precision in terms of actual events, placing several isolated episodes together into one not entirely convincing narrative. Matthew wrote in Greek, the language of learning in the Roman Empire, of which Judaea was a part.

The dating systems used at this time in the Roman Empire were Roman and Greek. According to the former, Roman system, Jesus of Nazareth was born about 749-751, a.u.c. (ab urbe condita, from the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus). According to the Greek dating system, Jesus of Nazareth was born at the end of the 193rd Olympiad or beginning of the 194th Olympiad (an Olympiad having occurred every four years since its founding almost 770 years before)–in short, 6-4, Ante Christos/Before the Common Era.

Luke, who professed at the beginning of his gospel to give his readers an accurate and complete story of the life of Jesus, provided two different accounts of Jesus’s birth that would result in two contradictory dates. Like Matthew, Luke, in chapter one, used episodic accounts, bringing into his narrative the stories of the visits of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, and Mary mother of Jesus. According to these stories, Jesus was born six months after the birth of John the Baptist, which occurred near the end of the reign of King Herod, which conforms with Matthew’s dating system. Unlike Matthew, however, Luke’s account, in chapters two and three, also provides chronological facts by which to date the birth of Jesus. Luke’s gospel implies simultaneity to several events: the creation of the province of Judaea by the Romans after almost a half century of rule by Herod and Herod Archelaus; Augustus Caesar’s ordering of a census; the subsequent rebellion of Judas of Galilee; and the appointment of Quirinius as Governor of Syria. Luke’s system of dating according to simultaneous public events is as sophisticated as the best Roman historians of the first century. According to Luke, Jesus was born in 760 a.u.c. or two years after the 196th Olympiad (i.e., 6 Anno Domini/Common Era).

In Luke, chapter three, the historian dated the beginning of Jesus’s ministry to several simultaneous public events: the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was Procurator of Judaea; Herod Antipas was Tetrarch of Galilee; Philip, son of Herod, was Tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis; Lysanias was Tetrarch of Abilene; and high priests of the Sanhedrin were Annas and his son Caiaphas. Luke also stated in chapter 3, verse 23, that Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. Had Luke been exact regarding Jesus’s age at this time, then it would be clear that he was born a few years after the death of King Herod, about 1 or 2 Ante Christos/Before the Common Era. Luke’s vague statement in 3:23 does not, however, accord with Matthew, or even with Luke’s earlier statements regarding the incarnation.

Subsequent chronologers who tried to date the birth of Jesus of necessity relied on Matthew and Luke supplemented by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. In his Antiquities and History of the Jewish War, Josephus provided confirmation of some of the events and rulers listed in Luke, chapter two. Josephus’ difficulties in dating events is illustrated by his chronology of the Roman destruction of the temple. Rather than relying on the Roman system of ab urbe conditia or the Greek system of Olympiads, Joseph used a Hebrew system according to significant events and the rule of kings.

The problem facing chronologers was, besides the inherent contradictions in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and the lack of an account of Jesus’s birth in the other two gospel writers Mark and John, that ancient historians and scientists disagreed upon which chronological system to use to date events. The great Athenian historian, Thucydides, relied on the reigns of Spartan ephors and Athenian archons to provide dates in his account of the Peloponnesian War. The Greek historian Polybius in his Histories used the more accurate and, from the standpoint of the Greeks, universal dating system of the Olympiads. The Roman historians Livy, writing during the reign of Augustus, and Tacitus, writing about a hundred years later during the reign of Domitian, used, besides the Olympiads, the system of dating events from the founding of the city of Rome (ab urbe conditia). In subsequent centuries, however, Christian writers, unwilling to rely on pagan dating systems, wished for a chronological system based on religious events. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing during the reign of Constantine, added to the pagan dating systems and the chronology of Josephus a hypothetical chronological scheme beginning with the birth of the Patriarch Abraham. Yet three hundred years after the incarnation, Eusebius still struggled to date the birth of Christ.

During Eusebius’ time the Church and Empire, after the conversion of Constantine, were also particularly concerned with dating the Resurrection, that is, Easter. Theologians and chronologers used Greek, Roman, and Hebrew dating systems, until Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century, tried to base the reckoning of the dates of Easter not according to the older systems, rather according to a new system based on the greatest event in human history, the incarnation of Christ. He used Luke 3,1 (John the Baptist appeared during the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, 28-29 AD) combined with Luke 3:23 (Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his ministry), to estimate the year 1 (the first year or the year of our Lord, Anno Domini).

There is also the system of time developed by Aurelius Augustine, which is a method of understanding the temporal significance of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth that eschews reliance upon dating systems both ancient and modern. Augustine realized that the incarnation and resurrection cannot really be understood according to reason and logic, the stuff upon which chronologies and dating systems are based. Augustine developed another way (other than narrative, chronological history) to understand the incarnation and its significance that eschews precise dating.

In Confessions, Augustine provided a model of personal time thatprovides each person with a model of the individual experience of the life and significance of Christ that has little to do with formal chronologies and history, and public events. It depends upon the old Greek idea of the Logos as developed by Philo Judaeus of Alexandria and the Apostle John. Philo wrote of the Logos: God creates “at once, not merely by uttering a command, but by even thinking of it.” And John wrote, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”

Logos simply exists, all times, but by taking on flesh enters into time, interacts with time, bringing light into time, whereas before there was darkness in time. Darkness, time, yields to lightness, eternity. Ignorance yields to knowledge. Time is darkness because we cannot see what lies ahead. The future is unknown, and the past a memory. The present is a brief momentary anticipation of what might be. But if light enters darkness, if timeless enters time, then the path forward is brightened, made aware to us, lighting the way in the darkness. The future, always dark, is opened to light, and complete ignorance gives way to some knowledge of what will be. Not what might be. Because the night implies ignorance, implies that we are still guessing based on experience. No, now we know what will be thanks to the light.

All cultures have struggled to know the Logos. Polytheistic peoples conceived of a divinity that was inherent in nature, controlling all things, encompassing past, present, and future. The Hebrews identified it as Yahweh. The Greeks as the mind, the infinite, the good—the Logos. Asian philosophy called it the Way, the source, the Brahma. Christianity offers a unique perspective, of a transcendent that acts in time, subtly, upon the self, connecting the self to the transcendent—a direct physical and spiritual connection.

As for me, in my teaching and writing, I prefer to stay with Ante Christos and Anno Domini (not BCE/CE)—for how can time be truly understood without the incarnation, the Logos becoming flesh?

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The Jesus Road

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

In the early 1830s, physician, scientist, and neophyte missionary Jean Louis Berlandier watched as his friend, an unnamed Kickapoo Indian, lay dying. The Kickapoo gave off a fierce appearance in his dress, paint, and bearing; he was a skilled hunter; he had once exacted terrible revenge against his estranged wife and her lover. But the Kickapoo had grown tired of his indigenous religion, which had allowed him to justify murderous vengeance; he had given up those ways where “once offended” by treachery, he believed his soul “to be defiled” and sought “at any cost and at every moment to destroy those who” had injured him. Guilt engendered by a growing knowledge of Christianity and the behavior and teachings of his friend Berlandier convinced the Kickapoo to repent and to embrace. How long he believed in Christ’s redemption before he accepted baptism is not recorded; perhaps he had been coming to the belief for some time; perhaps it occurred when he realized the nearness of death. The Kickapoo had been under Berlandier’s care, indeed had resided in the physician’s house, when Berlandier encouraged his mortally ill friend to be baptized. The Kickapoo consented, and Berlandier sent for a Catholic priest, then watched as his friend “rejoiced at the sight of the priest” who was to administer the sacrament. Berlandier, who was not a proselytizer, recorded what he observed: a former “savage” of the plains had willingly accepted the sacrament that would cleanse his sins and mark him as Christ’s own. Missionaries and other commentators before, during, and after this time tended to explain Indian embracement of Christianity as superficial, even inspired by mercenary reasons. The Kickapoo, however, believed that he had nothing to gain from baptism but his eternal soul. Berlandier observed his dying friend to “invoke the Most High” when the priest sprinkled the holy water upon his head. The invocation was “in his own way,” in his own language and according to the beliefs of his youth, “indicating the sky as His place of residence.” The astonishment and change in belief that the Kickapoo experienced was an act of accommodating new beliefs with the old; the new supplants, but does not eradicate, the teachings of youth and experiences of a lifetime. Like many Christians before and since, the Kickapoo embraced Christianity while not completely abandoning his previous indigenous beliefs.

            Recent scholarship on the Christian experience of indigenous peoples has questioned whether or not conversion is an accurate, sufficiently descriptive concept of what happens when a person puts aside traditional to embrace new beliefs. Conversion implies an ethnocentric view that describes the Christian experience of the Western Tradition—but does it describe the experience of indigenous peoples as well? Scholarly emphasis has been upon the synchronistic experience of indigenous religious change. Indeed, religious change from one belief to another is neither static nor isolated, but partakes of experiences over time and in particular places. At the same time, to focus so minutely on the particular that the universal is abandoned or simply not seen does not advance thought and understanding of human religiosity. In any culture during any time individuals feel an overwhelming need for completion, sense a pull from a transcendent other, what Rudolph Otto called the numinous, which the individual seeks, senses, reaches out for, receives, and accepts.

