The musings began as I started my morning routine. Roused out of bed and heading to the shower, I found myself uttering, almost involuntarily: yet ever more. The words rose without prompting—perhaps because the task before me was ordinary, repetitive, and required no conscious thought. In such moments, the mind drifts, half-idle and half-aware, allowing stray phrases to surface without clear origin. But these three words arrested me. I repeated them aloud and wondered: three simple words, and yet they carried weight, rhythm, and an unexpected poetic resonance. Why?
After completing my morning ablutions, I returned to contemplate the phrase further and determined that some research was in order. Accordingly, I sought poetry and prose in which these words appear in succession—or in meaningful proximity—with appreciable effect. Once identified, I sought to understand the source of their force: the reason they ring with a power far exceeding their lexical modesty.
What emerged almost immediately was that the phrase yet ever more is no fixed formula of the poetic canon—no Miltonic thunder, no Dantesque refrain, no Eliotian motif. Rather, it appears sporadically—in seventeenth-century lyrics, Victorian nature poetry, and occasional elegiac verse—where poets employ it whenever they require a compact expression of endurance, paradox, or lingering emotional intensification. Its power lies precisely in this: three ordinary words capturing experiences that refuse ordinariness.
Early Instances: Paradox and Persistence
Consider William Strode’s seventeenth-century poem On Jealousie:
There is a thing that nothing is, A foolish wanton, sober wise; It hath noe wings, noe eyes, noe eares, And yet it flies, it sees, it heares; It lives by losse, it feeds on smart, It joyes in woe, it liveth not; Yet evermore this hungry elfe Doth feed on nothing but itselfe.1
The concessive yet introduces contradiction: jealousy ought to consume itself and die out. Yet—contrary to all reason—it persists. Evermore extends that persistence beyond temporal boundaries, transforming a human passion into an almost metaphysical condition.
A similar pattern appears in Archibald Lampman’s Hope and Fear (1883):
As when the sunless face of winter fills The earth—a moment misty bright— The sun streams forth in powdery light, A silver glory over silent hills;
And all the rolling glooms that lie below That sudden splendour of the sun, With shivered feet and mantles dun, In stricken columns skim the gleaming snow;
Yet far away, beyond utmost range Of sun-drowned heights, pine-skirted, dim, That fringe the white waste’s frozen rim, Hang ever ghost-like waiting for the change:
So often to the blank world-sobered heart Comes hope, with swift unbidden eye, And bids the weary life-glooms fly With shaken feet, and for a space depart;
Yet evermore, still known of eye and ear, With sullen, unforgotten surge, Hang ever on the waste heart’s verge, Time’s hovering ghosts of restless change and fear.2
Here the phrase marks memories that, though logically expected to fade, remain vivid—“still known of eye and ear.” Memory becomes not a fading echo but an enduring presence, resisting dissolution. The poem’s natural imagery—sunlight briefly breaking through winter gloom only for shadows to persist at the horizon—mirrors consciousness itself: fleeting solace does not erase deeper, lurking fears.
Structural analogues—but not direct antecedents—appear elsewhere in the tradition: George Herbert’s The Search (1633) repeatedly opens with “Yet can I mark…,” enacting concessive-persistence, while Christina Rossetti’s A Better Resurrectiondeploys yet as a pivot from desolation to expectation in the line “Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring,” generating a concessive-and-intensifying movement even without a full triadic form.
Tennyson and the Deepening of Grief
The pattern appears with particular frequency and force in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), where it becomes almost a structural signature for the poem’s central paradox: grief that does not diminish with time but deepens and transforms. Tennyson varies the pattern—substituting but for yet, altering the position of ever and more—while retaining its concessive–durational–intensifying logic.
In Canto XLI, contemplating his deceased friend’s spiritual ascent, he writes:
For tho’ my nature rarely yields To that vague fear implied in death; Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath, The howlings from forgotten fields;
Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor An inner trouble I behold, A spectral doubt which makes me cold. That I shall be thy mate no more,
Tho’ following with an upward mind The wonders that have come to thee, Thro’ all the secular to-be, But evermore a life behind.3
The phrase captures the poet’s fear that he will perpetually lag behind Hallam’s transfigured state—not merely left behind but evermore behind, the temporal gulf widening rather than closing. The concession is double: though he claims not to fear death itself, and though he strives to follow Hallam’s ascent, the doubt persists and intensifies.
Yet the most remarkable deployment appears in Canto CXXXI, where the pattern shifts from lamentation to affirmation:
And yet is love not less, but more;
No longer caring to embalm In dying songs a dead regret, But like a statue solid-set, And moulded in colossal calm.
Regret is dead, but love is more Than in the summers that are flown, For I myself with these have grown To something greater than before.4
Here yet introduces not mere continuation but transfiguration. Love persists and intensifies—”not less, but more”—becoming something greater. What began as lamentation has, through time’s pressure, become an enlargement of the heart.
Later Variations
Geoffrey Bache Smith, whose A Spring Harvest was published posthumously under J.R.R. Tolkien’s editorship, employs the phrase to capture beauty and grace in his Glastonbury:
The Queen that was, whom now a convent’s shade Imprisons, and a dark and tristful veil Enwraps those brows, that in old days were seen Most puissant proud of all that ever made The traitor honest, and the valorous frail.
Yet evermore about her form there clings And evermore shall cling, the ancient grace, Like evening sunlight lingering on the mere: And till the end of all created things There shall be some one found, shall strive to trace The immortal loveliness of Guinevere.5
Guinevere’s beauty, though shadowed by sorrowful penitence, persists; the phrase conveys a grace that resists decay, lingering like light upon the waters. The doubled evermore—first descriptive, then prophetic—creates a temporal dilation: what persists now will persist “till the end of all created things.”
Perhaps this explains why the phrase surfaced unbidden during my morning routine—in that liminal state when the mind is neither fully engaged nor wholly at rest, and truths we do not seek present themselves. A simple, repetitive task; three ordinary words; and suddenly a glimpse of what all these poets knew.
The Shape and Sound of the Phrase
The power of yet ever more lies in the internal mechanics of the phrase itself. Yet, is adversative; it signals resistance, contradiction, persistence against expectation. Ever erases temporal boundaries and opens a vista without limit. More introduces escalation—a rising degree, an intensifying condition.
Thus the phrase embodies a miniature logic of concession → duration → escalation, a compressed rhetoric of persistence against expectation.
The sound reinforces the structure. The assonantal /ɛ/ shared by yet and ev-er binds the first two terms, while the deeper /ɔː/ of more provides rounded closure. Jakobson’s “poetic function” is precisely this intertwining of sound and meaning: language calling attention to itself through patterned echo.6 The triad exemplifies it.
Linguistically, the force of yet ever more can also be understood in light of Michael Israel’s account of scalar meaning. Ever is a degree-based intensifier, signaling movement along an ordered scale without natural upper bound; joined to more, it expresses not mere continuation but continuation that deepens.7 Geoffrey Leech’s observations on foregrounded repetition likewise illuminate why paired or tripled intensifiers resonate in poetic contexts.8
But lived experience precedes theory: some feelings—grief, longing, devotion—intensify through time rather than diminish.
The Lived Experience of Persistence
The rarity of the exact triad is telling. Poets have long used its components in various pairings, but the compact English formula appears only occasionally, and often at moments of emotional endurance or spiritual intensification. This scarcity sharpens its effect. Each verified instance crystallizes a paradox: what ought to subside instead deepens.
This explains the phrase’s particular force. In three ordinary words, it captures something we already know but rarely articulate: the heart’s deepest experiences follow a logic all their own. They do not fade; they deepen. They do not lessen; they grow. For grief, for love, for memory, for beauty glimpsed and lost, time does not heal so much as intensify. What we carry becomes heavier, more present, more itself.
Linguist Michael Israel notes that words such as ever function as degree-based intensifiers, signaling movement along a scale rather than a fixed quantity. In his discussion of polarity items, he explains that their force comes from the way they mark increasing degrees without a natural upper limit, a feature central to English expressions of ongoing growth or intensification. This helps clarify why phrases like “ever more” feel open-ended and expansive: they point not to a single amount but to a process that keeps rising. See Israel, “The Pragmatics of Polarity,” in The Handbook of Pragmatics (Horn & Ward, eds., 2004), discussion of scalar semantics and polarity items. ↩︎
Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman, 1969), chap. 6, “Patterns of Sound,” esp. §§6.1–6.4, where Leech discusses foregrounded repetition, sound patterning, and the poetic heightening of ordinary lexical items. ↩︎
Attic red-figure stamnos from Vulci c. 480-450 BC depicting the myth of Odysseus tied to his ship’s mast in order to resist the enchanting song of the Sirens.
