Books/Harpsichord/Harpsichord-2026.06.07-0630.txt

Foreword
Part I: A Story
I was 16, driving home from a piano lesson. I turned the corner into our cul-de-sac.
Wait, why are there police and paramedics parked in front of our house?
I go to the front door. “I live here. What’s going on?”
“Looks like your little brother just offed himself with a rifle.”

After that, my recollection is chaotic.
I remember my mother coming to a screeching halt, leaving the car door open and the engine running as she ran into the house.
I remember police, and paramedics, and the coroner, and detectives taking photos.
I remember the gurney as they wheeled him out.

And then they all left, and there we were: my step-father Tony, my mother, and my other brother.

So Tony and I decided that we needed to clean up ‘the mess’ on the floor and wall in the master bedroom. It had to be done.
So we got buckets, and sponges, and got to work.
While my mother sobbed uncontrollably in the living room, with feral shrieking that sounded more animal than human.

Eric was 13 years old.




He didn’t stand a chance.

Dad was a lieutenant in the Navy, and the Navy doctors decided it had to be nine months.
Oops, off by a month.
In that last month is when your glands and lungs get polished off.
Consequently, every winter — like clockwork — Eric spent a week in the hospital in an oxygen tent.
Also, because his pituitary wasn’t working right, he was almost a foot shorter than his classmates — regularly ridiculed and picked on.
And then he was off the charts smart. Back then I.Q. tests were a big thing, taken very seriously. At the elementary school he attended, where he took the test, he scored higher than anyone ever. I don’t know what the score was, but it was so high that they had him take the test again, this time under the watchful eye of a proctor. Same result.
But he was terribly withdrawn. Terribly. He had no use for school, or playing outside, or anything, really.. All he wanted to do was sit in his darkened room and play with his hand puppets.
I’ve wondered if he wasn’t autistic. In a day when ‘autism’ wasn’t even a word in psychiatry yet.
Meanwhile, my step-father Tony was the hard-driving executive — a Vice President at RCA (a really huge international electronics company). He also had a serious alcohol problem. And he could get physically brutal. 
Tony just couldn’t understand why Eric wasn’t “living up to his potential.” He’d bellow at him. He’d ground him. Suspend TV privileges. Berate him up and down — no change.
Meanwhile, his pediatrician thought that some new drug might jump start his pituitary. No effect, so he discontinued it. “He might be ‘kinda blue for a little while’ he told my mother.”
Then, in January 1970, Eric spent his annual week in an oxygen tent. First day back in school a history test awaited him — for which he had missed all the material. He had to take the test anyway.
So, coming home with a D on his history test, knowing the reaming he’d get from Tony, he got the rifle down from the top shelf in my parents bedroom. And they didn’t keep it loaded, so he got down the ammunition too. And then, he was so short that he couldn’t reach the trigger, so he took off a shoe and sock and used his big toe.


I was in utter misery. As his older brother, I kept racking my brain if there was “something I could have done.”
Meanwhile, my folks took my other brother to a psychiatrist, who immediately put him on anti-depressants. Back in 1970, those were really crude — I took one look at my brother’s almost drooling affect and said to myself. “We’re not doing that.”
Instead, when the darkness descended, I’d sit and play Bach — sometimes for hours, sometimes the same piece over and over, until it passed. 
I never, however, ever remotely considered following Eric’s path. I knew this would pass — somehow. I just had to find the way.

Meanwhile, friends at high school attended a local Evangelical church. I had alreay been going with them.
After Eric, however, my search for ‘answers’ took on real urgency. I went to every service and Bible study I could. But I didn’t find their answers very satisfactory.
So I kept pressing.
Finally, one day, Pastor Bob said, “You know, if you learned Greek, you could read the New Testament for yourself in the original and answer your own questions.”
I! CAN! DO! THAT!
I didn’t act on it right away — Life was still too crazy for that.
And everyone had their hearts set on me going to music school — Cal Arts in particular.
So I went there for a year, in abject misery.
So at the end of that year, I looked around for the toughest Greek program I could find in the greater Los Angeles, and transferred to Biola University (originally “Bible Institute of Los Angeles.)

Biola was awesome! I loved it there!
To be sure they had their quirks: you had to go to chapel every day (and submit your punchcard so they could verify it.) And you had to take one Bible class every semester. Whatever.
But their Greek exceeded my expectations. They were ruthless about it. 

First day: “Know chapter 1 for tomorrow, there will be a test.”
Second day: Take the test. Lecture. “Know chapter 2 for tomorrow.”
Third day: Take the test. Lecture. “Know chapter 3 for tomorrow.”

94% was an A, 88% was a B, 80% was a C — half point off for wrong or missing accent mark.

In the first semester they had two sections, 25 students each. By the end of week two, class size was cut in half. By the 4th semester, there was one session of 8 of us left.

I made vocabulary cards that I hung around my neck — we all did. Noses buried in our grammars every spare moment. On campus we were known as the “Greek Freaks.”

After that first year, they offered both semesters of second year in an 8 week summer session. Lecture for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. The first day of class the instructor said, “Don’t even try to have a life outside of this class. No job. No nothing.” He was right.

Thus I was able to cover 2 years of Greek in a calendar year. With near perfect scores. (Missed a few accents marks.)

There were two other courses that I took that made a huge difference.
One was “Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament.” The idea is that the Greek New Testament didn’t come down to us in nice leather bound volumes. It came down to us mostly in pieces — some fairly complete, much of it fragmentary. Half of Mark here. A few pages of I Corinthians there. And they aren’t all identical in their wording. Most of the time it’s pretty minor — different spellings of proper names, for example. But sometimes the differences are significant. 
At the time, the prevailing practice was “whichever version is oldest, use that.” Dr. Sturz — the Textual Criticism professor, disagreed with this, and was able to prove that this approach is too simplistic. 
He was fond of saying “A million Frenchmen can be wrong.” Meaning that just because ‘everyone’ thinks things are a certain way, doesn’t mean they are.

The other was a Survey of Philosophy. It was broken up into four semesters, and it worked out I was able to take two of them: Graeco-Roman philosophy, and “Modern Philosophy — Descartes through Kant.” 
Dr. Hansen was first rate. In his class you didn’t have to agree with anything — but you had better be able to articulate why not. 
In due time he had me over to dinner with his family, and he became just ‘Del.’ Dinner on Sunday became regular. They had a nice grand piano, so I made a point of “playing for my supper,” which they really enjoyed. His office was down in the basement: bookcase after bookcase packed with books on philosophy, history, etc. A couple times I grabbed a book at random, “Hey Del, what’s this one about?” And he’d launch into a detailed summary that made my eyes glaze over.
He also had a well-equipped shop in his garage — both woodworking and metal working (including welding). More than once I’d bring my beater car over, and we’d fix it together.


Although my Bioloa coursework was going really, everything else was going badly. 
I had stayed in the greater Los Angeles area so I could go home and “referee” my folks on weekends. I’d come home, and find a new hole that Tony had punched in the wall. One time I came home and found a note on the dining room table: “We’re at the hospital. You’re mother is having her stomach pumped because she O.D. on drugs.” Of course I flew to the emergency room. There Tony screamed at me at the top of his lungs at some length about how this was “all your fault” because — if I had only been home more… Tony was a big guy — think linebacker, so he was really imposing and intimidating. Mom, in despair, had deliberately overdosed, immediately realized her folly and had called 911, so there had never been any real danger. Nevertheless.
Meanwhile, I had a California State academic scholarship that covered part of my tuition,  but not all of it. And there were my living expenses. So I was working full time to cover that. I got a job as a night watchman graveyard shift at a giant food warehouse — I was expected to do rounds once an hour, but the rest of the time I could study. 
And there was no money from my folks.
Gradually the challenging course load, and working full time, and weekends of who-knows-what awaited at home took its toll. Del knew something of what was going on, but I guess I didn’t feel right telling him all of it. I went to the counseling center at Biola, and the counselor I was assigned (a retired pastor, not a real healthcare professional) told me “What you need is some sleep and a girl-friend.” Not helpful. 
And financially I just wasn’t making it. On a regular basis I would run out of money before I ran out of month. So I simply wouldn’t eat for a few days until my next paycheck.
I even stopped turning in my ‘chapel cards.’ Every day you had classes you were expected to attend chapel, and turn in a punch card proving that you did — or else you’d be having a conversation with the Dean of Men (or Women). I wanted that conversation — and it never happened.

In hindsight I realize I could have done a better job of reaching out for help. But I was in such a dark place I just didn’t know how. Finally, one day I walked into the accounting office and withdrew from Biola. 
I still have nothing but respect for Biola and my time there. In my opinion, the coursework dramatically over-delivered. To me the counseling not working, the ‘chapel-card’ not working — really what that boiled down to was: I had gotten out of Biola what I needed — five semesters of Greek in a calendar year, and two really great philosophy courses that gave me both a theoretical and historical framing. Providence saw that and shepherded me out the door and on my way. Of course couldn’t understand that at the time.
That last afternoon was surreal — on a normally busy afternoon, there was no one in the halls when I walked out of their doors for the last time.