            Historical accounts of missionary activities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America often provide narratives of indigenous peoples embracing Christian beliefs, usually as recorded by the missionary. The most common are accounts by missionaries who assumed that the convert was little better than a savage who, because of the efforts of the missionary, had embraced Christianity as well as civilization. An example is Jedidiah Morse, a New England missionary to the Iroquois and Algonquians of upstate New York, the Great Lakes Region, and Ontario, who assumed that indigenous peoples lived in a primitive state and needed to be civilized and Christianized. Missionaries who provided an empathetic portrait of conversion with no apparent bias are found less often in historical documents. Many missionaries had genuinely benevolent souls and acted in love toward indigenous people who were friends rather than objects. Jeremy Belknap, who ministered to the Indians of the upper Connecticut valley and upper New York, and who was a colleague with Morse in the Scots Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, empathized with these people whom he considered to be human, no better and no worse than himself, even if their society, culture, and technology were more primitive.

            More rare are accounts of religious change penned by the indigenous convert or dictated by the convert to an accurate transcriber or translator. Examples include autobiographical accounts of religious change, such as the personal experiences of George Copway, a nineteenth-century Ojibwa who embraced Christianity and became a missionary. Copway, who wrote an account of his experiences in 1847, argued that white missionary work among the Indians was obligatory considering that whites had “dispossessed” the Indians of their lands. Copway, who at a camp meeting in 1830 in Ontario was deeply influenced by the preaching of a missionary, wrote: “I . . . groaned and agonized over my sins. I was so agitated and alarmed that I knew not which way to turn in order to get relief. I was like a wounded bird, fluttering for its life. Presently and suddenly, I saw in my mind, something approaching; it was like a small but brilliant torch; it appeared to pass through the leaves of the trees. My poor body became so enfeebled that I fell; my heart trembled. The small brilliant light came near to me, and fell upon my head, and then ran all over and through me, just as if water had been copiously poured out upon me. I knew not how long I had lain after my fall; but when I recovered, my head was in a puddle of water, in a small ditch. I arose; and O! How happy I was. I felt as light as a feather. I clapped my hands, and exclaimed in English, ‘Glory to Jesus.’ I looked around for my father, and saw him. I told him that I had found ‘Jesus.” He embraced me, and kissed me; I threw myself into his arms. I felt as strong as a lion, yet as humble as a poor Indian boy saved by grace, by grace alone.” Another example was the Ojibwa Peter Jacobs, who after his religious change became a Methodist missionary to indigenous people in the Hudson’s Bay region. Jacobs wrote an autobiographical account of his experiences. In 1824, he wrote, “I was a heathen, and so were all the tribes of Canada West. When I was a lad, I never heard an Indian pray, as Christians pray, to the Great Being. Our people believed in the existence of a Great Being, the Maker of all things; but we thought that God was so very far away, that no human voice could reach Him; and, indeed, we all believed that God did not meddle with the affairs of the children of men.” The Indians did not fear God. They took care of affairs with the tomahawk. Whenever he prayed to the Great Spirit, it went like this: “O God, the Sun, I beseech you to hear my prayer, and to direct my steps through the woods in the direction where the deer is feeding, that I may get near him, shoot him, and kill him, and have something to eat thereby.” After listening to the Methodist missionary William Case, Jacobs realized that “the word of God had now got hold of my heart, but it made me feel very sick in my heart. I went to bed, and I could not sleep, for my thoughts troubled me very much. Then I would pray the words over and over again, and go more and more sick in my heart. I was very sorry that God could not understand my Ojibway. I thought God could only understand English; and when I was praying, tears came spontaneously from my eyes; and I could not understand this, because I had been taught from infancy never to weep. In this misery I passed three or four weeks. I then met with Peter Jones, who was converted a few months before me, and, to my surprise, I heard him return thanks, at meal, in Ojibway. This was quite enough for me. I now saw that God could understand me in my Ojibway, and therefore went far into the woods, and prayed, in the Ojibway tongue, to God, and said, “O God, I was so ignorant and blind, that I did not know that thou couldst understand my Ojibway tongue! Now, O God, I beseech thee to be gracious to me, a sinner! Take away this sickness that I now feel in my heart; for all my sins lay very heavy in my heart! Send now thy Holy Spirit to come work in my heart! Let the blood of Christ be now applied to my heart, that all my sins may depart!” Though I could now pray in this way in my native tongue, yet God did not seem to think it best to hear my prayers at this time, but left me to pass many miserable nights. And I cried out again, “O God, I will not let thee alone! I shall trouble thee with my prayers, till thou bless me!” And at last God heard my prayers, and he took away this heavy sickness of heart; but not till many tears had been shed. And when this sickness was taken away from my heart, then I experienced another feeling, which was joy in the Holy Ghost, which was indeed full of glory. My tongue could not express the joy I then felt. I could say nothing but, ‘Happy, happy!’ When I found this religion of Christ so sweet in the heart of man, I wanted all my people then to know of the great and true God; but they all said, No: that I was wrong; that I had been to the white man’s God, and not the Saviour of the Indians. But I said that God was the Saviour of all the nations of the earth; for I know in my own heart what he has done for me: and what he has done for me, he can do for you. And they began to pray for mercy and the forgiveness of their sins; and they praying in strong faith, many of them were converted; and now at this time there are hundreds that are converted among the North American Indians. I was the first fruits of the Missionary labors in my tribe.” Jacobs referred to another convert, Peter Jones, who also wrote of his experiences of religious change. Jones was influenced by the Anglican missionary Ralph Leeming. He had an initial conversion in 1831, but retained some of his Ojibwa religious beliefs. Three years later, in 1834, he “began to feel very sick in my heart, but I did not make my feelings known. Some of the sermons impressed my mind; I understood a good deal of what was said; I thought the black coats understood all that was in my heart, and that I was the person to whom they were speaking. The burden on my soul began to increase, and my heart said—what must I do to be saved? I saw myself in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity. The more I understood the plan of salvation, the more I was convinced of the truth of the Christian religion, and felt my need of its blessings. In spite of my old Indian heart, tears flowed down my cheeks at the remembrance of my sins.  . . . My convictions became more deep and powerful during the preaching: I wept much; this, however, I endeavoured to conceal by holding down my head behind the shoulders of the people. I felt anxious that no one might see me weeping like an old woman, as all my countrymen say that weeping is a sign of weakness, which is beneath the dignity of an Indian brave. In the afternoon of this day my sorrow and anguish of soul greatly increased, and I felt as if I should sink down into hell for my sins. . . . I was fully convinced that if I did not find mercy from the Lord Jesus, of whom I heard so much, I certainly would be lost for ever.” Finally “at the dawning of the day I was enabled to cast myself wholly on the Lord, and to claim an interest in the atoning blood of my Saviour Jesus Christ, who bore my sins in his own body on the tree; and when I received Him unspeakable joy filled my hear, and I could say, ‘Abba Father.’ The love of God being now shed abroad in my heart, I loved him intensely, and praised Him in the midst of the people. Every thing now appeared to me in a new light, and all the works of God seemed to unite with me in uttering the praises of the Lord. There was a time when I thought that the white man’s God was never intended to be our God; that the white man’s religion was never intended to be the red man’s religion; that the Great Spirit gave us our way of worship, and that it would be wrong to put away that mode of worship and take to the white man’s mode of worship. But I and my people now found that there is but one true religion, and that the true religion is the religion of the Bible. Christianity has found us, and has lifted us up out of a horrible pit, and out of the miry clay; it has placed our feet upon a rock; it has established our goings, and has put a new song into our mouths,and ever praise unto our God.”

            These two types of conversion narratives, the more common accounts told by the missionary and the more rare accounts told by the Indian convert, are found among the hitherto unexploited manuscripts of Southern Baptist missionaries found in the archives of the American Indian Collection here at Bacone College. This collection illustrates the problems Indians of particularly western Oklahoma had in adapting to white culture and federal land allotment laws. Baptist missionaries who kept extensive diaries of their interaction with Indians, sent and received correspondence with individual Indians, and submitted detailed reports to missionary organizations, consistently recorded the chagrin, anger, and depression of indigenous individuals who were trying to conform to the beliefs, institutions, and laws of white civilization while being tugged in the different direction of their tribal past. Baptist missionaries reported on the poverty, malnutrition, sicknesses, and passivity brought about by the new way of life of the Indians that afflicted the physical and emotional well-being of the tribes. Were such social and economic problems the stimuli for seeking and questioning that resulted in religious change to Christianity? How exactly did an indigenous person come to renounce traditional tribal beliefs to embrace the religion of white missionaries? What individual experiences of loss and suffering, or joy and understanding, resulted in the desire for baptism? How did conversion impact the individual’s sense of self? What was the Indian conception of sin and redemption?

            One particularly industrious missionary, Robert Hamilton, was tireless in his proselytizing to the Indians and in writing accounts of religious change in his diary and letters. Hamilton was a missionary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, active in western Oklahoma, engaging in particular the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, from the 1890s to the 1920s. Hamilton was part of a missionary movement into Indian Territory by Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, Anglicans, and other Christians during the latter half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century. Like Christian proselytizers during the preceding centuries in America and Europe, these missionaries considered civilization and Christianity to be one in the same. Missionaries generally adopted a patronizing, condescending attitude toward indigenous people at the same time that they exhibited outstanding energy and bravery in the face of overwhelming despair, poverty, conflict, and violence.

