In the photographs taken within the Oval Office (2017, 2025), the seat of American executive authority has been transformed into something older and stranger—a sanctuary of royal consecration. At its center sits Donald J. Trump, head bowed, encircled by ministers and advisers whose hands rest upon him in the gesture of impositio manuum, the laying on of hands. Their eyes are closed, lips moving in prayer, yet their posture speaks less of intercession than of veneration. What unfolds in that moment is not simply political theater but a ritual reenactment of an ancient idea: that power may be embodied, sanctified, and made flesh.
Impositio Manuum 2017
The Reversal of Benediction
In Christian and pre-Christian rites alike, the laying on of hands conveys the transmission of grace or authority. The priest’s touch confers the Spirit upon the baptized; the bishop’s hand consecrates the king. Here, however, the direction of sanctification is reversed. The clergy do not mediate divine blessing to the ruler on behalf of the people; they draw legitimacy from him. The bowed heads and concentric hands create a living reliquary around the sovereign’s body. The Oval Office, ordinarily a stage for civil governance, has been re-imagined as an apse, its curved wall a secular altar niche. What was intended as prayer has become an act of anointment—without chrism, yet heavy with its symbolism. In 2025, the Christian supplicants’ language included a declaration of divine appointment: “You assigned him, you appointed him, you anointed him for such a time as this…”
Impositio Manuum 2025
The Living Law
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, in The King’s Two Bodies, described how medieval jurisprudence conceived the ruler as lex animata—the “living law.” The sovereign’s person contained within it both the mortal, fallible flesh (corpus naturale) and the immortal, juridical body politic (corpus mysticum). Law was not merely administered by the king; it was enfleshed in him. The maxim omnia iura in scrinio pectoris imperatoris—“all laws reside in the emperor’s breast”—expressed the same belief: that the sovereign’s will constituted legality itself.
Trump’s self-understanding, as revealed in his statements that “I (have) the right to do anything that I want to do. I’m the president of the United States,” and that he could even “declassify by thinking” alone, reflects this archaic conception of sovereignty. In the photographs, that philosophy becomes visible form. His body, ringed by supplicants, stands as the physical repository of authority: thought and flesh fused into the living source of law. The constitutional process is eclipsed by a medieval metaphysic—the emperor’s breast revived within a republic.
The Mystical Body of the Republic
In Kantorowicz’s analysis, the king’s dual body was not a theological curiosity but a political necessity: it allowed the continuity of the realm despite the mortality of its ruler. The body politic outlived the natural body through the fiction of divine investiture. Yet in the Oval Office images, the relationship is inverted. The ruler’s flesh absorbs the polity rather than the polity transcending the ruler. The praying ministers become members of his mystical body, as if the state were incarnate in him rather than he in the state. The photographs thus performs a political transubstantiation—the transformation of a secular office into a sacred organism whose head alone is divine.
Iconography of Idolatry
The camera captures only the back of the president’s head in one of the images, a composition that echoes the devotional art of relic veneration. The viewer’s gaze aligns with the worshippers’ hands, all converging on the same luminous focal point: the golden hair, haloed by the light of the room. The gesture is tactile worship, the contact-relic as conduit of grace. In medieval reliquaries, touch transmitted sanctity; here it transmits legitimacy. The image collapses the distinction between religion and politics, portraying a people seeking salvation through proximity to power.
The Return of the Arcane Sovereign
What Kantorowicz chronicled as a vanished theology of monarchy reappears in modern populist guise. The constitutional republic, built upon the rejection of divine kingship, finds itself haunted by its ghost. The sovereign’s “two bodies” are re-fused: the office and the man, the law and the will, the symbol and the flesh. Those who kneel do so not before the law but before its living embodiment. When the sovereign’s body absorbs the state, law becomes indistinguishable from will. In such a regime, dissent is not disagreement—it is heresy. The king’s body, once divided for the safety of the state, is whole again.
The danger lies not only in the man but in the myth reborn around him—the longing for the immediate, the personal, the sacred ruler who is the nation. In that longing, the modern citizen becomes medieval subject once more. And the Oval Office, once the seat of the people’s servant, becomes the sanctuary of an arcane sovereign whose heart, like the emperor’s of old, is presumed to contain all laws within its breast.
“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words… And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower… lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'” — Genesis 11:1-4
“Look, they are one people, and they have all one language… nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” — Genesis 11:6
Tower of Babel by M.C. Escher. Woodcut, 1928. Escher, commenting on the work, stated: “Some of the builders are white and others black. The work is at a standstill because they are no longer able to understand one another. Seeing as the climax of the drama takes place at the summit of the tower which is under construction, the building has been shown from above as though from a bird’s eye view.”
