In
John C. Wright's Journal
Q: You were raised as a Protestant, you grew into an atheist,
you married a Christian Scientist and then you went and became a
Catholic. It’s hard not to think of a miracle. How were you led into the
fold?
A: Odd as this will sound to Christian readers, my reason for being an atheist was because of a deeply rooted love of truth.
Since a young age, I believed that human reason, and only human
reason, was man’s path to discover the nature of reality and virtue, to
discover what one is and what one ought to be, provided one was
sufficiently fearless and objective and dispassionate in the
investigation. All belief in anything supernatural I rejected as
insufficiently supported the evidence; even the concept of a natural
above nature I rejected as paradox. But for all my skepticism I never
lost my love of truth.
Three things happened which eroded my faith in atheism.
First, when I became a husband, I was shocked and appalled to learn
that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of unborn
children. The atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended
and acted as if my son were not alive, not human, not important; when,
of course, any man who loves the truth cannot help but see that he has a
duty to love and protect his beloved children. The secular not only
lied, they tempted young mothers to commit the most atrocious crime
imaginable, for surely to kill one’s own little helpless baby is worse
than to kill a stranger, because when a mother who should love her
helpless child kills a relative, there is treason involved, a betrayal
of her highest duty and her deepest instincts. The baby has no one else
to protect him.
My son was wrongly diagnosed with having a disease, and the doctor
gently suggested killing him. My wife was a Christian, and would not
even hear of the issue. To my infinite shame and regret, for a moment,
just for a moment, overcome with the fear of the burdens raising a
crippled child would lay on me, I was tempted by the offer, and
contemplated killing my own son. You see, I did not have the staff of
the Church on which to lean. I was trying with my own unaided human
reason to find my way through the thicket of vice and virtue, right and
wrong, and so for a moment my foot touched the pathway to hell.
For that moment, in my heart, I thought as a murderer thinks, and not
just a healthy, normal murderer, no, a kin-slayer; an infanticide.
What was wrong with the atheist world, if we atheists were so right
on so many things, that we could be so grossly wrong about this?
Second, when I became a father, I realized that my duty as a father
was to raise my sons to be men, real men, and not to be weak and foolish
creatures enslaved to degrading vices. This was not a matter of opinion
or preference: it was a matter of iron duty, which I could not evade
any more than I could evade the fact that twice two equals four. The
atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended and acted as if
all moral choices are equal and all equally meaningless: that no matter
what you choose, your choice is sacred and praiseworthy, because there
is no wrong choice. This doctrine is not only a lie, it is illogical, on
the grounds that a father cannot instruct his children to make choices
without standards, and a standard by definition is something one does
not choose. It is a given.
So, once again, I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been
lied to my whole life about the nature of human vice and human
sexuality. I had been told by the secular culture and by my fellow
atheists that sex was a recreation, a source of meaningless pleasure,
and I had been told that fornication was better than monogamy, and
sexual perversion was better than chastity. Upon becoming a father,
logic told me that no matter what my preferences or opinions in the
matter, I would be failing in my duty to my sons if I taught them to be
unchaste or to be perverts. But everyone around me, the entire world,
the media, the press, the culture, the academia, the laws, all were
unified against that single, simple idea that truth is better than
falsehood and purity better than vice. I realized with a sensation of
seasickness that I was surrounded by an empire of lies.
So for the second time I asked myself, what was wrong with the
atheist world, if we atheists were so right on so many things, that we
could be so grossly wrong about this?
On September 11th, the anniversary of the defeat of the
Paynims of the Battle of Vienna, America, and all the Western world, was
viciously and cravenly attacked by Mohammedans, and the long war
between Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, suspended since Lepanto, was
renewed. As an atheist, I saw this as an example of the extravagant
evils of religion in action, and was certain that my fellow atheists
would be as outraged as was I with the attack on our most beloved
institutions of the West, the liberty – particular intellectual and
academic liberty – which we enjoyed.