            Hamilton, who had been ordained a Baptist missionary in 1892, was a man of tremendous drive and devotion, energy and patience, curiosity and courage. He, like other missionaries in Oklahoma before and after statehood, cared for the indigenous people, whom he considered to be like children; he was their missionary father, and indeed the Indians themselves adopted the designations of “children” and “father” when addressing him. Hamilton understood that “the Indians are by nature religious, mystical, ritualistic, reverent,” as he wrote in The Gospel Among the Red Man, a partially autobiographical account of Baptist missionary activities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. “It is one of the evidences of the divine nature of the gospel, and of the efficiency of the Holy Spirit to ‘guide into all truth,’ that the missionary to a primitive people, with an unskilled interpreter, can get the message to them, and the resultant surprising grasp they have of divine truth.” In the manuscript account, Sketch of Work Among Cheyennes and Arapahos, found in Bacone’s American Indian Collection, Hamilton narrated in third person the scene when in 1892 he began to meet with the Cheyennes: “These Indians had only nineteen years before quit the warpath, and were living in the midst of a people, who if they had understood them, might have been a great blessing and help to them, but who viewed them with suspicion, and only visited their camps out of curiosity or to trade with them. For these reasons, they continued to live apart from their white neighbors, practicing the most disgusting of heathen customs in the name of religion. Mr. Hamilton attended an Indian burial, at which a woman cut gashes in her arms and legs for the dead, until the blood ran down to the ground. He saw women, who in their grief for their children, had cut off a joint of their fingers one after another until their hands were but stubs.” More astonishing was the Sun Dance ceremony “at which twenty men stripped of all their clothing, danced continuously for three days and nights without food or water. . . . Others had places cut in their breasts, and a skewer put through under a muscle, and this tied to a rope which was attached to a central pole of the dance lodge. Throwing their weight upon the rope, they would dance until the muscles were torn out.” He also witnessed the Ghost Dance, “where all night long, they formed a large circle, going round and round keeping step to the weird, plaintive music as they sang their Messianic songs. He saw a woman go inside the circle and stand for more than an hour with her hands stretched out toward the north, praying most fervently, while the tears ran down her face, pleading for the coming of the Indian Messiah. Her tone and posture expressed the most intense longing. Finally exhausted, she fell in a swoon.”

            Into this pagan environment Hamilton came preaching the Gospel, comparing himself to the Apostle Paul, who likewise brought the teachings of Christianity to a similarly polytheistic and animistic people. Although Hamilton was vain and full of himself, he nevertheless believed wholeheartedly in the Great Commission given by Christ to His disciples. Delivering the Gospel was the sole object to him, and he and his family endured privation and the environmental extremes of western Oklahoma to succeed in this self-appointed goal. The Indians of Oklahoma, like the missionaries that came among them, thought of life as a journey down a well-traveled road, as it were. The Indians knew of many roads to religious enlightenment: the peyote road, the traditional tribal road, and the “Jesus Road.” Frequently they were called upon by missionaries and their own people to make a choice among the available roads. The Cheyennes, Hamilton wrote in the manuscript, Recommendations as to the Cheyenne Field, “in the beginning received the missionaries and their message more readily, and came into the Jesus Road more quickly than any of the other tribes.” The Jesus Road, of course, was fraught with peril to the mind and soul; it was a terribly hard road to follow, and many times the Indian man or woman slipped, unable or unwilling to regain the Jesus Road, rather returning to the road of their ancestors.

            Hamilton provided many examples of this conflict and confusion over the correct path to happiness and redemption. He heard firsthand accounts from Indian men and women, a few of whom could speak English; for others, Hamilton relied on interpreters, such as the Cheyennes Philip Cook and Moore Vanhorn, the latter of whom was an early convert and enthusiastic Christian, despite having suffered many wrongs in his youth at the hands of white soldiers. In the manuscript pamphlet Christmas with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Hamilton described the anguish of two women, who had been through much sorrow because of personal loss of family, including their children: “One who had lost her son said that when he died, she had been tempted to throw away the Jesus Road, and take up again her old heathen religion, but that now she could see that it was better to trust in Jesus, and that she could see that His way was right, she asked the church to forgive her for her sinful thoughts, and promised to walk in the ‘Road’ more carefully.” In the manuscript Sketch of Work Among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Hamilton described the personal experience of “one old man,” who “told the missionary that in the olden times it was thought an honorable thing to steal from those who were not their friends, and the man who could steal the most horses and cattle, and thus make the best feasts and presents to his people, had the greatest respect. . . . How Jesus had changed his heart from that way of doing[!] Now he had learned to love his enemies, and to do good to all men, and his life bears out his testimony.” In the same manuscript, Hamilton described how some Cheyennes, “who started in the way ‘went back and walked no more with Him’,” and began to persecute those who stayed on the Jesus Road. Such antagonists rejected Christians who were to join a delegation of the tribe going to Washington because they considered the Christian Cheyenne to be too close to the white man, and therefore influenced in the wrong way by Christianity. Moreover, “Christians were told by the Ghost Dance prophets that when the Indian Messiah came and restored the Indians and the buffalo, that all the Indians, who were found in the white man’s religion, would be destroyed with the white people.” Even so, some Ghost Dancers, such as the Arapaho, Hail, in time rejected their beliefs to follow the Jesus Road. The Plains Indian “medicine man,” however, graced with the knowledge of the mystical selection of himself to influence the powers of nature, was less inclined to renounce his pagan beliefs, and was the most formidable opponent of Indian converts. Hamilton recorded the case of a Cheyenne “medicine man” who went so far as to hex a Christian Indian couple: “this medicine man had an arrow, called the arrow of jealousy or hate. When dipped in a certain preparation known only to the fraternity, and shot in the direction of his victim, though miles away, the substance would search him out, and his destruction was certain.” Hamilton rode miles to find the couple, then told them that the medicine man’s threats were the work of Satan (Eahwo), and believers in Christ could put off Satan. “After prayer they were able to cast off the delusion, and peace of mind was restored.”

            Hamilton recounted other examples of religious change among the Cheyennes of Oklahoma. One “old man . . . on being received for baptism, related the following touching incident. ‘The first religious act that impressed itself on my childish mind [the old man recounted], was when a small boy on my mother’s back. At that time my mother made an offering of two buffalo robes to the Great Spirit, and prayed for me, asking that I might live and grow up to be a good man. Later when I was a young man, I met a white man with a kind face and a soft voice, who told me that I ought to love and worship Jesus. He gave me this”–the old man drew “from his breast a crucifix, which he wore next his skin, under his shirt, attached to a string about his neck”–“and told me always to keep it. I have worn it over my heart ever since. I do not pray to it, but have kept it to remind me of the good man and his words. When the missionaries came to our reservation, I was glad to learn that they knew about this same Jesus. I never miss an opportunity to hear them tell about Him, and I was glad when I learned that I could be His friend and follower’.” At a meeting of Christian testimony among the Cheyenne, among other leaders was Chief Iron Shirt, who rose to speak, saying: “I feel as though we all being to uncover our heads, see what the Great Father has done for us. I want to thank you chiefs for the good talks you have made to the people, it makes my heart feel glad. This is all I wish to say as my heart is so full of joy I can scarcely speak.”

            The missionaries of western Oklahoma such as Robert Hamilton helped the Indians form an association of converts, called the Blanket Indian Association. They met annually in June during the first years of the twentieth century. At one meeting, held on the land of the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf near the town of Hobart, indigenous peoples of several tribes—the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Osage, and Navajo—met along with Baptist missionaries for a day of testimonial. On this day former Kiowa warriors, leaders of armed bands of men who had raided white settlements and attacked military installations in Texas and Indian Territory, but who had come to embrace peace, spoke of their commitment to the Jesus Road. One of the most notorious of the Kiowa warriors, Big Tree, proclaimed: “I express my gratitude to the Father above for knowing that the Lord Jesus is here. The Almighty created the earth and no part of it has been changed by any other power. God planted his word and work and it has been going on until it reached us. At last it reached me personally. All the Kiowas know what I was—bad—but now I have eated God’s food and been filled. Thirty years ago I was arrested and sent to prison I was so wicked. Lived that way until the Bible came before my face. I didn’t go round or back, but went up to it. My wife first baptised, I follow her, so must you . . . follow missionary teaching, all good. Religion is like throwing away an old garment and getting a new clean garment. I want you head-men to start in this road, it is a good road for all of you; it is the only road which will lead you to the best place we all can think of. Lone Wolf is our only chief, he is a good work-horse, but can’t pull alone, we all must help him; if we would all do this, it would be like traveling with a fast team on a good road. Now this is for the Comanches; tell your leading men to leave off their evil ways and walk in the Jesus road, and then we will get their followers. Today speak out and tell what you will do. Kiowas pushing and fighting every day and we are getting on. The Kiowas are like an engine to a train, it go first and pull, so we start in good, we help you all we can.” One Comanche named Ninsie told his brothers and sisters: “If you want to take the road straight, put away all bad roads. Our brother Jesus is strong, he is very loving, but if Jesus and God pull you out of the fire, and you hold some of it in your hand, they can’t help you.” Lone Wolf himself, who grew up hearing about his father and grandfather’s violent raids on farms and supply trains, spoke during another meeting of the Indian Blanket Association; his comments were recorded by one of the missionaries: “Some time ago [Lone Wolf said] I went up to visit the unfriendly Osages. I found them doing all the old time things. One of their leaders is here, and I want him to know I am very sorry to see them in the old time roads. (He said this with his eyes full of tears.) The white people see me and think I am educated. My father and my grandfather taught me the warpath, and I never had a chance to learn in school. Just as the children will learn the old roads, if not taught. . . . My father should have taught me, but he did not know the Jesus road. I am man enough to know that it is a good road, and take it.”