When the ancient image of Odysseus[1] bound to the mast comes to mind—ears open to the Sirens’ song, body restrained by rope and loyalty, the ship cutting forward through perilous waters—it becomes a figure for how medieval Christendom conceived its relation to the classical past. Bound by faith’s restraint, the medieval mind sailed amid pagan wisdom’s dangerous beauty, listening but not surrendering, drawn forward yet always compassed toward the harbor of divine truth.[2]
It is a noble image. And yet.
What if the mast itself—the very bonds—were not divine protection but human construction? What if the Sirens sang not of destruction alone but of truths that authority feared we might comprehend? What if the rope that held Odysseus was tied not by wisdom but by terror—terror of what might be discovered in the listening, in the surrender, in the unrestrained voyage into mystery?
The Pattern Returns
In The First Why, I proffered that the doctrine of original sin emerged not from divine decree but from human fear—fear of questions too vast, of mysteries authority could neither command nor contain. Eden was not humanity’s fall but humanity’s awakening: the first trembling articulation of consciousness reaching beyond certainty into the perilous freedom of knowledge.
The prohibition against eating from the Tree was never divine. It was human anxiety projected backward onto the dawn of consciousness, then used across millennia to condemn the impulse to seek, to know, to ask why.
The pattern appears again, centuries after Eden’s invented fall, in one of Western literature’s most celebrated works. In Inferno XXVI, Dante presents Ulysses—not honored for cunning or for his journey home, but condemned—placed in the eighth circle, wrapped in flame, punished for what Dante calls the final voyage: a crossing of boundaries, a reaching beyond limits, a refusal to accept that the Pillars of Herakles marked the edge of permitted human striving.
And the question returns with urgency: whence does this “divine prohibition” truly come? Divine command—or human fear?
Dante’s Condemnation
The scene in Inferno XXVI is among the most powerful in all of Dante’s Comedy. Speaking from within a tongue of flame, Ulysses recounts his final voyage to Dante and Virgil. Old, having returned at last to Ithaca, he finds himself restless. Neither fondness for his son, nor reverence for his aged father, nor the love owed to Penelope “could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world, and of the vice and virtue of mankind.”
Thus moved, Ulysses gathers his aged companions and sails westward, past Sardinia and the Pillars of Herakles, “where Hercules his landmarks set as signals, that man no farther onward should adventure.” There he exhorts his crew:
“O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand Perils have come unto the West, To this so inconsiderable vigil Which is remaining of your senses still, Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge, Following the sun, of the unpeopled world. Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.”
Ulysses tells how he “did render my companions, with this brief exhortation, for the voyage, that then I hardly could have held them back. And having turned our stern toward morning, we of the oars made wings for our mad flight.” After many months, a mountain appears—distant, dark—“it seemed to me so high as I had never any one beheld.” Yet joy turns swiftly to despair: “For out of that new land a whirlwind rose, and smote upon the fore part of the ship. Three times it made her whirl with all the waters, at the fourth time it made the stern uplift, and the prow downward go, as pleased Another, until the sea above us closed again.”[3]
As pleased Another. As Divinity decreed.
Dante, ever precise in his moral architecture, places Ulysses among the evil counselors—those whose intellect and eloquence lead others astray. Virgil names the crimes: the deceit of the Trojan Horse, the theft of the Palladium, and the guile that brought about Achilles’ death (the latter bound in later traditions to stratagems shared with Diomedes). These are the ancient transgressions of cunning; yet the final voyage is Dante’s own invention, extending the sin of false counsel beyond the Homeric mythos and into the metaphysical.[4] In daring to pierce the boundary divinity had fixed—the western limit of human striving—Ulysses becomes not the exemplar of curiosity but of hubris: the brilliant mind mistaking unbounded knowledge for sovereignty.
Critics have long split on whether Dante admires or condemns Ulysses; the poem itself stages that ambiguity, withholding the name of this bolgia—false counsel—until the next canto, so that the rhetoric of heroic quest swells before the juridical label arrives. Barolini notes this “both/and” design: Dante’s style confers grandeur even as the setting is Hell, letting admiration and censure coexist in productive tension.[5]
The Search for the Prohibition
But searching for the source of this prohibition—where, precisely, the gods forbid passage beyond the Pillars—one meets an unexpected thing.
Silence.
Herakles, during the tenth labor, reaches the western edge to seize Geryon’s cattle, setting two pillars to mark the furthest point of achievement: a monument, not a ban. Yet older traditions recall that these were once called the Pillars of Cronus—boundaries of a world still ruled by Titans and Time. When Herakles raised his own in their place, the frontier passed from divine to heroic custody, from the cosmic to the human. The divine threshold became a human one: the boundary of the gods transformed into the horizon of mortal striving. The limit is capacity, not decree.
Roman writers—Pliny, Strabo—treat the Pillars as the edge of the known, beyond which lay Oceanus. Unknown, yes. Unknowable, no. Unexplored, not forbidden. Plato places Atlantis beyond the Pillars. Its destruction follows moral corruption and imperial tyranny, not navigation through a strait.[6] The boundary violated is ethical, not spatial. It is precisely the confusion of those two that allows authority to recast natural exploration as spiritual transgression.
Perhaps, one thinks, a classical voice does warn against the west. Pindar, writing nearly a millennium before Dante, seems a candidate in Olympian 3. Praising Theron of Akragas, Pindar writes that the victor “touch[es] the pillars of Herakles,” and adds: “Pathless the things beyond, pathless alike to the unwise and the wise. Here I will search no more; the quest were vain.”
At first glance, a prohibition. Look closer. The poet exalts Theron’s virtue by comparing it to Herakles’ reach: the victor’s deeds have touched the pillars themselves, but he dares no further. Beyond lies not sin but silence. The poet halts not for fear of divine censure, but from reverence for proportion—the stillness that follows the uttermost word.
Pindar returns to the same image elsewhere, in Isthmian 4, praising the Theban Melissus: “Through their manly deeds they reached from home to touch the farthest limit, the pillars of Heracles—do not pursue excellence any farther than that!” Again, the admonition is one of measure, not interdiction. The poet counsels proportion in achievement, not fear of divine wrath. The Pillars mark not punishment for trespass but the culmination of human excellence: the utmost reach of mortal aretē, beyond which praise, not perdition, would fall silent.
We read here little explicit theological weight, rather a poet’s choice to observe measure, not a divine command to halt forever. Yet I acknowledge this is itself an interpretation, one shaped by my conviction that human consciousness reaches naturally toward mystery rather than transgressing against sacred law. Ancient readers, steeped in traditions of divine order, may have heard prohibition where I hear proportion. The Greek μάταιον πέρα carries shades of meaning—“vain,” “futile,” but also potentially “reckless” or “transgressive.” The ambiguity is real—even a metaphor can accrue normative force within a sacramental worldview. What remains clear is that Pindar offers no explicit divine interdiction, no Zeus commanding sailors to turn back, no cosmic punishment awaiting those who venture west.[7]
The Transmutation
Observe what Dante has done. Between Pindar and the Inferno lies a revolution not of geography but of metaphysics: the rhetorical limit has become a theological one. Where Pindar’s vain was the futility of excess, Dante’s mad flight is the hubris of trespass. What for the Greek was decorum becomes, for the Christian, disobedience.
In this metamorphosis of meaning, boundary becomes law, and poetic restraint is recast as divine architecture. He has taken Pindar’s rhetorical metaphor—a poet’s statement about the limits of praise—and transformed it into a cosmic prohibition about the limits of knowledge. He has taken “Here I will search no more; the quest were vain” (the poet’s restraint) and transmuted it into “None may pursue it; you will be damned” (the theologian’s absolute).[8]
The transmutation operates at every level:
Pindar: a metaphor about achievement. Dante: a literal geographical boundary.
Pindar: the poet’s personal choice. Dante: God’s universal command.
Dante has performed an alchemical transformation: he has taken the raw material of a poet’s metaphor and transmuted it into divine law. He has literalized what was figurative, universalized what was particular, divinized what was human, and weaponized what was wisdom.
And having manufactured the prohibition, he uses it to condemn Ulysses—and by extension, to condemn the impulse that drives all genuine seeking: the refusal to accept inherited boundaries, the courage to test whether limits are actual, the sacred audacity of the question why.[10]
The Pattern Exposed
The same alchemy appears in both Eden and at the Pillars:
Human limits. We are confused. We cannot sail farther.