Instead, the atheists, particularly those of the American Left,
vocally and wholeheartedly supported and applauded every effort to stop
any retaliation for the unprovoked attack, and sided, wherever possible,
with our enemies. While not coming out and saying they wished for enemy
victory, they rushed to aid and comfort them, put legal and social
barriers in place against our forces to protect the foe, and played the
grossly dishonest word-games of moral equivalence and blaming the
victim.
I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole
life about the nature of secularism. It was not, as it so often claimed
to be, a merely rational and human concern for human life on Earth. To
judge from the public reaction of the majority of atheists after the
Twin Towers fell, the atheists did not side with civilization against
the dark and barbaric terrorists. No, they sided with the terrorists
against the Christians.
I stared in all directions in astonishment, with wide eyes and mouth
hanging open. What had driven the world I served insane? They were
suicidal. The atheists were aiding and abetting the Jihad, offering
apologetics and support for it.
The thing I had thought my whole life was atheism was not atheism, it was merely antichristianity.
I was ashamed to the core of my being to see my fellow atheists
behaving in such a fashion. In three areas of paramount importance, the
nature of life and death, the nature of sex and romance, and the nature
of war and peace, my fellow atheists were not only wrong, they were
extraordinarily and absurdly and profoundly wrong, wrong to the point of
insanity.
At about this same time, atheism started becoming popular, and many
books and articles were published that were openly atheistic: authors
such as Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris. One would think I would
rejoice to see the ideas I supported at long last receiving public
attention. But the books and articles were lies. My fellow atheists were
not attacking the things about religion I thought mistaken and evil,
they were attacking the good things which made religion tolerable, those
same three issues of life versus death, chastity versus perversion,
self-defense versus self-destruction. They were attacking reason.
I was an atheist because I loved truth and I thought that the truth,
the unpleasant truth, was that no gods were or could be real. Because I
loved truth, I loved virtue, life, reason, and goodness. And I found
myself alone. All my fellow atheists, to one degree or another, were on
the side of falsehood, death, nonsense and madness and evil.
I have three times mentioned how shocked I was, but I did not say
what shocked me so. I was shocked by the sheer frivolity, the
lightheartedness, the silliness of my fellow atheists and the
whole secular world in their approach to these deep matters of life and
death, purity and perversity, peace and war. They treated all issues of
philosophy like questions of fashion.
None of my fellow atheists, not one, was an inspiration for me as a
husband, or as a father, or as a patriot of the civilization of the
West. Even men whom I admired for other reasons, or were dear friends,
treated selfishness as if it were the norm, treated love of life as if
it were an oddity, or treated history as if it had never happened.
The idea haunted me that the atheists could not be wrong about all
the important issues in life, but right about the one paramount issue of
whether God existed.
Once my faith in atheism was lost, my deep-seated hatred of
Christianity eroded. I began reading Christian authors, particularly
C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. In them, I found the sanity and sobriety
that was missing in my atheist allies. Lewis and Chesterton were not
merely right, but deeply and soundly and soberly right, right in the way
a healthy man is right: their hearts were in the right place.
The idea haunted me that the Christians could be right about all the
important issues in life, but wrong about the one paramount issue of
whether God existed.
So I sat down to read the Summa Theologica. Remember that it
was my firm belief that unaided human reason was the only tool men had
to discover the nature of reality and morality. I reasoned that this
work, written by the most reasonable writer of all time, could settle
the matter. If he could not reason me into belief in God, no one could.
Well, the thickness and the dryness, the sheer hard work of the
intellectual effort defeated my attempt. I gazed with weary eyes at the
endless pages of tightly-reasoned proofs, each as difficult as a math
problem, and decided that God Almighty would not, if He were real,
expect every illiterate farmer in every village too small to have a
paved road run to it to go through this careful and painstaking means of
reasoning to discover Him. If He were Almighty, as well as being the
creator of the laws of nature of the universe, He would have some means
by which the people whom He wished to save from death could be saved.
Armed with this simple reasoning, I decided to put all my lifetime of
philosophy to an empirical test! I knelt and prayed perhaps the most
arrogant prayer of all time (albeit, at the time, being an atheist, I
had no idea how arrogant it was).