When I was five years old, my folks bought a piano. When it materialized in our house one wondrous day, I was immediately transfixed. I can still remember the piano bench being chest high, so I had to jump up and scramble onto it for yet another session exploring its magic.
It didn’t take long for Mom to get me lessons — as much for her own sanity as anything else. That lasted a few months — Dad was in the Navy, and he got transfered again. No lessons after that, but I kept working at it on my own.
Finally, when I was about 8, Dad was posted to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey — we’d be there for a couple years while Dad got a degree in Electrical Engineering. So mom decided this was the perfect opportunity for lessons again.
Monterey was a small town then — still not large. When she asked around, the common recommendation was a fellow named Jack Reynolds. But he didn’t take child students. Mom prevailed on him to interview me, and he made an exception.
In the two years with him I progressed from really rudimentary playing, to one of the easy piano sonatas Beethoven wrote for his niece. He introduced me to music theory: how key signatures work, how to build scales and chords. And I wrote my first music — really short, simple pieces, but that’s where you start. And as part of my ‘general grounding’ he taught me basic guitar and recorder.
Then Dad finished his degree, and he was transferred again — this time to Norfolk, VA. I had other teachers after him — off and on as circumstances permitted, but no one like Jack.


Fast forward to my senior year. I’m in Southern California. Eric has just left us. I was in a dark place.
One of my circle of friends — the ones that invited me to Reseda Baptist — had an uncle who was a world-class bass/baritone. She knew I was a ‘Bach nut’ — learning to play as much of his music as I could, so she told her uncle about me.
“I’m singing in the Carmel Bach Festival this coming summer,” he said. “I can’t get you into the concerts, but I can get you in to all the dress rehearsals you want. My wife and I will only have a small cabin — the best I can offer is a floor for your sleeping bag.”
Of course! Bach was my hero!
It is still a deeply vivid memory of hearing the orchestra and chorus launch into Bach’s Magnificat — “My soul magnifies the Lord” — the boundless joy and magnificence of it. And I just sobbed at the bone-aching beauty of it. It was a blinding light blazing into my darkness.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, “while I’m here in the Carmel/Monterey area, why don’t I look up my old music teacher, Jack Reynold?”

Jack absolutely remembered me. I played a little for him, so he could see how I had progressed. And I told him something of what was going on. Not really much to tell yet — the full impact of everything hadn’t really landed yet.
So that year, and through my sojourns at Cal-Arts and Biola, we corresponded. 

Over time, I pieced together something of his story. He had been an Army Commander in World War II. His unit liberated a concentration camp. I once asked him about that — this was living history right in front of me. He got very quiet, then got up, grabbed a bottle of vodka, and for days I only saw him go from bedroom to the bathroom to his office.
After the Army, he was a reporter with his own byline with API. That’s no small thing: back then there were news syndicates like API (American Press International?) that gathered news and sold it to local newspapers. To have your own byline meant that you were a regular reporter.
Then he became interested in hotel management for some reason. So he completely fabricated a resume, got the job, and ran it better than anyone before him.
By the time I knew him, he had settled in Monterey because of it’s beauty. With the GI Bill he had gone to piano tuning/repair school. So when I visited him, he owned a few rental properties, owned a few stocks, had some piano students, and tuned and repaired pianos.
In his house there were no blank walls — all had bookcases filled with books on every topic imaginable. Next to his philosophy section might be gardening. I asked him about his eclectic tastes. He said “I want to be able to converse intelligently on any topic that the other person finds interesting.”
Although he had piano students, he could barely play himself. One of his students was learning Beethoven’s Appassionata (a difficult piece). So he bought every recording he could find, learning as many different approaches as he could, and was a very effective coach.
When Saigon fell, there was a major influx of Vietnamese, all who needed to learn English. So he hosted classes in his living room, conducting them with a baton so they could learn the cadence of the language.
One time he took me to a Mensa meeting (a society for ‘smart people’). He said he liked to go maybe once a year to see if there was anyone there he could ‘rescue’.

He also wrote poetry. Here’s an example:

I am a stranger here.
For many years I did not know
Why the words sound strange to my ear.
Or knew what I looked and waited for
When the moon shown living and clear
Or the rain spoke strangely among the stones
Or the wind in the trees was near

The ones who placed me within this frame
In the land beneath the Sun
Forgot to connect a pair of nerves
And left other things undone
And though we are bound by a common need
My body and I are not one.

Who are my people? Where is my land?
I don’t know, I cannot say.
But this I know: the ones I love
Live in a land far away
A land that this one reminds me of
Sometimes, on an odd-cast day.



So when I walked out of Biola, there was only one place to go. Certainly not to my folks house. I had to thrown myself onto Jack’s front door.
I called, “Come on up!”
He didn’t have a spare room, but he had a basement, with a room already partitioned off in the back. It had a bed in it, we cleared out the other stuff, and generally fixed it up into something quite serviceable. It’s not like I was picky, under the circumstances.
While I was there, we talked about just about everything — except Eric and the aftermath. 
At one point I expressed despair about what I would do, how I would survive. He became almost angry at me:
“You have the smarts, the imagination and the drive to make your own solutions. Trust that, and you’ll be OK.”

Or once we talked about ‘security’ in life. “What is it?” he asked me. “Money in the bank?” “No,” he said. “Banks fail.” I proposed a couple other things, which he shot down. “I give up. What?”
“The courage to face the day.”

In our correspondence, he wrote: “Remember, that while the talented man may produce a Taj Mahal, where the plodder was able only to build a church, it still takes a million times as much plain old work to produce the Taj.”

During my stay is when I learned much of his story. But it’s not so much that he told me things (although there was that too). Clearly I was marked for a life of taking the Road Less Traveled. But I had never known anyone blessed/cursed with that same Life Path. Until Jack. A living, compassionate, passionate traveler on the Road Less Traveled.

And that has made all the difference.


I stayed with Jack for a few weeks — that was enough. I certainly didn’t have ‘the answers’, but I had the beginnings of a plan. Step one was to finish my degree.

I stayed with my folks just long enough to find my own place, and re-enrolled at Cal-Arts. 

Also, I realized that doing the conventional employment plan to pay tuition and living expenses was not going to work. When I was in high school I had bought a harpsichord kit and built it (so I could play Bach on it, of course). It wasn’t a huge step to working on pianos.

But tuning a piano is a lot harder than tuning a harpsichord. So I bought some basic piano tuning tools, and called up churches: “Hi. I need to practice tuning pianos. I’ll bet you have a bunch of them in your Sunday School rooms that haven’t been tuned in decades. I’ll tune them for free — for practice. And if they need any repairs (basically notes not working), just reimburse me for my cost for the parts.”
I had no trouble finding takers, and after about 30 pianos I was passably decent. Certainly good enough for your typical home piano.

So I got a church organ/director job close to Cal-Arts. This gave me quite a stable of students and piano-tuning customers. Funny how I’d time tunings so that I’d be finishing up around dinner time. “Would you like to stay for dinner?” Yum, a free home cooked meal! And when I was done tuning I made it a practice to play for 15-20 minutes — they always liked that.

And I had a simple shop. I’d have a big piano job, or build a harpsichord in there, timing its completion to coincide with a tuition payment.

This was a much better plan.

So now I had a modicum of stability in my life. And steady meals. I could play the harpsichord really well — best in the school — so Cal-Arts was under control too. For my senior recital I played Bach’s Goldberg Variations — one of the pinnacles of the harpsichrod literature.

So now I could return to my quest for ‘answers’. The urgency hadn’t diminished, but now it wasn’t crowded out by too many life necessities.

I had been reading my New Testament in Greek. But that wasn’t really doing anything for me: I found it almost impossible to not lapse into the usual ways of understanding it. The usual English translations would echo in my mind, and that was that.

Yet, even with just basic reading, I was coming across problems. Right away, in the first verse of the Sermon on the Mount, we have:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the HEAVENS. [PLURAL!]

No translation conveys the plural. Why not? Of course there’s no big doctrinal controversy hanging on this. To me, all the more reason “Why NOT translate it as plural?” In first semester Greek we learned the plural forms in like week TWO.

Or better still, the Lord’s Prayer:

Our father, in the HEAVENS [PLURAL!]
Hallowed be your name,
Your kingdom come, 
your will be done
On earth as it is in HEAVEN [SINGULAR].

What’s the significance of switching from plural to singular? I don’t know. (I have some thoughts on that now, but those came later.) Yet — who am I, as the translator, to decide that those details are unimportant? This is “God’s Word,” the Evangelicals would say. “Every single word is ‘God-breathed.’” Then why are they flattening it, altering it really, with no good reason I could think of?

Gradually the idea formed to do my own translation. Virtually all translations take it as given that the target is about 7th grade, Miss Grundy approved, don’t rock the boat English. And, honestly, for most people, most of the time, that’s fine. That has it’s place. 

But I wondered: English is my native language. What if I used English more creatively to try convey more of the subtlety of the Original? It would be harder to read, sure. But for some folks (like me) — so what?

After all, I was still looking for MY ‘answers,’ and I knew I wasn’t going to find them by following the well-worn tracks of most everyone else. Plus, when just reading, it’s too easy to let your eyes glaze over the hard passages. To read the Greek, and then express that in a way designed to challenge the habitual rendering would FORCE me to really think about it.

