During my personal journey out of materialistic atheism, I searched for the perennially-true philosophy and ended up joining the Roman Catholic Church, with a specific fondness for “Byzantine” (Orthodox-style) Catholicism. After five years of spiritual growth, inquiry, and exploration within the world of Roman Catholicism — for which I am grateful — I ended up making the difficult decision to join the Orthodox Catholic Church, and was baptized and chrismated in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). I had not been actively seeking to convert, but I was compelled by my conscience to do so after studying the history of the first millennium church.

I hesitated on writing this essay for a long time, as I knew that it would involve theological discussions that might stir up controversy and anger from those who love Roman Catholicism and the Papacy. But with love, it is not my intention at all to make people angry, but in the spirit of St. Paisios to give people the “good kind of discomfort” by speaking out on matters of a life-saving nature. I felt especially compelled to write about this to finish this essay series and to document with gratitude the treasures that I have found in the Orthodox Catholic Church. I still love my friends who adhere to the Roman Catholic religion, and am thankful for the good parts of my edifying experiences in that faith. I do not hate anyone, and I hope that everyone in the world, most especially my friends and enemies, can come to an understanding of the truth that will save their lives.

With that said, let me rewind a bit to put my faith journey into deeper personal context.

A Snapshot of an Atheist

I was an ex-atheist who had searched through different religious traditions in the hope of finding edification, wisdom, and the path to spiritual growth through Eternal Truth. As someone who had grown up in secular American culture for his entire life, I had gotten tired of the philosophical and moral inconsistency of atheist arguments, as well as the inability to find deep wisdom, beauty, and the path to genuine virtue within modern culture. The modern self-improvement zeitgeist would push for “Being the best version of you,” “Follow your heart,” and “Doing what’s right for you” without really cutting to the core of how a person should live a good life. I also naturally had a dislike for self-justification, and I didn’t appreciate people who refused to accept criticism and thereby missed out on opportunities to fix their own lives.

As someone who considered himself at the time to have a decent sense of taste, the local secular philosophies seemed to be so lacking in beautiful and edifying words. In fiction and aesthetics, I enjoyed the story of a hero’s struggle against himself, the romance of breaking through irony to find sincerity in a genuine life, and the subtle difficulty of piercing the veil of falsehood to find truth hiding underneath. This was the kind of adventure which I truly valued. Even though my criteria for believing in philosophical frameworks consisted of hyper-rational examinations of various propositions and self-consistencies, in my private life, I actually cared deeply about certain types of beautiful stories and poetic forms of expression that might have been viewed as irrational.

Searching through my own personal notes from years ago, I found some quotations from around my college years that represented the type of writing that resonated with me.1

“The soul is an immense thing; it is the whole cosmos, since it is the copy of it. Everything which is in the cosmos is to be found in the soul; equally, everything in the soul is in the cosmos. Because of this fact, he who masters his soul most certainly masters the cosmos.” - Unnamed Sufi, quoted by S. H. Nasr

“When we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.” - Okakura Kazuko

“Indeed, the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.” - Boethius 

I basically required the pure rationality of philosophy to be convinced of any truth statement, especially since we live in a slippery, uncertain modern world where you cannot easily distinguish truth from fiction, and dreams from reality. On the other hand, there was a part of me that really felt moved and inspired by beautiful and concise writing. For that reason, even from the perspective of hobbyist self-interest, religious writings were one of the few things that could actually satisfy my entire personality. I could derive from them beautiful poetry, soul-saving wisdom, and rationally-grounded philosophy.

Intellectual Life in Roman Catholicism

After converting to modern Roman Catholic Christianity, I was able to satisfy most of my philosophical questions, especially since I had my own beliefs on how the spiritual universe worked which were consistent with Roman Catholicism, but not fully contained by it nor excluded from it. On the other hand, within the modern western Roman Catholic corpus, I was mostly unable to find the powerful, mind-blowing, awe-inspiring wisdom which I had loved in my secular days. To actually find deeper spiritual food that really fulfilled my needs, I turned to Orthodox writings like the Philokalia, as well as heterodox sources like Carl Jung for inspiration. In particular, I really loved how these writings actually contained step-by-step, granular, and very deep strategies on how to improve one’s mind and soul at a very specific level, whereas modern Roman Catholics had an overall “flatter” view of the soul and tended to paint with a large brush, often telling believers to simply pray the Rosary more frequently. In those days, I wrote down these quotes from the Orthodox Philokalia and pondered on them:

“Just as someone in the midst of a crowd, holding a mirror, and looking at it, sees not only his own face but also the faces of those looking in the mirror with him, so someone who looks into his own heart sees in it not only his own state, but also the black faces of the demons.” - St. Hesychios, Philokalia

“The devil, being a bodiless intellect, can deceive our souls only by means of fantasies and thoughts… Moses was referring to the act of assent to a provocation in his words: You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. Intellect is invisibly interlocked in battle with intellect, the demonic intellect with our own. So from the depths of our hearts we must at each instant call on Christ to drive the demonic intellect away from us and in His compassion give us the victory. Let your model for stillness of heart be the man who holds a mirror into which he looks. Then you will see both good and evil imprinted in your heart. See that you never have a single thought in your heart, whether senseless or sensible; then you can easily recognize that alien tribe, the firstborn sons of the Egyptians.”

- St. Hesychios, Philokalia

Since I was a convert to the religion of Roman Catholicism, I naturally wanted to take it seriously. And in particular, my main reasons for doing so were because I felt that it was a true and beautiful way to uplift my soul towards communion with God, the source of all Truth and Beauty and the ultimate hope and purpose for all people. Prior to my conversion, I was not really a “party member” of many modern ethical issues, and definitely would never have described myself as socially conservative. When I encountered controversial modern issues, I would try to think through them carefully, end-to-end, and consider what exactly it was that I was looking at and hold it up against the scrutiny of my true beliefs.

What I really yearned for was wisdom of a cosmic scope, as well as life-saving truth that would touch my heart and save my life. But within the world of modern Roman Catholicism, my original intention began to slowly fade away.

Resisting the New Order

After graduating from university, I moved to a new city and suddenly realized that Roman Catholicism across the country was not the same as the elite academic playground where I had been churched. I saw strange things like modern music, communion being served by laypeople in the hand, guitars and drums, and messages in sermons that sounded lukewarm at times or downright heretical, along with a general lack of seriousness in religious life. I was very confused, and as a new convert, I had a sense of being somewhat lost. I had converted to this grand and ancient religion in hopes of finding the primordial truth, and instead I ended up as a spectator in a circus surrounded by people who didn’t necessarily even believe in what was being preached.

When I talked to local people about what I was seeing, and how it disagreed with my sensibilities, I encountered two types of people: the type that would say, “What are you talking about? I think you’re wrong, and also judgmental!”, and the other who would say, “Yes, this is terrible. Let me explain to you how it happened.”

They told me that modern Roman Catholicism, after the Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”), suffered a great decline in catechism, local piety, and liturgical uniformity, due to the propagation of the Novus Ordo (“New Order”) Mass, an inferior liturgy that led to modernism and lukewarmness. There were some people who were totally fine with guitar music and vague sermons during Mass, and these were the ordinary lovers of the Novus Ordo, constituting the majority of American Roman Catholics. Others preferred to have stricter teachings and disciplined liturgy, and these were the Traditionalist Roman Catholics, which I will refer to as Tradcaths for the sake of brevity. The Tradcaths took their religion with actual seriousness, with a non-metaphorical belief in God and the Holy Communion, and also told me theories that had good explanatory power that helped me understand what I was seeing. The Tradcath thesis made sense to me, and it was the only way for me to move forward with my religion in a sincere and self-consistent manner, and I didn’t trust at all the alternative path of going with the flow when my eyes and intuition were continuously rebelling against what I was seeing in the Novus Ordo. I decided to stake my lot with them. I decided to become a Tradcath.

Even though my philosophical journey led me to Christianity, and also forced me to make a choice to avoid the circus show of the Novus Ordo, I would honestly still say that the Tradcaths, even at that time, did not fully feel like my tribe. I was a Chinese American university-educated convert, coming from a background of — for better or worse — modernistic cosmopolitan atheism, seeking something that could satisfy me intellectually and aesthetically with great wisdom, in defiance of but also in acknowledgement of the foggy mirror-world of existential irony. I was not someone like a third generation Irish-American son of a policeman who had been faithfully Roman Catholic for many generations, having never considered other religions, where this church served as his entire world, community, and family, trying to claw back traditional practices against an ugly modern trend that his family witnessed with their own eyes at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Nor did I fully identify with the religious struggles of American Latinos, children of immigrants, who fell away from the ancestral Catholicism of their youth and later experienced a religious re-awakening in Traditional Catholicism, but who didn’t want to explore Orthodoxy because they perceived that their ancestors would be unhappy.2

So I ended up suppressing my true love for certain kinds of philosophical beauty and tried to eat what was fed to me within Traditionalist Roman Catholicism. Outside of church, I had my actual buddies, my friends from my secular life, some who were Novus Ordo Catholics and others who were agnostics, and those were my real friends with whom I’d share drinks during midnight chats about God, existence, and the good life.

A peculiar quality of the Tradcath movement, owing to the fact that it only represents a small portion of Roman Catholics, is the cycle of traditionalist-modernist discourse, which I would summarize as this:

• Pope Francis says something bad, or you see something incorrect happening at church.

• You try to talk about this fact with normal Roman Catholics.

• They dismiss this fact and accuse you of being overly strict or judgmental.

• Feeling confused, you talk about it with your Tradcath buddies.

• They tell you about the strict interpretation of Roman Catholicism and why the normal Roman Catholics are wrong.

• You study the reasoning of so-and-so doctrine and move on with your life.