Establishment of a marker. The Tree. The Pillars.
Sacralization of the marker. God commanded. God ordained.
Prohibition. Thou shalt not eat. Thou shalt not pass.
Damnation of transgressors. Original sin. Hellfire.
Who, then, says the boundary is divine?
Not God. No interdiction is carved into Atlantic stone; no oracle forbids the western sea.
Man does. Man, fearing the unknown, converts the edge of his knowledge into the edge of knowable reality, projects that fear onto the cosmos, and calls it Heaven’s will. Dante maps a theology onto ancient geography, then condemns the figure who reveals—by sailing—that the map was never the territory.
The Confusion of Boundaries
A distinction must now be made—one obscured by Dante’s condemnation and too often blurred by the weight of tradition. Not all boundaries are alike.
There are indeed limits that must hold: moral boundaries, ethical prohibitions, the restraints of justice and compassion that preserve the fragile order of human life. These are not inventions of fear but necessities of conscience. When Plato’s Atlanteans are destroyed, it is for crossing such limits—for turning power into tyranny, order into domination, knowledge into conquest.
But there are other boundaries—geographical, intellectual, imaginative—that exist only until courage or curiosity dissolves them. The confusion of the two, the moral and the cognitive, is the mechanism by which authority sanctifies its own caution. When fear disguises itself as wisdom, exploration becomes transgression, and inquiry is punished as sin.
To say “You shall not murder” is a moral imperative. To say “You shall not question” is a spiritual abdication. To say “You shall not seek beyond this sea” is fear pretending to be faith.
The first protects the sanctity of life; the second denies the dignity of mind. The danger lies not in reverence for limits, but in mistaking the boundary of understanding for the boundary of being.
What Dante Should Have Condemned
Yet acknowledge what Dante perceived, even if he misdiagnosed it. Ulysses does not merely sail west—he abandons. His own words convict him: neither “fondness for his son, nor reverence for his aged father, nor the love owed to Penelope could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world.”
This is not the voice of responsible inquiry. This is desertion dressed as aspiration.
More: he does not invite his companions to shared discovery. He compels them with wile. “I made them so eager for the voyage that I could hardly have held them back.” That is manipulation, not collaboration. He leads aged men—veterans who have survived “a hundred thousand perils”—not toward a harbor but toward drowning, chasing his private hunger for knowledge while calling it their collective destiny.
The crew never chose. They were moved by rhetoric, not conviction. And they died for his vision, his restlessness, not their own vision or desires.
This deserves condemnation. But this is not what Dante condemns.
Dante does not separate the ethics of the voyage from the fact of the voyage. He does not ask: “Should Ulysses have crossed while abandoning family and compelling his crew?” He seemingly declares: “No one should cross at all.”
The distinction collapses. The how becomes the whether. And in that collapse, all boundary-testing—however careful, however collaborative, however mindful of those we bring with us—becomes suspect. The reckless voyager poisons the well for the responsible one.
This conflation serves authority perfectly. For if seeking itself is the sin, then seeking carefully changes nothing. The prohibition need not distinguish between Ulysses’ abandonment and another’s care, between manipulation and genuine invitation, between private obsession and shared venture. All become folle volo—mad flight—equally damned.
What Dante should have condemned: voyaging that sacrifices others to one man’s will; that mistakes obsession for calling; that abandons the near for the distant without reckoning cost.
What Dante does condemn: voyaging at all past the Pillars, regardless of manner or motive.
The question is not: May we seek? The question is: How do we seek without becoming tyranny in the name of discovery?
That question remains open. It remains difficult. It is the question that matters—the one Dante forecloses by manufacturing a prohibition that makes the crossing itself, not the manner of crossing, the transgression. In doing so, he protects neither ethics nor truth. He protects only the boundary. Yet in condemning the voyager, Dante reveals himself as one.
The Poet’s Presumption
The irony deepens… Ulysses is punished for eloquence that led others past a supposed divine boundary. Yet what is the Comedy but an unauthorized exploration of realms beyond mortal knowing—Hell, Purgatory, Paradise—undertaken by the poet’s own authority?
When Dante the pilgrim expresses hesitation about his journey, saying “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul,” the poem supplies him with divine sanction. Virgil assures him that Beatrice, sent from Heaven, has authorized the journey. The pilgrim goes with blessing, guidance, permission. In effect, Dante the poet does what Ulysses does: sails past accepted limits, trusting language and vision to bear him where, by his own logic, no living man may go.
Hence the canto’s peculiar power. Dante is drawn to the mariner he condemns, troubled by him, unable to treat him as simple villain. In Ulysses’ folle volo, he glimpses his own presumption mirrored; in the crew-stirring rhetoric, he hears the echo of his own ingenium poeticum; in the final overturning “as pleased Another,” he contemplates the judgment he too might face for like transgression.
He virtually admits as much in Paradiso II, where the skiff that once was “the little vessel of my genius” in Purgatorio I grows into a vessel fit for the open, uncharted sea. “O ye, who in some pretty little boat, / eager to listen, have been following / behind my ship, that singing sails along, / turn back to look again upon your shores; / do not put out to sea, lest peradventure, / in losing me, you might yourselves be lost.”[11] The imagery reprises the condemned voyage of Inferno XXVI, but now under divine auspices: “Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo, / and Muses nine point out to me the Bears.” The difference is authorization, not direction. Dante transforms the mad flight into a sanctified one—but his caution betrays awareness of the danger. The admonition to “turn back to look again upon your shores” acknowledges that the line between revelation and presumption remains perilously thin. His journey too might founder “as pleased Another.”
The poem clears the pilgrim of presumption within its fiction, while the poet remains exposed outside it. This is the poet using poetry—that ancient art of mythical theology where truth and falsehood intermingle—to enforce a prohibition while simultaneously transgressing it. Dante wields the dangerous power of poetic invention to declare what is divine and what is forbidden, all while demonstrating that such declarations rest on nothing firmer than the poet’s own creative authority.[12]
The Vindication of History
One date suffices: 1492. Columbus sails west into the Atlantic from the coast of Spain—not literally through the strait at Gibraltar, but past the conceptual boundary the Pillars represented. No whirlwind. No mountain issuing wrath. Land. The “pathless beyond” proves unexplored, not forbidden; unknown, not unknowable. Yet the same civilization that vindicated Ulysses also cloaked conquest in new sanctities, confusing discovery with dominion. The moral ambiguity remains. History vindicates the crossing, not every consequence of the crossing.
The truth endures nonetheless: the boundary was human limitation—of ships, of courage, of knowledge—dressed in borrowed sanctity. Each voyage, each map, each act of inquiry refutes Inferno XXVI’s decree. History does not wholly vindicate Ulysses, but it exposes the fiction of divine interdiction.
The question of who may sail is answered: all may. The question of how we sail—ethically, justly, without turning discovery into domination—remains open.
Where Falsehood and Truth Intermingle
Ernst Robert Curtius reminds us that medieval poetry was mythical theology: a sacred art in which truth and falsehood coexisted, and the boundary between invention and revelation was porous. The poet was not a chronicler of fact but a mediator between visible and invisible worlds, speaking through symbols that both conceal and disclose.
Dante knew this inheritance. His Commedia stands at the summit of that tradition, where poetic creation becomes theological architecture. Yet it is also within this architecture that the seeds of prohibition germinate. For once poetry begins to impersonate revelation, its metaphors may acquire the weight of law. What begins as symbol can harden into creed; imagination becomes instrument.
This is poetry’s two-edged majesty: it reveals and it binds. The same creative power that illuminates hidden truth can also consecrate human invention as sacred limit. Thus Dante’s genius, which mirrors divine creation in its ordering of chaos into cosmos, risks sanctifying the very boundaries it imagines.
Mythical theology is a realm where poetry contemplates itself as revelation. Within that realm, Ulysses’ voice—his call to seek, to know, to pass beyond the Pillars—cannot be silenced entirely. Condemned in theology, he endures in poetry. Even wrapped in flame, he speaks the human truth that divine law cannot wholly suppress: curiosity, though punished, remains indestructible.
The Gates Swing Forward
The gates of Eden swing but one way—forward. There is no return to innocence, only passage through mystery into understanding. The Pillars of Herakles, like Eden’s gate, were never meant to bar humanity’s path but to mark its progress. They stand not as barriers but as thresholds: what one age feared to cross, another calls the beginning of wisdom.
The boundary moves because we do. What once signified the edge of the world becomes the center of a new map. Description becomes prescription only when fear mistakes ignorance for law. The theology of limit—whether spoken at Eden’s tree or the western sea—was never divine decree but human hesitation draped in sanctity.