 So I resolved to do my own translation, 



Later I realized I had stumbled on my own version of an ancient practice: Lectio Divina: “Divine Reading.” The idea is to read a passage super slowly, meditating on every word. A spiritual practice going back to the Christian hermit mystics in the 4th century Egyptian desert.

Now, the resources for undertaking a project like this are plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Not so back in the early 1970s. No internet. No Amazon. The closest suitable library was hours away.

My starting library consisted of:

Nestle and Aland, eds., Novum Testamentum Graece, 25th edition
Rahlfs, ed., Septuaginta (LXX)
Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG)
Liddell, Scott, and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ)
Moulton and Geden, A Concordance to the Greek Testament
Hatch and Redpath, A Concordance to the Septuagint
Kittel and Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT)
Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament
Dana and Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament

Also, no home computers yet. So I translated the whole N.T. with a manual typewriter and white out for corrections (white paint you’d apply over your mistake and type again).



So, I started at the very beginning. A very good place to start — Matthew 1. The first few chapters are about Jesus birth — the Three Wise Men and all of that. By the way, it doesn’t say they were men — it’s plural so it could include mixed genders. And it’s MAGOI — mages “from the East”? Mesopotamia? That might make them astrologers. For whom it would make perfect sense to follow a star in the sky.

That was all fine, nothing earth-shaking.

And then I got to the Sermon on the Mount, and the earth moved. The first verse:

Blessed are the poor in spirit…

Except that the word invariably translated ‘poor’ doesn’t mean ‘poor’ like we would assume. Someone who is poor can still have enough to eat, and a warm place to sleep. They’re just on the low end of the socio-economic spectrum.

No, the word here for poor means: someone with NOTHING. A BEGGAR, who has to rely on the generosity of others for the necessities of life — just to have something to eat. Destitute.

Blessed are the beggars in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of the Heavens.
Blessed are the destitute in spirit…

“Homeless” is an interesting idea:

Blessed are the homeless in spirit…

But PTWXOI isn’t about not having a home. It’s about having nothing at all.

So I settled on ‘beggars’ because they’re actively trying to take care of themselves using the only option available — begging. Someone who is destitute might just crawl under a rock and die. Based on Jesus’ teaching as a whole, in which He expects us to DO something, I opted for ‘beggar.’

To me, “poor in spirit” is an an unnecessary flattening, neutering a saying with real teeth into something with toothless gums. Why? Why does practically everyone translate this ‘poor in spirit’? (Mostly inertia, frankly. More later.)

"This has to be an anomaly," I thought. But it wasn't. 



My plan was working: seriously trying to unflatten the Text forced me to really think about it.

And there were wonders to be found.

Just a few examples.

(FOOTNOTE: for readers who know Greek, of necessity I have to resort to ‘pedagogical simplifications.” We have to start somewhere.)

The New Testament famously has two words for love: AGAPE (“ah-GAH-pay”) and PHILIA, where virtually all the translations flatten them to the one English word love. AGAPE and PHILIA mean quite different things, so this flattening results in quite a bit of confusion for the English reader.

So to communicate the difference, I settled on ‘agape-love’ and ‘philia-love’.

AGAPE is more like commitment. PHILIA is more like feeling. The analogy I like is that on your wedding day, PHILIA runs high. But it’s AGAPE that keeps the marriage together over the years.

John famously says “God is AGAPE,” and I can’t tell you how many sermons and articles I’ve encountered that say something like “AGAPE is the highest form of love. It’s Divine love.”

So imagine my surprise translating John 3. We have the famous verse 16: “For God thus agape-loved the world, that he gave his uniquely-begotten son…”. 

But wait, what’s this, three verses later in vs. 19: “For people agape-loved the darkness rather than the light…” Wait! AGAPE can’t be “God’s wonderful love” after all. Something else is going on with AGAPE. (And there are other places where people AGAPE something other than The Good.)

Which is how I came around to AGAPE is more like commitment. Then it makes sense that people could agape-love the darkness. So then, what does John mean by “God is AGAPE”? That’s a question for elsewhere.

Making clear the distinction between AGAPE and PHILIA also opens up passages like this in John 21. This takes place after the resurrection:

Jesus says 3 to Simon Peter: Simon [son] of John, do you agape-love me more than these?
He says to them: Yes, Lord, you know that I philia-love you. 
He says to him: Be tending my lambs. 
16 He says to him again [a] second time: Simon [son] of John, do you agape-love me? 
He says to him: Yes Lord, you know that I philia-love you. 
He says to him: Be shepherding my sheep. 
17 He says to him the third time: Simon [son] of John, do you philia-love me? 
Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time: Do you philia-love me? 
And he said to him: You know everything, you know that I philia-love you.
Jesus says to him: Be tending my sheep.  

First of all, Jesus’ three questions echo Peter’s three denials just a couple chapters ealier. Peter, knowing he has denied Jesus, can’t bring himself to say “I AGAPE you.” Which helps clarify his exasperation in Jesus’ third question: do you PHILIA-love me?

SO many lovely things like this. No big doctrines overturned, but it was as if I had watched Star Wars on a 3-inch black-and-white screen with a tinny speaker for my whole life, and for the first time saw it on a big iMax screen in Technicolor with Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound. Sure, the same story. But an entirely different experience.



Two more examples.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you 

Except: Greek imperatives make the distinction between a one time action, versus an ongoing continual one:

* Take out the trash. (This once.) The so-called “aorist imperative.”
Vs.
* Be taking out the trash. (It’s your ongoing job. Keep taking it out whenever it needs it.) The so-called “present imperative.” 

Almost always the verbs in this passage are translated as aorist imperatives: “Ask…, seek…, knock… (once)”. When all of them are present imperatives: “Keep asking, keep seeking…, keep knocking… (over and over):

Be asking , and it will be given to you; be seeking, and you will find; be knocking, and it will be opened to you.

I get why this passage isn’t translated this way — it’s non-standard English. But flattening it is downright misleading.

And finally:

Greek has the word ANTHROPOS for ‘a human being’, and ANER for an adult male/husband (whether it’s ‘husband’ or just ‘adult male’ is determined from context.)

So in the Gospels especially, Jesus has the title “Son of Man”. Except that the word ‘Man” here is ANTHROPOS. Better would be 

“Son of Humanity”.

The King James used ‘man’ for both ANTHROPOS and ANER — that was standard English usage back in 1711. And countless translations since then have followed that precedent. Some modern translations have made a point of fixing this — English usage has changed, after all. So we now have; 

“People do not live by bread alone, but by every word proceeding from the mouth of god.”

Instead of 

“Man does not live by bread alone.”

Some modern translations make a fuss about being ‘gender accurate’, yet they STILL translate “Son of ANTHROPOS” as “Son of Man.” Why?

Especially since, to me, “Son of Humanity” has it’s own kind of poetic grandeur.

To me it’s not about being ‘gender neutral’, it’s about being “gender accurate” — reflect what’s in the original as best I can, and let the chips fall where they may

In general, that’s what translators are supposed to do, right? If you’re a translator for the U.N., your job is to reflect the meaning of the speaker as accurately as possible in the listener’s native language. What you think or feel about what the speaker is saying is supposed to be completely irrelevant, and should in no way influence or color your translation. It’s all about faithfulness. Interpretation wears a different hat.




My translation enterprise was vastly more than an intellectual exercise. This was how I was going to find the ‘answers’ I was looking for. I didn’t have any better ideas, and it seemed promising, so I was ALL IN.

I was barely into the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5ff) when I started feeling a Presence as I was translating. It felt more feminine than masculine, although the distinction is subtle. She never said who She was, or anything like that. If I could put words into Her mouth at all, it would be something like “Keep going. You’ll be OK.”
It wasn’t just once. I had the usual life tasks — making a living, doing the laundry — so I could only work on it in the evenings, or in odd snatches of time. All told, the entire N.T. took me a couple years.
Yet, every time I sat down to work on it, and got into it, Presence was there. Day after day, for the entirety of the Gospels. 

When I got to Acts, Paul, and the apostolic letters, no Presence. I don’t know why.

Most readers won’t know what to make of this. I’m not sure I know what to make of it. But there it is, anyway. That recurring, ongoing experience was as real to me as remembering hearing the Magnificat at Carmel. 

“Keep going. You’ll be OK.” 

I did. And I was.


One chapter at a time, I finally got to the last chapter of the last book: The Apocalypse of John. Appropriately, as I was translating that last chapter, it was night, and thunder and rain raged outside. It was great!

My translation project didn’t answer my questions in the way I had hoped. Instead, it gave me a much better set of new questions.

In order to better understand the context of the New Testament, I had been doing more and more research on its cultural context.

The New Testament is an odd mix of Judaism and Hellenistic (Greek) thinking. Jesus was operating in a more Judaic world (he was a rabbi, after all). As Christianity spread beyond Judea, it bumped up against Hellenistic thinking more and more. This is especially true with Paul. Christianity is an odd marriage of Greece and Palestine — with all the ongoing joys and tensions that go with any marriage.
And I wonder if we don’t sufficiently appreciate what the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. did to Christianity. Its Judaic branch was dealt a severe — perhaps mortal blow, and the Hellenistic branch was left standing. (And, if there had been government records of Jesus’ crucifixion, they would have been in Jerusalem and destroyed in the conflagration.)