The life of a Tradcath living in the modern world essentially involved what I would literally characterize as mental gymnastics, being part of a religion and yet not in ideological communion with others, and always being told that you’re wrong, even by the Novus Ordo priests, who were supposed to be ordained by God with priestly authority as spiritual shepherds, and having to find theological refreshment with a small clique of peers.

Instead of deepening my faith and acquiring the virtues, I ended up seeing modern ugliness which I could not ignore, speaking out about it, and then getting into arguments which would inflame my own anger and confusion. In such a state, the soul begins to suffocate. Rather than contemplating the higher ideals of transcendent realities, I was actually getting into heated arguments about nitty-gritty sectarian matters about specific incidents involving communion on the hand and German bishops. My former philosophical forebearer Frithjof Schuon would have been shaking his head in disappointment.

It’s no wonder that I found a tremendous amount of comfort in my secular friends, many of whom actually shared some of my deeper values on a variety of topics. During my years in Roman Catholicism, I probably did not make a single friend from the Novus Ordo gang of modernistic lukewarm Roman Catholics except for a few people from my university — who again, were more like the educated cosmopolitan people that, for better or worse, served as my demographic peers.

Trials and Errors

I found great comfort in the Eastern, Greco-Russian, Byzantine style liturgy of the “Byzantine Catholic” movement, which I explained in my previous essay. In short, this flavor of faith, which resembles Orthodox Christianity, is a minority movement within the American Roman Catholic world, but it particularly appealed to every part of me: my rational mind, my beauty-thirsty eyes, and my soul which needed deep spiritual refreshment.

Being a liturgical minority wasn’t so bad, and in many ways it shielded me from the consequences of the many errors of the modern Vatican, which is not meant to be an insult, but is something the Tradcaths acknowledge on a daily basis.

However, I was forced to confront the raw facts of modern Roman Catholicism during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020.

Churches were closed, liturgy was restricted, church fellowship was cancelled, and my spiritual comrade Will, a fellow Byzantine Catholic who shared my love of authentic spirituality with a hint of foolish irony, moved to a different city. The Pope declared that skipping church on Sundays was no longer a mortal sin in light of the pandemic, and local churches were allowed to implement measures like delivering communion via drive-thru on the hand, as well as livestreamed Masses where the faithful would watch church on TV and say a prayer of spiritual communion to non-physically receive the Eucharists using their minds.

Being more spiritually isolated than ever, and with the Tradcath movement being such a tiny minority in the Roman Catholic world, it was difficult to figure out what was right or wrong when the question of spiritual authority was so slippery and ambiguous in our complex modern world. Although the Pope was nominally the head of the Roman Catholic Church, in practice, the Tradcaths didn’t obey his spiritual leadership.

Much of the world, including my spiritual life, moved onto the internet, where I kept up to date on church matters and did video calls and texts with my friends. On the internet, I started to get into more contact with Orthodox Christian people, whom I essentially had never spoken with prior to this. I also got more involved with Tradcath polemical arguments, about whether the Pope was right or wrong, and whether Roman Catholicism was correct in light of Orthodox Christianity.

The pandemic years were particularly noteworthy for having a huge increase in anti-China sentiment, which was especially visible on the internet, where my Tradcath “brothers” would write nasty words like wishing that nuclear weapons would be dropped on China. This was hard for me to ignore, since I am Chinese American and am not ashamed of the country of my ancestors, nor would I ever wish for millions of them to perish violently in unjust wars. In general, I had never once met a Tradcath who shared my beliefs on the geopolitics of East Asia, as they would espouse ideas like, “It is a good thing for us to spread American democracy abroad, even if we have to use force.” But despite my disagreements, I always tried to remain peaceful and tolerant, even though one of my friends would actively try to provoke me by sending Fox News neocon articles about China every other week. But I write about these sad and unfortunate matters now in case other East Asian Christians who are reading this essay also struggle with this question in modern times.

Double Mindedness

As I continued to read more writings from Orthodox Christian converts on the internet, I was moved by some of their words, especially their gentle and calm language, the tendency to admit their own faults, and straightforward approach to repentance without overcomplicated theology. But I also became more familiar with Tradcaths who were opposed to Orthodox Christianity and dead set against it. Since I was myself a Byzantine Catholic, ostensibly an “Orthodox Christian in communion with Rome,”3 I forced myself to remain under the Papacy because of my prior convictions, and also because I believed it to be the “best of both worlds” scenario when it came to eternal salvation: to gain the double gifts of Papal keys to Heaven while maintaining Orthodox style traditions.

Over time, as the lockdowns continued, I started attending a pandemic-compliant Novus Ordo Church in order to receive the sacraments. I was brought back face-to-face with modernistic worship that greatly disgusted my instincts. Meanwhile, I admired Orthodox Christianity from a distance and also started to realize some of my frustrations with the medieval Frankish sentimentalism that characterized many spiritual practices and devotions in Western Europe. With medieval western Christianity, I frequently encountered this strange quality of being very fanciful and caught up in ones own emotions, which didn’t feel at all to me like the sober, concise, awe-inspiring wisdom that I had loved in the Desert Fathers. The medieval westerners advocated practices like proactively imagining visual images in one’s mind during prayers in order to ecstatically embody the pains and joys of the saints, which directly contradicted the words of the Philokalia, which I was reading with the approval of my Byzantine Catholic parish priest.

Because I was someone who cared deeply about good writing, it seemed to me that anyone with discernment could plainly see that the Desert Fathers and Philokalia were written by “different authors” with a “different style” than the medieval western mystics and the Fatima Marian apparitions. It really bothered me when Roman Catholics would try to insist that all of these were really part of the exact same tradition, as if someone were to believe that a fan-fiction was actually the same thing as an original book. It was like going jewelry-shopping with a person who correctly recognized the value of real gold and yet was also frequently tricked by fool’s gold.

At this point, converting to Orthodox Christianity would certainly have been my personal preference in terms of liturgical practice and church teaching. Even as a Roman Catholic, I had noticed that the Orthodox priests always wrote the best essays that clearly explained moral positions on modern questions like marriage, while Novus Ordo Roman Catholics often gave very ambiguous and wishy-washy responses. Moreover, I couldn’t help but notice that while western hymns tended to focus on how God is very Infinite and Glorious and Majestic, Orthodox hymns tended to focus on poetically expressing the Gospels in the spirit of deep repentance and paschal joy. I truly loved the heartfelt prayers of Orthodoxy, which talked about the pain of a world covered in death and the need for tearful repentance before participating in the Resurrection of Christ, which cured the curse of fallen Adam.

Adam sat before the gates of Eden, bewailing his nakedness and crying out:

Woe to me! I have listened to wicked deceit; I have lost my glory, and now am driven away! Woe to me! My open-mindedness has left me naked and confused!

No longer will I enjoy your delights, Paradise; No longer can I see my Lord, My God and Creator. He formed me from dust, and now to the dust I return!

Adam ate the forbidden fruit and was driven from Paradise. He sat outside, weeping bitterly:

Woe to me! What will become of me, a worthless man? I disobeyed one command of my master, and lost every good thing!

Holy Paradise, planted for me by God and closed by the weakness of Eve, grant that I may once again gaze on the flowers of your gardens!

Orthodox Hymn of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve

Sun of justice, now you have set beneath the earth, my Saviour, Therefore she, the Moon that gave birth to you, is eclipsed with grief, at seeing you no more.

Hades trembled then, when he saw you, the Life-giving Saviour, in your might despoiling him of his wealth, raising up the dead he held from every age.

Once the night has passed then again, O Word, the bright Sun blazes; radiant you blaze forth, when after death, as though from a bridal chamber, you arise.

How Earth quaked with fear, O Creator, as into her bosom, shaking, she received you, my Saving Lord, by her fearful shaking she awoke the dead.

Orthodox Lamentations of Holy Friday

To make a long story short, it eventually became my opinion that Orthodox Christianity was materially, aesthetically, and spiritually a superior religion, but I remained Roman Catholic due to very convincing and somewhat neurosis-inducing arguments from the Tradcaths. They argued that one can never be assured of one’s salvation outside of the Papacy, that Christ only gave the keys to Peter alone, and that the fact of the Roman Catholic Church suffering tremendous persecution is in a way proof of its veracity, as the devil is only interested in attacking the truth and has no time to attack false religions, who were already in his grasp. There was also a particularly offensive argument that a Roman Catholic Priest posted online, which is “The Roman Catholic Church is your mother, and she is dying, how can you abandon her when she is being attacked from outside?”4

Despite my personal preferences, I never gave up on Roman Catholicism at this time. I had a firm philosophical principle of never compromising my core values for the sake of personal convenience. Even when I was an atheist, I had disliked “rational” people who created sophisticated theories to normalize their own vices. Or, to put it in a more self-deprecating way, I had greater esteem for hypocrites who at least had the self-awareness to know that what they were doing was wrong. And I myself had converted to Christianity even though it made my life harder, not easier, and I had done so during a period of my life filled with peace and rationality, not tearful emotions or wonderful miracles.5 Suffering did not cause me to leave atheism, and likewise it would not cause me to leave Roman Catholicism.

The Frankish Church

As a firm and now actively anti-Orthodox Roman Catholic, I did not seek out to convert, nor did I have any curiosity for anti-Roman Catholic polemical arguments. If anything, I closed my eyes and ears to everything about these topics. And so time passed… And one day, I providentially stumbled upon an article about the Byzantine Papacy, which had been featured as an “On this day” article in Wikipedia.

The Byzantine Papacy was a period of Byzantine domination of the Roman Papacy from 537 to 752, when popes required the approval of the Byzantine Emperor for their episcopal consecration, and many popes were chosen from the apocrisiarii (liaisons from the pope to the emperor) or the inhabitants of Byzantine-ruled Greece, Syria, or Sicily. Justinian I reconquered the Italian peninsula in the Gothic War (535–554) and appointed the next three popes, a practice that would be continued by his successors and later be delegated to the Exarchate of Ravenna.

