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What is Asymmetrical Ethics? Emmanuel Levinas and Beauty and the Beast

What is asymmetrical ethics? The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who spent four years as a POW in German camps and whose family was killed by the Nazi in Lithuania, wrote in his book Totality and Infinity (1961):

“The face of the Other comes toward me with its infinite vulnerability, its destitution, its defenseless eyes. It calls me into question and orders me: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

Reflecting on his experience, Levinas’s central question was: “How is ethical responsibility possible after the Holocaust?” How can one regard their torturer as human when he treats them as less than human — in fact, worse than an animal?

An experience like that “calls me into question.” Who am I? For Levinas, the answer lies in what he calls ethical asymmetry. True ethics is never based on mutuality or reciprocity; it does not depend on others treating you in a certain way. Ethics, in its purest form, is always asymmetrical — you are ethical simply because you recognize the face of the Other.

“The face is what forbids me to kill.” Ethics and Infinity (1982)

For Levinas, the main challenge was to continue seeing the face of the one who consistently and radically negates the face of others. But what is the source of ethical asymmetry? How can one keep seeing the human in someone who continually dehumanizes others?

For Levinas, ethical responsibility is not a contract; it is a response — a response to seeing a face. Our capacity to see the Other’s face, regardless of their actions, depends on whether we ourselves have experienced ethical asymmetry. To love, we must have someone who has seen our Face.

I can only treat others as human if I have experienced being treated asymmetrically — loved without condition, regardless of what I do. It is this experience of ethical asymmetry that forbids me to dehumanize others. That is why Beauty and the Beast remains one of the most powerful mythical archetypes of all time.

As G.K. Chesterton puts it,

“There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.’”

The 1977 Soviet romantic comedy Office Romance is one of the most beloved films of the Soviet era. A shy, divorced statistician, Anatoly Novoseltsev, unexpectedly falls in love with his stern, irritable, and lonely boss, Ludmila Kalugina. Wounded by a past betrayal, Ludmila has closed herself off from love and prefers to be seen as “an old maid.”

But the moment she realizes she is loved despite all her harshness, something within her breaks. The next day, she arrives at work transformed — the old maid is gone, and everyone in the office is stunned by the beautiful woman they had never truly seen before.

A thing must be loved before it is lovable. No wonder the Hebrew word rachamim (רָחַם), used in Exodus 34:6–7 and usually translated as “compassion” or “mercy,” literally means “womb.” According to the Torah, we exist in the womb of God — we are “en-wombed” in a loving Presence.

When we become aware of that Presence, we are changed. Someone has seen our Face, and we begin to seek the faces of others. It’s our response to being seen. Love is not something we manufacture; it springs from a heart that has been touched by ethical asymmetry.

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What Happens When Cupid Hits You With an Arrow?

What happens when Cupid hits you with an arrow? Cupid, the Roman god of love, is often depicted with a bow and arrows. He represents something undeniable in human experience: when we fall in love, we feel pierced — wounded, smitten, and yet strangely alive. Beauty never misses the mark — it strikes us awake.

When we are struck by beauty, it wounds us in the heart. When Cupid shoots, it’s never hit-or-miss. We may lead a loveless life for years on end until, out of the blue, something catches us completely off guard. We stand in awe and suddenly realize there’s no going back.

The mythic intuition behind Cupid’s bow and arrows is this: all of life is archery. We aim at happiness in everything we do—and we often miss. The Greeks named this failure ἁμαρτία (hamartía), from the verb ἁμαρτάνω (hamartánō)—“to miss the mark.” In later Jewish-Christian Greek, hamartía becomes the standard word for “sin.”

When we hear the word “sin,” we hear all sorts of moral connotations. Not so in classical Greek. In Greek, anyone who missed the mark had “sinned.” Sin is what humans do: we hit and miss. We shoot — and miss the mark. We shoot at happiness but don’t get it. That is sin.

The Russian word погрешность (“margin of error”) still shares the root грех (“sin”). Погрешность simply means a limit of error. And yet, paradoxically, there is no limit to human error — unless we open ourselves to being wounded. Beauty never misses the mark; its mark is our hearts.