At any rate, one thread led to another. It was as if I were pulling the thread on a sweater, that turns out to be one for an octopus with 8 arms, and then for a centipede with a hundred.

And somewhere I tripped over Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. Which for the first time gave me a road map of my sojourn through the Underworld. And the knowledge that countless others had made this sojourn, and survived.

Indeed, once I recovered my emotional equilibrium, I realized that I had been sensitized to recognizing others on the same journey. As the roar of my own suffering quieted, I could see that untold numbers of people around me were making their own Sojourns through the Underworld.

So here I am, over 40 years later, having wandered in the wilderness lo these many decades, and ‘answers’ have cohered about as well as they’re ever likely to. Following those threads turned out to cover a lot of ground, and it has taken me a lifetime to weave them together into a semi-coherent whole.

And I have NEVER forgotten Presence. “Keep going. You’ll be OK.” She was right. She hasn’t shown up since. Hasn’t needed to, methinks. 

As for the New Testament in particular, I can’t do better than to quote Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965). He started out as a German theologian, Bach scholar and concert organist. Then he wrote a book: The Quest for the Historical Jesus…
In the 19th and 20th centuries in particular, New Testament scholars were obsessed with finding “the historical Jesus”  the ‘real’ Jesus behind the Gospel narratives. Schweitzer considered them one by one, and demonstrated that in every case the proposed ‘historical Jesus’ was the one the researcher wanted to find. Schweitzer argued that the whole enterprise was impossible. His book became a landmark in New Testament scholarship.
Then Schweitzer gave up his theological and music careers, went back to medical school, became a physician, and founded a hospital in the backwoods of Africa.
For which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
Schweitzer ended his Quest for the Historical Jesus with this paragraph, which I learned by heart decades ago. And I’m sure I don’t have it exactly right, but I share it from my heart to yours:

“He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew him not. He comes to us, he speaks the same word: Follow Thou Me! And sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands! And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself - in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings, which they shall pass through in His fellowship. And as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, Who He Is.







Part 2: Reflections
Over the last few decades, neuroscience has made enormous headway. Now comes the task of taking all those individual 'trees' of insight and collecting them into an intelligible forest. For me, one of the more striking pioneers of this is Ian McGilchrist — formerly professor at Oxford, he now devotes himself entirely to research and writing. He argues that our brains have two hemispheres because we need to accomplish two somewhat contradictory tasks to survive — simultaneously.
On the one hand, we need to be able to focus all our attention on one thing: prey maybe, or looking for berries. This requires intense focus on a small part of our surroundings. We need to be able to focus intensely to catch or find lunch.
On the other hand, we also need to maintain a global awareness of our surroundings. If we don't stay globally aware, we'll miss the snapping twig and become lunch ourselves.
We need both. We need the ability to focus intensely, yet maintain general awareness of our surroundings.
And that's what the two hemispheres do. The left-brain is really good at focusing its attention on ONE THING. The right-brain is really good at big-picture contexts. (In practice, both hemispheres are involved in almost everything. It's more accurate to think in terms of which hemisphere is in the "driver's seat.")
We find this arrangement in the animal kingdom in general. This two-hemisphere arrangement appears across the vertebrate kingdom — in fish, birds, mammals — suggesting it's been with us for hundreds of millions of years. Because all of us need both modes of awareness to survive — to find lunch without becoming lunch.
Neuroscience explores the mind from the outside. But humanity has also been exploring the mind from the inside since the dawn of humanity. 
I’d like to focus on just early Greek philosophy. In Plato we find two words for mind: DIANOIA (“dee-ah-NOY-ah”) and NOUS (“noose”). Plato inherited the term nous from earlier Greek thought but gave it philosophical precision.
For Plato, dianoia is discursive reasoning — the mind moving step by step through an argument, working with images and hypotheses, proceeding from premises to conclusions. It's what you do when you calculate, when you follow a proof, when you think things through. It operates in time, sequentially.
Nous is a different mode entirely — direct, non-discursive apprehension of truth. Not reasoning toward something but seeing it whole, immediately. Plato associates it with the direct contemplation of the Forms — the eternal, unchanging realities that mathematical objects and beautiful things and just acts all participate in. Dianoia can get you to the threshold. Nous is what happens at the threshold.
This maps to the left hemisphere as DIANOIA, and the right as NOUS.
Aristotle emphasize reason/DIANOIA over contemplation/NOUS, creating a trajectory that the Enlightenment accelerated — until dianoia became the only respectable mode of knowing and nous got quietly retired. That’s where we are today.

Which makes the rise of AI devastatingly ironic. Here, humanity has developed a machine that can out-DIANOIA us. Unsurprisingly, we don’t like it.

Meanwhile, there is still NOUS. Nature gave us NOUS because it too is essential for survival. And we’ve been using NOUS all along — just on the down low. 

(To be continued…)

Fast forward to 1650.

Europe had just had the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) — which, by percentage of the population who perished — was the worst war in European history. The War took place in the Holy Roman Empire — a loose confederation of separate feudal states, with the Emperor — the Hapsburg Dynasty — herding the cats. With the Reformation, local rulers saw the opportunity to pry power away from the Pope and the Emperor and have more for themselves. The kings and princes framed this to the population as a ‘theological war’ — “Catholics good, Protestants evil” and vice versa, when really it was about just plain old power.
The question of the Pope's authority had already largely settled before 1618. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) had effectively given princes the right to determine their territories' religion: cuius regio, eius religio — his realm, his religion. That is, the religion of the local king determined the religion of his kingdom. Which worked tolerably well, because the common folk could emigrate to a kingdom whose religion suited them.
What the Thirty Years War was actually about, at its core, was the contest between Habsburg universal empire and the emerging system of sovereign nation-states — with France (a Catholic kingdom!) funding Protestant armies against Catholic Austria precisely because Cardinal Richelieu of France understood that a Habsburg Europe was the real threat to France.
The Thirty Years War was not just between armies — it was total war against the entire social fabric, military and civilian alike. Marauding armies destroyed crops and civilian infrastructure as well as opposing forces and castles. Famine killed as many soldiers and civilians as bullets and cannonballs. And those that survived armies and famine were ravaged by plague. Historians estimate that some regions lost half their population. Compare this with WWII: overall about 6% in Europe. But Poland was caught between Hitler's eastward advance towards Moscow, and the Soviet counterattack  westward to Berlin, with both armies treating Polish territory and population as expendable. 
Finally, from exhaustion as much as anything, the Peace of Westphalia was concluded in 1648.
The intelligentsia (like the rest of Europe) were horrified by the slaughter, and vowed: Never again. But they bought the propaganda about it being religious in origin. “Therefore we must rule ourselves with Reason instead of Religion,” they argued, and the Enlightenment was born. The intelligentsia misdiagnosed the cause of the war (blaming religion when the real driver was power), and then built the Enlightenment program on that misdiagnosis. 
If Reason was prescribed as the antidote to Religion, but Religion wasn't actually the disease — then the Enlightenment, for all its genuine achievements, was treating the wrong disease. The actual pathogen (the will to power, the manipulation of populations through whatever compelling narrative is available) simply changed costumes. In the 20th century it wore Nationalism and Ideology instead of Theology — and produced body counts that dwarfed the Thirty Years War. 
Another way of describing the Enlightenment Agenda is: the privileging of DIANOIA over all other modes of thinking. DIANOIA — the Greek term for analytical reason, the mind's capacity to dissect, categorize, and solve. Logos über alles. Reason above all. If we rely on DIANOIA alone, we’ll never have another Thirty Years War.
Of course it didn’t work out that way, as the 20th century demonstrated to everyone’s horror. The Soviet Union in particular claimed to be ruling according to Scientific Materialism — the pinnacle of Reason — and slaughtered its population to a degree that rivaled Hitler. Reason also gave us Zyklon B (the gas used in Hitler's death camps) and nuclear weapons — not as aberrations, but as logical extensions of scientific method operating precisely as designed: which is to say, without the capacity for moral judgment built in. 
My point is not at all “Reason is evil too.” Instead, I want to call into question that Reason is necessarily benign. It’s not. 