The topic of the article itself provoked my curiosity, and I clicked on it and read through everything. I then clicked on its successor article, the Frankish Papacy, and read the contents of that.

In the history of the Papacy, the Frankish Papacy (756–857) was a period marked by a shifting of influence from the Byzantine Empire (i.e. the Byzantine Papacy) to that of the kings of the Franks. Pepin the Short (ruled 751–768), Charlemagne (r. 768–814) (co-ruler with his brother Carloman I until 771), and Louis the Pious (r. 814–840) had considerable influence in the selection and administration of popes.

When I finished these two articles, I was completely shocked and had to call into question my worldview when it came to Roman Catholicism. I realized then that within the catechism that was given to me, the Medieval Tridentine depiction of an Eternal Papacy was portrayed as something that had always existed and was without question, and the messy details of the Pope’s political domination by outside forces during the first millennium had never been mentioned to me at all. I realized I needed to come up with a different mental model in order to explain these new facts.6

As an ex-atheist, ex-perennialist, I wouldn’t have staked my life on the finer details of theological questions, because I understood that different rational systems follow as a result of different axiomatic, i.e. faith-based, presumptions. It was quite conceivable to me that different religions might be internally consistent within themselves, and yet they make claims in contradiction with one another. Wading through that type of theology was not something that I viewed as a rationally terminable process, unless of course I were to spot an inconsistency, which always disproves any system no matter what.

However, I did and absolutely staked my life on questions of historical facts, and was willing to die on the hill of history. I had invested a tremendous amount of time in my university life and personal intellectual interests to deeply study specific historical subjects, like pre-modern Europe, medieval Islam, contemporary China, and the origins of western ideas. These were topics through which I developed a sense of history and gained an ability to “detect” sensible historical claims versus ones that seemed propagandistic and incorrect.7 On certain subjects regarding history, I was willing to contradict authorities, teachers, and newspaper headlines because of my deep convictions on what was the true reality in a foreign time and place, despite claims that modern people made to the contrary.

Because of these strong feelings I had for history, and my innate disgust for untruthful propaganda, I dived deeper into questions regarding the East-West Schism, and I also tested claims that I read online with my own mental model of how the pre-modern world operated.

With that said, better and more talented people than me have summarized the history of the Papacy, as well as the First Millennium Roman Orthodox Catholic Church. An exhaustive discussion of the finer details of this historical topic is out of the scope of this essay, and I can only share my personal thoughts and opinions in an abbreviated manner. Besides, I have noticed that for matters like these, many people who have closed their eyes against the facts, in an absence of intellectual honesty which hurts themselves and others, have already decided beforehand what they wish to believe.

It seemed to me that Papal supremacy could not be true when the Pope’s very election, personal destiny, and sometimes life itself was controlled by secular authorities — the Roman Emperor in some cases, and the Frankish barbarians in others. If someone wanted to control the entire Christian Church, they would simply need to manipulate the Pope in order to gain ownership of the whole religion, and we know that the Pope isn’t morally perfect because there was so much corruption in the Middle Ages which is even acknowledged among Roman Catholics themselves. When you imagine a gathering of Cardinal Bishops uniting in a conclave to elect a new Pope, you could conceivably imagine that the Holy Spirit can intervene, but when an Emperor holds a sword to the Pope’s neck and asks him to create a false teaching, how could he refuse?8

Tradcaths with the unfortunate habit of talking too much about China complain vigorously that the Vatican can only appoint bishops in China with the approval of the Beijing government. To them, they would prefer that the Vatican had complete freedom and autonomy in every country across the world. And yet, I did not ever hear the Tradcaths protest the fact that not only did the governing Frankish kings directly appoint bishops in Europe, but they also controlled the election of the Pope himself.

At this point, it was no longer conceivable to me that the contemporary vision of Papal infallibility was something held by the right-believing faithful of the ancient and pre-modern Christian church. Although I had entered the Roman Catholic Church with the desire to conform my mind to life-giving teachings that would lead to salvation, it now seemed that I was potentially putting my soul and mind in jeopardy by obeying the questionable religion of Frankish warriors who cared more about their own political interests than the exact theology of the Christian faith.

Moreover, I was not neutral on the question of Franks versus Romans but had my own strongly-held opinions. Even during my secular historical adventures as a faithful Roman Catholic, I had looked fondly on the Roman Empire and viewed the so-called “Byzantine Empire” as being the uninterrupted continuation of the Roman Empire in the East.9 I never acknowledged the “Holy Roman Empire” of the Germans as being actually real or living up to its name, and as a Chinese person who had some sense of the 5000 year history of China, I had an innate distrust of newcomer barbarian tribes who spilled the blood of innocent people during their invasions of civilized societies.

After discussing my questions with friends, church members, and internet people, I became more convinced of my beliefs. Many people simply didn’t care about the question (9th century history is pretty esoteric for normal Roman Catholics who didn’t necessarily even care about the history of Vatican II), or they had a blank space in their historical knowledge and weren’t able to properly answer, or (more common for internet people) they started getting angry and insulting me, accusing me of being secretly Orthodox or overly influenced by Fr. John Romanides (I had never heard of the man at all prior to that, even though he seemed to be mostly correct about the question of the Franks).

If it is true that the Western church was compromised by Frankish domination and subversion, then not only were the Eastern Christians rightly called Orthodox, but they were also Catholic and Roman as well, which is still preserved today in the names of the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. And if this were the case, then the church of the post-schism West would just be the state church of the Frankish tribes, the very same criticism that Roman Catholics level against the Anglicans.

Out of Egypt

Although I had avoided attending Orthodox liturgies due to my dogmatic adherence to Roman Catholicism, it became proper and appropriate for me to answer these questions plaguing my conscience, so I decided to visit an Orthodox Church that was nearby. I chose to visit a parish of the ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, inspired by a semi-famous online writer who wrote that this church was by far the most traditional — preserving the faith in its entirety, and not bowing down to modernism — among all the communities he had visited.

Due to the unique circumstances of the 2020s lockdown, I was able to visit on Sunday because the Roman Catholic Sunday obligation had been removed. Moreover, the church had remained open, with liturgies available even for new inquirers like me to attend. I was invited with warmth and kindness to coffee hour, where I talked to the parish Father and explained to him my entire journey, the journey which you have been reading thus far.

I asked Father about issues specific to Roman Catholic history, on topics like Papal supremacy, the keys of St. Peter, whether it is possible to organize a church without a Pope, the meaning of a bishop, the Filioque, and the East-West Schism. I am grateful that he sat with me for hours and hours over repeated coffee discussions, answering all of my many questions, and providing a positive testimony (i.e., capable of standing on its own, and not simply a negative reaction against another) from the Orthodox Christian worldview.

Something that profoundly surprised me when speaking with Father was that, even though I had spent quite some time learning about the Orthodox Church from an outside perspective, almost none of the material that I had seen on the internet really penetrated into the core of the Orthodox life. As a “Byzantine” Catholic, all of my research had been seen through the lenses of Roman Catholicism, including my presumptions on ecclesiology, church history, and prayer life. When Tradcaths like myself argued against Orthodox Christianity, they were usually protesting against strawmen that they had conjured up in their own minds, not really cutting deeply into the Orthodox faith, nor did they really encounter what the Orthodox Christians said about themselves and their own church.10 Listening to Father explain the history of the church, while reading Orthodox materials written by Orthodox Christians themselves, filled in a huge number of gaps that has been left in my Roman Catholic catechism.

At the recommendation of a man who gave me free books and later became my godfather, I dived into the book Two Paths by Michael Whelton, who is himself a former Roman Catholic who converted to Orthodox Christianity, and I greatly valued his book because it contained raw source quotes that plainly explained the history of papal developments.11

I discussed what I learned in the Orthodox Church with other western Christians, and in short, the polemical conversations were not productive. I was quite distracted for some time by disingenuous circles of goalpost-moving and topic-shifting (“Well what about when the Orthodox did this?”) and gatekeeping (“Oh, you need to finish this book before you can understand that one”) until finally being inspired by Father Spyridon Bailey. The message I took away was that, as Christians, we are actually obliged to search for the truth and to make a commitment with our lives, and if we are under the teaching of a church that has changed the truth in some way, what right do we have to declare that God will be satisfied with that? It isn’t about listening to arguments or pleasing others, but rather the eternal destination of your own soul.

Eventually, I broke the cycle of unproductive discourse by firmly committing to becoming a catechumen, and I was later baptized and chrismated in the Orthodox Church in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so I began life in my new church and new faith community, the one and the same religion of the ancient Apostles, foretold by Moses himself, for the salvation of Adam and Eve, for the sake of all people, including those struggling in the United States and China and the whole world. I was blessed so much and endlessly grateful to the people I met in the Russian Church, most especially my Father Confessor who baptized me and is like a true Father to me. I am thankful that Father not only talked to me about faith matters and theology but, during the course of my journey, gave me heartfelt spiritual mentorship and guidance during at least four major trials that I had been suffering from during my own personal life.

Coming Home

Because I converted for historical reasons, and not for personal gain, I could not have imagined how many overwhelming good things I encountered as a result of joining the Orthodox Church. Although I try not to write too many things which can be construed as negative, there are some facts which I must document. I mention these things with sincere intentions to explain some of the key differences I noticed in the spiritual fruits of Orthodox Christian people compared to others. I thought about remaining silent, but I decided that it is not right for me to hold back the conclusions of my many years of personal research just to avoid offending certain people who are unwilling to self-reflect on the problems within their own churches, which not only endangers the salvation of their own souls but also hinders many others whom they’ve ensnared in their nets. By writing these experiences, I hope to save people some time so that they don’t spend years of uncertainty trapped in sectarian confusion, as I was.

