https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/ 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z Confessions https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0360 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Erich Auerbach's argument that Western realism began with the Bible, not the Greeks: Homer's uniformly lit foreground against Genesis 22, which is 'fraught with background'; the Bible's 'tyrannical' claim to truth; Petronius and Tacitus looking down from above, against Peter's denial told from below; Augustine's Alypius at the games and the birth of the sermo humilis; figura as the Christian reading of history; the Mystère d'Adam; and Dante, where 'the image of man eclipses the image of God'. With an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0359 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

What Thucydides says about why men and cities do what they do: the 'truest cause' of the war, the Athenian thesis (fear, honour and interest), the Funeral Oration set against the plague, the Mytilene debate (Cleon against Diodotus), the civil war at Corcyra where 'words changed their meanings', the Melian Dialogue, and Sicily. The readings of Orwin (the 'humanity' of Thucydides), Price (the whole war as stasis), Woodruff (justice as fact against norm), and the Byzantine reception. With a comparison table and an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0358 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

What does the Orthodox Church teach about the state? The scriptural starting points; the history from Eusebius and Chrysostom through Justinian's symphonia, the Russian landmarks (Joseph of Volokolamsk, the Third Rome, Peter's Synod), Solov'ev's 'free theocracy' and Bulgakov's Christian socialism; then three living answers: the Russian Church's Basis of the Social Concept (2000), Vladimir Moss's case for Orthodox autocracy, and Aristotle Papanikolaou's case that theosis implies liberal democracy. With a comparison table and an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0357 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Euripides' last play read through its interpreters: the plot and its ambiguities; the old question of whether Euripides was for or against Dionysus (Verrall, Winnington-Ingram); Nietzsche's embarrassment that the 'Socratic' poet ended by glorifying the god (Hinden); Dodds and Seaford on maenadism and mystery initiation; Otto's god of madness and duality; Girard's sacrificial crisis and lynching; and the strange afterlife of the play in Acts, Clement of Alexandria and the Byzantine Christus Patiens; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0356 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Aeschylus' trilogy (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides) read through four interpreters: the standard 'vendetta to law' reading (Kitto), Goldhill on the double bind, the slipperiness of dikē and gender, Vellacott's dissent that the 'reconciliation' is a lie and the Furies are the trilogy's one consistent moral voice, Nikolopoulou's 'cosmological' dikē that the court cannot abolish, and Fagles and Stanford on 'suffering into truth'; with Girard on the court replacing revenge, and an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0355 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

How Greek readers rescued Homer from the charge of immoral gods: Xenophanes' and Plato's attacks; Theagenes and the first allegory; the Sophists' 'hidden sense'; Aristotle's answer (poetry has its own standards); Stoic physical allegory and etymology; Crates' cosmic shields; Heraclitus and Ps.-Plutarch; Numenius, Porphyry's Cave of the Nymphs and Proclus' Homer the theologian; the Byzantines (Psellus, Eustathius, Tzetzes) and the golden chain; then how Christian typology differs from pagan allegory; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0354 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

What death means in the Iliad and Odyssey: the carefree gods against wretched mortals, glory (kleos) as substitute immortality, the 'race of half-gods', menos and the hero's slide toward beast or god (Achilles, Hector), the Achilles–Priam scene and the jars of Zeus, the shades in Odyssey 11 and Achilles' 'I would rather be a serf', Odysseus refusing immortality; then how later Greeks and the Fathers answered Homer's Hades; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0353 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Is Hamlet's duty to kill Claudius, or not to? The Elizabethan teaching against private revenge and the revenge-play tradition (Kyd, Tourneur, Marston); Prosser's case that the Ghost is a devil and Hamlet's revenge damnable; Sister Miriam Joseph's case that the Ghost is a soul from Purgatory, tested by the discernment of spirits, with a just command ('taint not thy mind'); Cantor's Hamlet as a Christian soul charged with a pagan task; the prayer scene, 'To be or not to be', 'the readiness is all'; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0352 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Two accounts of why we want what others want: Girard's triangular, mimetic desire (from Deceit, Desire and the Novel through Things Hidden), Oughourlian's 'interdividual' psychology and his reading of the Fall, and Lacan's mirror stage and 'man's desire is the desire of the Other', with Girard's critique of Lacan and Freud; compared, then assessed against the Fathers on the passions, the tenth commandment and the imitation of Christ.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0351 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