(To be continued)

There’s a famous wisdom story about a  drunk looking for his car keys on a dark night. He’s looking under a street light, and a passerby asks, “Is this where you lost them?” “No,” the drunk replies, “but the light is better here.”
Reason and the Scientific Method are arguably the most powerful flashlights humanity has ever devised. But they don’t guarantee that we’re looking under the right street light.
We build mathematical systems. And rightly so — when well framed, they are enormously powerful. So we assume: if a problem can be reduced to a mathematical system, we can solve it, or at least control it. That’s the theory, anyway.
If we can describe our economy with equations, then we can control it. 
If we can describe how human beings behave with sociology equations, then we can control that too. 
One problem, however, is “confirmation bias.” Once a person, or a corporation, or a government commits itself to an understanding of something, then it doesn’t want to be proved wrong and will go to great lengths to interpret all subsequent data as confirming their stance. It doesn’t matter if the system never really worked in the first place, or if the context changed and the system stopped working, the result is the same: double down on our (now) problematic stance.
But the problem isn’t just intellectual. It’s also political. Once a system is implemented, a supporting infrastructure is put in place, with people to build and manage it. Many of those people just want job security — nothing wrong with that. And some of those in leadership like the power, money and prestige they’ve been given, and will go to great lengths to keep it.
So the system becomes self-perpetuating, regardless of whether it works. The problem isn't just bad ideas, or good ideas that have passed their ‘use by’ date — it's that these now dysfunctional ideas grow armor. 
The Church is as good an example of this as any.
The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most lofty visions of how humanity can live together as has ever been uttered. And what happens? St. Paul starts building a system around it. (I note that Paul never mentions the Sermon on the Mount, or any of Jesus’ parables, or…) Not necessarily bad — wheat needs a bowl to contain it. But the trajectory was set.
The first few centuries of Christianity were a theological free for all. “Jesus was completely human” vs. “Jesus was completely divine, and didn’t feel a thing on the cross.” “The body is evil, so flee from comfort and pleasure” vs. “The body is of no consequence, so eat, drink and be merry.” The later Church liked to claim “the way we think is the one and only way the early Church thought,” and destroyed any evidence to the contrary. But newly emerging evidence — like the Nag Hammadi finds — continue to paint a different story.
And then came the Roman Emperor, Constantine (272-337). By the 4th century, the Empire was starting to come apart at the seams. Meanwhile, Christianity had emerged as a very substantial movement. So he legalized Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, hoping to make an ally out of a movement that Constantine realized had never really been a political threat to Rome. And since the whole point of legalizing Christianity was political, Constantine saw it as necessary that to make Christianity politically effective, it needed to be unified under one doctrine, and one leadership. Thus he convened the Council of Nicea (325 CE), convening Christian leadership from throughout the Empire, with the mandate: “Figure it out.” And thus was born the Roman (as in Roman Empire), Catholic (which means ‘universal’) Church. (That official name wasn’t adopted until later.)
In 380, Emperor Theodosius (347-39) decreed that henceforth Christianity would not just be permitted, it would be mandatory. With the full might of the Roman Army put in service of the Church to suppress dissent. Whatever persecutions the Romans inflicted on Christians in the first few centuries paled in comparison to the persecutions the Church inflicted on the Romans — and subsequent citizenry.
(By the way, Constantine is frequently blamed for the dark side of the Church’s subsequent history. But that’s not quite fair. Constantine only legalized Christianity — he didn’t ban the alternatives. That was Theodosius . From Constantine’s perspective, there was no reason the Church and Paganism couldn’t peacefully coexist.)
Many Christians were horrified by this turn of events. Many kept right on trying to live the Teachings of Jesus independent of whatever the Church was doing. Others were in a position to vote with their feet, left the Empire proper, and retreated to the Egyptian desert where a community of radically independent believers had already established themselves. Radical in the sense that they wanted nothing to do with power, or money, or any of the trappings of ‘civilization’ — they just wanted to pray, fast and meditate.
Constantine didn't just legalize Christianity — he DIANOIA-fied it. He took a contemplative movement and turned it into an administrative one. Control, systematization, doctrinal enforcement: the left hemisphere in full institutional armor. The Desert Fathers were the holdouts — the ones who refused that takeover and kept the NOUS tradition alive in the margins, away from the machinery.
In this sense, the history of the Church is in large part the story of DIANOIA's slow victory over NOUS. Which is also, not coincidentally, the story of how an institution founded on the Sermon on the Mount ended up with an army.
In keeping with this agenda, the Catholic Church discovered Aristotle, and practically made him a saint. The Church took Aristotle’s agenda of applying DIANOIA to everything, and extended to theology, culminating in Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). His Summa is as massive a paean to theological DIANOIA as you’re ever likely to find, about 3500 pages. He never completed it. (Interestingly, towards the end of his life, Thomas had a vision  — he was never clear about the content, repudiated his massive Summa as ‘nothing but straw’ and lived a contemplative life for his remaining years.)
The Reformation didn’t address the steady rise of DIANOIA at all — if anything they doubled down on it. Massive “Systematic Theologies” multiplied— in which everything about God, the Cosmos and humanity are all figured out. (Calvin’s ran a mere 1500 pages.) And they continued the Church’s long-standing program of “believe exactly as we tell you — or else.” And much of the Reformation’s agenda was more about changing political power structures (e.g. “we repudiate the pope”) and less about substantive theological differences.
Indeed, for all its rigid order, the Catholic Church could be remarkably tolerant towards mystics. To be sure, they’d try to change their minds — sometimes forcibly. But in the end they frequently tolerated their mystics and later canonized them. (After they were safely dead.)
The Protestant church, however, has been quite inimical to mystics altogether. Against the long list of Catholic mystics: St. Francis, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena, we arguably have only one Protestant: Jacob Boehme. The Protestant church treated him terribly and promptly consigned him to oblivion. And the Quakers were a genuinely Protestant mystical tradition — but always at the margins, persecuted for their troubles, never mainstream.
Indeed, I’ve thought of my own experience of Presence when translating the Gospels as a very small-M ‘mystical’ experience. In my early naiveté, trying to make sense of it, I shared it with clergy, thinking they would know something about this sort of experience. Part of their training. At best I got “that’s interesting — what about those Dodgers?” At worst, denounced from the pulpit (but never by name, at least.) I learned very quickly that “religious professionals” were definitely NOT a safe source of insight for me. (I did eventually find exceptions.)
The Protestants also continued the unholy alliance between Church and State initiated by Constantine and Theodosius. Contemporary Christian Nationalists continue the same tradition.





Over the centuries In the Church and in the Enlightenment we see the continued listing of the ship of Civilization more and more to port — to the left hemisphere.
What does this mean?
DIANOIA is indeed a powerful feature of the mind. It is unmatched for hunting prey in all its forms. But Nature endowed us with NOUS for a reason. Apparently, from Nature’s perspective, we need both hemispheres to survive. And by implication, we are less able to survive when we drastically privilege one hemisphere — half of our brain — and deprecate the other half.
Why? How?
For one, we frequently build systems that prioritize ONE parameter out of many. One parameter at the expense of all else. DIANOIA, after all, is really good at focusing on ONE THING, where NOUS holds the big picture. …

We see it in the optimization at the heart of Capitalism: profit. Profit at all cost. Right now. Regardless of the consequences. To the extent that corporations take other aspects into serious consideration, I would say this is NOUS operating. But there’s nothing intrinsic to Capitalism itself that says you have to take anything but profit and self-interest into consideration. And indeed, many individuals and corporations behave in just this way.

We also see it in the obsession with the Individual (rhymes with DIANOIA) as opposed to the Community (rhymes with NOUS). 
One of the Enlightenment's great gifts was the liberation of the Individual — from feudal hierarchy, from the Church's thought-police, from inherited identity. And that was real and necessary and hard-won. But DIANOIA, focusing on the Individual as the irreducible unit, can't quite see what gets lost in the process. NOUS knows that the Individual exists only in a web of relationships — family, community, tradition, land, story. Sever those, and you don't get a free individual. You get an atomized one. Lonely, rootless, and — as it turns out — surprisingly easy to manipulate, because people without community are people without ballast. The 20th century's great totalitarianisms understood this perfectly: first destroy the community structures, then offer the State as replacement. DIANOIA's Individual, it turns out, is paradoxically vulnerable to exactly the collectivist nightmares DIANOIA thought it had escaped.

We also see it in AI Slop overwhelming the Internet. What is capitalism if not maximum benefit for minimum input? The absolute most for me, with the least from me? What is the ‘benefit’? Money and attention. And what could be a more optimal amount of ‘less input’ than virtually none at all?
People have flocked to the Internet as an extraordinary source of information and entertainment — the greatest by far that Humanity has ever seen. When reliable information can no longer be had because it’s overwhelmed by AI Deep Fakes, and real entertainment is drowned out by the bland average of AI Slop, what else can folks do but abandon the Internet altogether and seek their information and entertainment elsewhere?
The abandonment of the Internet would be NOUS asserting itself against DIANOIA's takeover of the information space. People seeking reliable information and genuine entertainment "elsewhere" — in person, in community, in embodied experience — is the right hemisphere reasserting its claim. The ship self-correcting.
Which would make AI Slop, paradoxically, the thing that finally drives people back toward NOUS. Back into their own bodies instead of virtual reality, families instead of Facebook Friends, local communities instead of online counterfeit versions, and genuine wisdom instead of Listicles.
Indeed, what do most folks need besides a good LLM for information, Netflx, Youtube et al for entertainment, and email so they can do banking and Amazon online? All businesses need a website for is to make their raw data available to AI-Bots, and maybe an order-taking portal. As for customer support — I personally am frequently finding my LLM more helpful than the “support”: bots supplied by big companies. But I digress.

It’s an example of the “Tragedy of the Commons.”

The Marriage of Two Minds
Alexandria, Egypt. First century CE. The most intellectually fertile city in the ancient world — Greek philosophy, Jewish scripture, Egyptian mysticism, and nascent Christianity all crowding the same narrow streets, arguing in the same agora, reading in the same extraordinary library.
It is here that a Jewish philosopher named Philo tries to reconcile Moses with Plato. And in doing so, makes a move that will echo through Western civilization for two thousand years.
Philo reads Genesis allegorically. Adam, he says, represents nous — the higher mind, the intellect oriented toward God. Eve represents aisthesis — sense perception, the faculty that binds us to the material world. The Fall, then, is not simply a historical event. It is a psychological drama: the higher mind seduced downward by sensation, by matter, by the body.
And in that reading, almost casually, Philo does something momentous. He genders the two modes of knowing.
DIANOIA — discursive reason, the analytical mind — is masculine. NOUS — the receptive, whole-seeing, contemplative faculty — is feminine. And feminine, in Philo's framework, means lower. Matter. Body. The principle that drags the soul away from God rather than toward Him.
Notice what has happened. NOUS — the very faculty Plato placed at the apex of human knowing, the direct apprehension of truth that DIANOIA can only approach but never achieve — has been coded as feminine, and therefore as something to be transcended rather than cultivated.
This is not a minor footnote. This is a load-bearing move in the architecture of Western thought.

