John C. Wright's Journal

25 May 2025 AD
Feast Day of Venerable Bede

Dear Godson,

Today is the feast of the Venerable Bede, a scholar and historian and most celebrated man of letters of his day. He wrote treatises on scripture, science, history, biography, and it the first to use the dating system from the Birth of Christ, Anno Domini, A.D. He is also the first to mention King Arthur, whose historical reality many skeptics doubt.

Let us call on his spirit to aid us as we turn to another of the great doubts likely to afflict the modern Christian, which are doubts issuing from a particular philosophy, or, rather, mental disorder, to which only scholars seem prone, namely, that of refusing to admit what one knows to be the self evident.

Radical skepticism is the besetting sin of the modern day.

Radical skepticism is not doubt about this thing or that, but rather is skepticism about the faculty of the human mind itself. It is doubt about the instrument used to discriminate between reasonable and unreasonable doubt.

Skepticism is doubt about matters where there is a reasonable argument on both sides. Radical skepticism is doubt about matters no one is honestly able to doubt.

But there are things we cannot not know.

Such things are not open to reasonable doubt. They are open to unreasonable doubt, for all things are.

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04 May 2025 AD
Feast Day of St John Paine

Dear Godson,

In prior letters we examined reasons for our faith in the Lord. Let us now examine reasons for doubt, and, if possible how to answer or assuage such doubts. Let us start with the hardest question of all: the Problem of Pain.

Today is the feast day of Saint John Payne, and so perhaps apt for the topic.

Today is also the feast day for the Forty Martyrs of England, among whom St John Payne is numbered. While hiding in estate of the widowed Lady Petre, he was denounced by John “Judas” Eliot (a rapist, murderer, and thief who made a career out of denouncing Catholics for bounty), who falsely accused him of conspiring to murder Queen Elizabeth. After perjured testimony and a preordained verdict, Payne was imprisoned and tortured in the Tower of London for nine months, and finally condemned, hanged, drawn, and quartered. He never renounced his Catholic faith.

The histories of secular kings and conquerors boast of their victories, of armies routed, cities burned, lands looted. Our history of sacred martyrs boast instead of mild submission to those  betrayals, torments, executions, and deaths, which never separated the saints we venerate from the love of God. It is an attestation of the impossible power of the Lord.

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24 April 2025 AD
Quasimodo Sunday

Dear Godson,

The name Quasimodo, is from the text of the traditional Introit for this day, which begins “Quasi modo geniti infantes...” from 1 Peter 2:2 “As in the fashion of newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby.”

The hunchback in Victor Hugo was foundling discovered on this day, and named after it (albeit, the name is a play on words in Latin, as it also means half-formed).

This day is also known as Saint Thomas Sunday, as it was eight days after Easter. Here the doubt of Thomas was assuaged when he saw the living Christ with his own eyes. He was invited to put his finger into the wound as he had previously demanded, but instead fell to his knees and cried out that Christ was Lord and God. Christ replied, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

The request for evidence, if asked honestly, is always to be respected. Sad experience, however, shows how rarely the request is made honestly.

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05 March 2025 AD
Ash Wednesday

Dear Godson,

Ash Wednesday opens Lent, a season of repentance and fasting. The rite of placing ashes on the brow has it roots in the ancient Jewish practice of mourning and humility, and, earlier, the reminder from the days of Adam that man is risen from dust and returns to dust.

The beasts of the field, as best we know, have no forethought of their mortal span nor any  craving for eternal life. Devising memorials is no part of their lives, nor any admiration of beauty for its own sake.

Man gets a glimpse of eternity when his eye falls on beauty in nature, seeing star or diamond, moonrise or mountain, geyser, pine forest, rushing rill, rearing stallion, bright flower, sleek cat, beetle or butterfly or gurgling babe in joy, a damsel seen by candlelight turning her head just so, dark eyes softly gleaming.

Beauty reflects eternity, hence springs from God and leads back to Him.

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9 Feb AD 2025
Feast Day of Saint Cuaran the Wise

Dear Godson,

Today is the feast day of St Cuaran the Wise, also known as Curvinus or Cronan, and Irish Bishop of the Eight Century. When the press of bishopric work crowded out his prayer life, Cuaran fled to Iona, hid his name, and became a monk. However, he was found and recognized by St Columba and returned to his duty. He was called wise for his wide knowledge of canon law, but perhaps his flight from worldly offices to pursue intimate prayer with heaven was the better part of wisdom.

We can ask St. Cuaran to pray for the wisdom we need to face the question of man’s moral nature. If conscience is indeed the still, small voice of God within us, if it is supernatural, then God is known to us through the conscience: His voice reveals Him.