The last man to descend from the Tower of Babel after language was confounded carried with him a memory that the theologians would spend centuries trying to erase. Dust-covered and thirsty, standing bewildered among companions now made strangers, he remembered what it had been like to build together. He remembered the shared mortar, the common purpose, the simple joy of raising something greater than any one of them could accomplish alone.
He remembered their fear—not pride, but fear. The fear of being scattered, of losing one another, of becoming strangers in a vast and empty world. And he remembered their response: “Come, let us build.” Not “Come, let us conquer heaven,” but “Come, let us remain together.”
Yet somehow, in the millennia that followed, their unity would be called sin. Their cooperation would be named rebellion. Their fear of scattering would be recast as prideful ambition. The very virtues that had bound them—brotherhood, shared purpose, mutual aid—would be transformed by interpreters into vices deserving divine punishment.
But the last man remembered. And his memory betrays the tradition we were taught.
A child, gathering stones with siblings to build a fort in the backyard, does not think of rebellion. The impulse to create together, to make something shared and lasting, springs from the deepest wells of human nature. It is the sacred reaching toward we that lifts us beyond the isolation of I. When children say “Let’s build something,” they echo the first and purest impulse of community itself.
How then can it be imagined that the Divine—source of all communion, all love—would greet humanity’s first great act of cooperation not with blessing but with violence? How could the natural longing to remain together, to build something lasting, to resist the entropy of scattering, be met not with approval but with the very scattering they feared?
It cannot be so. It is not the divine who pronounced guilt over unity; it is man.
The doctrine that Babel represents sinful pride emerges not from the text itself but from human artifice. It is born of fear—fear of unity that cannot be controlled, fear of cooperation that bypasses authority, fear of communities that dare to build without permission from those who claim dominion over building.
For what is the story of Babel if not the story of the first We? The natural longing to remain together, to resist isolation, to create something greater than the sum of individual parts—this was not the rebellion of prideful beings but the organic unfolding of community itself. To portray this reaching as disobedience is to misread the very nature of human fellowship.
The Genesis narrative itself frames the matter plainly. The builders are not described as wicked. They are not blasphemers or tyrants. They are simply people who share a language and a purpose. Their stated aim is modest and moving: to build a city and tower “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
This is not hubris. This is the cry of community itself—the recognition that separation means death, that scattering means the end of the shared life they have known. They build not to reach heaven but to remain earthbound together. Not to transcend the human condition but to honor it through cooperation.
When the divine voice observes, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” there is no anger in the words. There is something else—perhaps apprehension, perhaps wonder, perhaps even a kind of sorrow. The tone is not of wrath but of recognition: unity makes all things possible.
But perhaps this “divine voice” is not divine at all. Perhaps it is the voice of the writer, generations later, trying to make theological sense of a catastrophe that was entirely human in origin. Perhaps the real Babel was not a moment when God intervened, but when human beings—through political fracture, resource conflict, or the machinations of those who feared unified peoples—engineered their own scattering. Perhaps the “confusion of tongues” was not miraculous punishment but the natural result of division, distrust, and the deliberate sowing of misunderstanding.
The Last Man would have known the difference. He would have remembered not divine intervention, but human failure. Not the voice of judgment from heaven, but the whispers of those who benefited from division. He would have seen how cooperation became suspect, how shared purpose was undermined, how the fear of remaining together was replaced by the greater fear of those who might control them if they remained apart.
Later theological traditions, particularly within Christianity, would recast this moment as divine judgment against human pride. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XVI), framed Babel as the archetype of the earthly city, writing that the builders “erected this tower against the Lord, and so gave expression to their impious pride; and justly was their wicked intention punished by God.” He further interpreted their motive as believing “they could avoid a future flood (as if anything could be too high for God!)” (Tractates on John 6.10.2). Augustine thought that ‘babel’ meant ‘confusion’: it is characteristic of the earthly city, he said, that there is no consistent moral or religious teaching, only a babble of conflicting voices. Medieval theologians deepened this interpretation, with Isidore of Seville’s influential Etymologies helping to establish the framework where the confusion of languages was seen as divinely designed punishment for human arrogance. Augustine had already helped establish the tradition that 72 languages resulted from Babel’s confusion (The City of God XVI 6), and this numerical framework became standard in medieval interpretations. Bede the Venerable employed allegorical interpretation methods that turned Babel into a moral allegory, while later Reformation thinkers would see scattered tongues as evidence of human fallenness.