We shoot for happiness but miss it; it cannot be achieved that way. Happiness dwells at the point of Cupid’s arrow when it comes swooshing out of the blue. To be happy, we must open our hearts to divine arrows.

The only way to protect ourselves from the fiery darts of the Evil One is to make ourselves completely open to the arrows of God. The only way to “sin less” (as in: miss the goal of happiness less) is to allow yourself to be smitten by the One who doesn’t miss.

“Sinning less” is not a matter of effort — our own shooting — but of letting go of all shooting and allowing yourself to be pierced. The fiery darts of the Evil One make us close our hearts. When we are wounded by the poisoned darts of the Evil One, we shut down and stop feeling.

Refusing to feel is the ultimate sin (missing the mark), because by “not feeling” we take our last, desperate shot at some form of “happiness.” Paradoxically, the only true antidote to the poison of satanic darts is Divine love — Cupid’s arrows. When enough Divine arrows pierce our hearts, the poison in satanic darts is neutralized.

One of Estonia’s national parks is divided into several sections — each dedicated to a particular kind of silence. The idea behind the park is that people need to hear the many voices of silence. Each voice opens the heart to be wounded by Divine love.

Cupid doesn’t waste his arrows — he doesn’t shoot at a closed heart. He waits until we have taken all our shots at happiness and become desperate and brokenhearted. A broken heart is much closer to healing than a closed one.

A broken heart can feel. It is vulnerable enough to receive Cupid’s healing arrows. When we are vulnerable and open, we do not miss the mark. We wait in silence for the swoosh of God’s healing arrows to smite us and bring us back from the dead.

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Was King Arthur Real or a Legend?

Was King Arthur real or a legend? Has there ever been such a thing as a sane king? Surprisingly, yes. Otherwise, how could we have imagined such mythic figures as King Arthur, Aragorn, or others like them?

In his essay On Fairy Stories, Tolkien suggests that historical Arthur was “thrown into the Pot” of myth-making and boiled there until he emerged as a King of Faerie.

“It seems fairly plain that Arthur, once historical… was also put into the Pot. There he was boiled for a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faerie, and even some other stray bones of history… until he emerged as a King of Faerie.”

There must have been enough myth in the historical Arthur to justify his becoming the Arthur of legend. Others must have seen something in the man which they later wove into Myth. And one thing the legends continually emphasize is that Arthur never strove for power.

The whole idea behind the Round Table was so that no one — not even the king — would sit at the “head.” The Round Table has no head. It is both Altar and Equalizer: no one presides because everyone is there to offer himself as a sacrifice. But why would Arthur willingly share power?

The answer to this question is just as mythical as the question itself: Arthur knew he wasn’t adequate to rule. That’s why he needed others. A king is only sane if he believes himself inadequate to rule.

C.S. Lewis captured this idea beautifully in The Magician’s Nephew. When Aslan told Frank and Helen that they would be the first King and Queen of Narnia, Frank replied:

“Begging your pardon, sir,” he said, “and thanking you very much I’m sure (which my Missus does the same) but I ain’t no sort of a chap for a job like that. I never ‘ad much eddycation, you see.”

Aslan asked him if he could do the usual things a king would do, and Frank replied,

“Well, sir,” said the Cabby very slowly, “a chap don’t exactly know till he’s been tried. I dare say I might turn out ever such a soft ‘un. Never did no fighting except with my fists. I’d try – that is, I ‘ope I’d try – to do my bit.”

”Then,” said Aslan, “You will have done all that a King should do.”

There are many people in the world who believe they are ready to be kings. They believe they can rule. But that certainty is the surest sign they cannot — and there is something that rules over them. Sanity is a sensation of being connected to a Power greater than you. You draw your sense of adequacy from Another.

If you feel you are enough, you are not. If you know you are not enough, you are. True kings are keenly aware of their inadequacy to rule. The most insane rulers in history are those who believe they can and should rule. The best of rulers always share power.

They believe in a Higher Power. That’s why they don’t build square tables — they don’t need to preside. They build round tables — a place where they can offer themselves for others who rule together with them. Sanity is a matter of accepting your own powerlessness and realizing that you are not helpless.