            One of the most dramatic testimonials given at a meeting of the Blanket Indian Association was by another Kiowa convert, Sanco. “He said,” in the words of one of his hearers, that the experience of embracing Christianity and coming to know the Gospel was “like a stream of living water without sticks or stones or mud in it, ever-flowing, clear as crystal, free to all.” He added: “before the missionaries came they knew nothing about God; the Indians lived in the dark; their minds were covered just like a veil over the face, but now they can see clearly.”

            The accounts of religious change among the Plains Indians of western Oklahoma translated by Indian interpreters and transcribed and recorded by Robert Hamilton were, notwithstanding the time, place, language and events, similar in evocation of feeling and sincerity of mind to the accounts of other religious feelers and thinkers who had their sensations, thoughts, words, and deeds translated and recorded by others. Was the experience of religious change of the Kiowa Sanco any different from the dazzling light that blinded Paul of Tarsus; the child’s voice that responded to Saint Augustine’s agonizing question; the austere, universal presence of the One that so captivated Plotinus and his disciples Porphyry and Julian; the oneness that Siddhartha Gautama experienced in the rushing water of  the river of life; or the fear and awe that Moses knew when standing on holy ground before Yahweh? Common in most of the world’s great testimonies of religious change is the question of who and what exists, followed by the search for being or substance outside of yet connected to oneself, which leads to the discovery of the answer, change in belief and behavior, and finally, acceptance of what is.

            Christianity as an experience of religious change has been an ecumenical force in world history because the religious seeker finds in the scriptures, teachings, traditions, music, liturgy, and the experience of the holy their own questions and answers and their own search and discovery notwithstanding the place or time. The Plains Indians of western Oklahoma discovered in the words of the missionary explanations for human behavior, for mistakes and doubts, for unhappiness and suffering. Even the most fierce warriors sought to be embraced in overwhelming love. The closest experiences to such love that tribal beliefs offered were the promises of happiness in the next life, or the benevolence of the Great Spirit, or the means by which nature nourished, clothed, and sheltered them. The Kiowa Sanco adapted the natural theology inherent in Christianity to his own experiences of delight and satisfaction when finding a pure stream of bright, crystal water, or when coming from out of the darkness of a spring thunderstorm into the broad horizon of the plains covered by the ubiquitous rays of the sun. Not only did Christianity emphasize the importance of natural history in the scheme of redemption, but one’s personal physical and spiritual experiences were known to God, who watched to see whether or not these peripatetic people would keep to the Jesus Road, eschewing all other roads as being distractions of ignorance, hubris, and idleness.

            Baptist missionaries to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and other western Oklahoma tribes were struck by how eager the indigenous people were to learn of this new religious road that they could take out of the shadows of darkness and doubt into the light of understanding. These religious converts understood what Jesus meant when he told Nicodemus that one must be born again from the mother’s womb. There was no other way, no other road. As a writer the the Baptist Mission Monthly put it:“The evidence of a genuine work of grace in the hearts of these children of the plains are so marked and varied that no one can doubt the reality of their conversion”–or, should we say, the reality of their change from one religious belief that had its own inherent validity to another belief that offered similar conceptions of salvation and redemption, of a universal deity that defied understanding, of rituals of blessing and healing, but which offered something more, a clear path undertaken originally by a man whom the Indians knew simply as Jesus. By forging a road through life and time amid distractions, temptations, suffering, and death, Jesus showed, by means of his example and by the examples of his missionaries, that his road was one for all people. Christian Indians believed that by taking the Jesus Road they shared Jesus’s experience, even if they did live in the arid plains of Indian Territory, hunting the dwindling numbers of beasts and living in mud huts or skin dwellings, impoverished but proud, willing to humble themselves to others, to the Other, for the sake of love.

For more on Jean Louis Berlandier, see https://author.amazon.com/books/editionsMaster?marketplace=ATVPDKIKX0DER&titleset=B009I4EXUW

For more on the Baptist missionaries of Oklahoma, see Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years, newly republished in January 2026 and available on Amazon at Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years: Lawson, Dr. Russell Matthew: 9780977244805: Amazon.com: Books

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Montaigne and Christianity

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French aristocrat, was neither saint, priest, nor monk, rather a worldly man who lived in a secular time of conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Montaigne was a landowner, a government official, and soldier. He was as well a Catholic layman who struggled with his faith in light of the Protestant challenge and the sometimes violent Catholic response. He struggled with the new ideas of the Renaissance, such as humanism, which placed humans as equals to the divine. He struggled as well with the new scientific ideas of Copernicus, which seemed to challenge Biblical authority. Montaigne was a thinker who penetrated self in search of answers for his faith, his heritage, and his relationship with God. His response, the Essays, has been variously interpreted as the work of a humanist, a skeptic, perhaps an atheist. Rarely are Montaigne’s Essays considered for what they are in fact, the ruminations of a Catholic layman searching for answers that are in response to his understanding of the Son of Man.

In Montaigne’s third essay, “That Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us,” he shows tremendous awareness of humans and time. The future is unknown. “Fear, desire, and hope, are still pushing us on towards the future, depriving us, in the meantime, of the sense and consideration of that which is, to amuse us with the thought of what shall be, even when we shall be no more.” He wishes to focus on the present, what he is now and what is proper for him now. If we always focus on the future, then it becomes a panacea for an unclear, uncomfortable present. The future is the means by which the imagination reaches out for what might be, rather than focusing on what is, and in the process fantasies of delight and misery overwhelm our minds, taking us from what is happening now, in the present.

But Montaigne’s present is always informed by his past. It is by means of the records and memories of the past that we can find the anchor to still our wayward present voyage into the unknown. The past, of humans in general, of the self in particular, is the one thing we can know to help us with the momentary present and the journey into the unknown future.

Montaigne’s essay, Of Prayers, reveals that Montaigne was filled with piety. He was a conservative Catholic who believed that God existed and ordered reality. But Montaigne’s god is a distant god, an inscrutable god whose wisdom and knowledge is so far beyond human reason as to be impenetrable. That Montaigne sets a limit on human reason is of course consistent with the Essays. In contrast, divine wisdom, justice, and order are unchanging. Montaigne’s words reveal that he had a sense of dutiful reverence and awe toward this unknown being, so much so that he did not agree with the common person praying to God, for prayer must be completely pious, pure, uncorrupted by human motives and desires. One must have a certain basis in religious knowledge to approach God.

In the Apology for Raimon Sebond, Montaigne shows how much we do not know, just how unstable human reason really is. If there is absolute knowledge, and if we are so distant in our relation to that knowledge, then is makes sense that Montaigne would go to the only sure source of knowledge, the only sure thing we humans might know, and that is himself. If we realize that in our instability we cannot penetrate the inscrutability of God, yet as humans we cannot help but seek knowledge, then we must go to that single source, human knowledge, as the only real means of ever hoping to approach knowledge of something more than just passing temporal affairs. If we cannot rely on human philosophers, theologians, arguments and counterarguments, etc., well at least we might be able to rely on ourselves for whatever knowledge we gain. Who am I to know God? Who am I to gain a relationship with God? Who am I but a mere human? How can I truly know God? These questions, and the doubts of the possibilities of human knowledge to ever approach the divine, reveals piety. Montaigne had tremendous awe and respect regarding the distance of God to humans, and the inconstancy of human knowledge and constancy of divine knowledge.

Montaigne during the time of the Protestant Reformation was a consistent thinker: God is inscrutable. Knowledge of God is nearly impossible. Knowledge of human affairs likewise is in general difficult for such inconstant thinkers; so by reduction we come to just ourselves—personal knowledge might just be obtainable. By relying on himself for standards and knowledge, Montaigne went to the one place where, if any kind of awareness of God can be found, it will be found, there, in the self. Luther and Calvin looked within, but along with Scripture. Montaigne looked within, joined by other introspective thinkers, seeking himself in all nakedness. Luther and Calvin on the other had spent their lives examining the relationship of God to man even though they believed He was inscrutable, Calvin, and distant, Luther. Montaigne thought that knowledge was the sine qua non of life. It is the creation of God, the Knower. Hence knowledge is the route to know God.

Montaigne declared that the life and teachings of Jesus “is not a story to tell, it is a story to revere, fear, and adore.” Montaigne went out of his way to place his Essays before the judgment of the Church, comparing himself to a child seeking “to be instructed, not to instruct.” He worried that the “sacred mysteries” of Christianity were being “bandied about a hall or a kitchen” in a “promiscuous, reckless, and indiscreet” way by the “wicked” and the “ignorant.” As Montaigne predicted, modern writers and scholars have taken it upon themselves to expose, redact, interpret, discount, doubt, reconstruct, and discard the teachings of Jesus and accounts of his life. That this is a symptom of a secular and atheistic age is shown clearly, and the point driven home forcefully, by the number of modern scholars who have laughed at Montaigne’s confession that the Essays are “always very religious,” declaring instead that Montaigne was too much the skeptic to be a sincere Christian.