In Roman Catholicism, so much of my cognitive energy was wasted and consumed with frustration over daily news related to Pope Francis and modernistic bishops. The normal Mass for the majority of Roman Catholics would inevitably be filled with something “wrong,” like lay women handing out the Eucharist on the hand, and the cycle of demoralization was all-consuming. In Orthodox Christianity, everything is normal. Orthodox church services are always excellent, and if they lack anything, it is due to being short of money and manpower, not modernistic contempt towards things good and beautiful. Instead of me testing the Roman Catholic Mass to see if it’s done correctly, the Orthodox Divine Liturgy tests me to the core, with long services, prostrations, fasting, and deep prayers of repentance that require my heart and attention. Instead of having to actively seek out church friends and discerning whether they are modernistic or traditional, I now have people knocking on my door at coffee hour, teaching me about holy traditions and opening my mind to new heights of piety. In the Novus Ordo, I was usually the smartest man in the room. In Orthodox Christianity, I am the stupidest man, and I am constantly humbled and edified by the wisdom of people around me.

In the Orthodox Church, many simple aspects of “daily life” were shocking to me as a former Roman Catholic. Parishioners visited monasteries frequently and mentioned this habit casually in common conversations. People, even laity when a priest was absent, crossed their food and blessed it before eating. They drank holy water and anointed themselves with holy oil at home. They seriously abstained from meat not just on Fridays, but Wednesdays as well. Sunday services were long, with a similarly long Vigil on Saturday evening. People studied the Lives of the Saints, sometimes literally every day, and they would tell you at length about their favorite spiritual elders with great joy and happiness, even making pilgrimages to venerate relics, and discussing modern wonderworkers who reposed even in our own generation. Some even had stories of miracles, told to me in a pious and sober manner, not eager to overshare a sensational story, but humbly and quietly expressing their gratitude for God’s work in their own lives.

Some might think what I said applies only to crazy convert zealots, but many of these delightful people I am talking about were actually cradle Orthodox. I was shocked when on a few occasions, boomer aunties and grandmas came up to me and started dropping some serious redpills, or when a Russian lady living in Tokyo spoke with me in Japanese (she didn’t speak English) about her love for the American priest, Father Seraphim Rose.12 In Orthodoxy, I saw with my own eyes that the academic converts and the pious babushkas possessed the same mind and the same religion, which cannot be said for many other religions.

In Roman Catholicism, there seemed to be a great divide between people who were gentle and mild, yet very liberal when it came to faith matters, and others who were strict and conservative on the faith, and yet lacking in love and affected by anger. For that reason, I was greatly surprised when I saw how the most “traditionalist” and “zealous” Orthodox Christian people that I met were also filled with love and kindness. They spoke carefully and deliberately, watching their words and trying to genuinely measure themselves up to the standards of the Gospels. Rather than saying things like “That guy is a complete idiot and should be killed,” they would say “He was sadly mistaken when it came to that matter and we hope that he corrects his life.” Compared to secular people, Orthodox Christians genuinely seemed to have intellectual integrity and self-criticism, apologizing when they made mistakes and also humbling themselves when they speak to others.

I also found out that many people in the Orthodox Church had similar historical and geopolitical positions as me, which shocked me because many of my positions were ones that I had acquired with painstaking effort through independent learning, and which had often put me at odds with secular people and ordinary Roman Catholics. When it came to global affairs, I saw that American Orthodox Christians, far from being of one mind with the political parties of this era, possessed fairly nuanced views and were much more willing to admit the flaws of their own country, and they disavowed themselves from government actions which they viewed as immoral.13 In contrast, many Tradcaths seemed to mostly follow the party line of the American Republicans and Fox News and to take neoconservative headlines at face value. Rather than treating modern China as an evil boogeyman, Orthodox Christians were more sympathetic to the country and the particular struggles it faces — despite me almost never bringing up the topic. I truly did feel that the average Orthodox Christian believer is part of my “tribe,” and I was blessed to meet so many dear new friends through attending the divine services and coffee hours, including during my travels in East Asia.

Some Tradcaths will contradict what I have said by saying I didn’t experience “True Catholicism,” and that I need to do even more research before coming to a conclusion. Maybe I need to drive 420 miles away to see a once-per-month Special Latin Supreme Traditional Mass in order to discover true Catholicism. To this, I would respond that I was a faithful member of the Roman Catholic church for years, and I participated in its normal life in a western country, the United States. If True Catholicism is so hard to find, then perhaps the Supreme Papacy has failed. Meanwhile, I encountered the greater fruit of Orthodoxy with far less effort and with far less time spent searching. Orthodox Christianity, despite being smaller in population, newer to the American lands, and significantly weaker in financial status,14 with many priests struggling by having secular jobs outside of church, has vastly surpassed Roman Catholicism — including the SSPX15 and FSSP — in planting traditional churches across every state of the USA.

The End and The Beginning

After my long spiritual search, I am grateful to be part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic faith of Orthodox Christianity, a source of wisdom and joy in my life that helped me to understand the meaning of a good life, the path towards self-mastery, and the cure for the problems of evil and death. It has been a journey of many ups and downs, and although I am very far away from many of the virtues that I seek to acquire, I hope that my experiences can be useful and valuable for others walking along the same path. Thank you!

If you liked, or really hated, this essay, please feel free to check out Part 1 (“Atheism”), Part 2 (“Tradition”), and Part 3 (“Christianity”).

Follow along with the discussion on Instagram, X/Twitter, and Reddit!

Notes on This Blog

Going forward, I will continue to write about topics related to Orthodoxy, Christian lifestyle, the modern world, atheism and its limitations, and East Asia. After this essay, which I deliberated on for quite some time, I expect to be able to write shorter articles more frequently. Please feel free to contact me (e.g., by commenting on this article or reaching out on Instagram or X/Twitter) if you have anything in particular you want for me to write about.

Many thanks to A. and N. for offering feedback on an earlier version of this essay.

Roughly a year ago, the number of Chinese Orthodox Christians that I knew were fewer than the fingers on my hand.

I still remember making great effort to attend a Lenten Retreat, in part because there was a legendary Chinese "Orthobro" in the area about whom people had spoken highly for his courage and sense of humor. That person was the very first Chinese Orthodox Christian I'd ever met, and we became great friends lasting even to this day.

One of the main reasons I made this account was so that I could turn my lonely journey into something unique and valuable for others. A hidden story about China, atheism, the diaspora, and Orthodox Christianity transformed into a platform, and it helped me tremendously with personal learning and meeting like-minded friends.

Through travel, divine services, and of course the power of the internet, my contact book is filled with the names of so many Chinese Christian people, as well as non-Chinese friends who care deeply about the topic of Orthodoxy in Asia.

It was mind-blowing to visit Japan and see a priest who was a 5th generation Orthodox Christian from the spiritual lineage of St. Nicholas of Japan, helping to lead services in Literary Japanese. As a convert myself who had grown up as an atheist, it was unbelievable. Later on, in Osaka, I not only met another Chinese Orthodox believer, but I also bumped into TWO people from faraway America and Russia who had been spiritual children of the two parishes I attended. What a small world.

It was deeply enlightening to venerate the relics of St. John of Shanghai, visit his old office, and meet with believers who had inherited his legacy in San Francisco. After that, I visited Shanghai itself and saw the modern parish community that continues their faith life there. It was a culture shock to speak in Chinese about deep matters of the Faith when I had been catechized into Orthodoxy in English! But somehow, everyone understood each other, and I could see that Orthodox locals in the Mainland cared about the exact same topics — faith, the lives of the saints, modern society — as everyone else.1

I am very thankful to the parishes in Hong Kong for their hard work in maintaining and persevering in Orthodox missionary work, and for opening their doors wide for Christians — converts, inquirers, cradles, Cantonese-speakers, the Mainland Chinese, and expats — to come together in faith.

What a blessing! Thank God, and cheers to you, the reader. I hope your 2025 will be full of learning and fellowship. #OrthoAsia

See the discussion on Twitter and Reddit.

New videos of the church in Hong Kong are available on now. Check it out!

This article is part of a series. The next essay is now available: The 10,000 Mile Journey to Orthodoxy!

The Search for Ancient Faith

After departing from the foolishness of modern atheism, I became convinced that people need to adhere to transcendent principles and multi-generational traditions to be saved. So I joined the Roman Catholic church, hoping to find the original, primordial faith that binds together the entire universe.

This part of my journey took place on the college campus, where I pursued my career-driven undergraduate studies but also indulged in history and philosophy as a side hobby. Looking back, it’s easy for me to say that being a religious convert at a university is, in some sense, pretty awesome. The intellectual caliber of college students can be quite high, and my school had a Roman Catholic club that met frequently for catechesis, social events, and church services. We attended Bible studies together, shared deep questions and faith stories with each other, and got meals semi-regularly. Moreover, the prevailing ideology within our school was mostly modern and atheistic, so we had a sense of camaraderie among our small group of religious “zealots” (which I say jokingly; at the time, it felt like anyone who was even a little skeptical of mainstream thinking was lumped in together with the hardcore right-wingers). As an ex-atheist in these religious clubs, I got to talk about my spiritual journey all the time with some of the brightest minds of the nation, who were all curious and greatly desirous to hear my story. Outside of that, I did not speak about faith with my other secular friends, since I was worried about being stigmatized as a “religious idiot.”

Although I am quite grateful for the friendships I made and the spiritual refuge I found within the Roman Catholic club, I see now that my experience was kind of like being a “party member” within the “Christian Conservative faction.” During my catechesis (RCIA), we learned about history and faith topics, but I struggled to actually figure out how to pray, what the Christian mindset is supposed to look like, and how to cultivate interior spirituality. My conversations with the Roman Catholic comrades tended to be discursive, related to history, culture wars, politics, or papal announcements, which was very fun and enjoyable but did not teach me much about how to practically cultivate the virtues. Whenever the topic of virtue and vice did come up, I was often told “just pray” or “just say the Rosary” in response to every spiritual need that I had, without any sort of deep conversation on the root causes of sin and how to heal the passions of the soul.