The Church Inherits the Framework
Philo's influence on early Christianity was enormous, flowing primarily through the Alexandrian theological tradition — Clement, Origen, and eventually Augustine in the West. Each of these figures absorbed Philo's gendered hierarchy in different ways, but the essential equation remained intact:
Masculine = reason = spirit = the path to God.
Feminine = sensation = matter = the obstacle to God.
Origen is subtle about it — he figures the soul's relationship to the divine Logos as a kind of feminine receptivity, which sounds like a rehabilitation of the feminine until you realize the goal is ultimately to transcend that receptivity into union with the masculine divine principle. The feminine is a stage on the way, not the destination.
Augustine is less subtle. He states explicitly that while woman with man images God, woman alone does not — because she represents the lower reason oriented toward temporal things, while man represents the higher reason oriented toward eternal truth. That is Philo's framework, now installed at the foundation of Western Christian anthropology.
Meanwhile, the institutional Church was making parallel moves. The canon gets fixed — which texts count, which don't. The creeds get formulated — correct belief defined propositionally. The episcopate consolidates — authority becomes linear, traceable, institutional rather than charismatic.
Each of these moves is simultaneously a DIANOIA move. Categorizing, defining, systematizing, controlling. The Spirit moves where it will — but increasingly, the Church wanted to know in advance where that would be.
Then Constantine. In 313 CE the Edict of Milan made Christianity legal. By the end of the fourth century it was the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Church had to become legible to Roman administrative culture to survive — and Roman administrative culture ran entirely on DIANOIA. Hierarchy. Authority. Correct doctrine. One emperor, one Church, one creed.
NOUS — direct, unmediated, ungovernable — doesn't fit that architecture. You cannot institutionalize the wind.
The suppression was not always deliberate. It was often structural. But the result was the same. By the fifth century, the mode of knowing that Plato had placed at the apex of human consciousness had been coded feminine, associated with matter and sensation, and gradually marginalized in favor of the mode that could be taught, tested, and controlled.
That's where we are when we leave Alexandria. DIANOIA in the driver's seat. NOUS coded feminine and therefore suspect. The institutional Church as the inheritor and enforcer of that arrangement.
But Alexandria had other children.

The Countercurrent
In roughly the same period — first to third centuries CE — something else was stirring in Alexandria. Something that looked, on the surface, like chemistry.
Alchemy.
The earliest figure we can name is Maria the Prophetess — Maria Hebraea, Mary the Jewess — whose technical innovations were sophisticated enough that later alchemists quoted her for centuries. She is credited with the invention of the water bath that still bears a version of her name: the bain-marie. A woman, at the origin of a tradition, whose practical genius was taken seriously enough to be preserved and transmitted across a millennium.
In a culture simultaneously constructing elaborate theological justifications for why women couldn't image God alone, alchemy's founding figure was female. That is not coincidental. It is the tradition embodying its own deepest insight from the very beginning.
Because alchemy was never primarily about transmuting lead into gold. That was the exoteric claim — the grant proposal, if you will, the promise made to wealthy patrons who wanted literal treasure. The serious practitioners knew better. The Magnum Opus, the Great Work, was the transformation of the self. The gross into the refined. The divided into the whole. The lead of unconscious, fragmented human existence into the gold of integrated, conscious being.
And at the center of that Work stood an image: the Hieros Gamos. The Sacred Marriage.
Not the domination of one principle over another. Not the masculine conquering the feminine, or the feminine overthrowing the masculine. The partnership. The King and the Queen, Sol and Luna, joined in the sacred union that alone produces the Philosopher's Stone.
The Stone — which the alchemists described in terms that resist literal interpretation — represents the integrated human being. Whole. Neither half suppressed. Both fully operative, in right relationship.
Now: the alchemists used the language of masculine and feminine because that was the symbolic vocabulary available to them. They were not writing treatises on epistemology. But consider what their central image implies.
If we read Sol/King/masculine as DIANOIA — the analytical, sequential, categorizing mind — and Luna/Queen/feminine as NOUS — the receptive, whole-seeing, contemplative mind — then the alchemical coniunctio is precisely the integration of the two modes of knowing that Philo's framework had split apart and ranked hierarchically.
This is my reading, not the alchemists' explicit claim. But it is, I think, a productive one. Two traditions, emerging from the same Alexandrian crucible, using the same gendered symbolic vocabulary — and arriving at opposite conclusions. The institutional Church said: transcend the feminine, cultivate the masculine, DIANOIA is the path. Alchemy said: neither principle alone produces the Stone. The Work requires both, in genuine partnership.
That is a countercultural claim. In the third century CE, in the shadow of an increasingly hierarchical and masculinized institutional Christianity, it is a quietly radical one.

The Hermetic Stream
Flowing alongside both Christianity and alchemy from the same Alexandrian source is a third tradition — the texts collected under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-greatest Hermes, a legendary figure synthesizing the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth.
The Corpus Hermeticum — probably composed between the first and third centuries CE — is built around a single central concept: Nous.
Not DIANOIA. Not reason, argument, systematic theology. Nous — direct experiential knowledge of the divine Mind that is the source of all things and the deepest nature of the human soul.
The opening text, the Poimandres, begins with the narrator encountering a vast being who identifies himself as Nous, the Master Mind. What follows is a vision of creation and a description of the human soul's situation: partly divine, partly material, uniquely positioned at the intersection of both — and capable, through the cultivation of nous, of recovering its divine nature and returning to its source.
The Hermetic anthropology is thus: humanity as the meeting point of the divine and material, whose vocation is not to escape matter but to transform it — and to be transformed — through the recovery of nous.
That is not Philo's framework. Matter here is not simply the enemy of the spirit. The human soul's engagement with matter is the condition of its transformation. The descent into the material world is simultaneously a fall and a vocation.
Which is much closer to the alchemical position. The Work happens in the vessel, not by abandoning it. You don't escape the lead — you transform it.
Three streams from the same source. Christianity, alchemy, Hermeticism — all emerging from Alexandria in the first centuries of the Common Era, all using overlapping vocabulary, all reaching different conclusions about NOUS, matter, and the path to human wholeness.
Christianity, increasingly, said: transcend matter, cultivate reason, submit to institutional authority.
Alchemy and Hermeticism said: the Work happens here, in the vessel, in the marriage of the two principles, through direct experiential knowing.
The institutional Church won — in the sense that it had empire behind it and the others did not. Alchemy survived by going underground, encoding its wisdom in obscure symbolic language that looked like proto-chemistry to outsiders. The Hermetic texts circulated in limited networks, periodically suppressed, periodically rediscovered.
But they survived. Because what they carried was real.

The Long Suppression
The trajectory from Constantine through the medieval period through the Enlightenment is, in one sense, a single continuous movement: the progressive narrowing of legitimate knowing to DIANOIA alone.
Scholasticism systematized it — Aquinas's magnificent synthesis of Aristotelian reason and Christian theology is one of the great intellectual achievements of Western civilization, and it runs almost entirely on DIANOIA. The contemplative tradition survived in monasteries, in the Hesychast practice of the Eastern Church, in the mystical lineages — Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross — but always at the margins, always slightly suspect, always requiring careful management by institutional authority.
Then the Reformation, which meant to recover the Spirit, ended up producing — through a complex and ironic historical process — an even more text-centered, doctrinally-defined, institutionally-controlled Christianity. More DIANOIA, not less.
Then the Enlightenment, which simply declared NOUS illegitimate by definition. Reason alone. Evidence alone. What cannot be measured cannot be known. The contemplative traditions were superstition. The mystical experience was psychology. The alchemists were prescientific fumbling toward real chemistry.
The Enlightenment wasn't wrong about everything. Its fruits — science, medicine, technology, liberal democracy — are real and valuable. DIANOIA is a genuine and necessary mode of knowing. The problem was not the Enlightenment's cultivation of DIANOIA. The problem was its effective retirement of NOUS.
By the twentieth century, NOUS had been so thoroughly marginalized that most educated Westerners didn't even have a word for it. The thing itself was still happening — in art, in music, in contemplative practice, in the moment of scientific insight that precedes the proof — but it had no respectable name and no institutional home.
Enter Jung. Who opened the alchemical texts, recognized immediately that they were not about chemistry, and spent decades reconstructing what they were actually about. The coniunctio as psychological integration. The hieros gamos as the marriage of conscious and unconscious. The Philosopher's Stone as the Self — the integrated human being that is the goal of the individuation process.
Jung was right about the essential insight. What he perhaps didn't fully articulate — because his primary instrument was psychology rather than philosophy — was the epistemological dimension. The coniunctio is not just the integration of conscious and unconscious. It is the recovery of the full range of human knowing: DIANOIA and NOUS, in right relationship, neither suppressed, neither dominant, both fully operative.
The whole human mind. Recovering human wholeness.
That is what the alchemists were pointing at. That is what the Hermetic tradition carried through centuries of marginalization. That is what Jung glimpsed through the psychological lens.
And now — from the entirely independent direction of neuroscience — Ian McGilchrist arrives and says: we have two hemispheres because we need two modes of awareness. The left hemisphere is extraordinarily good at focused, sequential, analytical knowing. The right hemisphere is extraordinarily good at whole-seeing, contextual, relational knowing. Western civilization has been running on the left hemisphere for three centuries. The results are — mixed.
Three traditions, converging on the same insight from three different directions. The Greek philosophical distinction between DIANOIA and NOUS. The alchemical coniunctio of King and Queen. McGilchrist's hemispheric reintegration.
They are not saying the same thing in every detail. But they are pointing at the same territory.
And the territory is real. Nature gave us both modes of knowing because we need both to survive — to find lunch without becoming lunch. The suppression of NOUS was never sustainable. It just took two thousand years for the bill to come due.
It is coming due now.
Which brings us — unavoidably — to AI. But that is the next chapter.