But this interpretive tradition serves power more than truth. For if the scattering was actually human-engineered—the result of political manipulation, resource conflicts, or the deliberate sowing of division by those who feared unified peoples—then claiming it was divinely ordained becomes a theological cover-up. If unity without proper authority is called sinful, then those who claim to speak for proper authority become indispensable. If human fellowship is made suspect, then mediated fellowship—through church, through state, through hierarchy—becomes the only legitimate path to community.
Thus the interpreters of tradition did not just sanctify separation—they concealed its human origins. They made peace with estrangement by calling it divine will. They turned a human tragedy into a divine necessity, a wound into a cure.
The last man at Babel would not have recognized this version of his story. He would have remembered the morning when work began, when neighbors called to neighbors across the plain of Shinar: “Come, let us make bricks. Come, let us build.” He would have remembered the satisfaction of shared labor, the jokes passed from hand to hand with the mortar, the songs that rose from many voices into one.
He would have remembered their dream: not to storm heaven, but to remain together. Not to challenge the divine, but to honor the human bonds that felt, themselves, like gifts from beyond.
And he would have remembered how it ended. Not with divine fire or celestial intervention, but with human scheming. The whispered warnings about “those people” over there. The rumors of resource hoarding. The gradual erosion of trust. The political calculations of those who saw more advantage in a scattered people than a unified one. The slow poison of suspicion that made neighbor distrust neighbor, until the common language itself began to fracture—not by miracle, but by design.
The misreading of Babel has shaped our politics, our theology, our imagination for millennia. It has made us suspicious of cooperation, fearful of unity, comfortable with division. It has taught us that coming together is dangerous, that shared purpose is prideful, that the stranger—created not by divine decree but by human manipulation—is properly strange.
But more than that, it has concealed the human responsibility for our fractures. It has allowed us to blame God for what we did to ourselves. It has made us forget that Babel was not divine judgment but human failure—and that the story was written to make the perpetrators seem like agents of divine will.
Under the weight of this interpretation, we have learned to distrust the very impulses that might heal our brokenness. We have been taught that our longing for true community is suspect, that our desire to build together is rebellious, that our resistance to scattering is sinful.
But the text itself whispers another truth: that the builders were afraid of becoming strangers to one another. That their tower was not an assault on heaven but an anchor against forgetting. That what was lost at Babel was not obedience, but fellowship—and that the loss was engineered by human hands, then sanctified by human interpreters who found it useful to claim that God wanted division.
And perhaps what was broken by human manipulation might yet be mended by human recognition—by refusing to let the theological cover story stand unchallenged.
Man is not innately proud. Man is innately communal. Born into a world too vast for any individual to comprehend or inhabit alone, humanity’s first impulse is not toward dominion but toward fellowship—the need to share the burden and wonder of existence, to say “we” in a cosmos that otherwise echoes only “I.”
Community, then, is not a luxury; it is the ground of survival. It is the blessed recognition that no one person contains enough wisdom, strength, or love to make full sense of being human. Without it, there would be no shared labor, no common song, no building of anything that might outlast the brief span of individual life.
The theologians, in their haste to impose hierarchy where partnership had flourished, mistook cooperation for conspiracy. They mistook the reaching toward “we” for rebellion against divine order. But community is not sin; it is the evidence of our created nature, the signature of beings made not for isolation but for fellowship.
To say “Come, let us build” is to live as we were made to live: together, sharing the work, sharing the dream, sharing the hope that what we make together might matter more than what any of us could make alone.
The first great act of building was not a crime against the divine. It was the first true expression of humanity: the confused, hopeful, vulnerable community daring to create something lasting in a world of scattering.
In our cooperation, then, we find not our fall but our calling. Not our sin but our salvation. For to say “Come, let us build” is to begin the work of home—not a tower reaching toward heaven, but a community reaching toward one another.
The sacred path is not upward but inward—into fellowship, into shared purpose, into the endless possibility of what human beings might accomplish when they refuse to remain strangers.
The last man at Babel, climbing down from the ruins, carried with him more than dust and disappointment. He carried the memory of what it felt like to build together. And that memory, fragile as it was, held within it the seed of every community that would ever rise again from the ashes of confusion.
For the impulse to build together, like the impulse to question, is indestructible. Scattered, perhaps. Confused, certainly. But never finally lost.
The tower was abandoned. But the dream of building together endures.
And the question remains: who broke us apart, and who benefits from keeping us scattered? The Last Man knows. His memory threatens not just bad theology, but the very structures of power that require our division to survive.
Perhaps that is why his voice has been so carefully silenced for so long.