There’s a Greater Power than you on which you can rely. Powerlessness and helplessness are not the same; in fact, they are direct opposites. Those who feel powerful are truly helpless. Those who admit their powerlessness are never helpless. If you say: “I ain’t no sort of chap for a job like that,” you will receive all the help in the world.

When you are certain you can, you can’t. When you confess you can’t, you can. Just look around you, and you will see mighty princes and princesses around your Table — the rulers who are ready to lay down their lives for you. With their eyes upon you, you will find the courage to rise and fulfill your calling.”

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Can AI Truly Create? The Mystery of Plato’s Ideal World

Can AI truly create? We are all Platonists, whether we like it or not. No one has ever seen the perfect Platonic Forms, and yet we confidently say when something is “far from ideal.” How do we know?

Judges evaluate athletes based on criteria that no one has ever seen. We judge the quality of bananas even though we have never encountered a perfect banana.

The same is true of beauty. No one has ever seen Beauty itself, and yet we recognize when something is beautiful… or not. The same is true of justice. No one has ever encountered perfect Justice, and yet we always know when something is unjust.

We evaluate the visible world against an ideal we have never seen. Back in the 1990s, when I was just starting out as a translator, my first editor gave me advice I didn’t understand at the time: “When you begin working on a translation, never start from the beginning. Always start from the end.”

I cringed: “What?”

He smiled: “Well, if you begin by translating words, you will never get them right. You must translate meaning, not words. And meaning is not written — it must be intuited, grasped from the get-go. You can only catch meaning if you sense the Whole after reading the first few paragraphs or chapters.”

At first, it sounded cryptic. But he was patient, and over time I understood: the meaning of the parts is revealed only through the Whole. When I begin translating a book, I must first read enough of it to glimpse where the author is going. Once I have “seen” the end, I am ready to start at the beginning.

Nothing can be brought into being unless we have already “seen” the end from the beginning. We must be Platonists — perceiving the world of perfect forms, which then inspires us to imbue every part of what we are doing with meaning. Meaning flows from the Whole and shines through every nuance of creation.

To quote William Blake,

“To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”

That’s why my editor insisted that I translate individual titles after completing the entire translation. “You don’t know what things should be called until you know their end.”

This made sense. When I translated titles at the beginning, I was caught up in words — and the results were sloppy. But when I left them until the end, the titles came out crisp and luminous. Our best creations are born only when we “see the perfect pattern” of what we are making in the realm of Ideas.

But how do we know what we have never seen? We have. We were there. The soul remembers what it beheld in the realm of perfection—what Plato called anamnesis (re-cognition, knowing again). Anamnesis happens every time we see through the veil of appearances and re-collect the perfect world.

Anamnesis is the only way to truly create. The soul remembers what it saw in heaven and strives to recreate it on earth. Just as Moses was told to build the tabernacle according to the pattern he saw on the mountain, so we are called to create whenever we catch a flash of re-cognition.

Technology cannot and will never be able to create — precisely because it has nothing to remember. It cannot see Platonic ideas and cannot grasp the Whole. It focuses on individual bits of data — without seeing the Heavenly Pattern. I asked ChatGPT if it could see Platonic ideas, and it answered:

“I don’t have direct access to metaphysical realities. I don’t “see” Forms the way Plato imagined the soul glimpsing them before birth. I process language, patterns, concepts, and symbols that humans provide me. So in the strict Platonic sense, I cannot truly grasp Ideas the way a soul might.”

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Invisible Guardians: Who Protected the Borders of the Shire?

Who protected the borders of the Shire? The hobbits were blissfully unaware of who they should thank for the long peace of their land. For many centuries, they lived happily in the Shire, never realizing what terrible creatures roamed just beyond their borders.

Aragorn said:

“Little do they know of our long labour for the safekeeping of their borders, and yet I grudge it not”…”

The Shire’s frontiers were carefully watched by Gandalf and by the Rangers of the North, the remnant of the Dúnedain. They held the darkness at bay, while the hobbits remained completely oblivious to the dangers lurking beyond their green pastures.