“Dear God,” I prayed, “I know you do not exist. I can prove it with
the accuracy and elegance of a proof from Euclid. But, as a philosopher,
I am honor bound to entertain seriously even ideas I know to be absurd.
So, just on the off chance that the absurd idea that You exist is true,
sir, I demand that You show Yourself to me and prove that You exist. If
You hear this prayer, and do not answer, then You either do not care if
I know You, or You cannot. If the first case, You are not all-loving,
and in the second, not all-knowing or not all-powerful , so if You do
not answer this prayer, You lack one of the defining attributes of God.
And if You do not exist at all, I have wasted no more than a lungful of
air and a moment, of time, but I have done all my duty as a philosopher
requires, and put the matter to the test. I dare You to show Yourself to
me.”
Well, God answers prayers, even blasphemous ones, sometimes with a
dreadful sense of humor. Three days later, I was stricken out of the
clear blue with a heart attack. As I lay on the floor writhing and
dying, my wife, a good Christian woman, called her Church, and a man who
makes his living praying for the sick and healing them offered to heal
me , which he did on the spot and in that same moment. The pain went
from being all-consuming to nothing in the time it would take you to
snap your fingers.
Astonished and clutching my chest at the sudden and complete surcease
of pain, and curious as to what had afflicted me, I went to the
hospital emergency room. I was not worried, but I wanted an examination
to tell me what had happened. The doctors ordered major heart surgery,
for it seemed that I had five blocked arteries in my heart. So I was in
one hospital and then another for several days.
On the first day, before any surgery, while I was waiting in the
emergency room, I suddenly grew aware of my own soul, a part of myself
which, up until that moment, I would have said was mythical,
make-believe. I felt the Holy Spirit enter my body. It was like a
physical sensation. I was not drugged nor in pain nor frightened nor
influenced by anything that would deceive my senses and memory: nor can I
describe it to anyone who had not suffered a similar sensation.
As you can imagine, this gave me much to ponder. After the surgery,
to the surprise of the nurses, I did not need any pain killers, because
an act of prayer merely made the pain go away.
Then the Virgin Mary came to visit me. She has told me not to speak
of what we spoke of, but I will say that there was no secret to it,
nothing you could not learn merely by reading your Bible.
That was astonishing enough, but then I saw God. He was like a light,
and like perfect love, and I was filled with ecstasy and bliss.
Later, I saw Jesus Christ. Unlike my other visitors, He terrified
me, telling me that He would be my judge on the last day, but that God
the Father judged no man. At this point, I suspect that my visions might
be hallucinations, because no Christian I had ever met, and no book by
any Christian I had ever read, had ever put across this odd and zany
doctrine that God does not judge men, but that Christ does.
After I was released from the Hospital, I spend many a day at home
recovering. Again, I was not on any drugs nor pain killers, nothing
that would influence my thinking or my perceptions. And I had a
religious experience. This was different in nature than the visions,
which were experiences much like speaking to a person, or communing
with a loved one. This was more like being a mind taken up into a larger
mind, a small soul being embraced in a larger one, a soul larger than
the universe. I saw that all thoughts ultimately issue from God, who is
the prime mover of thought as He is of action, and I saw the relation of
time to free will, and the paradox of God’s foreknowledge and the
freedom of men to disobey was explained to me. It was as if I stood
outside of time, and could turn and look at it, and see its structure,
its symphony.
If this were not enough, two or three weeks later, I decided to read
the Bible for the first time since in my adult life. I came across a
passage which was word for word the same as the vision of Christ said to
me. The passage is from the John, which I had never read before, not
even in school.
So, I had asked, nay, demanded proof from God that He show Himself to
me, and I was answered as entirely as any man could ask. I experienced a
miracle healing, was saved from death, then felt the Holy Spirit, spoke
to the Virgin and saw the Father, and later had a religious experience.
As a philosopher, I note with wry amusement that the attempts of my
atheist friends to explain away my experiences as coincidence or
delusion or self-delusion are contemptibly weak, a mere tissue of ad hoc
explanations. I note as well, that they cannot explain why virtue is
better than vice, logic better than nonsense, life better than death, or
why there is a universe instead of a void.