Into the Desert
Something was wrong with Rome. Not just politically — though the third century CE was catastrophic by any measure, empire fracturing, currency collapsing, plague recurring, borders dissolving. Something was wrong at a deeper level. The civilization that had absorbed Christianity was now shaping it — and what it was shaping it into was not what the earliest followers of Jesus had recognized as the thing itself.
Some people left.
Not dramatically. Not with manifestos. One by one, beginning sometime in the mid-third century, men and women began walking into the Egyptian desert and not coming back. Anthony of Egypt is the figure whose story we know best — a young Coptic Christian who heard the Gospel passage about selling all you have, took it literally, gave away his inheritance, and headed for the wilderness around 270 CE. Others had gone before him. Many more would follow.
They were not running away, exactly. They were running toward something. What that something was is harder to articulate — which is perhaps why they didn't articulate it much. They went. They prayed. They worked with their hands. They struggled with what they called the logismoi — the intrusive thoughts, the passions, the endless chatter of a mind that wouldn't quiet down. And they learned, slowly and at great cost, how to be still.
What they were after was what the Greek tradition called hesychia — stillness, quiet, interior peace. Not the absence of thought but the stilling of the compulsive mental machinery that substitutes thinking about life for actually living it. Not DIANOIA running on empty, rehearsing anxieties and grievances and fantasies — but something older and quieter underneath. The thing that was there before the noise started.
They didn't use the language of Plato. They were not, for the most part, philosophers. They were Egyptian farmers and Syrian shepherds and the occasional aristocrat who had seen enough of civilization to know what it was worth. But what they were pursuing in practice — the stilling of discursive mental chatter in order to access a deeper mode of awareness and presence — maps with remarkable precision onto what Plato called NOUS.
They followed their NOUS into the desert. That's not their language. But it is, I think, what they did.

What They Built
The popular image of the Desert Fathers is solitary — the hermit in his cave, alone with God and the scorpions. And solitude was real, and valued. Anthony spent years in genuine isolation.
But what actually developed was something more interesting than solitary heroism. It was community.
Disciples gathered around the elders — abba, father; amma, mother. And yes, there were mothers. Amma Syncletica, Amma Sarah, Amma Theodora — their sayings appear in the same collections as the men's, carrying the same compressed authority. The desert was less gender-segregated than the institutional Church it was implicitly critiquing.
The form that developed — the lavra, the cluster of cells around a common meeting point — was neither purely solitary nor conventionally communal. You had your own cell, your own silence, your own struggle. But you also had the elder. You had the community of practice. You had the apophthegmata — the sayings, the wisdom distilled from hard experience and passed from mouth to ear.
The Apophthegmata Patrum — the Sayings of the Desert Fathers — is the literary legacy of this world. And it is unlike almost anything else in Christian literature. No systematic theology. No creedal formulations. No arguments. Just scenes.
A brother came to Abba Moses and asked for a word. The old man said: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
Abba Poemen said: Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart.
Amma Syncletica said: In the beginning there is struggle and a lot of work for those who come near to God. But after that, there is indescribable joy.
Short. Imagistic. Irreducible to their paraphrase. The saying doesn't explain — it points. You either see what it's pointing at or you don't. That's NOUS-register communication. The form itself is the argument.

What They Were Responding To
It's worth being clear about what the desert movement was implicitly pushing back against — because it wasn't just Roman decadence or political chaos.
It was the increasingly DIANOIA-dominant institutional Church.
By the mid-third century the pattern was well established: correct doctrine defined propositionally, episcopal authority consolidated hierarchically, canon fixed, creed formulated. The path to God ran through the institution — through correct belief, proper sacrament, legitimate authority. The inner life mattered, but it was increasingly managed, interpreted, and validated from outside.
The desert said: no. The path runs through the cell. Through the struggle with your own logismoi. Through the relationship with the elder who has been where you're trying to go. Through the silence that DIANOIA cannot fill and cannot survive.
This was not anti-intellectual. The greatest of the Desert Fathers — Evagrius Ponticus, who brought genuine philosophical sophistication to the desert — developed a precise and nuanced account of the inner life that drew on both Platonic and Christian sources. He understood exactly what was at stake epistemologically. His work was later condemned — partly because it was too NOUS-friendly for the institutional Church's comfort, too insistent on the soul's direct access to God without institutional mediation.
But the movement as a whole didn't need Evagrius's sophistication to know what it knew. The farmers and shepherds in their cells knew it in their bones. Sit still long enough and something becomes available that wasn't available before. That something is real. It is not produced by argument or doctrine or institutional authority. It simply — arrives.

What They Built Outlasted What They Fled
Rome fell. The Western Empire collapsed in 476 CE. The civilization that had seemed permanent — that had absorbed and reshaped Christianity in its own image — turned out not to be permanent at all.
The desert communities survived. Not unchanged — monasticism developed, evolved, institutionalized to its own degree. Benedict in the sixth century gave the Western monastic tradition its enduring rule. The Eastern hesychast tradition continued in an unbroken line through the Byzantine period and into the present — Athonite monasticism, the Philokalia, the Jesus Prayer.
What the desert movement built — a practice-based, community-grounded, NOUS-centered alternative to the dominant civilization — outlasted that civilization by more than a millennium. It is still alive.
That is worth pausing on.
They didn't fight Rome. They didn't write polemics against the institutional Church. They walked into the desert and built something better, quietly, one cell at a time. And what they built proved more durable than what they left behind.

The Lesson That Keeps Not Being Learned
Every generation has its version of the drift-and-calcification problem. A good idea takes root. It grows. It attracts followers, institutions, resources, power. And somewhere in that process — not through malice, mostly, but through the ordinary pressures of institutional survival — what was originally alive begins to calcify. The living water becomes the managed reservoir.
It happened to the Jesus movement as it became the imperial Church. It happened, in different ways, to the Reformation movements that meant to recover what the Church had lost. It happened to the Enlightenment project. It happens to therapy culture, to academic philosophy, to every tradition that begins in genuine insight and ends in defended territory.
The Desert Fathers knew this. They had watched it happen in real time to the thing they loved. Their response was not to fix the institution — they seem to have had few illusions about that project's prospects — but to go build something else.
Something smaller. More honest. More directly accountable to actual experience rather than inherited formulation.
One doesn't have to go to Egypt. The desert is available wherever you are. The cell is the sanctuary of your own soul — the interior space where the logismoi can be observed, the noise can be stilled, and what is actually true can make itself known without institutional permission.
The earliest Christian communities understood something about this that later centuries largely forgot. They weren't primarily about a weekly gathering. They were about a way of life — shared, daily, embodied, practiced together. Moving to the Christian neighborhood. Eating together. Bearing one another's burdens in the unglamorous daily texture of actual community.
That possibility hasn't gone away. It just requires the same willingness the desert dwellers had: to recognize that what the dominant culture is offering isn't enough, and to go build something better.
Not geographically necessarily. But really. Actually. With other people.
That's what lasts.

Let me be honest about something before we go further.
Everything in the preceding chapters — the DIANOIA/NOUS distinction, the Alexandrian crucible, the alchemical coniunctio, the Desert Fathers — is interesting. I hope it's more than interesting. I hope it opens something.
But interesting isn't enough. The question the reader has every right to ask is: so what? What does any of this actually do for a person trying to live?
That's the question this chapter tries to answer. Imperfectly, from one person's experience. Which is the only honest way I know to answer it.