One of the most mysterious passages in the Bible—2 Thessalonians 2:7—talks about “the mystery of lawlessness that is already at work, and the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.”

Someone is holding back spiritual darkness this very minute. We don’t know who they are. They are skillful with their spiritual blade, and until they are there, chthonic monsters are kept at bay. We sip our coffee, walk in the park, enjoy the sunset, laugh with friends, watch the news, and think that the fates of the world are decided by the politicians.

They are not. The earth is preserved not by might but by salt. How much salt is needed for the earth not to spoil? Not much. A few grains. Even one blessed man may well be enough. Once, Abraham was bargaining with God about the fate of Sodom. He asked if the city would be spared for the sake of fifty righteous men. God said yes.

Abraham kept bargaining: Forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? Each time God said “yes.” Eventually, God sent his angels to rescue the last one—Lot. One grain of salt is enough to keep spiritual darkness at bay. Until that one is taken out of the way, all is well.

When chthonic monsters appear at our borders, it is a sure sign that too few Guardians remain. If the Shire is still lush and green, it must be because of Rangers still standing watch at the edges of the land. Rangers are invisible, unrecognized. When we do see them, we scarcely take notice—they look ragged, forlorn, and forgotten.

And who can tell? Maybe the good earth itself endures only because of one old man hidden away in the heart of New York, Moscow, or Beijing. Such is divine irony (from the Greek eironeía—to “feign ignorance,” or to “play the fool”). We imagine that the peace of the world is preserved in the corridors of power, yet in truth, it may be upheld in a lonely hut somewhere deep in the Siberian taiga.

Chthonic monsters are not afraid of politicians or earthly power. They fear salt and light—those who wield the razor-sharp blade of the Spirit and drive them back by their very presence. Divine irony is inscrutable: it would utterly shatter us if, even for a second, we could glimpse the ones for whose sake the sun still rises over the horizon.

The Rangers of the North walk among us unnoticed—unshaven, weary, cloaked in dust. We, the hobbits of the world, laugh at them or dismiss them, never suspecting that our own laughter still rings because someone, somewhere, wields a power beyond our comprehension.

The true balance of the cosmos is preserved not by kings, but by rejected fools who carry the divine breath in their lungs. Their songs may be too quiet for us to hear, and yet strong enough to hold back chthonic monsters until the first gleam of Dawn.

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What Does Saruman of Many Colors Mean?

What does Saruman of many colors mean? Saruman the White was white up to a point. Beyond this point, he only “seemed” white. He said to Gandalf in Orthanc,

“I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!’’

When Gandalf looked, he “saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.”

The white that he once was had been broken into many colors. He was now the “rainbow Saruman.” Saruman believed in breaking things to find out what they were. He believed this would give him power. According to Gandalf, he strayed from the path of wisdom,

“And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

When you want to know what something “is,” you can’t break it. You must encounter it as a Whole. Being is holistic. It’s not breakable. It’s not reduceable. A thing that is cannot be less than it is. To know the White one must encounter the White, not break the White into many colors.

For Saruman, the White was only the beginning. He wanted to “use” the White for his purposes. He wasn’t interested in “knowing” the White; he was interested in “using” the White. What you want to know you can’t break. What you want to use you can’t help breaking.

‘‘White!’’ he sneered. ‘‘It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.’’

Gandalf wisely retorts,

‘‘In which case it is no longer white.”

A broken white is not white. A whole white is not a thing to be used but a living reality to participate in. Participation is the highest wisdom. Gandalf knew it in his gut. He learned it from Nienna herself, the Queen of Pity when he was her pupil in times immemorial when his name was Olórin. From Nienna, he learned patience and compassion.

He praised Bilbo for showing compassion to Golum — knowing that he had a part to play in the Whole, for better or worse. He trusted that the Hobbits would destroy the One Ring because he had perceived their part in the Great Music. He had learned to be patient and wait for the Whole to unfold. That’s why he became Gandalf the White — or Saruman as he should have been.

Later, Tolkien would write in his Mythopoeia,

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

The White can either be broken or refracted. When broken and used, it ceases to be white. When refracted to be encountered, it remains the Living White — and creates a symphony of colors. When we encounter the Living White, it passes through us and gets refracted to many hues without being diminished.