I agree with Montaigne that the New Testament is beyond my power to be able to master, that it is beyond my right to be able to doubt, that it is only for me to search and to question, not to proclaim and to answer. And yet like Montaigne I feel in me a call to explore myself in light of the Son of Man. Montaigne’s Essays was, I believe, his response to the Son of Man. My response is imperfect according to the blessedness of the subject. Yet if there is a contribution here it is that of a scholar willing to sacrifice his natural arrogance and vanity to try deeply and humbly (I pray) to see how the Son of Man has been manifested throughout time.

Montaigne’s philosophy of human experience is the guide to a religious experience for all humans, coming to know the Son of Man.

(Translations from Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1958)

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“The Thing I Fear Most is Fear”

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Such were the words of Michel de Montaigne, the French writer of Essays.

Like all humans, Montaigne struggled with fear. How did he wrestle with it, try to conquer it?

Montaigne was a thinker, alone in a library, his library, pondering. Alone, as he was in conception, as he will be in death. Alone, facing his maker, facing the universe, facing himself. No one thinks but that they are alone. In such times fear is greatest. No other can think for us. Only an individual can think, can hope to know. And so he sits and thinks, surrounded by books, classics: Sallust, Seneca, Plato, Livy, and especially Plutarch. Surrounded as well by quotes, statements carved into the wooden rafters of the thinker’s hall, reminding him of earlier thinkers, of great thoughts. They are not his thoughts but he wants them to be. He wants them to seep within him, became a part of him, become him. Old thoughts resurrected, restored, renewed. What were another’s thoughts to become his, singularly expressed, unique, once-in-a-lifetime thoughts.

Montaigne had cause to think. His life was filled with thought and confusion, joy and sorrow, peace and conflict–fear. Sixteenth-century France was a time of moral, political, and intellectual chaos, when the dearest assumptions of the Western Tradition were turned upside down. Michel de Montaigne’s birth coincided with the rise of Spanish power throughout Europe, due in part to Columbus’s discoveries and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America. Europeans confronted hitherto unknown continents and peoples, which showed the limitations of classical geographic knowledge and the theories and maps upon which contemporary Europeans based their knowledge. When Montaigne was a child Nicolaus Copernicus died, in 1543, simultaneous to the publication of his On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, which contradicted the geocentric universe advocated by the Church as well as the greatest astronomers of antiquity. Such discoveries placed the assumptions of the Catholic Church—the assumption of the Fall of Man, and the special place the unmoved Earth held in God’s system—into question; but these intellectual concerns appeared as minor nuisances compared to the threat of the protest inaugurated by the Augustinian monk Martin Luther in Germany and the French legal scholar Jean Calvin in Geneva. France became a literal battleground over competing ideas of election, salvation, scripture, and authority, which exacerbated the political conflicts of the country as monarchy competed with aristocracy over their comparative pretenses to power. Religious conflicts became a blanket justification for any kind of horror. Is it a coincidence that Montaigne began the Essays the same year as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when on an August day in 1572 Catholics killed ten thousand Protestants of all ages and both sexes? Montaigne’s own chateau was threatened on several occasions; one time Protestants briefly took him prisoner. His family the Eyquems were like many French families divided over the issue; at least Michel and his brothers and sisters remained at peace with one another.

Montaigne was born and lived at the family estates in the wine region of Bordeaux. He served for years in the Bordeaux parlement, and was an adviser to royalty. He married in 1565, just three years before his father’s death to kidney stones. The son inherited the disease five years later, and lived with it for almost twenty years before it finally killed him in 1592. Montaigne enjoyed semi-permanent retirement during these years of disease and expectation of death. He typically spent his days in his library, secluded from the rest of the chateau. There he surrounded himself with the past, with his favorite authors and their profound words, carved into the beams of the ceiling and elsewhere throughout the cylindrical room.

Montaigne wrote the course of his life into his book. In Book One of the Essays, written from 1572 to 1580, Montaigne commented on the lives, works, and personalities of the authors of his favorite books. He wondered about the customs, habits, and needs of himself and others, such as wearing clothes, counting money, and sleeping. He thought about his varying emotions, his need for solitude, his vanity, fear, and cowardice. Saddened by the death of his friend Etienne de La Boetie, he wrote of friendship, suffering, and death. He followed the ancient Stoics in believing that one must control one’s passions and live moderately, rid oneself of needless emotions and conquer the fear of death. Philosophy can teach us how to die, Montaigne declared, as had so many philosophers before him. But great thoughts could not turn away the fear of acquiring, and pain of having, kidney stones.

In Book Two, written during the same decade of the 1570s, Montaigne considered his inconsistency and contradictions, vicariously explored suicide, considered his intellectual influences, thought and wrote about his father, and discussed the three greatest men: Homer, Alexander of Macedon, and Epaminondas of Thebes. His longest and most profound essay in Book Two is the Apology for Raimon Sebond, in which Montaigne challenged the human presumption of reason, questioned what can be known, and explored the dependence of humans upon God. The skeptical Apology betrayed the direction Montaigne was heading in his Essays: inward towards exploring the self.

Montaigne wrote the thirteen essays of Book Three during the 1580s. These are introspective, intuitive essays in which Montaigne discovered the universality of his own experiences, confronted his own mortality, and discovered the means of achieving contentment. The final essay, Of Experience, expresses the essence of what scholars call Renaissance humanism: it surpasses Petrarch’s Secret in the portrayal of the interaction of human and personal experience. In its depth it makes Francis Bacon’s Essays appear like the writings of a child. Not as humorous as Erasmus’s satire, In Praise of Folly, nevertheless Montaigne’s Of Experience is a more complete and penetrating portrait of human limitations and possibilities.

Montaigne’s bitterness about the violence of the age in which he lived and the problems in the country that gave him birth exuded from the pages of the Essays. “What causes do we not invent for the misfortunes that befall us?” Montaigne wrote in How the Soul Discharges its Passions on False Objects when the True are Wanting. “On what do we not place the blame, rightly or wrongly, so as to have something at which to thrust?” Some even “surpass all madness . . . , adding impiety to folly,” blaming “God himself.”

Conflict is an unavoidable fact of human existence. Political and religious conflicts that yield war and destruction are the most dramatic and horrifying examples of what humans do to each other. But the most numerous conflicts—ubiquitous in human experience—are the hidden and subtle conflicts within each person, who daily wages a war of ideals versus realities, inclinations followed by hesitations, fear and hope, mind versus body. Hence beneath the surface of the religious conflicts of sixteenth-century France were the personal conflicts of normal people. Often they were religious in nature: faith and reason, sin and redemption. Others were the brutal conflicts brought on by sickness, decay, death. Montaigne, for example, waged as fierce a battle with himself on a private scale as those terrible public wars waged by his French countrymen. Montaigne waged a battle against fear. His rival for peace of mind were the minute mineral deposits that formed in his kidneys, which when blocking the passage of the urine, caused tremendous pain, eventually death. On St. Bartholomew’s Day, when public conflict was brought to a head, Montaigne had not yet experienced the stone. But he feared that he would. And fear is much more powerful indeed than actuality.

Death, an all too frequent visitor for a man who lost his father, best friend, younger brother, and five children all by the time he was fifty, transfixed Montaigne. In a 1570 letter, Montaigne dedicated to his wife Francoise de La Chassaigne his friend La Boetie’s translation of Plutarch’s “Letter of Consolation to His Wife.” The couple had recently lost their first born, Thoinette, at the age of two months. Montaigne claimed that all of his feelings regarding the sad event were best summed by Plutarch, who consoled his wife upon the death of their daughter at the age of two.

Montaigne and his wife had five times the experience of this most fleeting moment of life. Six daughters they conceived and brought forth: all save one died within three months. The last, Marie, died within a few days of her birth. Montaigne was (like Plutarch) not the type to bounce an infant on his knee in play. Yet to bury five infants, five wonderful examples of God’s grace, each a singular incarnation, took a significant toll on Montaigne, who characteristically (and stoically) submerged his feelings under the weight of philosophy and faith. What more proof is needed to show humans to be, in Aeschylus’s words, “creatures of a day,” doomed to mirror the passing instant, overwhelmed by the passage of time, uncertain where they are going and where they have been, living only in the narcissistic moment?

Death defined Montaigne’s being. Each moment was potentially a singular experience of joy and wonder if it was not that the passing seconds move one that much closer to the end. Montaigne argued in That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die that he should constantly have the image of death before him. Only in this way may he conquer the fear of death. At the same time that he counseled his readers to accept “divine will” and God’s “inscrutable wisdom,” he was descending deeper into the unforgiving world of thought. He ironically thanked God for the constant “brooding over my thoughts” that would make him the one man prepared “to leave the world . . . utterly and completely.” He anticipated and expected so much as to lose sight of the present for the future. Surrounded by the cold stone walls of his library, the thoughts and examples of countless others, Montaigne entered into an imaginary world where he vicariously explored the range of human experience.

Montaigne was never more miserable than during the twelve years that he witnessed his father’s slow death then awaited his own fate. His fears came true in 1573 when he began to feel abdominal discomfort and he knew that his father’s disease was now his. Then in 1578 came the first awful stone, blocking the urine then slowly proceeding through the penis, ripping the skin, and gushing crimson blood when expelled. The pain was unbearable. His fears grew more intense. When would a stone grow so big within the kidneys as to grind up his organs and his ability to expel waste, so killing him?