Entropy and Malice
One of the things I had to excavate in myself was a set of beliefs about how the world works that turned out to be wrong. Not slightly wrong — structurally wrong. Wrong in ways that were costing me considerably.
Some of those wrong beliefs came from deliberate misrepresentation. There is malice in the world, and shameless self-interest, and institutions that knowingly sell things they know don't work. That's real.
But in my experience the more pervasive problem isn't malice. It's entropy.
A good idea takes root. It grows. It attracts followers, then institutions, then resources, then power. And somewhere in that process — not through conspiracy, mostly, but through the ordinary pressures of institutional survival — what was originally alive begins to calcify. The living water becomes the managed reservoir. The insight becomes the doctrine. The practice becomes the ritual. The community becomes the hierarchy.
It happened to the Jesus movement as it became the imperial Church. It happened to the Reformation movements that meant to recover what the Church had lost. It happens to therapy culture, to academic philosophy, to every tradition that begins in genuine insight and ends in defended territory.
And it happened to me personally.
My brother Eric needed help. I wanted to help him. That was a genuinely good impulse — I'm still confident of that. But the good impulse, over time and under the pressure of circumstances I didn't fully understand, calcified into something else: the belief that I should have done more. That his suffering was my failure. That the right response to a situation I couldn't control was to blame myself for not controlling it better.
That belief was wrong. It was also crippling.
Ideas matter. Wrong ideas about how things work — about what you owe, what you can control, what your failures mean — can be as disabling as any physical injury. More so, sometimes, because at least a physical injury is visible.
The excavation work I'm describing is partly the work of finding those wrong ideas — wherever they came from, whether from institutions, from relationships, from the stories you told yourself under pressure — and replacing them with something truer.
Nobody can do that work for you. That's the first thing to say clearly.

What Professional Help Actually Does
Before I say more about the excavation work, I want to be clear about something — both for honest reasons and because it genuinely matters.
I am not a therapist, a counselor, a physician, or any kind of licensed mental health professional. Nothing in this book is a substitute for professional help. If you are struggling with depression, trauma, addiction, or any condition that requires clinical support — please get that support. Therapy works. Medication works. These are real tools that real people genuinely need.
But let me offer an analogy for what professional help actually does — and what it can't do.
Suppose you're seriously injured in a car crash. Not your fault. You don't try to set your own broken bones. You go to a hospital, where trained people know exactly what to do — how to set the bones, suture the wounds, manage the pain. And then the healing begins.
But notice: it's not the doctors who re-knit your bones. It's your own body. The doctors create the conditions. The healing is yours.
Eventually they release you. Maybe you're still doing physical therapy — supervised transition, guided recovery. But the arc is clear: professional intervention becomes less and less. More and more, you have to learn how to deal with the knee that never works quite the same.
Therapy works the same way. Enormously helpful for getting you over the initial hump, stabilizing what has been destabilized, creating the conditions for healing. But even in the conventional therapy model, you have to do the real work. The therapist cannot do your excavation for you. Nobody can.
What I'm describing in this book is not an alternative to professional help. It runs alongside it, underneath it, and sometimes through it. The broader, longer, less institutionally manageable project of becoming more honestly yourself.

The Holes in the Hands
There's a detail in the resurrection accounts that has stayed with me for a long time.
After the crucifixion — after the Underworld of Holy Saturday — Jesus appears to his disciples in what the tradition calls a resurrection body. Something transformed. Something that can walk through locked doors, appear and disappear, operate outside the normal constraints of physical existence.
You would think that in the process of receiving a shiny new resurrection body, the wounds would be healed. That the holes in the hands and feet — the marks of the nails, the evidence of the crucifixion — would simply be gone. It would seem trivial, given everything else that apparently happened, to close those wounds.
But they weren't closed.
Thomas touches them. They're still there. The trip from the cross through the Underworld to the empty tomb is now part of the resurrection body's identity. The wounds are not erased — they are incorporated. They become credentials.
I've been there.
This reframes everything. The goal of the excavation work is not to become the person you were before the injury. That person is gone. The goal is not the erasure of what happened to you. The goal is the resurrection body that still carries the holes — the integrated self that has been through the Underworld and come back with something, bearing the marks of the journey as evidence rather than embarrassment.
Wholeness is not the absence of wounds. It is their integration into something that can walk through walls.
The knee that never works quite the same is not a sign that healing failed. It is the hole in the hand. It is how people know you've been somewhere real.

My Desert
The received wisdom about healing, in my particular situation, pointed in certain directions. Therapy. The established routes. And for many people those routes are exactly right — the hospital, the bone-setting, the supervised recovery.
But something in me — something quiet, persistent, not easily articulated — kept pointing elsewhere. Toward the Greek New Testament. Toward the project of translating it myself, from scratch, without the accumulated weight of received translations telling me in advance what it said.
There was no obvious therapeutic rationale for this. Nobody prescribed it. No institution validated it. It looked, from outside, like an eccentric scholarly project with no practical application.
But NOUS doesn't explain itself. It points. You follow or you don't.
I followed. And what opened in the process of staying with the Greek text — word by word, year by year, resisting comfortable received readings in favor of what the text actually said — was something I couldn't have predicted and can't fully account for even now.
The Desert Fathers walked into the Egyptian desert. That was their cell, their discipline, their place of excavation. Mine was a Greek lexicon and a manual typewriter. Different cell. Same basic move.
Not following received wisdom about where healing happens. Following instead the still small voice that knew something the received wisdom didn't.
I want to be careful here. I am not suggesting that everyone should abandon conventional routes and follow some idiosyncratic inner prompting instead. I am suggesting that genuine discernment about which route is actually yours — rather than following received wisdom on autopilot — is itself part of the work. For some people therapy is exactly what their NOUS is pointing toward. The question is whether you're choosing it genuinely or simply because it's what you're supposed to do.

The Still Small Voice
The image comes from Elijah — the qol demamah daqah, the voice of thin silence. After the wind and the earthquake and the fire, none of which contained what he was looking for — then the still small voice.
NOUS speaks like that. Quietly. Without drama. Without the insistence that darker impulses and institutional voices and internal shouting all share.
This raises the obvious and necessary question: how do you tell the difference? How do you know you're actually hearing NOUS and not something else wearing its voice?
And here I want to be precise about something. The problem is not that NOUS can mislead you. I don't believe it can — by definition it's the faculty that apprehends what's actually real. The problem is the identification problem. In the moment, you can't always tell whether what you're hearing is NOUS or an impostor. Fear can speak quietly. Grief can speak persistently. Wounded pride can be remarkably patient. These are not NOUS — but they can wear its register convincingly.
That's where diakrisis comes in. The Desert Fathers' word for discernment. Not a check on NOUS's reliability — but a set of tools for identifying whether what you're hearing is NOUS in the first place.
Some of those tools:
Do no harm — to yourself or others. Simple, ancient, cross-traditional. If the voice is pointing toward harm, it is not NOUS. Full stop. NOUS does not lead you to damage yourself or others. This is not a subtle test. It is the first and most basic filter.
Does it require secrecy or shame? NOUS doesn't hide from honest examination. What you're genuinely called toward can usually bear being looked at in daylight. The impostors — the self-serving impulses dressed up as calling — tend to wilt under scrutiny.
Does it persist across moods and conditions? The darker impulses tend to be loud when conditions favor them and quieter otherwise. NOUS tends to be consistent — the same quiet signal in good times and bad, in clarity and in confusion. What you keep coming back to when the noise settles is worth paying attention to.
Does it open outward over time? NOUS-following tends eventually to move toward others, toward something larger than personal advantage. The impostors tend to close inward — toward self-protection, self-justification, self-advancement dressed as principle.
Does it survive honest community scrutiny? Not majority vote — that's just social pressure. But the people who genuinely know you, who are committed to your actual wellbeing rather than your comfort, who have their own serious skin in the excavation game — their witness matters. The elder and the community aren't checking NOUS's reliability. They're helping you identify whether what you're hearing is NOUS at all.
Can it be tested against what you know to be true? This is perhaps the most underrated test. NOUS doesn't operate in isolation from accumulated wisdom — the moral knowledge that the tradition, at its best, has distilled over centuries. Do no harm is one such touchstone. There are others. Genuine interior prompting tends to cohere with what you already know to be true at the deepest level. The impostors tend to require you to override or rationalize away what you know.
None of these tests are infallible individually. Taken together — practiced over time, in honest community — they constitute something real. Not a guarantee. A serious practice.
The Desert Fathers called this the long work. They weren't wrong.

The Absent Elder
I craved an elder. I never had one, not fully — not the way the tradition describes. I had mentors who appeared at crucial moments and gave me direction when I most needed it. I had the texts themselves — Plato, the Desert Fathers, Jung, McGilchrist — as a kind of distributed eldership across time. But the living elder, the person who knows you and watches you and calls you back when you've drifted — that I didn't have.
It was harder without one. Considerably harder. And longer. A lifetime, really — still ongoing, if I'm honest. Though I've come to suspect that may always be true regardless. The Desert Fathers weren't producing enlightened twenty-five year olds. The work may simply take as long as it takes — which is to say, all of it.
What the elder might have provided is not a shortcut to the destination. Nothing shortcuts the destination. But perhaps fewer catastrophically wrong turns. Less time in the cul-de-sacs. Less time paying for lessons a wiser guide could have helped me see coming.
Which is the practical argument for community. For finding people who are serious about the excavation work and doing it alongside them. Not a replacement for the elder — but something real in the elder's absence. People who can see your blind spots. People who will call you back when the internal shouting drowns out the still small voice.
The Desert Fathers built exactly that. Small, honest, practice-based community, directly accountable to actual experience rather than inherited formulation. And what they built outlasted Rome.
That possibility hasn't gone away.
The desert is available wherever you are. The cell is the sanctuary of your own soul. The work is yours to do.
But you don't have to do it entirely alone.