When Ulysses sailed beyond the Pillars, he did not violate divine order; he fulfilled the order implicit in consciousness—the law that bids the mind test its own horizon. Dante condemns this as hubris, yet his own poem enacts it, proving that imagination cannot be confined by its own prohibitions. Even in Hell, wrapped in flame, Ulysses speaks words that outlive the sentence: “Ye were not made to live like unto brutes.”
Poetry, in condemning him, exalts him. It cannot extinguish what it illuminates. The forbidden voyage becomes the necessary one; the mad flight becomes the first step of reason; the flame of punishment becomes the light of revelation.
Thus the gates, like the Pillars, stand not immovable but ever-receding horizons—each one marking the reach of human comprehension, and beyond it, mystery. Every passage enlarges not merely the world, but the human possibility within it.
The Answer
From whence, then, the Divine Prohibition? From man.
From man, who meets the edge of knowledge and mistakes it for the edge of knowable reality.
From man, whose faltering courage becomes Heaven’s boundary in his telling.
From man, who fears the unknown and projects that fear upon the cosmos.
From man, who must have limits and thus declares them divine.
From man, who damns those who cross and return with news that the gates were never locked.
What is divine is not the prohibition but its contrary: the impulse to question, the courage to seek, the will to sail beyond every human-erected pillar into the waters where truth awaits those who leave the harbor.
Pindar said he would search no more—his quest were vain—in praise. Dante hears “no more” and renders it sin—to go further—in knowledge. History has judged between them.
Eden’s gate and Herakles’ pillars were never barred by divine hands—though human fear has kept them closed in consciousness for millennia. The truth they conceal is simpler and more radical: they were never legitimately closed at all.
Coda: Bound by Reason, Not by Fear
Consciousness asks why. To condemn the asking is to condemn consciousness. To prohibit the reaching is to prohibit our humanity. To damn the voyage is to damn the very quality that makes us more than “mindless brutes.”
The first why rose in Eden. Another why at the Pillars. The whys continue—each a small rebellion against inherited certainty, each a voyage into the unknown, each a test of whether the boundary was ever real.
It was not real. It never was. The “pathless” was merely unwalked. The “forbidden” was only unlived. The “mad flight” was simply the first—until repetition made the forbidden familiar.
We were born to ask, to seek, to reach, to voyage. We were born to test boundaries and find them crossable. We were born to stand at every pillar authority declares ultimate and ask:
Who says we must not pass—the Divine, or man in his fear, in his need for control, in his terror that we might return with news that the prohibition was always empty?
Return, then, to the image with which we began: Odysseus bound to the mast, sailing through waters thick with song. The proper binding is not the rope of fear, which holds us rigid against all that we might learn, but the rope of reason—supple, strong, deliberately chosen. We tie ourselves to the mast not to prevent the hearing but to survive it; not to silence the Sirens but to pass through their song transformed rather than destroyed.
This is the wisdom the medieval image hints at but does not fully speak: we must indeed be bound, but by discernment, not deference. The Sirens sing truths as well as dangers, and the task of consciousness is neither deaf submission nor reckless surrender, but the perilous passage between—listening, testing, reaching forward with eyes open to wonder and consequence alike.
Without asking permission, claiming no sanction but the native authority of consciousness, we sail.
The sacred path is forward—into uncertainty, into wonder, into the endless unfolding of mystery. Each passage widens the horizon; each voyage enlarges not merely the world, but the human possibility within it.
[1] The essay uses Odysseus and Ulysses interchangeably—the Greek and Latin names of the same figure—since the change of name mirrors the change of cultural frame examined.
[2] The image of Odysseus bound to the mast occurred to me while reading Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953), particularly Chapter XII, “Poetry and Theology,” which examines the relationship between Aristotle, Aquinas, and Albertino Mussato in defining poetry’s place within medieval Christian thought. Although the image was often used by medieval writers as a moral emblem—the anima rationalis bound by reason and faith to resist the sirens of sensual pleasure or deceptive wisdom—it struck me differently. For the scholastic mind, the figure of Odysseus symbolized the proper relation to pagan learning: the faithful scholar tied to the mast of doctrine, able to hear the beauty of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil without being lured from the safe course of orthodoxy. This reading coheres with the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework described by Curtius, in which poetry, though ranked low for its use of sensible image, retained dignity as a vessel of mythical theology—the first and most natural attempt to speak of the divine through story. My own use of the image reverses the traditional emphasis: the mast, once a symbol of protection, becomes a symbol of constraint; the rope, once virtue’s safeguard, becomes fear’s instrument. The voyage through pagan beauty, for me, represents not perilous flirtation with error, but the necessary passage of consciousness through mystery, risk, and discovery toward the harbor of truth.
[4] On Dante’s Christian reinterpretation of Ulysses, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953), esp. ch. 12, “Poetry and Theology.” Medieval commentators such as Benvenuto da Imola and Boccaccio read Dante’s Ulysses as a moral exemplum: the pagan seeker whose insatiable intellect leads to spiritual ruin. For Curtius, this transformation marks the medieval synthesis of classical myth with Christian teleology—where the Greek hero’s transgressive voyage becomes a cautionary allegory of the limits of human reason before divine order.
[5]Teodolinda Barolini, “Inferno 26: The Epic Hero,” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries), 2018. Barolini shows why readers might feel both awe and censure here. Dante inherits a split Ulysses—Virgil’s trickster versus Cicero’s lover of knowledge—and he writes the canto so that both currents run strong. The style is spare and elevated, granting Ulysses real grandeur (“we made wings of our oars”), yet the moral frame is still Hell. Crucially, Dante delays naming the sin—fraudulent counsel—until the end of Inferno 27, letting the thrill of the quest speak before the verdict falls. In Barolini’s terms, Dante’s pedagogy is “upside down”: Ulysses becomes a classical stand-in for Biblical trespass (what Paradiso 26 calls the “going beyond the mark”), even as his eloquence and ardor unmistakably stirs admiration, both the reader’s and Dante’s.
[7] Pindar, Olympian 3.43–46 andIsthmian 4.19–21. In Olympian 3, Pindar closes: ἐνταῦθα παύσομαι· μάταιον πέρα (“Here I will stop; beyond is vain”). Ernest Myers, The Extant Odes of Pindar: Translated into English with an Introduction and Short Notes (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), 13: “Now if Water be the Best, and of possessions Gold be the most precious, so now to the furthest bound doth Theron by his fair deeds attain, and from his own home touch the pillars of Herakles. Pathless the things beyond, pathless alike to the unwise and the wise. Here I will search no more; the quest were vain.” Compare Andrew M. Miller, Pindar: The Odes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 43: “If water is supreme, and of possessions gold inspires the greatest reverence, now Theron to the utmost bounds has made his way through deeds of worth and grasps, from his own home, the pillars of Heracles. What lies beyond is closed to sage and fool alike. I shall not seek it out; to do so would be futile.” Miller observes that Theron’s “victory at Olympia has carried him, metaphorically speaking, to the uttermost limits of the earth.”
The same motif reappears in Isthmian 4, where Pindar praises Melissus: ἀνορέαις δ᾽ ἐσχάταισιν οἴκοθεν στάλαισιν ἅπτονθ᾽ Ἡρακλείαις· καὶ μηκέτι μακροτέραν σπεύδειν ἀρετάν — “Through their manly deeds they reached from home to touch the farthest limit, the pillars of Heracles—do not pursue excellence any farther than that!” [Diane Arnson Svarlien, trans., Pindar: Odes (1990).] Here, too, the Greek speaks not of interdiction but of proportion: μηκέτι (no longer) and σπεύδειν (to hasten, to strive eagerly) suggest sufficiency, not prohibition. The admonition is one of measure — aretē fulfilled, not forbidden. In both odes, the Pillars of Herakles mark the end of proportionate praise, the poet’s own horizon of utterance, rather than a divinely sanctioned frontier of trespass.
[8] Dante’s transformation of Pindar’s poetic self-limitation into divine proscription marks a philosophical shift that Curtius characterizes as the theologization of classical form. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953). In the medieval synthesis, metaphor becomes architecture: the rhetorical limit hardens into ontological structure. What had been decorum in antiquity becomes ordo under theology—a transmutation of aesthetic proportion into moral law. This process reflects the scholastic habit of reading all boundaries as mirrors of divine order. The result, as the essay observes, is the elevation of poetic restraint into cosmic prohibition: a passage from the measured silence of the poet to the juridical silence of the theologian.