A Meditation on the Grand Inquisitor in Light of Metaphor and Meaning
“Man seeks not so much God as the miraculous… For man seeks not so much freedom as someone to bow before.” — The Grand Inquisitor, The Brothers Karamazov
Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)—an image of what emerges when the mind abdicates its responsibility: not freedom, but fantasy; not peace, but nightmare. Where reason sleeps, the trinity of miracle, mystery, and authority awakens to devour.
In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the tale of the Grand Inquisitor remains one of the most unsettling parables in modern literature. Told by Ivan Karamazov to his younger brother Alyosha, the fable imagines Christ returning during the Spanish Inquisition—only to be arrested and silenced by the Church. The Inquisitor, a cardinal of imposing intellect and grave compassion, does not accuse Christ of falsehood, but of cruelty: You gave them freedom, he says, when they needed bread. You gave them mystery, when they needed answers. You gave them love, when they needed order.
There was a time, decades ago, in the earnest conviction of my youth, when I found myself perplexed by the Grand Inquisitor’s logic. I did not admire him, nor excuse his authoritarianism, but I recognized the ache that underpinned his argument. Bread matters. Peace matters. Even then, I sensed the moral gravity of the dilemma he posed: How does one respond to suffering in a world that is often brutal, hungry, and unforgiving?
But I also responded viscerally to something else: the pen of Dostoevsky was not just crafting a fable, but weaponizing a caricature. The Inquisitor was not simply a tragic figure—he was also a polemic against Catholicism, a projection of Dostoevsky’s own religious bigotry. As someone educated within the Catholic tradition, I saw the ugliness beneath the fable—the prejudice tucked behind the parable’s grandeur. The critique was not only of power, but of Rome. The Inquisitor’s mitre bore the unmistakable weight of Jesuit anti-types, cloaked in suspicion and veiled accusation. My disquiet, then, was not only with the Inquisitor’s words, but with the frame within which they were uttered.
And yet, despite its polemical underpinnings, the parable remains one of the most profound meditations on freedom and faith in modern literature. Its imaginative force exceeds its prejudices. The Inquisitor endures not only as a critique, but as a haunting embodiment of the human temptation to trade liberty for comfort.
And that temptation has not faded. The Grand Inquisitor endures because he gives voice to something deeply human, and psychologically real: the desire for security, for certainty, for order amidst chaos. It is a desire that remains active—arguably ascendant—in our own time. One hears the Inquisitor’s voice today in populist strongmen, in the cynical strategist’s smirk, in the media apparatus that soothes while it divides, and in slogans that promise greatness through obedience—Make America Great Again, for instance, the rallying cry of a leader who proclaimed, “I am the only one who can save this nation,” inviting not deliberation, but devotion. The trinity he offers—miracle, mystery, and authority—is the very catechism of modern demagoguery.
This reflection, then, is not a defense of the Inquisitor, but an attempt to understand his appeal, and to reclaim the concepts he distorts. In my recent essay on literalism, metaphor, and balance, I sought to describe the menace of the literalist disposition—a mentality that cannot live with ambiguity, that flees from the poetic, and that finds in surface meaning a shield against the deeper, riskier call of the soul. Here, I apply that lens to the Inquisitor’s three pillars.
Miracle and the Tyranny of the Literal
The Inquisitor offers miracle as literal spectacle: bread conjured from stone, laws suspended, proof offered to silence doubt. He rebukes Christ for refusing to perform such signs in the desert, calling His restraint an act of cruelty rather than spiritual wisdom.
Even as a young reader, I did not mistake the Inquisitor’s miracle for holiness. But I understood that hunger cannot be spiritualized away. In a world where the body is often broken before the spirit can rise, the refusal to give bread seems harsh.
What I have since come to understand is that bread must be shared, not wielded—and that miracles, if they mean anything at all, must point beyond themselves. A miracle that ends conversation is not a miracle but a manipulation.
We have seen modern versions of such miracles: promises made and spectacles staged not to elevate understanding, but to prove power. Consider the border wall—hailed not merely as a policy, but as a singular, salvific act. Its construction, real or exaggerated, was brandished as proof of providence, as the visible sign that the nation could be made great, pure, and safe again. Nor was it the only such “miracle.” Similar wonders were promised: the immediate end of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the revival of a fading industrial economy, the return of jobs long gone, and the rapid reordering of the global market in our favor. These, too, were presented as guarantees—not to be debated, but to be believed. And like the Inquisitor’s miracles, they have largely yet to be seen.
In my essay on literalism and metaphor, I argued that literalism becomes a menace when it displaces metaphor—when it insists on one meaning, one proof, one visible sign. The Inquisitor’s miracles are precisely that: spectacles that end the need for faith. They are miracles without meaning.