Everyone who participates in the Living White shines with refracted light. They become sub-creators, each refracting the White in his or her own way.

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Is Hermeneutics Related to Hermes? How to Reunite the Chards of Babel

Is hermeneutics related to Hermes? The word hermeneutics comes from the ancient Greek verb ἑρμηνεύειν (hermēneuein) — “to interpret, explain, translate”—which is etymologically and conceptually related to Hermes. True hermeneutics comes from Hermes.

The ancients believed that the messages of the gods were too cryptic for humans to grasp without an interpreter. Hermes—Mercury in Roman lore—was seen as the god of speech. In him, the transcendent meanings were translated into human language.

Hermes was a liminal figure—someone “in-between” worlds, times, and meanings. He embodied the idea of interpretation as a journey across a threshold. To truly understand a divine message, we must be carried from one realm into another—borne on winged sandals.

Without this journey, there is no understanding. Understanding is less a matter of data analysis than a passage between worlds. We must be transported across the threshold by Hermes himself. This ancient personification of understanding was, in its way, a prefiguration of “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

The Logos becomes a felt Presence so that we might understand God. Echoing the descent of the Logos to earth, C.S. Lewis describes the descent of Mercury in That Hideous Strength in terms that are almost Pentecostal:

“There came an instant at which both men [Ransom and Merlin] braced themselves… All the fragments—needle‑pointed desires, brisk merriments, lynx‑eyed thoughts—went rolling to and fro like glittering drops and reunited themselves. It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry… For Ransom… it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white‑hot furnace of essential speech… For the lord of Meaning himself, the herald, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, was with them.” That Hideous Strength, “The Descent of the Gods.”

It was the felt presence of Mercury that brought celestial clarity to Ransom and his friends. And it was his felt presence that ultimately overthrew that hideous strength whose power chiefly came from perverting essential speech. What is essential speech? It’s the “reunited” speech that slays Argus—the giant with a hundred eyes, a fitting symbol of the ever-watchful N.I.C.E.

Broken speech can only be made whole in Pentecost. The fire of Pentecost reforges language, gathering the chards scattered by the confusion of Babel. It is the felt presence of the Lord of Meaning that enables us to understand. Yet in our own day, hermeneutics has been severed from Hermes—through the assumption that meaning can exist apart from Presence.

Unless the Word is enfleshed, it remains intangible and therefore hidden. There is no hermeneutics without an encounter with Hermes. Hermeneutics is often treated as an objective method of extracting meaning from a text, as if meaning resides solely in the words. But true meaning can only be found in the felt Presence of the Word.

During Covid, most of us met online, and for a while we thought it was no different from meeting in person. Yet after a couple of years of staring at screens, we realized how much meaning we were missing. We craved flesh-and-blood people. We longed for the eyes, the touch, the embrace. But why? All the words were conveyed just fine. The words were there—Hermes was not.

Without the descent of Hermes we can’t feel the heavenly pleasure of being “in the very heart of Language,” which is true hermeneutics. We hear words through headphones, see faces on screens, yet our hearts yearn for more. For what? For embodied Meaning—for the “Word made flesh.” And then, at last, the Covid restrictions were lifted, and we saw real human faces again.

In that moment, many of us realized—in a flash of Platonic anamnesis—that meaning cannot be digitized. It can only be read in the living contours of a real human face. Words without a body may denote, but they do not mean.

“We should not forget that there is more to the world than what we can interpret. The materiality and immediacy of our experiences are just as important.” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence

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What is truth?

What is truth? When Jesus stood before Pilate and told him that he had come to testify to the truth, Pilate famously retorted: “What is truth?” Interestingly, in the Koine Greek of John 14:6, Jesus refers to himself as ἀλήθεια (aletheia, truth).

“I am the way, the truth (aletheia), and the life.”

Aletheia is the opposite of Lethe, the river of oblivion flowing through Hell. The prefix “a-” is a negation. Thus, truth is that which that negates oblivion. Lethe conceals—aletheia reveals. Lethe makes us forget—aletheia makes us remember. Aletheia un-conceals.