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26 Jan 2025 AD
Feast Day of Sts Timothy and Titus

Dear Godson,

Today we celebrate Saints Timothy and Titus, first bishops of Ephesus and Crete, who followed Saint Paul on his apostolic journeys. One was a Jew, the other Greek, one was circumcised according to the Law of Moses, and the other not, which was a matter of stark controversy in the Church in first years after the Ascension. Despite any differences, both followed Christ faithfully to sainthood, and are among the very earliest number of saints assuming the thrones vacated by the fallen angels in heaven.

The verse from scripture, “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom” distinguishes traditional Jewish and Greek approaches. Jews rely on the revelation of sacred books, whereas Greeks follow philosophy and science — the love of wisdom and knowledge — to discover what human reason can reveal.

And yet both paths, properly followed, lead to Christ hence to God. One might use Timothy and Titus as symbols of this twofold brotherhood of faith and reason. There is no war between them.

Today, we follow the Greek way. Reason brings forth proofs for God, especially these seven:  the argument from design; from the nature of being; from the nature of reason; from free will; from first causes; from beauty; from conscience. My two previous letters addressed these first two. Here we turn to the argument from the nature of reason.

The “Argument from Reason” is not an argument merely saying it is reasonable to believe in God. Belief in God is reasonable, to be sure, for it is backed by historical and physical evidence, intuition and common sense.

But here we are offering a more abstract argument, namely, that without God, reason is unreasonable.

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15 December AD 2024,
Gaudete Sunday

Dear Godson,

On Gaudete Sunday, we light the rose candle of rejoicing, and give thanks in the midst of our season of penitential waiting. The coming joy of the birth of Our Lord awaits us.

In lesser matters, we can also take joy, in that the Lord made knowledge of Him open not just to the spirit of faith, but also to the eyes of reason. He could have arranges the world otherwise, but, in His mercy, the Lord saw fit to give mortal man just enough power of reason for philosophy to reach the pearly gate of heaven, but not enough to enter the throneroom. Reason can tell us that the Lord is real, and worthy of glory and worship, but more than that, must be revealed by a grace, or remain hidden.

But to know God exists is no more impossible than to know reality is real. Indeed, from the fact that reality it real, that being has being, is one way to  know God exists.

The Church teaches, and reason confirms, that the Supreme Being is and must be the ground of being: and this all men know to be God.

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24 November AD 2024,
Solemnity of Christ, King of the Universe

Dear Godson,

Today is the last day of the Liturgical Calendar, which differs from the Gregorian Calendar used by the world. This worldly calendar, as is fitting, begins and ends in the fortnight of the Winter Solstice, when, daylight hours cease to dwindle, light returns, and longer days begin again. But the Liturgical Calendar takes Christ as our Sun, and so we begin the year with the advent of his birth, and end with his triumphant Second Coming.

Today is a celebration of Doomsday. This Doomsday is the celebration of our salvation, and our resurrection, and of the salvation of the world, and the renewal of the world.

What is salvation?

From what are we being saved?

The word “Doomsday” has a dreadful sound to modern ears, but originally the “doom” proclaimed by a king included indeed the downfalls and punishments owed to the disloyal and wicked, but also the promotions and rewards owed to the loyal and righteous.

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21 April AD 2024, Good Shepherd Sunday

Dear Godson,

Over these several letters, I mean to discuss the source, the substance, and the spirit of our faith, which is to say, why we believe, what we believe, and how we are to live our belief in practice.

Because myriad confusions surround the matter, let us say what faith is, and what it is not.

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28 January AD 2024, Feast of St Thomas Aquinas

Dear Godson,

This day is the Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the schoolman who, for once and all, reconciled faith and philosophy, church and science.

Any man who says there is conflict speaks in ignorance, or in malice, either being too literal in his interpretation of scripture, or too hasty in calling the ever-changing guesswork of science factual. It is to be noted that true Churchmen and true scientists themselves see no such conflict, nor appearance of conflict.

The same Holy Ghost who inspired Moses and the prophets, and inspired the saints and apostles, was He who moved softly across the face of the deep when creation was formless and void, brooding as a dove over her chicks. The Creator will not take amiss any disciplined and honest investigation of the artwork and architecture involved in the making of stars and atoms, sea and sky, microbe and mastodon, the geometry of the leaf, the lifecycle of galaxies, the engineering of the inner amoeba.

Thomas Aquinas would approve of any intellectual approach to these great things that kept its aim and nature in mind: science is meant to topple the idols of false beliefs about nature, not to erect them.

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