During this decade of expectation and fulfillment, of expecting the onset of disease, acquiring it, then awaiting death, Montaigne began his Essays—not so much because he awaited death, rather because he feared it. He wanted to know why he feared it. Why did this simple feeling about an as yet undetermined future so dominate his existence? But if he was to understand his fear, he had to understand other, related things, too. Fear is the product of imagination. “We drip with sweat, we tremble, we turn pale and turn red at the blows of our imagination.” Yearning to understand his images of doom, the abstractions of his mind, “that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”

Fear was Montaigne’s constant companion. The abstractions of his mind took off “like a runaway horse” during his mid-thirties. Death appeared to Montaigne as “so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose.”

At first he tried to employ his powers of reason to control his imagination. More, he hoped to “help it and flatter it, and fool it” if possible. If only his mind “could persuade as well as it preaches, it would help me out very happily.” Day upon day he reasoned with himself, preached to himself, trying to make an apparent evil good, trying to bring pleasure out of suffering. He tried to convince himself that the stone was “for my own good.” “Of the men who are stricken by it there are few that get off more cheaply.” And they are dependent upon the advice, worse, the remedies of physicians. Montaigne began to feel pride as well that he could “hold my water ten hours and as long as anyone,” and though in the grip of pain he could keep up “conversation with . . . company with a normal countenance.” He convinced himself that he was joining the company of the ancient Stoics, through Nature’s favor, controlling the body, elevating the mind. He rationalized his ailment. “But you do not die of being sick, you die of being alive. Death kills you well enough without the help of illness.” Sickness granted him a unique personal experience: in a single moment he could experience the joys and horrors of life: “Is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full?” Montaigne discovered death’s irony that amid its universality is the uniqueness of the particular experience in countless moments of time, never again to be repeated. Human death mirrors human life, human existence, human history, as infinite unique events become the past moving toward the future. The oneness yet individual uniqueness of man is seen most clearly through death. And if one feels terror because of death one also feels beauty and love, for without death life itself would be meaningless. Human love for another requires a sense of an end.

Montaigne’s game of matching his wits against his fears was a delaying action with no possibility of success. On days when his fears became worse, his technique was to “provide other ways of escape.” To aid his reason in the conquest of the imagination, Montaigne kept a personal history of his disease, randomly jotting down his experiences on paper. He would resort to these “Sibyl’s leaves” whenever an image of doom sprang from his fears. “If some grave stroke threatens me, by glancing through these little notes, . . . I never fail to find grounds for comfort in some favorable prognostic from my past experience.” But abstractions of the mind are not so easily destroyed. Just when one perceives victory, some new thought jumps in, fresh, strong, full-armored, and the battle begins anew. With such tactics the war will last until death. Montaigne sensed that though his ruminations were beneficial, and helped him to endure uncertainty and crippling fear, that ultimately some other tactic must be relied upon. Face it, he told himself, the ways of illness, of all existence, are fraught with “uncertainty” and “variety.” “Except for old age,” he concluded, “in all other ailments I see few signs of the future on which to base our divination.”

Montaigne’s bout with the stone gave him a historical perspective on the continuum of past, present, and future. He looked to the past to help him get through the momentary pain of the present and to help alleviate his fears of the future. Here we see life in microcosm: the uncertainty of time, of death, and consequent fears; the employ of reason to convince oneself that such fears are invalid; the use of the past to anticipate the future, to stabilize the present.

Montaigne’s personal historical perspective suggested to him that he reject reason for “actual sensation,” for the experiences and feelings of life, for action. Fear should yield action rather than contemplation in response. Hence, should a new development occur within him, even if it forces “pure blood out of my kidneys,” he must respond, “what of it?” and go on as before, chasing after his hounds “with youthful and insolent ardor.” Images of dread must be countered with the most basic sensations of life, and the primordial joy of living. Imaginary monsters vanish in the real heat of the noonday sun; evil shadows of night disappear in the bright hope of the full moon. “What would be the use,” Montaigne asked, in continuing the fight armed only with reason? The sensations of life cannot be abstracted, cannot be reasoned nor objectively known: only felt. Montaigne decided to wait out the disease, to endure it, to replace reasoning with the experiences and feelings of the moment, to combat the imagination with the reality of a present enlightened by past feelings and past experiences, both his own and those of other humans.

Near the end of his life Montaigne grew to respect Socrates above all men before the birth of Christ. Socrates was the exact opposite of Alexander, who was greedy for power, wealth, knowledge, even virtue. Such was the Europe of Montaigne’s time, immoderate even in good things such as devotion to religion, chaste living, the search for order, and passion for inquiry. Montaigne learned from Socrates that the amount of knowledge necessary to be happy is small indeed. It is because of time, no doubt, that humans can never accept where they are, what they are doing, what they have, who they are: each moment brings with it new opportunities.

The time spent reading, contemplating, pacing, writing, staring out of the windows of his library looking upon the peasants at work on the fields and vineyards of the lands of Montaigne, the endless hours ruminating, searching, trying to know the path to happiness, the way to knowledge, eventually appeared, Montaigne concluded at the end of his life, impious. Why should humans, should he, seek, question, ask, decide, move, plan, force, act upon those matters reserved for the will of God? What is the point to all of the rules of objective scholarship and scientific detachment if what we know or do not know, do or do not do, are in God’s hands anyway? One must accept. “I let myself go as I have come,” Montaigne confessed in Of Physiognomy; I combat nothing.” Balancing knowledge is ignorance; next to will is passivity. Though science and reason call, one must learn the value of faith. Mystery and miracles contradicted the well-trained philosopher’s mind of Montaigne. And yet the so-called stoic, skeptic, rationalist, atheist Montaigne, the Montaigne of the modern scholar, learned to refuse “to condemn,” “dogmatically, as false and impossible,” “prodigies or miracles,” any of which might have marked upon them the hand of God. Carved in the ceiling of his library was the line from the Psalmist, “Thy judgments are like a great deep.” Montaigne’s struggle to accept himself in light of his understanding of God is the story of his life and the theme of the Essays.

(Translations by Donald Frame, Stanford University Press)

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God’s Shadow over American History

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Jean-Pierre Caussade in Abandonment to Divine Providence writes truthfully that God is behind all historical events. If so, then it is God’s will that the United States is in 2025 exactly where He wills it to be. And further, that each person is alive and living their lives according to the divine will. This presents each of us with an enviable but problematic position. Enviable, that we are so blessed by God. Problematic, in that we are responsible to our God to make this life as godly and worthwhile as possible. As Caussade tells us, God is with us, working with us. The metaphor Caussade uses is the shadow. Mary was overshadowed by the divine will, and so are we all, he argues. The shadow is “like a veil” covering “sensible objects,” hiding “them from us.” God’s shadow is near us, even merging with our shadows in the bright sunlight. The shadow, the reality of God’s will, is typically concealed from us. How often do we see it, are we aware of the presence of the Lord?

Working backward in time, what are the signs in our lives, individually and collectively, of God’s shadow? History is a collective story of individual lives. God’s interaction with each person, God’s shadow in the lives of hundreds of millions, becomes one great multifaceted shadow that we call American history. How is it possible to make sense of such a complex interaction? How can 350,000,000 stories come together into one? How can 350,000,000 shadows of God’s will be cast into a remarkable yet incomprehensible single shadow?

More mind-boggling is the population of the earth, over eight billion, each human a part of God’s will. Incredibly, there are millions of species of animal types sharing Earth. The numbers of individual animals are in the hundreds if not thousands or millions of trillions– researchers with a great capacity for counting at the National Science Foundation have estimated that there are at least one trillion species of microbial, plant, and animal life residing on Earth.

To make this assessment of the vast wonder of God’s will even more mystifying, consider the infinite layers of time, of births and deaths, even on a single day, and how these wonderful and tragic events, reflecting God’s will, inform us individually of our own lives in the shadow of His will as well as collectively of a single story of the American people in the vast shadow of His will. But more, what of the dead, and their past lives still impacting the present, the memory, the consequences of their actions, all a part of the collective shadow of God’s will? Proceeding further, what of the angels and their actions on behalf of God’s will interacting with humans as they move hither and yon under the eternal shadow of the will of God?

We love to focus on specific instances to reveal for us the significance of time’s passing, God’s will. Some events are incomprehensible. Each individual death appears a tragedy, and collective deaths even more so. How can we make sense of the 9/11 terror attacks, the deaths so apparently random, the impact on other lives so confusing and terrifying? War is like this. It appears so random. Why is one person destroyed when the next person is spared? Often our greatest leaders at such time of war and disaster are those who accept the will of God. George Washington, for example, was praised for this. A minister wrote during the Revolutionary War that “A man is never more truly noble than when he is sensible that he is only a secondary instrument of bringing to pass God’s great designs.” This was in reference to Washington, whose characteristics included humility before God, his realization that Divine Providence, the will of God, was the ultimate reason for American success during the American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln likewise could not understand why America was being destroyed during the Civil War, but he accepted it as God’s will and put himself, as President, in God’s hands. The Gettysburg Address was his most profound statement in this regard. In other revolutionary events, such as the discovery and colonization of America, the one who relies on God’s will and serves as an instrument of that will—people such as Columbus—are most remembered. Pope Leo XIII praised Christopher Columbus for his devotion to God’s will, quoting the explorer as saying “‘I trust that, by God’s help, I may spread the Holy Name and Gospel of Jesus Christ as widely as may be’.”