During this period of my life, I often felt like a fundamentally ironic and absurd modern person wearing the shell of a religion, participating in discursive belief statements that made me a comrade of the “Christian Conservative party” but which did not transform my soul internally. I had a strong philosophical conception of God, but it was difficult for me to really bring it into my heart. Although I had sincere belief in moral principles, the question of genuine miracles and the superstitious folk piety of older people continued to elude my comprehension, and I explained them away within the perennialist framework as being explosions of the divine within the mundane world happening over grand scales of time. For people who have been raised religious from birth, it might be hard to imagine what it’s like to be an ex-atheist trying to acquire faith. I think it is similar to watching TV and feeling like a spectator, or being an actor in a performance going through the motions. This poem reflected some of my feelings at the time:

We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald

Within this half-hearted, semi-ironic interior life, I tried to become reasonably serious about Roman Catholicism, participating in the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist. I was convinced, at a metaphysical level, that such things were given to us by God to cleanse our souls and to give us the true life through communion with the Body and Blood of Christ. But I was not so enamored with Roman Catholicism as to become religiously exclusive. I continued my internal belief in “perennialism” (the idea that all orthodox religions are valid) with great fervor, deriving spiritual refreshment from the beautiful and mystical teachings I encountered. I continued to read the non-Christian Frithjof Schuon in my spare time, admired Buddhism and Sufism from a distance, and later on relied on Carl Jung and the Orthodox Philokalia to help with spiritual self-improvement. I could not fully shake off perennialism, because I experientially encountered that Roman Catholicism alone could not satisfy my spiritual needs. In particular, I was sometimes frustrated by the liturgical prayers and hymns of modern Roman Catholicism, which usually involved praising God for being a wonderful Eternal King, without touching on personal repentance or the more philosophical, cosmic-scale spiritual themes that I encountered in other religions.

Spiritual Drought

After graduating from college, I got a job and moved to a new city, and the situation became quite different. I no longer had the tight-knit, college campus religious community, and it seemed that ordinary people in normal Roman Catholic parishes do not easily mingle or meet with new friends. I also realized, only in hindsight, that my university Mass was actually a fairly high form of the Roman Catholic liturgy, with organ music and pious choir singing. In contrast, the new churches I encountered would innovate with guitars, drums, “performance” spectacles, layperson ministers, clapping in church, and semi-modernistic sermons.

In the midst of a lonely spiritual drought, my faith level started to decline. I kept in touch with my dearest and beloved Roman Catholic friends with messaging apps and travel meetups, but in my ordinary life, I slowly began to be pulled back into the sphere of my local friends and coworkers, who were all ambitious transplants to the new city. The modernistic and liberal tendencies of these kind and well-intentioned people is not to be underestimated, and I tried (and often failed) to keep my moral positions and political opinions to myself.

This all changed one day, during an indulgent drinking party at a friend’s house, when I bumped into a guy named Will who was suspiciously quiet about his opinions on almost everything. We started talking about Japanese anime, and as we discussed different themes within the story … I began to feel, more and more, that this guy must be a secret Conservative Party member! I revealed my power level to him, and he did the same, and we quickly bonded over our shared beliefs and started talking about many topics in great detail. To my surprise, a small crowd of people began to form, listening to our conversation and disagreeing with our positions, and they even began discussing their own personal attachment to certain passions and arguing with us! Fired up with the zeal of a rookie, and encouraged by a sense of brotherhood, my new friend and I teamed up together and began to “preach” to our fellow party-goers about these topics for quite some time…

My new friend Will became like a spiritual brother to me, and was himself a lapsed Roman Catholic, and so together we decided to break out of our spiritual idleness and actively search for new churches. Browsing casually on Google Maps, I saw that one of the recommendations was a “Byzantine Greek Catholic Church.” My curiosity for ridiculous and obscure esoterica was immediately triggered.

“GREEK Catholicism? What in the world even is that? We’ve got to go!”

Coming to church, I cautiously attended the “Byzantine” Liturgy for the first time and was completely blown away. We heard beautiful music that surpassed anything we’d ever heard in the other nearby churches, but could not see where the choir loft was located. We even wondered if it was just a recording…

The walls were covered with Eastern-style icons that greatly appealed to me with their symmetry, symbolism, and mystical appearance. I was particularly drawn to what was explained to me as “Our Lady of the Sign,” the image of the Virgin Mary with Christ emerging out of her as a child surrounded by stars. The image seemed to be of grand cosmic scope, the exact sort of idea that I had been searching for in my spiritual journey. The icons within the church clearly represented subtle spiritual realities and were meant to uplift the soul, unlike the standard Roman Catholic artwork, which depicted earthly scenes in humanistic, Renaissance-style paintings.

During the consecration of the Eucharist, the doors to the altar were closed, and a curtain was drawn. No one could see how the priest was preparing the Holy Gifts. My friend and I both turned to each other with our jaws dropping in amazement. We had never seen that before. Of course you should close the door to the altar, and not let ordinary people see the consecration, because this was a great sacramental mystery! Whereas ordinary modern churches seemed to be letting anyone do whatever they want in the altar, the Byzantine church was powerfully affirming the sacredness of this holy space by closing it off.

The priest emerged from the doors, carrying the magnificent chalice, and he proclaimed a glorious prayer:

I believe, O Lord, and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who camest into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first. I believe also that this is truly Thine own most pure Body, and that this is truly Thine own precious Blood. Therefore, I pray Thee: have mercy upon me and forgive my transgressions, both voluntary and involuntary, of word and of deed, committed in knowledge or in ignorance. And make me worthy to partake without condemnation of Thy most pure Mysteries, for the remission of my sins, and unto life everlasting. Amen.

Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither like Judas will I give Thee a kiss; but like the thief will I confess Thee: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy kingdom.

May the communion of Thy holy Mysteries be neither to my judgment, nor to my condemnation, O Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.

For what felt like the millionth time, I was astounded again. This single prayer contained the entire truth and explanation of the Holy Eucharist, which (in the context of a valid church) is indeed the Body and Blood of Christ. Listening to this powerful prayer, I felt that modern Protestantism was blown to bits and never even stood a fair chance. Living in a lukewarm cultural zeitgeist where most Christians and even many baptized Roman Catholics did not believe in the literal presence of Christ within the Eucharist, I was shocked to hear this faith proclaimed so openly, and in such a simple and straightforward manner, during the routine operation of the liturgy.

During the service, I loved hearing the Bible, which was enclosed in a magnificent silver cover, chanted according to an intoned melody. Whereas modern Roman Catholics and Protestants walk up to a podium, flipping through pages of paper, voice-acting their own dramatic interpretations of the text, the Byzantines used these flat musical tones to wipe away the individuality of the reader, allowing the faithful to concentrate on the words themselves.

Listening to the hymns and prayers of the Byzantine Catholic service, I heard words of deep repentance, interior spirituality, and even metaphysical truths which I had never heard before in any Christian liturgy in my entire life. Instead of praising “Christ, the King and Great God” as in the modern churches, I heard for the first time “Christ, the True Life and Source of Existence.” The music, in just two to three short sentences, concisely explained the theology that would require multiple paragraphs from less-talented hands. One of my all-time favorites was “Only Begotten Son”:

Only Begotten Son and Immortal Word of God,

Who for our salvation didst will to be incarnate of the holy Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary,

Who without change didst become man and wast crucified, O Christ our God,

Trampling down death by death, Who art one of the Holy Trinity,

Glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit, save us.

- Hymn of Justinian

As Far as the East is from the West

After that one Sunday, I was completely finished with modern (“Novus Ordo”) Roman Catholicism. After having been so thoroughly nourished by this beautiful and grand liturgy, I could not in good conscience go back to regular attendance to the barren, anti-traditional, and also genuinely boring services that constituted 95% of Roman Catholic Masses in America. I truly felt that this was the greater, higher truth of the Roman Catholic religion. It was like finding real gold for the first time after a lifetime of being tricked by pyrite.

Forcing myself out of bed to listen to guitar music at the modern Mass and receive communion from a T-shirt-wearing laywoman had become a homework assignment that I usually dreaded, but now, I found myself thoroughly looking forward to the liturgy every Sunday. I became a serious parishioner of this Byzantine Catholic church. The Byzantine Catholics say that they are “Orthodox Christians in communion with Rome,” and I believed them and basically started viewing their religion as Orthodoxy. I performed cursory research on Orthodox teachings, practices, and online communities. Whenever I wanted an actual, serious answer for any controversial or difficult questions, I always added “Orthodox” to my online search queries and knew that I could trust the answer that was provided. Byzantine Catholic believers repeatedly emphasized to me that the Eastern Orthodox Church is a valid church with real sacraments and priests, and that the two churches are one religion but differ in the question of the Pope.

At the Byzantine Catholic church, I was introduced to the concept of “coffee hour,” which is a post-liturgical meal shared with fellow believers. During these meetings, I was able to talk to many intelligent and extremely interesting new friends. They were very zealous and redpilled me on what they believed to be the dark secrets of the modern Vatican, explaining to me the errors of Vatican II which led to the degradation of the modern Roman Catholic Mass, as well as the mistakes of Pope Francis who, despite being the Pope, has nothing to do with our daily faith lives and should be continually ignored. One of them had been a seminarian in Europe and told me about the improper conduct and illicit activities that had become a frequent occurrence among the students. It was here that I basically learned about the “Traditionalist Catholic” (tradcath) movement, which sought to roll back the cultural damage from Vatican II and bring back the Roman Catholic Church (and American society) to how it was in the 1950s. Although the church was supposed to be “Orthodox Christianity, in communion with Rome,” in practice, the core of my parish community was essentially Tradcath and Latin-oriented in mindset. The coffee hour conversations inevitably went towards topics of modern politics and “What did the Pope do wrong today?”