René Girard's theory of religion worked through his four main books: mimetic rivalry, the sacrificial crisis, the single victim who is first blamed and then made sacred, ritual and myth as memory of a founding murder, 'texts of persecution', and the claim that the Bible, and above all the Passion, reveals the mechanism from the victim's side; with the 'non-sacrificial' reading and its later revision, and an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0350 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Greek ecstatic religion against Nietzsche's Apollo/Dionysus scheme: Dodds on Plato's four divine madnesses, the Pythia, Dionysiac and Corybantic catharsis, maenadism, the 'Greek shamans' (Abaris, Aristeas, Epimenides, Pythagoras, Empedocles) and the origin of Greek puritanism; Orpheus and Orphism (Guthrie, Linforth's scepticism, Meisner on the theogonies); the myth of Dionysus and the Titans and the 'original sin' debate; Eleusis; Eliade on what was and wasn't shamanic; Girard on the Bacchae; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0349 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Was alchemy really about the soul? Jung's Psychology and Alchemy (projection, the opus as individuation, the lapis–Christ parallel) and Eliade's initiatory reading, against Principe's history of how the 'spiritual alchemy' idea was invented in the 19th century (Atwood, Hitchcock, Waite) and the recent 'chymistry' scholarship: decoding Decknamen, replicating the Philosophers' Tree, Newman on Newton's alchemy; with where real religious ideas did enter alchemy, and an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0348 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

The six figures of the Genealogy of Morals read as six kinds of conscience, following Ridley's Nietzsche's Conscience: the slave's revolt, the priest's transcendental turn, the philosopher's 'ephectic' self-relation, the artist's counter-art of the soul, the scientist's will to truth, and the noble as an ideal Nietzsche can recommend but not describe; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0347 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

What 'God is dead' means and why Nietzsche thinks nihilism follows from it only given a hidden premise. Reginster's two kinds of nihilism (disorientation and despair), life-negating values, why denying objective values isn't enough, and the revaluation of suffering, compassion and happiness through the will to power; Ridley on the will to truth; Heidegger on nihilism as the history of Platonism; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0346 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Girard's essay on Nietzsche's last formula: Nietzsche saw, against the positivists, that the Passion and the death of Dionysus are the same collective murder interpreted in opposite ways, the myth from the side of the crowd and the Gospel from the side of the victim, and he chose the crowd. Also the madman's 'we have killed him' as murder, not natural death, ressentiment as weakened vengeance, and the contrast with Maistre's sacrificial theology; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0345 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872): the wisdom of Silenus, four responses to the horror of existence (none, Apollonian, Dionysian, Socratic), the chorus and the tragic effect, myth and culture, and the death of tragedy at the hands of Euripides and Socrates, with Young on the Schopenhauerian frame, Porter on Socrates as Silenus and the 'Platonism' of the book, and Reginster on the book as Nietzsche's first account of nihilism; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0344 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

The Logos of John 1 against its possible backgrounds (the Hebrew Word, Wisdom, Philo, Stoicism), following Engberg-Pedersen's Stoic reading in John and Philosophy: logos and pneuma as two sides of one reality, 'signs' as Stoic signs, two kinds of belief, the Paraclete; with an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0343 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Four arguments that rule by one is best: Aquinas from unity and peace (De Regno), Dante for a single world monarch (Monarchy I), Maistre on sovereignty as one and monarchy as the natural government (Study on Sovereignty II), and Kuehnelt-Leddihn's comparison of hereditary monarchy with democracy (Liberty or Equality ch. 4). With the counter-voices inside the same books and a comparison.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0342 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Maistre's St Petersburg Dialogues on why the just suffer: the reframed question, the executioner, illness as punishment, original sin, suffering as medicine and expiation, prayer against the 'laws of nature', the 'divinity' of war, hereditary guilt, and substitution and blood sacrifice; with the French Revolution as chastisement and an Orthodox assessment.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0341 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