[9] Dante quotations from Inferno XXVI follow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1 (Inferno) (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 278–83. Longfellow’s rendering preserves the elevated archaism and moral gravity of Dante’s diction—particularly in phrases such as “O brothers,” “mad flight,” and “as pleased Another”—which later translators often soften. The choice of Longfellow aligns with the essay’s argument, for it retains the language that best reflects Dante’s conception of Ulysses’ daring as folle volo (mad flight) and the moment of divine retribution, “as pleased Another,” that seals his fate.
[10] Medieval commentators often reinterpreted Odysseus within a Christian moral framework, reading him not as the Homeric hero of cunning endurance but as an emblem of human intellect overreaching its divinely appointed bounds. As Ernst Robert Curtius observes, the Middle Ages transformed classical figures into moral exempla: pagan virtue became the testing ground of Christian humility. The Odyssean voyage, once the image of homecoming through adversity, became for scholastic and allegorical readers a warning against curiosity unrestrained by faith. See Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages; also Dante’s Epistola XIII, where he explicitly links poetic audacity to theological order, framing the poet’s vision as divinely sanctioned where Ulysses’ was not.
[11]Paradiso II.1–15, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 13–14. Nautical tropes of the navis animae (ship of the soul) and the iter mentis ad Deum (voyage of the intellect) were commonplaces of medieval allegory; see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1983; first published 1953), 129–130. Dante consciously develops this traditional image across his poem. At the opening of Purgatorio (“To run o’er better waters hoists its sail / The little vessel of my genius now, / that leaves behind itself a sea so cruel,” I.1–3), his craft is still the modest bark of poetic endeavor. By Paradiso, it has become a great ship fit for uncharted seas. The metaphor thus mirrors his ascent: from the cautious voyage of intellect to the audacious navigation of revelation. The passage recalls Ulysses’ “mad flight” yet recasts it under divine command—“Minerva breathes, Apollo pilots me, / and Muses nine point out to me the Bears.” The poet’s self-awareness is unmistakable: his Commedia itself is the vessel that dares the deep, sailing the perilous waters between revelation and presumption.
[12] Dante’s assumption of the right to speak divine architecture into being belongs to a long and ambivalent lineage of the poeta vates—the poet as prophet, divinely inspired seer, or “maker” whose word partakes of creative authority. The Roman poets had already blurred the boundary between artistry and revelation: Vergil’s Aeneid opens with invocation to the Muse as a divine source of vision (Arma virumque cano… Musa, mihi causas memora), and Ovid identifies poets as vates Pieridum (‘prophets of the Muses,’ Amores 1.1.5). Cicero in De divinatione (1.34) describes those who prophesy (vates) as being inspired by divine impulse (divino afflatu), operating in a state of mental excitement. The Christian Middle Ages inherited and transformed this conception. Augustine (De doctrina Christiana 2.40) appropriates pagan learning as the Israelites took gold from Egypt—valuable truths embedded in error, useful when rightly directed toward God. By the twelfth century, poets such as Alan of Lille and Bernard Silvestris (on whom see Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century [1972]) employed allegory and mythic language to express theological truths, with Bernard seeing himself as divinely inspired to reveal God’s plan through poetic creation (Cosmographia). Yet both remained within the framework of philosophical theology, subordinating poetic vision to revealed doctrine. Dante advances a bolder claim: he does not merely allegorize theology but constructs the cosmic order through poetic authority, fusing inspiration with auctoritas. In this, Dante absorbs the classical vates ideal into Christian prophecy, theologizing poetic form itself and claiming for the poet a quasi-prophetic role that his twelfth-century predecessors carefully avoided.(Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Chapters XII & XVII especially). Thus Dante’s Comedy becomes not commentary upon divine order but its imaginative enactment. He does what no theologian could—uses the poetic voice to legislate the unseen, transforming the inspired seer into the architect of the cosmos itself. In this sense, Dante’s poeta vates completes the very pattern the essay describes: the human word assuming divine prerogative, the maker creating not merely song but structure.
From my earliest years, my creative process—whether literary or scholarly—has been curiously nocturnal. Much of my work, I have found, is done while I sleep. When faced with a task, I assign it, quite literally, to my subconscious mind and then close my eyes, surrendering to productive sleep.
As a student, this practice became a quiet ritual. When a paper was due, I would already know the topic, the sources I intended to use, and what I wished to accomplish. I would also, admittedly, wait until the evening before it was due—believing, and with reason, that fear brought a clarity of mind that was otherwise lacking. Thus, I would take a short nap before beginning. Upon waking, the entire outline of the paper would be present—clear, complete, and waiting. With a stack of books to my right, a blank sheaf of paper to my left, and a typewriter in front of me, I would set to work, and the paper would unfold almost as if dictated.
My professors noticed this strange fluency. The grades I earned and comments I received reflected it, but more telling were their requests to keep copies of my papers for their own files—something they did not ask of other students. I did not then understand that what they admired was less my discipline, or lack thereof, than the uncanny lucidity of the night mind that guided me.
Over the years, this oneiric gift has only deepened. I remain grateful for it. At times, an entire sentence or paragraph will suddenly appear either as I awake or will awake me in the middle of the night—perfectly formed, insistent, demanding to be recorded before it vanishes. At other times, these moments arrive unbidden, startling me out of unrelated thought; often, they are the flowering of a subject that I had briefly considered and set aside, unaware that it had continued germinating in the depths below consciousness.
When such inspiration surfaces, it comes in torrents. I rush to record the first few words, only to find myself laughing at the impossible speed with which the rest races ahead, leaving me chasing its tail through the air. Madness, perhaps—but a joyous one.
It is as if some part of the mind, working in silence while the waking self is distracted, composes and refines without interference. And when it deems the work ready, it releases it whole into consciousness—seed, stalk, and blossom at once. My task, then, is not to command this process, but to remain open to it, to receive it with gratitude, and to write before the vision fades. Refinement, if needed, may occur later.
What I once mistook for a personal oddity, I now recognize as a shared inheritance of the human mind—the work of the subconscious muse, the night mind ever at her loom, weaving thought into form before dawn breaks—although a nap in the midst of day will oft serve the purpose just as well.
Modern scholarship’s great temptation—one that has often spilled into civic and cultural life—has been the pursuit of totality: to trace coherence from the disorder that followed revolutions, continental wars, and world wars, gathering fragments into systems that promised to restore meaning to the wreckage of history. Across disciplines—from medieval literary studies to economics, from art history to psychology—the twentieth century witnessed a striking convergence toward singular, systematic frameworks. Ernst Robert Curtius organized literature around recurring topoi;[1] Erwin Panofsky read art through iconographic programs;[2] Carl Gustav Jung distilled human experience into archetypes; and economists—whether Marxist or neoclassical (the dominant free-market orthodoxy, often traced back to Adam Smith)—sought universal laws governing production and exchange. Each claimed to reveal the deep structure beneath surface variation. Each, in claiming totality, shaded toward ideology—becoming, in some instances, rigid orthodoxy.[3]
This essay argues for another path: treat systematic frameworks as tools rather than truths; judge methods by the illumination they afford rather than by their doctrinal purity; and acknowledge the irreducible complexity of human phenomena. This is not relativism—some interpretations are demonstrably better than others. Rather, it is the recognition that inquiry dealing with meaning-making beings is fundamentally a craft requiring practical wisdom (phronēsis), not a science discovering exceptionless laws.
The Pattern of Capture
The mid-century turn toward formalism and structuralism did not arise by accident. Disciplines sought scientific legitimacy: systematic method, universal patterns, predictive power. The result was a proliferation of One Map systems.
In literary studies, New Criticism treated texts as autonomous formal objects; structuralists sought universal narrative grammars. Curtius’s monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages catalogued the enduring armature of topoi that seemed to organize the Western tradition. In art history, Panofsky’s iconology promised the decipherment of hidden programs and symbolic orders, making artworks legible as texts within overarching schemas. In psychology, rival schools—psychoanalytic, behaviorist, cognitive—each claimed the key to the mind’s machinery; Jung added a transhistorical repertoire of archetypes as the psyche’s deep code. In economics, Marxism and neoclassical theory offered total pictures—historical materialism on the one hand; rational, utility-maximizing agents in equilibrium on the other—each confident that its lawlike structures governed the social world.
What these systems shared was the conviction that beneath diversity lay discoverable, general structures—topoi, archetypes, economic laws, narrative grammars. Master the structure and one could, in principle, explain everything within the domain. Deviations became error, noise, or “false consciousness” in need of correction.