My spiritual research, especially when it came to hard questions of religion and practical virtue, was a combination of discussions with parish brothers and independent inquiry, as the Greek Catholic priest was not really a spiritual father to me. The Orthodox-style liturgy encouraged me to dip my toes in the vast ocean of Orthodox Christian literature, and during these cursory investigations I read books like “Way of a Pilgrim” and the Philokalia. I continued to get positive confirmations that these hymns, prayers, services, and books clearly resembled the same faith as the Desert Fathers. The Philokalia obviously had the interior spirituality demanded by the perennialists, along with the philosophical sophistication to compete with the Buddhists and the Neoplatonists.

Eastern Easter and the End of Irony

As time passed, I continued diving into the church services, and eventually, we entered Great Lent. In my previous Roman Catholic communities, Lent basically consisted of making a vow to give something up and the continued eating of meat and cheese. Moreover, the grand culmination of the Roman Catholic feast cycle was really about Christmas, not Easter, which usually felt like a normal Sunday to me. However, in the Orthodox-style practice, Lent was a big deal, and the rigorous rules were explained to me: no meat, no eggs, no fish. Plus extra church services during the week.

For my first Orthodox-style Lent, I undertook it with my spiritual brother Will, and we full-heartedly and even somewhat foolishly went on this journey together. Since we lived close to each other, we frequently visited each other’s apartments and cooked Lenten meals together. We were not great chefs and a lot of our concoctions ended up being like bachelor slop, but it was a joy to eat lentil soup, almonds, and bread in the spirit of fraternity.

Part of our foolish joy was owed to the fact that modern men who’ve grown up in a formless ironic modern world actually love the austerity and discipline of spiritual rules. Being able to take on virtuous burdens as a layperson in the secular world feels very empowering and is a genuinely exciting form of chronological tourism. Eating bread and oil makes you feel kind of like a medieval monk. While we were eating soup, Will pointed at a single lentil and said, “You see this? The Desert Fathers would be overjoyed to even eat one bean! They would say, ‘Oh boy, I get to eat a WHOLE LENTIL today? Yippee!’”

My friendship with Will was full of this kind of light-hearted humor. He was totally okay with making jokes in order to crack your skull open with the spirit of the Gospels.1 Like a Zen Buddhist using ko’ans to dispel delusion, he used comedy to pierce through the veil of modern rationalism. We would say things like these:

"You're telling me that church is extra long today? Woohoo!"

"Who would've thought that the greatest king who created the entire universe made this life just for me!"

"You know what would really help with that problem you're having? Some penance and prayer."

"Have you considered being more like the Virgin Mary, who is perfect and pure and is so saddenned when she sees your sins?"

“Sometimes when I’m struggling, I just say, ‘Thank you God, that You didn’t send down heavenly lightning to obliterate me for my failures.’”

Eventually, we reached the joyous feast of Pascha (Easter), where a long, midnight liturgy revealed the triumph of Jesus Christ and the opening up of the Kingdom of God. The altar doors flew open, bright lights cast away the darkness, and we celebrated the Resurrection in all its glory. I heard the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom for the first time in my life: "Rejoice today, both you who have fasted and you who have disregarded the fast.… Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave!" The words spoke to me about how God offers His mercy even to the latecomers and prodigal sons, and a victory cry as He conquers death itself. Death has died a death, as Christ entered into death to undo the curse of Adam by His Resurrection, saving the lost souls that came before Him.

Processing around the church building at midnight, with incense blowing in the wind, this felt like the culmination of all of our pious efforts for the previous 40 days, and indeed of my entire spiritual journey. I shouted joyfully in the church with the other parishioners: “Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!” We brought baskets of meat, cheese, eggs, and alcohol, previously prohibited during Lent, to have them blessed by the priest so that we could eat them during the celebrations.2 At around 1 am, we feasted with the fellowship together, under the happiness and assurance of the Resurrection.

O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen.

The Paschal Sermon

After a year of participating in the Orthodox-style services, I felt that Orthodoxy was a serious and authentic faith. It was not symbolic, an exoteric peasant’s religion, or a mythical fairy tale for kids, but meant to be embraced deeply with a man’s soul and heart. As an ex-atheist, I had not known how to pray, what it meant to be spiritual, or how to put my full self into the religious services. With Byzantine Catholicism and its Orthodox-style faith, I finally started getting closer to understanding the Christian life. Whenever I had spiritual battles, I tried to integrate my personal readings of the Philokalia and apply them to the movements of my soul. Hanging out with my spiritual brother, Will, gave me encouragement and allowed me to approach Christianity without an overly-rationalized perspective. I was no longer an anti-atheist, simply reacting against the negativity of modernity, but became a struggler of the soul using my body and mind to apply positive traditional teachings to my own life.

The Papal Question

With Byzantine Catholicism, it felt like you could have your cake and eat it too. You can be Orthodox, and you can still follow the Pope — or not! You can go to Tridentine Latin Mass (which I attended on several occasions), pray the Rosary, get plenary indulgences, and celebrate western Easter. You can even attend a lame Novus Ordo Mass at 2 pm if you want to sleep in and check off your Sunday church obligation. You can’t visit an actual Orthodox Church, though, because that doesn’t legally count as an obligation fulfillment.

Is this really how it should be, though? Over the years, I continued my faithful participation in the Byzantine (and Roman Catholic) church. I felt that there was no reason to actually consider Eastern Orthodoxy — until one day, I received an unexpected answer for a question I’d never asked. I hope to elaborate on that in Part 4 of this article series, which is now available here: The 10,000 Mile Journey to Orthodoxy.

If you liked (or hated) this essay, check out the previous article “Tradition and Rationality.”

See the discussion on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit.

• Hardcover, Simplified Chinese ($15 USD)

• Pocket-sized, Simplified Chinese ($7 USD)

• Pocket-sized, Non-Simplified Chinese ($7 USD)

The books are available at the lowest price for zero net profit. The remaining cost is what is asked for by Lulu itself.

Link: https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=China+Orthodox+Press&page=1&pageSize=10&adult_audience_rating=00

If you would like the benefit from this prayer book in electronic form, it is available at the church website.

I created a video documenting some of my travels in the Orthodox Christian East Asian world. Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, and more… Please check it out!

See the discussion on Twitter and Instagram.

This essay is part of a series. The next article “Faith Without Irony” is now available here!

Plato’s Armchair

After abandoning the incoherent world of atheism, I was something like a Platonic idealist, believing in transcendent principles of Truth and Beauty that weren’t constrained by the limits of the material world. But this wasn’t a complete picture of reality. I didn’t have any explanation for where Truth or Beauty come from, how they can be apprehended by humans, and why people were separated from this knowledge in the first place.

I traced my steps backward from known “core beliefs,” searching for a full theory that could explain the meaning of life. While I was evaluating the many “systems” of ideologies, several principles were important to me:

1. The system must not be self-contradictory. If a belief is in conflict with itself, then it cannot be true. An example of this is the claim that “all truth is relative,” which cannot itself be an absolutely true statement.

2. The system must give an account of itself. It needs to have some explanation for why it does not die under its own judgment. For example, someone who says “humans are just irrational animals” must tell us why he, a human animal, is immune to his own criticism.

3. Who made the system, and why? The individual personhood of the system’s creators cannot be ignored. The authors must be “reasonable” people whom I would respect and admire if I were to meet them in real life.1 For example, I do not respect the beliefs of New Age spiritual “gurus” who abused their authority to indulge in illict romantic relations with their own students.

Traditional religion became appealing to me because it had the backing of thousands of years of history, culture, and philosophy, lovingly and sincerely passed through many generations from teachers to students, holding itself accountable to daily practices and written standards of orthodoxy. In contrast, the tiny, provincial, self-limitedness of modern atheism and “enlightenment ideology” was artificially constructed 300 years ago by a peculiar, self-indulgent, and — in many cases — murderous group of people who not only thought they were smarter than and superior to their own ancestors but also didn’t consistently hold themselves accountable to anything they wrote.

I reckoned that everyone in the world is religious, but only some are conscious of what faith they follow. As a diligent student of the modern academic system, I knew for sure that we couldn’t trust our own minds to re-invent modern science or mathematics. Would you fly in an airplane designed by an engineer with zero teachers and who claimed to come up with his own alternative to algebra? Of course not. So how can you stake your very soul, your own definition of right and wrong, and the entire purpose of your life, on the flimsy foundations of unexamined, unserious moral theories?

The Boundaries of Tradition

Frithjof Schuon and the perennial philosophy appealed to me because they were intellectually rigorous — slow to believe and not “superstitious,” rejecting many of the false dogmas of modern philosophy, preserving the objectivity of the truth — while still accounting for the diversity we see in the many faiths, opinions, and theories of the world. He wrote with contempt and hostility against the hyper-relativism of the modern era:

Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing.…2

It is abundantly evident that man can escape subjectivity, for otherwise he would not be man; and the proof of this possibility is that we are able to conceive of both the subjective and the surpassing of the subjective. This subjectivity would not even be conceivable for a man who was totally enclosed in his subjectivity; an animal lives its subjectivity but does not conceive it, for unlike man it does not possess the gift of objectivity.

- The Contradiction of Relativism, Frithjof Schuon

The perennial philosophy preaches that every great religious tradition leads to the truth, but it also warns its followers to avoid heresy and maintain orthodoxy. This might sound weirdly zealous and intolerant, but it makes sense from a systems perspective. If every religion is a “system” with its own different axioms, then “heresy” would be a violation within the system, a contradiction. We can pay respect to the individual traditions, which are complete in themselves and on their own rights, but we refuse to mix those systems together: no picking and choosing.