To be sure, there are mysteries and paradoxes in Christianity,
questions of incarnation and foreknowledge at which the human reason
quails, and yet from these paradoxes come conclusions so sound and clear
and wholesome that a man can know how best to live. I have tried my
whole life to live up to the strict and stern standards of the noble
Roman Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Seneca, and to
live with as little fear of death as Socrates displayed, even with a cup
of poison in his hand.
The only time I was utterly unafraid was when (according to the
world’s standards) I should have been most afraid, when I was under the
knife for major surgery. Instead, filled with the love of God and a
peace that cannot be described, I was buoyant, fearless, and cheerful. I
was as unafraid as Saint John when he held a cup of poison in his hand.
In other words, as a Stoic, I could never live as a Stoic, and adhere
to the pagan standards of a good and noble life. But as a Christian, I
could.
My atheist friends, when they pontificate on their doctrines of
life, utter paradoxes even more paradoxical than any Christian theology,
and from their paradoxes come only darkness and hell, conclusions so
confused and petty that a man who actually believed them would either
throw himself into a whorehouse and live his life in an endless and
endlessly vain pursuit of false pleasures, or throw himself in to the
sea and drown his meaningless life in the uncaring salt wave.
I hope that answers the question.
Q: The Great Books program of St. John’s College had a
significant influence on the way you understand the world and,
indirectly, on your becoming a Catholic. Could you tell us something
about it?
A: Ah, I see you have resolved only to ask me questions which require
page after page to answer! Saint John’s College in Annapolis is a
school of a type that might be more familiar to Europeans than to
Americans. There are no tests and no grades, and every student follows
the same course of study, which consists of the classical Trivium and
Quadrivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music,
Astronomy). We read the Great Books of Western literature in roughly
chronological order, starting with the ancient Greeks, the Latins, the
Medieval and Renaissance writers, the Reformation and Enlightenment, and
finally, and disappointingly, the Moderns.
We read literature starting with Homer, philosophy starting with
Plato, studies music and languages, science from Ptolemy to Einstein,
mathematics from Euclid to Goedel politics from Aristotle to the
Federalist Papers, and economics, the youngest of the disciplines, from
Adam Smith to Karl Marx.
Such an education is like being a man with a memory in a world of
amnesiacs. All the clever ideas which you will hear from all the clever
people, repeated as if no one could question them, all come from
somewhere and for some reason, usually in answer to a specific problem
in philosophy or politics, ethics or mathematics – and the clever people
are not clever enough to tell you where their ideas come from. Nor, not
knowing their origins, can the clever people defend such ideas.
A little knowledge of the great conversation which has been going on
between the generations and which forms the basis of our civilization
(for the basis of civilization is in the habits of virtue formed by the
habits of mind, which in turn are formed by philosophy) would be of
inestimable value. Consider that Aristotle, in analyzing the Utopian
Republic of Plato, adroitly identified the problem with all schemes to
own property in common, or raise children communally. Imagine the
bloodshed that would have been averted, the millions and tens of
millions of lives saved in the Twentieth Century, had this adroit
criticism of communism been remembered and taken to heart by the
intellectuals of those years.
In my day, the school was blissfully free of Political Correctness –
there simply are no African American ancient Greek philosophers or
playwrights or historians or poets to put onto the list of Great Books,
and a writer like Cervantes was present because he was great, not
because he was “Hispanic”. I believe that purity has been sullied by the
inclusion of at least one writer based on his skin color, not based on
the merit of his contribution in the commonwealth of letters.
Q: Should Catholic colleges concentrate on providing that kind of education?
A: I don’t know anything about Catholic colleges to be able to answer
the question. I will say that the swiftest and best cure for
Protestantism and Modernism is to be familiar with the accomplishments
of the past. Nothing shatters the yokel parochialism of the present day
more swiftly than recognizing the immense stature of men of genius whose
thought built our world.
Q: When you became a Catholic you took the name of a 1st Century martyr, Saint Justin. Why did you choose that patron saint?