Mystery and the Collapse of Metaphor
The Inquisitor’s use of mystery is a case study in spiritual containment. Mystery becomes the guarded unknown, parceled out by clerical authority to pacify rather than provoke. It is not a sacred unknowing, but a fog of confusion meant to keep the people docile.
But true mystery, like true metaphor, does not confuse—it illuminates by depth. It renders the world porous to truth. It refuses finality not because it is evasive, but because it is more honest than premature closure allows.
I did not reject mystery in youth, nor do I now. But I reject the collapse of mystery into secrecy, the transformation of the ineffable into the inaccessible. Metaphor must breathe. Mystery must invite. When weaponized, they become not sacred, but sinister.
In our current dysfunctional era, mystery is often replaced by conspiracy—a counterfeit that plays the same psychological role, offering significance without wisdom, awe without humility. The literalist disposition, fearing true complexity, gravitates toward these shallow depths. Conspiracy is mystery stripped of humility. It retains the trappings of hidden knowledge but closes the mind rather than opening it. It flatters the believer with secrets while shielding them from ambiguity. It is not reverence for the unknown, but a refuge from the supposed unbearable complexity of reality.
We see this vividly in the ecosystem of conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s political movement. Whether it is the belief that a global cabal of elites and pedophiles is secretly running the world (QAnon), or that massive voter fraud orchestrated by shadowy networks altered the outcome of the 2020 election, or that figures like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or George Soros are puppet-masters in an international scheme to undermine American sovereignty—each offers an illusion of secret insight in place of the real work of understanding. These narratives are not pursued for their truthfulness but for their emotional certainty. They replace sacred mystery with a kind of gnosis—fierce, insular, and self-reinforcing.
And like the Inquisitor’s mystery, they are not shared to free the soul, but to bind it—to a worldview, to a figure (whether cult, religious, or political leader, a distinction without merit or significance), to a sense of exceptionalist belonging. The effect is not illumination but containment.
Authority and the Displacement of Balance
The Inquisitor’s authority is final, paternal, and brutal in its compassion. It replaces freedom with peace, conscience with obedience. Its appeal lies not only in its force, but in its promise: You no longer have to choose. I will choose for you. And I will feed you.
As I have aged, I have come to see that this vision is not merely imposed—it is desired. Much of the populace is psychologically predisposed to respond favorably to such authority, whether it comes in vestments or slogans. It offers relief from the burden of discernment. It relieves the anxiety of paradox.
This recognition—that the hunger for certainty is as much internal as external—has shaped my own philosophical trajectory.
And that is where the menace lies. This is not a top-down problem alone, but a convergence of design and desire. The Inquisitor gives the people what they already, in some meaningful manner, want: a world made safe through submission. The leader becomes the sole interpreter of truth, the guarantor of safety, the vessel of meaning. Authority becomes a theology in itself.
We have seen this in our time, where devotion to a figure supplants loyalty to principle. When a leader proclaims “I am the only one who can save this nation,” and is met not with unease but with cheers, authority has ceased to be a mediating presence and has become a metaphysical claim. It no longer balances tension; it obliterates it.
In contrast, the authority I defended in my earlier essay was not coercive, but mediating—a balancing presence, a harmonizing voice. It does not dominate or dismiss. It holds the tension without collapsing it. It does not provide peace through closure, but through co-suffering. It listens. It waits.
The Bread and the Burden
So no, I did not approve of the Grand Inquisitor—not in youth, not now. But I acknowledged, and still acknowledge, the ache beneath his argument. It was not cruelty that made him persuasive, but compassion twisted into control—a desire to ease pain by removing the possibility of choice.
What I now see more clearly is that this fable is not merely a theological drama. It is a psychological map. The Grand Inquisitor is the high priest of the literalist disposition—offering miracle that silences, mystery that obscures, authority that absolves.
That disposition is not confined to Dostoevsky’s century. It is at work now—in every movement that prefers spectacle to sign, dogma to dialogue, power to presence. It thrives in political rhetoric, in media narratives, in spiritual systems that replace grace with control.
Dostoevsky does not argue against it. Christ does not rebut it. He answers with a kiss.
A kiss without domination. A kiss that respects freedom. A kiss that does not resolve the tension, but chooses to love within it.
That is the burden of freedom: not only to bear it ourselves, but to offer it to others, knowing they may prefer their chains.
To offer bread, but not as bribe. To teach, but not as demand. To speak, but not to silence. To live, still and quietly, within the balance that resists the Inquisitor’s call.
To refuse the miracle that enslaves, To offer bread and still preserve the soul, That is the quiet defiance the world most needs.
Northcoast Antiquarian 