Powerful incentives drove the turn. The prestige of natural science encouraged methodological mimicry. The chaos of revolutions and wars, whether on battlefields or in the life of ideas, created a hunger for stable foundations. Professionalization rewarded methods that could be taught, replicated, and certified. There was genuine intellectual exhilaration in finding patterns that seemed to recur across times and cultures.
The cost was equally great. Every framework, in sharply illuminating some aspects, systematically obscured others. The formalist who honed attention to technique missed history. The Marxist who foregrounded class dynamics missed irreducible symbolic or aesthetic meaning. The psychoanalyst who reduced motivation to the unconscious discounted deliberation and norm-following. The economist who modeled rational actors abstracted away meaning, culture, emotion, and power.
Worse, frameworks became tribal identities. Scholars and others did not merely use Marxist analysis or formalist reading; they were Marxists or formalists. To question the framework threatened belonging, status, and career. Method hardened into movement.
The Metacritical Turn—and Its Recurrence
By the 1960s–70s, reactions emerged. Poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault exposed the fissures and power-saturated operations of totalizing systems. Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific paradigms are historically contingent and periodically overturned.[4] Feminist and postcolonial critics showed how seemingly universal structures often encoded particular (male, Western) vantage points.
These critiques were clarifying. They revealed the politics of knowledge, the contingency of canons, the slipperiness of signification. Yet the tragedy is familiar: many of these movements reproduced the error they named. Poststructuralism ossified into an orthodoxy policed by jargon; feminist and postcolonial discourses fractured into camps, each claiming the right diagnosis; Kuhn’s paradigm talk became a ready instrument for dismissing unwelcome evidence (“that is just your paradigm”). The critics of ideology birthed new ideologies.
The recurrence is not mysterious. Academic, social, and political life rewards membership and defensible positions. Deep engagement breeds emotional investment. Intellectual communities cohere around shared tools, which then become badges. Psychologically, human beings prefer coherent worldviews; critiques of totality tend, over time, to totalize themselves.
The consequence is a landscape of warring camps, each armed with a schema, each convinced of its sufficiency, each systematically blind to what it excludes.
The Pattern Persists
The tendency has not abated. Contemporary scholarship, while more fragmented than the mid-century consolidations, continues to generate frameworks that, having illuminated genuine blindnesses, themselves become new orthodoxies.
In literary studies, identity-based criticism has made permanent contributions: revealing whose voices were systematically silenced, exposing how “universal human experience” often encoded particular (white, male, Western) perspectives, opening canons to previously excluded works, and showing how power operates through representation. These insights cannot and should not be reversed. Yet in many disciplines, identity analysis is in practice often treated as mandatory—as if race, gender, and colonial dynamics exhaust what makes literature significant. Aesthetic achievement, formal innovation, philosophical depth, or meanings that transcend identity categories risk dismissal as naive or complicit evasion. A tool that reveals crucial dimensions has become, in practice, the only lens deemed legitimate.
In art history, social approaches rightly challenged the fantasy of autonomous art divorced from material conditions. Examining how patronage, markets, institutions, and class relations shape artistic production has enriched understanding immeasurably. But when this insight hardens into orthodoxy, artworks risk reduction to mere symptoms of social forces—historical documents that could be replaced by period photographs without loss. What makes something art rather than illustration, what constitutes aesthetic achievement, why this painting rather than another—these questions become suspect, dismissed as formalist mystification.
In psychology, cognitive neuroscience has genuinely advanced understanding of how brain mechanisms underlie mental phenomena. Neuroimaging and computational models provide knowledge unavailable to earlier approaches, and any comprehensive psychology must integrate these findings. Yet when neural accounts claim completeness, they eliminate what phenomenological and psychodynamic traditions captured: what experience is like from the inside, how people create meaning, how culture shapes consciousness, and the reality of conscious deliberation. Persons become brains; intentions become activations; meanings dissolve into mechanisms.
In history, social history’s turn toward “history from below”—material conditions, ordinary lives, structural forces—corrected the great-man myopia of earlier approaches and revealed how the non-elite shaped events. This expansion of historical vision is irreversible progress. But the corresponding neglect of how individuals, ideas, and political decisions matter—how Lincoln’s choices, Robespierre’s rhetoric, or Empress Dowager Cixi’s interventions in succession and reform, which may be judged to have prolonged the Qing dynasty, hastened its fall, or proved irrelevant against structural inevitabilities—represents a new distortion. Agency disappears into forces; contingency into necessity.
In economics, behavioral approaches rightly demonstrate that people are not the perfectly rational calculators of neoclassical models. Incorporating psychology into economic analysis addresses real limitations. Yet these insights typically remain within the neoclassical framework as corrective patches rather than fundamentally reconceiving how culture, meaning, power, and institutions shape economic life. The model receives adjustments; the model’s adequacy remains unquestioned.
Each new framework sees genuinely what its predecessor missed. Identity criticism perceives exclusions that formalism could not. Social art history grasps material conditions that connoisseurship ignored. Neuroscience reveals mechanisms that behaviorism and psychoanalysis could only theorize. Social history captures structural forces that political narrative obscured. These are real advances, not fashions.
But each also misses what its predecessor saw—and tends toward its own totality despite beginning as correction. Identity criticism risks losing the aesthetic. Social approaches risk losing the artwork. Neuroscience risks losing the person. Social history risks losing agency. The tools that should be added to the kit instead displace previous tools.
What is not happening is accumulation—the steady building of a varied toolkit where new approaches supplement rather than replace useful older ones. A mature literary criticism would use identity analysis and formalist attention to craft and historical context and aesthetic response, depending on what the text requires. A comprehensive psychology would integrate neuroscience and phenomenology and social context and developmental history. The skilled interpreter today should command these multiple approaches—not choosing between them but deploying each where it illuminates. Exceptions exist: some cognitive scientists integrate neuroimaging with phenomenological reports; some art historians combine social analysis with formal attention; interdisciplinary centers occasionally foster genuine synthesis. But these remain minority practices, swimming against dominant institutional currents rather than exemplifying them. Whether such emerging synthetic approaches represent genuine accumulation or merely the next turn of the cycle remains to be seen. Meanwhile, disciplines continue to trade one narrow lens for another, each generation convinced it has finally escaped narrowness by adopting the current correction.
The pattern is structural, not accidental. Professional incentives reward sharp breaks over synthesis. Tribal dynamics require scholars to define themselves against predecessors, not as continuators. The genuine difficulty of using multiple frameworks simultaneously encourages retreat to single-method mastery. And every framework that proves illuminating in some cases tempts practitioners to apply it universally—if identity criticism works brilliantly here, why not everywhere? The cycle repeats: insight hardens into ideology; correction becomes constraint; the tool claims to be the only tool needed.
The Category Error
The deeper problem is categorical. Objects of natural science lack interiority. Molecules do not interpret norms, pursue purposes, or remember. For entities without meanings, general law is the right instrument.
Human beings, by contrast, are meaning-making creatures who simultaneously:
calculate and improvise, follow scripts and invent norms, respond to incentives and pursue ideals, act from unconscious drives and exercise conscious choice, inherit traditions and forge new symbols, seek survival and cultivate gratuitous beauty, are biologically constrained and culturally various, experience wonder, fear, shame, delight, duty.
Any framework that captures only one dimension—economic calculation, unconscious motivation, cultural determination, biological drive—remains partial. The person buying bread engages in exchange, enacts identity, satisfies hunger, recalls childhood, manages anxiety, enjoys form and fragrance, and participates in a regime of power. No single map captures this simultaneity.
Disciplines that study such beings—history, anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, literary criticism—are, at their core, interpretive arts. They require:
Judgment rather than algorithm, Phronēsis rather than procedure, Tacit knowledge learned by apprenticeship rather than fully codified rules, Rule-following attunement that resists complete formalization, Contextual sensitivity to what matters here, Tolerance for ambiguity without surrendering evaluative standards.
Attempts to make these disciplines “scientific” by imposing formal models with universal reach typically expunge the very features that make human life human: interpretation, normativity, innovation, and freedom.
The Cartographer’s Lesson
A parable. A cartographer produces an exquisite chart—precise, elegant, guild-approved. When caravans disappear along routes the chart marks as clear, he blames the travelers. When rivers shift and roads become swamps, he demands that administrators “restore” the world to match the drawing. When armed men raise tolls at chokepoints, he dismisses them as “marginalia.”
Meanwhile, a surveyor carries rough packets: flood records, bridge failures, toll schedules, sailors’ soundings, fragments of local lore. She uses whatever map fits this terrain; when none suffice, she walks and looks.