He is the patron saint of philosophy. I think of myself first as a
philosopher who writes novels, not as a novelist who writes philosophy.
I pray him to inspire and lead me to be as he was: one who cared more
for truth than for life.
Q: You write for a living and, apparently, in your free time,
after a long day writing… you keep on writing. You have a successful
blog on which you talk about literature and sci-fi, but also about God,
philosophy, politics and morals. Why did you start writing a blog?
A: Human weakness, vanity, madness. I was once a newspaperman, and my
generous editor gave me leave to write on any of the topics of the day,
or, for that many, any topic at all. As if bitten by a bug, I became so
used to writing editorials that I find I cannot long do without it. It
is sort of like St Vitus’s Dance, except with words rather than
foot-twitching.
Q: Some people think that science fiction and Catholicism
are all but incompatible (due to the old Faith vs. Science canard). I
guess you don’t agree…
A: I rather strongly do not agree. Catholicism invented Western
Civilization which invented science. The scientific method rests on
certain metaphysical and theological axioms without which it cannot
exist. Because these axioms were not recognized in the ancient world or
the Orient, there was no scientific progress properly so called in
ancient Greece, or Rome, or before the coming of the White Man, in
India, China, or the New World, accomplished though these civilizations
in other ways certainly were.
The modern recrudescence of paganism, the bland heathen world view of
the materialists, is undermining the ability of the West to continue to
do science. The recent scandal and word-war over Global Warming and
Global Cooling I suggest is a sign of the decay of modern science.
Postmodern science is a dead limb severed from its life giving Catholic
roots. Earlier examples of the abortive science of postchristian nations
can be seen in Lysenko in Soviet Russia, and the make-believe race
sciences and history of the Nazi Germans.
To a smaller degree, science and Protestantism are all but
incompatible, since the essential point of Protestantism is the
rejection of the unity and the Magisterium of the Church. This
necessitates whole dependence for all matters of faith and morals on a
private interpretation of scripture. Such private interpretation is
strongly inclined, since there is no certain authority on which to rely,
to be literal. Protestantism, with its strong emphasis on private
judgment and private reason, ironically is prone to enthusiasm,
including outbreaks of mania and emotionalism and esoteric doctrine
which an authoritarian Church naturally hinders or checks. Science is
unemotional and public and authoritative, and the findings of geology,
astronomy, and biology certainly seem to be incompatible with a literal
reading of Genesis; and the enthusiastic nature of some Protestant
groups urges them to hold science and literature and learning in low
regard (the example of Deal Hudson as depicted in his autobiographical
AN AMERICAN CONVERSION spring to mind).
That said, it must be emphasized that Protestantism does not contain
the direct opposition to science and reason found in the esoteric
religions of the East, Buddhism and Taoism, or the indirect opposition
to reason and science prompted by paganism and polytheism in general.
Without a belief in a monotheistic creator, there is no assurance
that reason is sufficient to discover the laws of nature, or even that
there are laws. The materialism of Karl Marx, for example, proposes a
universe where by definition the position of brain atoms are determined
by mechanics, by the actions of selfish genes or mindless social and
economic forces. In such a universe no scientific reasoning, nor
reasoning on any topic, is possible or imaginable.
Likewise, without a belief in the independence of secondary causes
from the whims of many gods there is no point to the study, since such
laws are merely illusions of consistence in an arbitrary acts. For this
reason, the classical world never reduced the speculations of its
philosophers to an system of natural philosophy called science.
Likewise again, the belief in that all the material world is
illusionary of necessity obliterates the motive for scientific research.
There are no medical researchers who are practicing Christian
Scientists.
And finally, the belief found in mainstream Mohammedanism that the
one God participates directly in all acts of cause and effect in effect
obliterates cause and effect, since the existence of regularity in
nature becomes an illusion produced by the reliability of the
inscrutable will of God.
Q: You’ve recently published a novel called Count to a Trillion. Could a new reader guess that you’re a Catholic just by reading it? Are there Catholic elements in your books?