There is overwhelming evidence in the affirmative to the debate in recent years as to whether or not the United States was formed by Christians who were sure that God’s will was behind the discovery of America by the Europeans, the colonization of the east coast of North America by the British, and the emergence of an independent United States of America in the 1770s and 1780s. Today, this idea is often derided with the sneer that conservatives believe in “American exceptionalism,” yet like it or not, the founders of this country did believe in American exceptionalism because they believed that God was behind the founding and success of the United States of America. And over the course of the past two hundred and fifty years, there continue to be huge numbers of Americans who believe that God has destined America for greatness, past, present, and future, conforming to the will of God.  

Of this greatness, this conformity, no single mind can comprehend the infinite thoughts, actions, hesitations, mistakes, influences, accidents, layers and layers of interactions of humans, animals, supernatural presences, all foreseen, all known, all willed in a mysterious shadowy form, like mist on a foggy day, or rays of sunlight filtering through cloudy skies. Trying to conceive of it all just in a moment much less to consider scores of years appears impossible, fruitless, defeating. And yet God wills us to contemplate it, to trace our individual and collective pasts, for Jesus Himself lived in time, moment by moment in the shadow of God’s will. Salvation is accomplished in time. Miracles occur in time. Sin shackles and redemption releases in time. The Eucharistic miracle occurs in time. When Jesus was overwhelmed by time’s passing, by the demands of so many souls, so many people acting in the shadow of God’s will, he sought refuge in quiet and prayer. This was His way of making sense. Prayer is the only way we can make sense of time, of the past, the present, and the future, and God’s will guiding us along the path to Himself.

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Love and Compassion

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Buddhists call it compassion,

This love that we have within,

A love that is in fashion,

Intuits when we begin,

A house with many mansions,

A place without sin.

A place where fly the fairies,

Those beings swift as the air,

Where evil never tarries

Only the beautiful and the fair,

With hearts like golden cherries,

Scampering here and there.

Our lives are God’s the Provident,

All beings big and small,

His will and love are evident,

Even in a sparrow’s fall,

It’s clear if you just think of it,

Here, there—everywhere–God is all.

He counts the strands of fur,

In every cat and dog,

His knowledge is the lure,

That clears the mind in fog,

Time goes by in a blur,

Recorded in God’s log.

Fear of death is staggering,

It’s present everywhere,

Comes to the weak and swaggering,

Death’s ubiquity has no care,

The end is the great gathering,

A universal nightmare.

We all are beings of fancy,

Playthings with each other,

Impatient with life, antsy—

Accusing the great Mother,

She who fills the vacancy,

When confronting the eternal Other.

Trillions the sorts of creatures,

That teach us the lesson,

Life is the grand feature,

The never-ending session,

Words of the great Teacher,

Sets us on a mission.

To bring to the world Love,

That creation at the first,

The Maker of heaven above,

Instills in us the thirst,

To bring to all what He wove,

Complacency that will burst.

Go out among them all,

Commanded the eternal Lord,

From here to there go call,

Slashing evil with the sword,

Bring them to Heaven’s great hall,

The King of Glory’s award.

All life throughout every clime,

Unrelentingly rushes forward,

All those we loved in time,

In the direction of the divine, toward,

Happiness, when all words rhyme.

And all is a Word,

Divinely spoken.

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The Southern Hill Country Mentality

Posted on October 10, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Reflections on the people of the American South after the Civil War into the 20th and 21st centuries as they confronted the perils of modernization.

The Southern hill country personality type is a reticence towards others, even a reticence toward life, a suspicion about others, really a suspicion about everything, being afraid to commit, being afraid to take action, waiting, accepting—accepting not so much God, awaiting the will of God, as accepting because of unwillingness to act, to take a chance. And so life can pass by and one sits and waits, stifled by inaction, stifled by indecision, until finally something forces movement. Movement may be caused by hunger, or fear, some outside force that impels the person to do what he might not otherwise have done. The consequent movement, action, might be absurd, completely out of character, yet circumstances have brought about this action, this movement, and the person goes blindly along, not sure, waiting even while moving, passive even while in the process of acting, faithless even while seemingly throwing all aside in an act of blind faith.

Emotions, likewise, are restricted, because one is unsure how to express them. How does one express love toward another when one is unsure, and reticence is the typical response to everything in life. How can one feel excitement, feel love, feel wonder, feel happiness, in an uncertain world where inaction, waiting, watching, seems the most comfortable approach to life? Rocking in the chair on the porch, waiting—for what? For nothing really, just waiting. Perhaps just waiting for death, waiting for everything to finally come to an end. Waiting for the boredom to end. Waiting for the failure to end. Waiting to be released from the stifling inaction and uncertainty and hopelessness and faithlessness.

The Southern hill country personality is outwardly pious, but inwardly barren. Outwardly such people belong to a church, believe in God, say the proper grace at meals, sing the proper hymns, but without emotion, without feeling, because religion is something not to express emotion over; to express love for God is just as uncomfortable as to express love for another, a child, a relative, a parent. It is embarrassing.  

Thank God for radio and television, by which one can submerge inaction and lack of confidence and the endless waiting for who knows what into a fantasy world of action, of love, of certitude, of confidence, of knowing exactly what to do, of taking life and directing it according to one’s will. How relieving to be able to watch a program, watch others, who are doing what you are unable, unwilling, to do, but you can watch along as they do it, and feel the satisfaction of a life well lived even if it is not your own.

Such crutches are everywhere, to help one limp along in life. If not television, if not the internet, then booze, or pills, or gambling, or something that takes one’s mind away from what is, to focus on what could be, what might be, and so lose oneself in a stupor, a fantasy world where one is exactly what one is not, where one is a great actor, a great mover, a great lover, a wealthy dynamic mover and shaker, a confident person wrestling with life and winning the match time and again.

What happens to you if all of a sudden chance (or destiny) steps in and wrestles  you away from such a life, and you are brought into an awareness of something completely different, a different approach to life, whether it be due to the northern urban personality or some sort of personality in which the fire has been lit, and there is no embarrassment, and a person acts, sometimes foolishly, sometimes in failure, but acts just the same. What is it to put aside inaction to grasp an opportunity and do it? How can the southern hill personality abide by such a notion? Perhaps there becomes a contest of different personalities, different approaches to life, and a person is caught in between, and the personality conflict rages within, the genes of the past confronting the newness of the present, and the split personality results in internal chaos. North and south meet, action and inaction, arrogance and humility, certainty and uncertainty, willingness and unwillingness, and the split personality is torn in so many directions, between choice and non-choice, action and inaction, moving and waiting, doing and watching, accepting life as opportunity or accepting life as struggle.

How can life be both opportunity and struggle, action and inaction, doing and waiting, getting up and sitting down, embracing and distancing, feeling emotion and fearing emotion, loving but being embarrassed by love?

Northern Yankees and Southern hill country people: two different ways at looking at life. One is more accepting, but still has the same fears and trepidations as others, but masks the fears in the formalities and structures of urbanized living—the associations or gessellschaft of modern society. The other is suspicious of such formalities, befitting a more rural people; the fears and trepidations of life are often dealt with not by masking them in formalities, rather by submerging them in the informalities of a more community existence: plain speaking, suspicion of others outside of one’s typical familiarity, a rough appearance to the world to show “ain’t scared–even if you are.

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Christianity and Memorial Day

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

What does Memorial Day have to do with Roman Catholics? Is it only a ceremony with meaning for patriotic Americans? Or can others throughout the world learn from the Roman Catholic approach to celebrating Memorial Day? To answer these questions, let the wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI guide us, as expressed in his writings.

Memorial Day was initially associated with the commemoration of soldiers who died during the Civil War. At first it was nonsectarian yet devoted to a belief that God has a connection with, a regard for, the United States of America. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” reflects this attitude that all the dead of the war should be commemorated to God. Lincoln himself was a nonsectarian Christian, believing in Christ but not in a standardized, denominational Christianity.

Memorial Day is associated with civil religion, that is, a sense that an ill-defined God is concerned with the affairs of a people and nation. Memorial Day is a patriotic devotion to a nation and its God, and uses various icons—imagery, words, music—to express this devotion and to remember not only soldiers but all deceased.

In Catholicism, there are many memorial days commemorating the lives of saints, those who sacrificed for others, giving of oneself for the sake of another or others. This sacrifice is not restricted to soldiers, but all people who make an ultimate sacrifice for others, even if this sacrifice did not occur on a battlefield. This sacrifice is part of freedom, the freedom of Christ, where we are no longer condemned to slavery. Those people who live lives conforming to Christ are living in freedom and fighting for freedom in the same sense as a soldier fighting for physical and material freedom for his/her country. Memorial Day therefore is honoring all people, worldwide, that have fought for the freedom of others, not just physical or political freedom, but spiritual freedom, by teaching and example conforming to Christ.

There are some humans who do not live according to the freedom God offers to conform to or to reject the teachings and life example of Christ; nevertheless their lives have significance for multiple reasons, for they are a part of God’s creation, and as humans they have struggled against themselves, exercising free will either in conformity to or in opposition to God’s will. All of creation, including humans, are a gift of God: we honor this gift when we recognize their lives and pray in gratitude for their lives. But there is something more here. We pray for the departed because we believe our prayers help them. They are still with us, they are still a part of history if not time, and our prayers connect with them. Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, in the book Eschatology as well as his Encyclical Spe Salvi, explains how the departed continue to be connected to our lives, to all human history. He writes that time besets us with problems, but we find help in the community of saints: the redeemed of all ages. “This signifies that the walls separating heaven and earth, and past, present, and future, are now as glass.” We find hope in the saved, those who have “already achieved history of faith.” He argues further that Scripture does not support the idea of a sleep of death that occurs between dying and the end of time; rather those who “died in Christ are alive.” He explains further that “God’s dialogue with us becomes truly human, since God conducts his part as man. Conversely, the dialogue of human beings with each other now becomes a vehicle for the life everlasting, since in the communion of saints it is drawn up into the dialogue of the Trinity itself.” (Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, 2nd ed. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 9, 131, 159.)