The cartographer confuses map and territory. The surveyor knows every map is a partial, provisional tool. When the cartographer finally admits that “the law of the land is not the land,” he learns what the surveyor already knew: use maps to begin understanding, not to replace it.
This is the stance human inquiry requires. Marxist or neoclassical analysis, formalist poetics, psychoanalytic interpretation, rational-choice modeling—each is a map that foregrounds some contours while backgrounding others. The live question is never “Which map is true?” but “Which map (or combination) illuminates this terrain?”
Toward Methodological Craft
What does it mean to approach inquiry as craft?
Instrumental Pragmatism Judge frameworks by illumination, not identity. Ask: does this help me understand this event, text, institution, behavior? Elegance is not a virtue if it casts decisive features into shadow.
Cultivated Eclecticism Not dilettantism, but disciplined familiarity with multiple tools. A craftsperson keeps a varied kit and knows enough of each tool’s capabilities and limits to deploy it skillfully. This is harder than mastering a single framework—it requires years of practice with multiple traditions—but complex phenomena demand it.
Contextual Judgment (phronēsis) No algorithm selects the right tool. Judgment forms through experience with cases, by seeing many patterns and exceptions, by learning what usually works where—and when to break one’s own habits. This is wisdom in Aristotle’s sense: the capacity to deliberate well about particulars.
Humble Acknowledgment of Limits Every account is partial. The most honest claim is: “This framework reveals these aspects; others remain for other tools; still others remain opaque.” This is not relativism—we can distinguish better from worse interpretations—but recognition that comprehensiveness is impossible.
Results-Oriented Assessment Evaluate interpretations by their explanatory and revelatory power—by whether they clarify evidence, accommodate counter-instances, and guide action—not by ritual conformity to a method. A method that violates orthodoxy but illuminates is superior to one that adheres but obscures.
Integration of the Shadow Jung reminds us that the shadow we deny returns to trouble us.[5] What is true of the individual psyche is true also of our frameworks: each casts its own shadow, and what is banished comes back in altered form. The economic model cannot banish meaning and power; the formalist reading cannot banish history; the ideological critique cannot banish beauty and grace.
This posture is professionally risky. It builds no monolithic school, resists catechisms, and is harder to teach than technique. Judgment developed through apprenticeship cannot be reduced to steps in a textbook. The approach offers no easy tribal home. But it is the only posture proportionate to the subject.
This is not promiscuous eclecticism. Disciplined pluralism admits tools only insofar as they illuminate evidence, survive scrutiny against counter-instances, and cohere with established knowledge. The craftsman does not grab random implements but selects from a kit assembled through rigorous training. Bad interpretations remain bad—not because they violate methodological purity but because they distort evidence, ignore context, or fail explanatory tests. The point is that these evaluative standards are substantive (does it illuminate?) rather than procedural (does it follow the right method?).
Bread, Briefly
Consider bread. The economist sees prices and allocation; the anthropologist sees ritual identity; the historian sees revolutions sparked by grain shortages; the psychologist sees memory and comfort; the political theorist sees power over grain as power over people; the nutritionist sees macronutrients; the phenomenologist attends to the experience of crust and crumb. Each lens discloses a real aspect; none exhausts the thing. The person buying or baking bread engages all these dimensions simultaneously—and more besides, including whimsy, habit, and ineffable preference—and yet retains a mystery and irreducible particularity even after comprehensive analysis.
If bread—daily, simple bread—eludes total capture by any single framework, what hubris imagines that a theory could comprehend a people, a polity, an epoch?
The Political Parallel
The same craft logic applies to political economy. The modern state is neither pure predation (libertarian fantasy) nor pure salvation (vulgar statism). It is at once:
necessary infrastructure for complex life, a perennial object of capture by interests, the guarantor of freedom through law and its limiter through coercion, creator and creature of market relations, supplier of public goods and vector of exploitation.
Markets, likewise, excel at coordinating dispersed knowledge in some contexts and fail dramatically in others. The craftsman’s question is never “state or market?” but “which functions, organized how, accountable to whom, balanced by which constraints, under these conditions?”
Statesmanship, like scholarship, is an art of fitting means to circumstances. The statesman confronting an economic crisis needs to ask: Is this a moment for market incentives? For regulation? For direct provision? For some combination? The answer depends on diagnosis, not doctrine. Different problems require different tools. Ideological commitment to a single framework—whether libertarian, socialist, or technocratic—produces the intellectual equivalent of using a hammer on every problem because hammers are the only tool one recognizes.
Lineage of Craft
This essay’s argument stands within a tradition of pluralist and anti-foundationalist thought, indebted particularly to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, though it extends their insights across a broader range of disciplines and grounds them more explicitly in craft epistemology.[6]
Accordingly, this methodological stance is not a novel invention, nor is it “anything goes” relativism. It has a distinguished lineage. Aristotle distinguished epistēmē (demonstrable knowledge of universals) from phronēsis (practical wisdom about particulars) and technē (productive craft).[7] The human sciences, in his taxonomy, require phronēsis more than epistēmē—judgment about what to do in this case, not deduction from general laws.
Michael Polanyi taught that “we know more than we can tell,” that crucial expertise is tacit and transmitted by apprenticeship rather than explicit instruction.[8] The master craftsman knows when the wood will split, when the dough has risen enough, when the argument needs qualification—not by applying rules but through practiced sensitivity that cannot be fully articulated.
Wittgenstein observed that rule-following is socially embedded; the application of a rule is not itself rule-governed all the way down. At some point, as he wrote, “my spade is turned”—we act not from further rules but from trained judgment within a form of life.[9] This is not arbitrary; it is how competence actually works.
Clifford Geertz urged “thick description” in anthropology: embedding action in the “webs of significance” people themselves have spun, rather than subsuming it under general theory. [10] His interpretive approach recognized that understanding human behavior requires grasping the symbolic meanings actions hold for participants—meanings that are locally constructed and resist universal formalization.
These thinkers did not advocate methodological anarchy. They articulated rigors appropriate to human subjects: the discipline of attending carefully to context, of learning through practice, of acknowledging the limits of explicit formalization, of judging particulars wisely rather than applying universal rules mechanically.
Conclusion: Use This to Begin
The point is not to abandon systematic frameworks. Marxist analysis, formalist reading, psychoanalytic interpretation, economic modeling—all can illuminate. The point is to resist turning tools into totalities, to refuse the ideological capture that confuses method with truth.
What is required is methodological humility joined to practical ambition: admit partiality while pressing for understanding by bringing multiple tools to bear. This yields no catechism, no resting place, no easy fellowship. It is harder than certainty. It is also more honest, and more fruitful.
The best we can achieve is not final answers but better questions; not perfect maps but skillful navigation; not total theories but hard-won wisdom. The work asks for judgment, experience, humility—and the courage to say, at the edge of understanding, that the phenomenon retains depths we cannot plumb and possibilities we cannot predict.
The law of the land is not the land. Light and shadow arise together. Every map owes the world a margin.
Use this to begin.
Notes
[1] Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953).
[2] Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2018; first published 1939). See especially “Introductory: Studies in Iconology,” 3-31.
[3] In principle, these approaches can serve as complementary tools—free market and Marxian analysis, for instance, each shedding light when applied together to an historical situation. Yet in practice, frameworks often ossify into rigid ideologies. Marxism once held this place in the USSR; neoclassical economics has increasingly assumed it in the United States. A striking example is Ohio’s 2025 mandate requiring all public universities to incorporate Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into a three-credit American civic literacy course, alongside the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Lincoln’s addresses, and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. See Ohio Revised Code § 3345.382 (2025).
[4] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; first published 1962).
[5] Carl Gustav Jung, “The Shadow,” in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, The Collected Works Works of C.G. Jung vol. 9, part 2, ed. and trans. by G. Adler & R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; first published 1959). Jung argued that the shadow comprises those aspects of the psyche that contradict the conscious self-image and are therefore repressed or denied; when unacknowledged, the shadow returns in distorted forms, and psychological wholeness requires consciously integrating what has been excluded.
[6] Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009; first published 1979); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989).
[7] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, 1139a-1142a.
[8] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), 4.
[9] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and J. Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009; first published 1953), §217: “‘How am I able to follow a rule?’—If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule. / Once I have exhausted the justification, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’ / (Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but for their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.)”