A: So far in my life, I have not used by books to proselytize or
flatter or even to describe my own beliefs, neither my atheist beliefs
when I was an atheist, nor theist now. I write enough editorials that I
feel little need to editorialize while engaged in the serious business
of storytelling. But any writer’s world view appears whether he will or
no in the world he invents, so a new reader who was perspicacious might
hazard such a guess. But he would have to be extremely perspicacious.
What I do not do in COUNT TO A TRILLION is have the main characters
avoid religion or condemn it. Both the heroine and the villain are Roman
Catholics, because they are Spanish, and my conceit is that the Spain
of the future will reflect the days of the Spanish Empire, achieving a
glory from the discovery of news worlds in space which once she achieved
in the discovery of the New World in the Americas. My hero is
something of a skeptic, albeit nominally a Christian.
Because the novel deals with immense spans of time, the Roman
Catholic Church obtains an unusual prominence, merely because it is
assumed in the novel that the Church will last as far into the future as
she has into the past.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am writing the opposite of a Dan Brown novel. My young hero
realizes that he is unlike his brothers in looks and nature, and begins
to wonder if he was adopted. Tillamook, Oregon, the cheese capital of
America somehow does not seem like his home to himself. He father is a
deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps an assassin for the Opus
Dei or, better yet, a Knight Templar whose grandmaster still controls
the Ark of the Covenant. When our hero goes to work for the Haunted
Museum, whose curator is an insane scientists who collects animals that
should not or could not still exist in our world, he discovers that
there is more than one world. Our young hero falls in love with the mad
scientist’s beautiful daughter, and is off to rescue her when the mad
scientist warns him she is about to open a doorway into a parallel
dimension using the Moebius Coil.
The idea behind the story is that the energy required to create a
second and parallel universe is greater than the universe and comes from
outside of it, so therefore only when miracles occur or fail to occur
is the timeline split into two parallels. The main enemy of the youthful
hero is the world that arose when the Tower of Babel, in that version
of history, never was struck by the confusion of tongues and never fell.
Unfortunately, the Babylonians were the first in all parallel history
to discover the secret of how to travel sideways in time, and, being
from a world where there are neither nations nor tribes nor divisions,
the Babylonians can neither imagine nor tolerate living in peace with
neighbors not in union and unity with them, and so they have conquered
all the various versions of history, and soon will conquer ours.
There is more to it than that, of course. The story includes
monkey-masked ninja-girls, levitating prophets, one eyed Arimaspians,
living iron, no-headed Blemmye, blood-quaffers and cynocephalics,
one-legged Sciopods, not to mention the stolen Rhine-gold, the flail of
a conquered Pharaoh, the tarncape, the Cup of Jamshyd, and a
prayer-powered “mecha” or walking tower shaped like a shining suit of
armor forty stories tall, and a remarkably beautiful mermaid from a
world where the fleets descended from the Ark of Noah have yet to find
dry ground.
Q: Finally, two obvious questions for all Catholic sci-fi
writers: Has any Cardinal already contacted you to enlist you in the
Arcane Conspiracy to replace all Heads of State with robots in order to
enslave free countries and subject them to the Tyranny of the Church?
Have you received the unbreakable medieval-latin cyphers for secret
communications with the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith by the
(Laser) Sword?
A: No, but I have been given my secret decoder rosary with built in
strangle wire, my stealth jetpack, and I have been shown the secret
confessional booth whose trapdoor leads into the secret lair where the
crime-solving supercomputer of the Archbishop hums with power. Adoring
the lair walls, along with giant pennies and robots of dinosaurs, is the
trophy room of relics and icons. From this cave, cadres of
ninja-trained priests in black rush out to track down criminals and
evildoers …. in order to hear their confessions and bring them
forgiveness and tell them the secret of eternal life.
Compared to how wild and supernatural that is, any mere conspiracy of
world conquest seems tame, does it not? The world is already subject to
the tyranny of the head of our Church, for all authority in heaven and
earth is His.
2. How would you instruct a soul that finds their being to be oddly, madly jealous of your certitude on questions of faith?