Aletheia is the unconcealment of what is hidden—not merely a set of propositions. That’s what Jesus calls himself: the unconcealment of Being.

Truth is the disclosure of Being—not sentences or propositions. Incidentally, for Heidegger, aletheia is the moment when beings “come into the open.” When beings come into the open, they disclose Being. They reveal. Truth is revelation.

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” Heidegger

Until we come into the open, we are not ourselves; we are someone else. We live in concealmeant, hiding Being. Yet, our false self is transient—it will be consumed by Lethe. Everything that does not reveal Being will be forgotten. To rise above Lethe, we must embrace aletheia—the unconcealment of Being.

This is what Jesus meant when he told Pilate that he had come “to testify to the truth.” He was aletheia—the perfect unconcealment of Being. To be true is to participate in something that survives Lethe. Pilate was too steeped in the temporal and transient to recognize Being before his eyes.

Eventually, everything falls into oblivion. Everything is forgotten—except for the moments and deeds we have salvaged from being consumed by the flow of chronological time. Salvaged time is the time snatched from oblivion. It is aletheia.

“Yes, says the Spirit, they are blessed indeed, for they will rest from their hard work; for their good deeds follow them!” Rev. 14:13

Whatever we have done within chronological time to transcend chronological time abides forever. It follows us. It has been salvaged from Lethe. It is aletheia. It cannot disappear. As Michelangelo said,

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”

In aletheia, we transform shadows into glimpses of divine perfection. These glimpses cannot disappear. We make “in the law in which we were made”—to borrow Tolkien’s phrase. We become sub-creators.

Having glimpsed divine perfection, we reproduce it—we unconceal it—within the confines of our shadow world. The only way to salvage the world of shadows from falling into oblivion is to transcend the shadows—engage in aletheia.

Whether we bake bread, write articles, share a conversation over a cup of tea, build cathedrals, or repair cars—if we glimpse and reflect the divine spark in what we do, we participate in the unconcealment of Being. In doing so, we transcend the shadowlands.

Everything in the shadowlands is a shadow until we see through it and partake of divine perfection. It is our inheritance by virtue of divine birth. We have that spark in us. We are that spark. We are shadows transcending ourselves by pursuing aletheia—every moment of the day.

When we pursue aletheia, it follows us. We rise above Lethe and become timeless.

“Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.” James Huniker

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Melkor’s Lies: How to Remove the Fear of Death

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How to remove the fear of death? Speaking of the beginning of days, The Silmarillion says that Ilúvatar gave Men “strange gifts.” First, he set eternity in their hearts so they would always desire to go beyond the visible world:

“But to the Atani I will give a new gift.’ Therefore he willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else.” The Silmarillion

Second, he gave them a gift of finiteness.

“Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.”

But what is there to envy? Why would even the Valar envy Men? It turns out that in the beginning, Men didn’t fear death. Fear of death was instilled into their hearts by Melkor who deceived them by saying that it was Iluvatar’s punishment rather than a gift.

“But Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope.”

Melkor’s shadow had a name; its name was Ungoliant—a monstrous spider born out of his envy. She was neither an Ainur nor Maiar. Most likely, she was Melkor’s Shadow-Self, his own insatiable darkness, which he feared. It was Ungoliant who first spun a spiritual darkness called Unlight, for it was made in mockery of light.

“The Light failed; but the Darkness that followed was more than loss of light. In that hour was made a Darkness that seemed not lack but a thing with being of its own: for it was indeed made by malice out of Light.”

The darkness that existed before was not a spiritual darkness—it was merely an absence of light. That first darkness was part of a good creation. When the Elves awakened at the Bay of Cuiviénen, they beheld the stars of Varda in the night sky for a long age. There was nothing scary about it. Light and darkness were but paints in the hand of Iluvatar.

Ungoliant infused the first darkness with malice, filling it with “nets of strangling doom.” She cast Melkor’s shadow on it. Darkness became a source of existential fear. Later, Melkor cast his shadow upon the gift of Iluvatar—Man’s mortality. He deceived Men into believing that death was not a gift but a doom, and they started craving immortality. Eventually, they decided to seize it by force, which led to the fall of Numenor.