This made sense to me when I considered that even eastern religions like Daoism and Buddhism — commonly seen as “tolerant” and “non-dogmatic” these days — have historically had their own struggles for orthodoxy and occasionally engaged in persecution of heretics. Traditional Zen teachers, most certainly, did not allow the student to simply believe in whatever he wanted; the monks were subjected to rigorous training and frequent discourse with a master, and they were rejected and even beaten for giving wrong answers. Both Zhuang Zi and Nagarjuna engaged in discourse to separate what was wrong from right, which implies that they believed in a truth and did not think that every single arbitrary statement was correct. In mathematics, we know that a single problem under a single set of axioms will have a single set of answers. So why should philosophy, which is ontologically prior to both math and science, be any different?

Frithjof Schuon taught about religious obedience, a concept that might sound shocking and scandalous to modern readers who have become accustomed to always having their own opinions and following their own interests, but which appealed to me at an intuitive level when I reflected on the process of learning other difficult matters in this world. I thought about Japanese swordsmiths who dedicated their entire lives to the craft, living under the authority of a strict teacher before graduating to independence, obsessing over esoteric details for many years before producing the perfect blade. Just as we can’t follow our own self-willed impulses when pursuing craftsmanship, so too must we study under the authority of teachers when pursuing the good life, which, in a way, is the craftmanship of one’s own character.3 And the teachers themselves were taught by teachers, all the way back up until the beginning, and that lineage of teachers and disciples is known as tradition.

At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the will of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart's desire without overstepping the boundaries of what was right. - Confucius

Ashes and Fire

Although I loved reading Buddhist, Daoist, and Neoplatonic philosophy in my spare time, I had serious doubts that the authentic religious practices of these traditions were even possible in modern America, as they had only been imported within the last 70 years. Since I am myself a Chinese American with a Confucian upbringing, I intuitively grasped how westerners misinterpreted Eastern religions to satisfy their own wishes, cherry-picking their favorite ideas and “meditation” practices without making sacrifices or seriously holding themselves accountable to authorities within those traditions. Although they would call themselves Buddhists, sometimes even ordaining themselves as gurus, they would not have proper dharma transmission, refused to learn Eastern languages, and would still be beholden to Western ideas of individualism. Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, and Sam Harris are major representatives of what I would call westernized Buddhism. The mindset of this type of person is described well by Father Seraphim Rose, himself a former student of Chinese traditional religion:

At base, this ex-Anglican priest [Alan Watts] wanted a religion that he could be comfortable with, that promised him spiritual benefits while allowing him to do basically whatever he wanted; and he used his very able mind to both formulate and justify this amorphous religion. Zen, with its aversion to dogma, proved malleable in his hands.

While Guénon [a perennialist philosopher] had attempted to study Eastern religions within their own context, Watts seemed to be trying to make them digestible to Westerners. The “Buddhism” he espoused as a remedy for the spiritual malaise of the West was thus an inauthentic, synthesized expression of that tradition, streamlined to cater to the modern mentality of self-worship. […]

Watts himself admitted to being a charlatan and claimed to be nothing other than a “philosophical entertainer” — though he said this with a twinkle in his eye that made one imagine that there was something more to him. He did not accept the disciplines of the Eastern religions he was espousing, and argued with Zen masters and swamis who told him what their religions demanded. […]

Looking back, it is obvious that he had simply caught the right wavelength, followed it all the way and made his career out of it, made lots of money, and attracted many followers. Some of what he taught was true, especially about what is wrong with contemporary civilization. But he gave only some pitifully small shred of truth combined with a lot of his own opinions, and in the end a great system of lies; and he destroyed souls, including his own undoubtedly.

- “Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works,” Father Damascene Christensen

Because of my desire for authentic tradition, I chose to personally practice Christianity. I reckoned that this faith was indeed the tradition that enlightened the western peoples, and its psycho-spiritual influence could be measured in the very language of English, which had been profoundly reshaped and re-invented by the King James Bible in the 17th century. Although Christianity has been declining in influence in the modern age, it can never be completely ignored, as the Christian ethos has saturated the Roman Empire, and its faraway peripheral province of the USA, for hundreds and thousands of years: in law, culture, customs, and even in unconscious thinking patterns.

I also had great respect for the idea of bishops as living witnesses of tradition, exemplified in the concept of apostolic succession: meaning that the leaders of the Christian Church can trace their origins — both physically and spiritually — to the actual apostles in the Bible who were hand-picked by Jesus Christ. Many of these lineages are openly available online for anyone to verify. The bishops themselves are never supposed to create their own arbitrary and self-willed beliefs but rather remain faithful to what was passed down to them since the very beginning.

Reading the Gospels, I deeply resonated with its depiction of right and wrong, truth and delusion, depicting the stubbornness of people who refuse to listen and constantly run away from criticism. Seeing people who, in their pride, continued to do what they knew was incorrect, and even turned around to persecute those who dared to proclaim the truth, matched well with my own experiences in the fallen material world and the irrational interminality of modern ethical discourse. Even when I was an atheist kid, I hated people who created obviously self-serving theories that simply justified whatever decisions they’d already made, and reading the Bible as an adult, I saw such behavior clearly outlined as the product of a blind and irrational heart.

And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God. - Gospel of John (NKJV)

I also greatly admired the idea of confession as practiced in ancient Christianity, a way for holding yourself accountable to your actions and for directly admitting that what you did was wrong. Not only was this practice required before participating in the sacraments of the Church, but it was even mandatory for the salvation of the soul! As a former atheist, the concept of this ritual was mind blowing to me. I was so tired and demoralized from the rank hypocrisy and lack of accountability I had seen in public life, and even of major stakeholders in our society — CEOs, politicians, and artists — who seemed to always dodge questions asked to them and refused to admit to nakedly obvious wrongdoings. The idea of confession was a breath of fresh air. It harmonized nicely with my learning from Aristotle: the idea that knowledge isn’t simply an intellectual concept, but the active rejection of hypocrisy, the practical pursuit of good behavior to conform one’s actions with the truth.

Gripes with Christ

As I continued my research, I made some “progress” in my study of this religion by comparing Christian ideas with concepts I’d seen in other religions. For example, it was appealing to conceive of the Christian Logos, the Son of the Father, and the name “I AM THAT I AM” as being equivalent to the Neoplatonic Nous, which is a concept that refers to the eternal existence containing all truth, possibilities, and ideas. Similarly, the Dao (道) of Chinese philosophy, which self-sufficiently exists and generates all things, and yet cannot be named or known, seemed very similar to God the Father to me. Although I see now that this was a bad habit, it helped me in my early days of wrestling with faith by mapping Christianity with familiar concepts that I understood and respected.

Some inquirers, even faithful Christians, struggle with the problem of evil, the question of why a good God would permit tragedy and unhappiness to exist in His perfect creation, but I suspect that many ex-atheists do not find this question to be too perplexing. For me personally, I found satisfaction in Zhuang Zi’s speculation that this life is like a dream: we experience great pains and terrors in our nightmares, but these are quickly forgotten when we wake up and enjoy the comfort of the sun. If this world is a computer simulation (as some transhumanists have declared), then “waking up” from the Matrix could be infinitely more valuable than any evil that happened in the simulated world. It is openly taught in the Bible that the Christian Heaven is supposed to last for eternity, so how can any “logical atheist” complain about the momentary bitterness we experience on earth? It would be like a child complaining about yucky medicine, a temporary unpleasantness that precedes a long-lasting cure.

As an ex-atheist, my biggest struggle with Christianity was the particularity of the Bible combined with its exclusive claims. The Gospels famously show that Jesus Christ said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” The plain reading of the text seems to suggest that unity with Christ is a prerequisite for approaching God the Father, and it’s a difficult teaching for modern people who are generally afraid of believing in doctrinal pronouncements. Why did Jesus of Nazareth, the God of the Christians, have to be born in the land of Judea? Why did He choose to make himself known through a peculiar tribe of people in a world with so many different nations? Why did He have to walk around wearing sandals in the desert, speaking the languages of Aramaic and Greek? Wasn’t this whole story just arbitrary and random?

But I was helped tremendously when I flipped the question around: in order for God to meet us at the level of humans, how could He not become particular? We see similar things happening all the time in the world of applied math, when a multi-dimensional vector needs to be projected onto a space with fewer dimensions, like a ray of sunshine hitting a piece of paper. It seemed reasonable for God to “compress” Himself down to the level of humans, maintaining His divinity while still existing in the world, not because of His arbitrariness, but owing to our own needs as small and limited people. Just as a company has to choose one particular person if they want a CEO, likewise, God has to become a particular person if He wants to be incarnate in our times — and that one person would be the best possible human across all time and space, measured in a way knowable to God Himself. For the perennialist, seeing Christ proclaim “I am the truth” is not a sad story of truth becoming broken and diminished in relativity, but the joyful mystery of the all-encompassing God making Himself knowable in the little world of ordinary humanity.

“Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One! Angels, with shepherds, glorify Him. The wise men journey with a star, since for our sake the Pre-Eternal God was born as a young Child.” - Kontakion of the Nativity

Truth is a Person

Perennialism, in practice, led me to live a double life. I would read the Bible and attend Christian “non-denominational” events with my friends, but on the other hand, the gaps in my spiritual and intellectual diet would be filled by outside sources that weren’t within the Christian tradition. I justified this at the time by saying “they all point to the same ultimate truth,” but in a way, it made me unable to fully and seriously participate in the living tradition that was right in front of me. Due to this sense of distance, I was not able to fully put my heart into my prayers. I also was not able to empathize with frustrated Christians who had serious intellectual dissatisfaction with the watered-down version of religion they were experiencing in the modern churches, since my mind wasn’t even a part of the same faith framework as them.

During my private research, I eventually stumbled upon the Desert Fathers: early Christian monks who sold all their possessions, rejected the cities, and lived in the wilderness in order to cultivate the truth at all costs. Like the martyrs of the early church, these monks truly paid the price for their own beliefs, undertaking great physical trials, all-nighter prayer vigils, and the pain of humility and repentance. I fell in love with the beautiful, sober, and concise expressions of their faith, which talked about the practical acquisition of the virtues and the path of spiritual improvement.