The theme of God dwelling with His people traced through Scripture. Eden as the first sanctuary, the tabernacle, Solomon's temple, the glory departing and the promised temple, Christ's body as the temple, the Church and the believer as temple, and the New Jerusalem where there is no temple because God and the Lamb are its temple.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0340 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

The theme of God's Name traced through Scripture. "I AM" at the bush, the Name as God's presence and power, the Name in the Psalms and in the temple, Jesus' "I am" sayings, the Name given to Jesus (Phil 2), and prayer, baptism and healing "in the Name", ending with the Jesus Prayer.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0339 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Who the Spirit is and what He does. His divinity (Scripture, St. Basil, Constantinople 381), procession from the Father alone vs sending through the Son, the Filioque, the Spirit in the Old Testament, Pentecost, the Spirit in the Church and the sacraments, the epiclesis, and "acquiring the Spirit" as the goal of the Christian life.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0338 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

What Christ did between His death and Resurrection. The Scripture texts (1 Peter 3-4, Ephesians 4, Acts 2, Psalm 16 and others), the Fathers, the Holy Saturday hymns and Chrysostom's Paschal homily, the Resurrection icon, and how the Orthodox and Western views differ.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0337 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

What sola scriptura claims (and what it doesn't: "solo" vs "sola"), the Protestant proof texts (2 Tim 3:16-17, Mark 7, Acts 17:11, Isa 8:20, Rev 22:18) and the replies to each, the Orthodox arguments against (the canon, oral tradition, the Church as pillar of truth, interpretation, history), the best Protestant replies, and the Orthodox alternative.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0336 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Christ as King traced through Scripture. God as Israel's true King, Melchizedek the priest-king, the promise to David, the royal Psalms (2, 45, 72, 110), the prophets' coming King, Daniel 7's Son of Man, the Gospels' "King of the Jews" and the crown of thorns, and Revelation's King of kings.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0335 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

What the Qur'an says about Jesus (virgin birth, miracles, Messiah, Word and Spirit from God, but only a prophet), the denial of the crucifixion in Surah 4:157 and the theories behind it, tawhid vs the Trinity, the "corruption" (tahrif) claim, and the problems for each, set against the Gospels.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0334 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Hume's empiricism (impressions and ideas, relations of ideas vs matters of fact), his analysis of causation (no necessary connection is ever perceived; it is constant conjunction plus habit), the problem of induction and why it can't be answered without circularity, the main replies (Kant, Reid, Popper, Bayesians, Aristotelians), and what it means for natural theology.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0333 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

How the Fathers read Genesis (literal, allegorical, both), what they said about the days, the age of the earth and "seminal reasons", the main problem for an Orthodox view of evolution (death before the Fall), and the range of modern Orthodox positions from creationist (Seraphim Rose) to theistic evolution.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0332 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

What we inherit from Adam. The Augustinian doctrine (inherited guilt) and the Orthodox one (inherited death and corruption, not guilt), the Romans 5:12 "in whom all sinned" translation problem, what the Greek Fathers said, the consequences (infant baptism, the Immaculate Conception, the atonement), and the usual objections.

https://beyondgoodevil.github.io/Confessions/#/M-0331 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

The Divine Liturgy step by step. The five liturgies and when each is served, the preparation (Proskomedia), the Liturgy of the Catechumens (litanies, Little Entrance, readings), the Liturgy of the Faithful (Great Entrance, Creed, Anaphora, Epiclesis, Communion), with what each part means and where it comes from in Scripture.