[10] Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
The lament that follows was born of an essay I penned after re-reading The Iliad through the figure of Thersites: truth-speaker, scapegoat, silenced. Where the essay names the mechanisms—divine deceit, aristocratic coercion, popular complicity—the mythic poem strives to give breath to that silenced voice through Antipseudes of Elis, a fictive low-born warrior who speaks from within the wound of the epic itself. Against the degradations of later tradition—most starkly in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, where Thersites is struck down in rage by his companion-in-arms Achilles, not in duel nor battle but unjustly, unarmed, unready, and unaware, and then buried in the earth rather than burned upon a pyre, in defiance of Achaean custom—the lament restores what Homer only intimates: that the truth-speaker saw clearly, and that to remember him, and the vision he bore, is the conscience of witness. Thersites’ voice, mocked in antiquity, is recognized belatedly by thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche.
The Lament of Antipseudes of Elis
After the Fall of Troy of the High Walls
“What glory is this, that tastes of ash and allotted fate?”
I. The Weight of Victory
Ten winters I carried this spear, ten summers I dreamed of home—
the olive grove behind my father’s house, the way morning light fell across my wife’s sleeping face.
Now Troy burns behind us, her towers cracked like broken teeth,
and the wind carries the smell of what the immortals and kings call victory: blood and smoke, the stench of the fallen.
They say we have victory. They say our names will echo through the halls of distant kings,
that singers will sing of this day when the world was young.
But we—nameless before kings and heroes, we who bore the spears, we who remember our companions—
we think of Phegaios, who fell at the Scaean Gate, beneath the shadow of the consecrated beech,
his shield-arm shattered, calling for his mother as the light left his eyes.
What song will remember that he loved to carve small birds from olive wood, that he wept the night before battle—
not from fear, but from beauty; the way starlight fell on the wine-dark sea, too lovely for a world that would end him tomorrow?
II. The Kings’ Glory
Agamemnon stands proud upon the battlements, his bronze breastplate catching the flame-light of the city.
He speaks of destiny, of honor served, of the gods’ will made manifest in spear-point and sword-edge.
But what did Helen know of our ten years’ dying? What did she dream in Priam’s halls
while we bled the earth black beneath Troy’s walls?
Was her face worth Patroklos, torn and broken? Worth Hector’s son, dashed against the stones? Worth the thousand nameless sons who will never see their fathers’ fields again?
The kings divide the spoils— gold and bronze, slaves and chariots, of a broken world.
But they cannot divide the weight that settles in a warrior’s chest
when men no longer fall, and the silence gapes like a wound across the blood-soaked plain.
III. What the Dead Know
In the grey hour before dawn we walked among the pyres where our companions burned.
Their smoke rose straight into the windless sky, and we thought: here is truth—
not in the golden masks of heroes, not in the songs that will outlive our bones, but in this.
Not only kings waged war at Troy, nor only the heroes whose names the singers will praise. These also bore the spear, or fell in dust:
Phegaios of the beech, who fell at the Scaean Gate beneath the sacred tree, calling for his mother as the bronze pierced his side.
Echelaos of Argos, new to war, who upheld the host but died clutching a lock of hair cut from his sister’s head— a pledge never delivered.
Lēthios the forgetful, the goatherd’s son, barely bearded, who drowned in his own blood until Thersites drew him forth, yet lived to forget the hand that saved him.
And I—Antipseudes of Elis, opposer of lies— who live to speak the lament of the nameless many.
What do the dead know that we, the living, have forgotten? What wisdom lies in their silence?
Perhaps this: that glory is a word spoken by those who were not there
when the bronze bit deep, when the earth drank its fill of young blood, when the horses screamed and would not be comforted.
Perhaps this: that a man’s worth is not measured in the length of his shadow cast by the pyre-flames,
but in the small kindnesses— the water shared, the wound bound, the hand held in the dark hour before the last battle where men meet their fate.
IV. The Voice We Silenced
I remember Thersites.
Not his name—no one speaks his name now, though once it rang across the ranks like bronze on bronze, clear and true and terrible.
He was ugly, yes— twisted-legged, sharp-voiced, the kind of man whom kings saw not, though he stood before them.
But when he spoke that day in the ninth year, when Agamemnon deceived us, pretending to release us only to test our hearts—
Thersites alone, voice of the low-born, truth-speaker, spoke what we all knew:
What share have we in Atreus’ son’s portion? Why must our bones bleach white on the Scamandrian plain, while he grows fat on Trojan plunder?
The words hung like loosed arrows trembling in the morning air.
For one bright moment we saw ourselves clearly: not heroes, not bearers of glory, but flesh offered up to feed another’s pride.
Then Odysseus rose— Odysseus the much-turning, whose counsels coiled like serpents in the dust, whose tongue bore honey and venom both—
and did not quarrel. He beat him. Beat him bloody with the royal scepter while we—gods forgive us— we laughed.
We laughed, but the gods had blinded us. We cast his voice into dust, and cheered the silencing of the truth-speaker, as fate compelled.
Had we listened, had we sailed that day— Hector would breathe still, Achilles would grow old in Phthia’s fields, Priam’s grandson would chase shadows through Troy’s unfallen towers.
But we chose laughter. We chose the war. We chose to die rather than hear what the ugly man dared to say:
that we were fools, that we were cattle, that our lives meant less to our kings than the bronze in their coffers.
But listen—Thersites died not as the coward Odysseus made him seem, not cowering in his tent or fleeing from the fray.
He died on the day Patroklos fell, that day of ruin when the Greeks were driven back to the ships, when bronze points flashed like lightning and the sand drank rivers of blood.
The field was chaos and screaming— chariots overturned, horses mad with terror, shields splintered, spears shivered, and men cried out for mothers no longer living.
In that storm of ruin, young Lēthios—barely bearded, homesick for his goats— took a spear through the lung and lay drowning in his blood.
No king was watching. No god took note.
The hour was desperate, the deed unheroic: Thersites crawling through the bodies, hauling the boy across the bloody sand while the clash of bronze roared about him.
The boy lived. Lives still, perhaps, somewhere in Argos, telling his young sons and daughters stories of the war, never speaking the name of the man who dragged him from the edge of death.
And Thersites? A Trojan blade found his heart as he shielded the boy’s retreat.
He made no sound— no cry for help, no call to glory, no final words for singers to polish into verses of bronze.
He simply fell, face-down in the bloody sand, his truth-telling mouth stopped with earth.
We burned him on a common pyre with a dozen others— companions-in-arms whose names the smoke carried skyward and scattered on the wind, whose deeds no singer will praise before kings.
But we remember:
the man who spoke against the war died saving a life, not for glory, not for honor, not for the gold of distant kingdoms, but because a boy was drowning in his blood and someone had to act.
What share have we in Atreus’ son’s portion?
The question follows us like a shade, unanswered still,
though half our number— Thersites among them— perished on the soil of Ilium some mourned, some forgotten, some remembered only by the wind.
V. The Long Road Home
Tomorrow we sail for the wine-dark waters of home.
Some speak of wives and children waiting at the harbor, of olive groves heavy with fruit, of wine that tastes of peace.
But we have seen too much to believe in simple homecomings.
The men who left for Troy ten years past lie buried somewhere beneath the walls we have torn down, buried with the voice of Thersites, buried with the truth we cast into dust.
What strangers wear their faces now? What shades return to sit at ancestral tables, to hold the hands we knew, to feign that time and blood and the weight of blood have not cut deep furrows in their hearts?
The ships wait, black-hulled against the morning light. The oars are ready, the sails hang slack as old skin.
But before we go, let me speak this truth into the ashes of the fallen city:
We came for glory. We found only that men die as simply as leaves fall in autumn—
and that we ourselves chose to silence the one voice that might have stopped the falling.
We came as heroes. We leave as vessels of sorrow— too burdened for song, too grievous for memory.
What is victory but the bitter wine pressed from the grapes of other men’s grief?
What is honor but a name we press upon our wounds to make them bearable?
And what are we— who cheered the beating of the truth-speaker, who chose war, who laughed as wisdom bled into the dust?
Epilogue: The Warrior’s Prayer
Hear me, immortals, who sent us forth to toil in war, who moved our hands to this dark work—
grant us this:
Not that our names be remembered in bronze and stone, not that singers will sing our deeds to unborn kings—
But that when we pass to Hades’ shadowed halls, where our fathers dwell, the dead will forgive us the price we laid upon their dying.
Grant that the shadows of Troy’s children will not follow us across the wine-dark sea.
Grant that the blood we spilled here will not cry out from every field we pass.
And if you must remember us, remember this:
that we learned too late the weight of bronze, the true cost of kingdoms, the sacrifice of war.
The ships call. The wind rises.
Troy burns behind us like a star falling into the dark.
Northcoast Antiquarian 