Ratzinger’s work provides a definitive explanation of purgatory, which adds new meaning to the thoughts and prayers for loved ones on Memorial Day. Humans experience memory time, per St. Augustine, shaped by our temporal experiences but not completely tied to them. When we die, memory time separates us from biological time, and we retain this memory for the “possibility of purification and fulfillment in a final destiny which will relate us to matter in a new way. It is a precondition for the intelligibility of the resurrection as a fresh possibility for man.” Memorial Day is a perfect time to ask for forgiveness from those we have wronged, and to pray for them on their journey to righteousness. Ratzinger argues that Jesus in the incarnation bound himself to human history. A person cannot be said to have reached his fulfillment if other humans suffer on account of him/her. “The guilt which goes on because of me,” he writes, “is a part of me. Reaching as it does deep into me, it is part of my permanent abandonment to time, whereby human beings really do continue to suffer on my account, and which, therefore, still affects me.” Moreover, “love cannot . . . close itself against others or be without them so long as time, and with it suffering, is real”—hence love ties us to the present and past suffering of humans even after our deaths. Purgatory is “unresolved guilt, a suffering which continues to radiate out because of guilt. Purgatory means, then, suffering to the end what one has left behind on earth—in the certainty of being definitively accepted, yet having to bear the infinite burden of the withdrawn presence of the Beloved.” (Eschatology, 184, 187, 188, 189)

When on Memorial Day we go to pray for our lost loved ones, it is well to remember Ratzinger’s comment that “even when they have crossed over the threshold of the world beyond, human beings can still carry each other and bear each others’ burdens.” (Eschatology, 227) As Pope Benedict writes in the Encyclical, Spe Salvi, “In Hope We are Saved”: “The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today.” Again: “The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse. So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death. In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other—my prayer for him—can play a small part in his purification. And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God’s time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain.”

Pope Benedict’s teaching has had a profound impact on how I perceive Memorial Day. He is inviting me–and you–to take this Day seriously, to pray for the departed, to establish a communion that reaches beyond time and the grave.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Christianity and Independence Day

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Independence Day in America is a secular holiday celebrating freedom with picnics, fireworks, parades, and the proud display of the American flag. For Christians, Independence Day means even more, for by the signing of the Declaration of Independence a series of events ensued that shaped Christianity in America from 1776 until today. For Roman Catholics, Independence Day means the freedom to worship in America, which allows Roman Catholics the opportunity to spread the truth of Christianity to all people in North America and beyond, thus fulfilling, ultimately, Jesus’s command to His disciples, as quoted by the Apostle Mark, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was Roman Catholic Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, who like all Catholics in the thirteen British-American colonies was persecuted for his beliefs. Carroll, however, believed in the promise of America: that constitutional safeguards would protect liberty by limiting popular rule, suppress vice and promote virtue, and restrain political passions with a focus on reason. His cousin John Carroll had also grown up in Maryland, experiencing the same restrictions on Roman Catholics; after years of education in Europe, he returned to Maryland during the revolutionary crisis. In 1776, John joined his cousin Charles (as well as Benjamin Franklin) in an unsuccessful diplomatic expedition to Canada to try to convince the Catholics of Quebec to join the American cause. John Carroll was also a Jesuit who lived at a time when Pope Clement XIV had suppressed the Jesuits; Carroll lived through the war keeping his head down as both a Jesuit and Catholic. During the war, the Vicar Apostolic of London had ostensible authority over American Catholics. The Vatican, responding to John Carroll and other Catholics at the end of the war requesting a new authority over American Catholics, appointed Father John Carroll Superior of the Missions. Father Carroll at wars end faced this question: how are Catholics, suppressed during the colonial period, able to exercise their rights and freedoms in an independent United States of America?

The freedom to exercise the same rights as other Americans while also fulfilling the Great Commission to spread Christianity throughout North America inspired Father Carroll in 1784 to write a book, Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America. In responding to attacks by American Protestants on Roman Catholics, Father John Carroll’s remarks shed light on how Roman Catholics viewed Independence.

Father Carroll argued that Protestants incorrectly assume that Roman Catholics are authoritarian and unable to accept other people who do not embrace the Catholic way. Rather, “the members of the catholic church are all those, who with a sincere heart seek true religion, and are in an unfeigned disposition to embrace the truth, whenever they find it.” He quoted the authority of St. Thomas Aquinas, “that even they, to whom the gospel was never announced, will be excused from the sin of infidelity. . . . If any of them conduct themselves in the best manner they are able . . . God will provide for them in his mercy.” Carroll elaborated that humans must conform to the “laws of nature” (echoing the Declaration of Independence) “and directions of right reason.” Roman Catholics are therefore joined to other American seekers of religious truth.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims arguments according to reason that are “self-evident” truths. Father Carroll used the same approach in his book, showing the rationale for the emphasis of Roman Catholics on the apostolic tradition: each priest receives from Christ “the same commission of teaching, and administering the sacraments.” The church “cannot exist without preaching of the gospel”; hence the infallible doctrines are continuously provided for all people. “No books, no erudition is here necessary. The illiterate, as well as learned Christian can easily be certified of the fact, on which the reasoning is founded.”

The Declaration of Independence is written for a rational people. Father Carroll expressed his view of the devotion of Catholics to an America “blessed with civil and religious liberty.” Americans, he believed, have “the wisdom and temper to preserve” this liberty such that “America may come to exhibit a proof to the world, that general and equal toleration, by giving a free circulation to fair argument, is the most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith.”

Independence Day to such a person as Father John Carroll is a symbol of God’s providential care for a people who are willing to join together in pursuit of God’s truth, and upon acquiring a working knowledge of said truth, to implement it in government, society, and culture, to promote freedom of conscience confident that inquiring people shall know the truth, and the truth shall set them free.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Christianity and Labor Day: Why Work Matters

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Americans first celebrated Labor Day in the 1880s during the height of the Industrial Revolution in America when immigrants were coming to America to fill the growing number of low-paying jobs in factories in American cities. The founders of Labor Day were Irish Catholics who were seeking better working conditions for the millions of American workers. Whole families, including children, worked long hours in unsafe and dismal factories for extremely low wages. Many of the immigrants arriving to America after the Civil War were Roman Catholics from all parts of Europe. Although their jobs were often the worst of the worst, they knew that work was nevertheless a blessing from God and therefore should be honored. President Grover Cleveland in 1894 made Labor Day an official holiday so that all Americans could celebrate work and workers.

American Catholic workers from the nineteenth to the twentieth century looking for validity in their jobs and commensurate recognition, mostly in terms of job security and good wages, joined labor unions and other organizations to promote the cause of American workers. One such promoter of Catholic work was Dorothy Day, a convert to Catholicism, who in 1933 helped to establish a movement and newspaper, The Catholic Worker, to fight for the recognition and the rights of the American worker.

There is Biblical and ecclesiastical support for the recognition of the worker, the value of work, and the rights of workers. In the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, issued under Pope John Paul II, the necessity and value of work is justified according to Biblical and Catholic doctrine. God’s work, human work, God’s Creation, and humans as creatures who work according to God’s will: these are important themes in the Bible. Adam and Eve were ordained to work, but as obedient creatures working according to God’s will rather than as creators of their own world in the absence of God. God made humans the stewards of the creation working within the guidelines, the will, of God.

There is no better source of wisdom for the value of work and no better model for the worker than the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who learned the trade of a carpenter, and practiced this trade during his life. He often commented on his role working to bring about the Kingdom of God. His life was therefore one of working with God’s creation to fulfill its potential, and working to bring awareness of God’ love for all creatures: these tasks are still considered worthy and holy by His disciples.

The Holy Family is a model of a working family. As Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church proclaims, “the family constitutes one of the most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical order of human work”. Work is the core that holds the family together both in terms of self-esteem of the different family members and the ability of the family to provide a successful and healthy standard of living. By extension, just as Joseph taught Jesus a trade so must all parents impart to their children the realization of the importance of work in human social and cultural existence and in God’s plan for His creation. “Idleness is harmful to man’s being, whereas activity is good for his body and soul.” Work in the family is for the stability of the family’s domestic economy of order, cleanliness, and health, as well as for the material basis to maintain an adequate standard of living to promote self-respect and family pride. For this to occur, as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states, adequate wages must be provided for substantial quality work. The modern industrial age has often seen exploitation of the poor by means of the wealthy; the Bible and the Church teach that it is incumbent upon those participating in our modern economy to treat workers, no matter their status, with dignity, rewarding their toil with adequate wages, and honoring their work as akin to God’s plan.

Jesus also taught, based on the Scriptures, that work is required for the fulfillment of God’s plan for Creation. Humans, as stewards of the creation, through work care for, protect, manage, and show love for the creation. This Care for Our Common Home has been a frequent theme in the writings of Pope Francis. Through work, he writes in the Encyclical Laudato Si, “each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.”

Work is therefore not only a way to seek fulfillment in life, but work is also required by God to fulfill His benevolent plan for His creation.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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