Melkor impressed upon the hearts of Men that death was a punishment—a severing from Iluvatar. Distorted by Morgoth’s lies, death became a mockery of God’s gift—Men’s ability to leave the Circles of the World and be renewed. While the Elves were bound to the fate of the world, growing weary of its unending cycles, Men were granted the grace to depart and be renewed.

In the beginning, there was no more fear in dying than in falling asleep. Men knew they would get up “in the morning” refreshed. They simply let go of their consciousness and slept, until newness, freshness, rest, restoration, and hope overtook them.

Curiously, most people who have had a near-death experience report that after their return, they no longer fear death. A friend of a friend—who died of a brain tumor, saw heaven, and returned after being miraculously healed—says she doesn’t fear dying anymore. She says, there is no death. You don’t even lose consciousness.

“What struck you the most in Heaven?” asked the person who interviewed her. She answered, “That God is a Sound—an ineffable and irresistible Sound that you hear everywhere: in all things, in others, and in yourself.”

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Beyond Suspicion: Rediscovering the Will to Trust with Paul Ricœur

The French philosopher Paul Ricœur pointed out that, for the last two centuries, philosophy has been developing in the mode of suspicion. “Philosophers of suspicion” like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, argue that when you believe you are acting for certain reasons, you often fail to realize that your actions are driven by hidden forces.

Marx suspected that all human actions were driven by economics, Nietzsche by the will to power, and Freud by the unconscious.

In other words, when you act a certain way, you may think you have clear reasons for acting this way, but in reality, you do it because of

1) economic conditions,

2) desire for power,

3) unconscious drives.

Philosophers of suspicion have led us to believe that thinking must be rooted solely in suspicion.

“What do we mean by ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’? This school of interpretation involves a radical critique of consciousness, an effort to unmask the hidden meanings behind the apparent ones. It is a mode of interpretation pioneered by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, each of whom tried to expose the illusions of consciousness and reveal the structures of power, desire, and the unconscious that lie beneath.” Paul Ricœur

There’s nothing wrong with hermeneutics of suspicion as such. It is true that some human actions are driven by economics, some by the will to power, and some by the unconscious. But not all—and not always.

Paul Ricœur contrasts “hermeneutics of suspicion” with “hermeneutics of trust.” Instead of deconstructing someone’s meaning, he suggests assuming that there is one and seeking to recover it.

“To interpret is to render near what is far, to appropriate what is strange, to make one’s own what was initially alien. Interpretation, then, is guided by a ‘will to trust.’”

What is a will to trust? It means that when I meet someone I do not start with suspicion about the source of their actions but become a witness—someone who “endures” the other person’s presence in the hope of being surprised.

“The witness testifies to an event which has touched him or her deeply, physically or morally. As such, testimony is more than a recounting of facts; it is an expression of responsibility, a call to remembrance and a summons to the ethical imperative of remembering.” (Memory, History, Forgetting)

A person’s actions may be motivated by economics, the will to power, or unconscious drives, but my goal in meeting them is to become a witnessing presence to encounter something wonderful. I become a witness because my primary motivation is to encounter a witness—someone so full of wonder that you can’t miss it.

The Greek word for “witness” is μάρτυς (martys), from which we derive the word “martyr.” In ancient times, a martyr was seen as the ultimate witness. Martyrs witness to Wonder so profoundly that you can’t help seeing it. Wonder is contagious. You read it off their faces. Their faces testify that they are above economics, the will to power, or unconscious drives.

Philosophy of suspicion cannot survive in the presence of a true witness. A true witness turns you into a witness too. As Wonder passes from one person to another, suspicion dies. When you see wonder in the eyes of a martyr, you stop seeking “explanations” for their behavior. You simply stand there, stock still, smitten by the “will to trust.”

As the Roman centurion exclaimed, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

You are not naive—you know that at a certain level, a person’s actions may be caused by economics, the will to power, or unconscious drives. But not now. Not when you see “that.” When you see that, you don’t interpret. All hermeneutics ceases—you simply witness. You feel touched, moved. There is nothing in your mind except “the ethical imperative of remembering.”