“It is dangerous for a man to try teaching before he is trained in the good life. A man whose house is about to fall down may invite travellers inside to refresh them, but instead they will be hurt in the collapse of the house. It is the same with teachers who have not carefully trained themselves in the good life; they destroy their hearers as well as themselves. Their mouth invites to salvation, their way of life leads to ruin.” - Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Within the Desert Fathers, I recognized the spiritual athleticism of Aristotle, the wisdom of Zhuang Zi, and the piety of Iamblichus. The reading helped me truly connect the dots between perennialism-in-theory and Christianity-in-practice, and it gave me the push to sincerely pursue a more ancient kind of faith. I thought for sure that I wanted to be part of the traditional church that embodied the spirit of the Desert Fathers. I also wished to partake in the Eucharist, the precious Christian sacrament of God descending into the world and offering His Body to be consumed by the faithful, which I believed to be of essential spiritual importance and was also staunchly advocated by the Desert Fathers themselves.4 It seemed obvious to me to reject Protestantism in light of its historical contingency (being easily traced to the movements of Martin Luther, who seemed to be rebelling against his own teachers) and self-contradictions (how can the Bible alone explain who compiled the Bible?).

Based on my understanding of church history at the time, I chose to pursue Roman Catholicism. I thought that this church was the successor of the Desert Fathers and a possessor of the ancient faith that enlightened the Roman Empire. Although I would later become Orthodox Christian, at the time I did not have any spiritual contact with people worshipping God all the way across the world in Greece and Russia (even though, as it later turned out, there was an Orthodox community within driving distance of my own hometown).

It would only be years later that I would truly encounter the Christian faith of the Romans and engage with prayers, philosophy, and an interior religious life that seemed exactly as if it were written in the same spirit as the Desert Fathers themselves. That’s a whole different story, full of providence and unexpected surprises, that I’ll elaborate on, with God’s permission, in Part 3, which is now available here!

If you liked (or extremely hated) this essay, check out the next part, available here: “Faith Without Irony and the Byzantine Catholics.” You can also check out the previous article “Why I Left the Atheist Faith.”

See the discussion on Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram.

This essay is Part One of a series. The next article “Tradition and Rationality” is now available here!

The Modern Confucian

I grew up as a modern Chinese Confucian, not identifying with a particular religion, but with a strong sense of ethics that was part of my cultural inheritance: Accept criticism with humility, respect your elders, and obey the laws of society. Although we never visited any Buddhist temples or Daoist shrines, my parents believed in an abstract notion of karma, an idea that doing evil deeds will lead to eventual negative consequences, even if no one catches you doing it. We were also far from agnostic on ethical questions. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, regardless of your own personal wishes.

Looking back, I felt that the educated Chinese, and especially my own family, were particularly distinguished from other Americans for their ability to confront the truth. The modern Confucian never allows his ego to get in the way of excellence. If someone does something better than you, you need to learn from him, without making excuses. If someone argues with you, you think about whether his criticisms are actually valid rather than dismissing his points. If someone is right, you acknowledge the truth of what he says, even if you hate him. You’re always willing to adopt the other position and think about whether you yourself could be the mistaken party. “You are just personally attacking me” is not a sentence in our vocabulary.

The combination of a competitive spirit and a zero-ego approach to self-improvement leads many Chinese people to good universities and prestigious jobs. In my case, it eventually led me to the Orthodox Christian Church.

Mere Atheism

As a teenager, I had a natural obsession for thinking about questions of right and wrong, which eventually turned into a love for philosophy. I felt that “If someone’s belief is truer than yours, then why would you keep clinging onto your previous false beliefs?” I would go on the internet and browse articles and forum comments on hot button ethical issues, like digital piracy, human rights, and drug legalization, and I would keep reading arguments until I’d decided on what seemed true to me. At the age of 13, I decided that atheism, and in fact, anti-theism, must be true, in part because modern “scientistic” atheism seemed to be so much better and more consistent than the ideology of mass-media evangelical protestants. For example, I perceived that proponents of weed legalization would say that drugs are about a man having control over his own private life, while Christian opponents would make special appeals against weed by saying that the Bible has outlawed drugs. Inspired by people like George Carlin and Richard Dawkins, I felt that Christianity must have been a man-made religion that was becoming increasingly irrelevant with the “progress” of modern science.

My beliefs began to evolve in high school, where I started taking classes on literature, European philosophy, and modern ethics. Because of my nature as an obsessive truth-seeker, I loved those classes and took them extremely seriously, taking care to engage with the subject matter deeply and contrast the ideas with my own thinking. It also helped that the classroom environment naturally incentivized me to be more sincere in my studies to get better grades. In my literature class, we were taught to read the Bible from a secular perspective “as a work of great literature,” and I was exposed to the stories of the Old Testament and the basic framework of sin and justice with the help of talented teachers who were simply trying to convey the message clearly in a neutral context. I particularly loved the early stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and began to view them as beautiful myths that performed good service to early people who didn’t know any better.

After learning about the Old Testament, I began to become increasingly intolerant of modern American atheism. I now started to see that these atheists did not even have a basic understanding of the Bible, and in their blindness, would throw away the good inheritance of Christian myths without even bothering to understand them. They would ask unreasonable questions like “Why did God say ‘where art thou, Adam,’ as if He could not see?” when such basic answers were easily accessible within the source texts and with some honest critical thinking (the answer: Adam hid himself from God on purpose, on account of his own sin, and God was speaking on account of His mercy, not His inability to see). I started to see that they were not intellectually honest and were, in a way, religious themselves, defining themselves as anti-Christian rather than true atheists. Incidentally, this is why I think we must be careful when thinking about the concept of “atheism,” because in the West, it is certainly defined by opposition to Christianity, while in modern East Asia, it is more like a childlike lack of belief in religion.

Afterward, I completely disavowed modern American atheism and gave it zero intellectual respect, but I still had materialistic presumptions and did not believe in a personal God as defined by the Christians. In modern literature class, we were exposed to a wide variety of writers, and I was particularly drawn to the French existentialism of Albert Camus, who was charming and ironic, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who seemed to be a wretched over-thinker. Their writings were philosophically rich and perfectly captured the post-Christian spirit in a seductive and reasonable way. The chief idea I took away from these readings was that the human life was devoid of intrinsic meaning, but we construct myths and narratives for ourselves through a combination of personal pleasure and self-delusion. In this context, religion was like a creative fiction and a personal choice, and the wise man could still abide by religious ideas but only with an ironic sense of distance.

I also loved the writing of Hermann Hesse which perfectly appealed to modern, bourgeois, truth-seeking strugglers. His writing depicted the young man’s path of heroic transformation, the struggle of heady rationalism versus integrated consciousness, and the search for light, goodness, and authenticity in the chaos of the modern godless world. I felt drawn to his characters, as I myself was a sincere and occasionally-naïve sojourner trying to grasp onto objective truth in our slippery, rootless, and ironic society.

"Have I played my part well? Then applaud, for the comedy is over!” 

- Emperor Augustus, on death

Dreams and Certainty

It was also at this time that a dear friend and classmate introduced me to Daoism, the Chinese philosophy of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi. I learned about it seriously, for the first time, in an American context, as my parents had never passed down this tradition to me. I loved Zhuang Zi, who was playful, thoughtful, and self-consistent. He was the ultimate skeptic, much greater than Descartes and his successors, because Zhuang Zi was even skeptical of his own skepticism. He would ask not just “How do I know?” but also “How do I know that I do not know?” One of my favorite passages is his discussion on dreams and the fear of death:

How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home?

Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life?

One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.

After putting my full mind into the teachings of Zhuang Zi and the European existentialists, I realized that many “certainties” of modern life — such as the idea that this world is real and not some sort of simulation — were not certain at all and were built on very flimsy epistemological foundations and limited by extremely narrow preconceptions. Even the “objective” knowledge of science depends on fundamental assumptions of cause-and-effect (it’s not obvious that an action at time T causes the effect at time T+1), the consistency of the universe (it’s not obvious that physical properties at a certain time and place should always be true for all times and all places), and the idea that your particular assignment of empirical data points to a trend line is the correct one. No one has ever “seen” the law of gravitation, and even fewer have seen the boundaries of the universe. There is not even such a thing as perfect measurement, since the act of measurement itself changes the test subject, by bombarding it with photons or by snipping away a piece of it.

What we call science is simply our best guess with the instruments we have today, and the 0.001% of measurement error hiding in a experimental process is the determinant of your own faith. Those who think that “0.001% is good enough” are the self-satisfied materialists, but those who see the limitation of this type of thinking are the true skeptics and the real scientists, like an airplane pilot who knows that one day the wings of the aircraft might fall out from under him.

Materialism and its Limits

I began to believe that reductionist materialistic atheism — the idea that all things are caused solely by physical phenomena — was itself a type of religion, and not a particularly good one. It lacked explanatory power, it wasn’t consistent with itself, and it also wasn’t faithfully followed by its practitioners. Materialist atheists would say “we’re all just a bundle of chemicals” and yet continue to love their families in all seriousness and without a hint of irony. They say things like “money is just a social construct” and yet get infuriated when you steal from them. They say they only believe in science, and yet they espouse ideas like human rights and democracy which can never be seen in the laboratory.

"There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” - Daniel Dennett

Most egregiously, the materialist person, who believes that all his actions are determined by brain chemicals, has no basis by which to conclude that his actions are right. If “your” brain is just a bunch of arbitrary chemical processes, why should you trust “your brain” over someone else’s? Why is “your brain” more trustworthy than a man who walks to the beach and uses the configuration of sea-shells that wash on the shore as a basis for determining his life? Why is dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin randomly firing in all directions any better than leaves blowing in the wind? How do you know that you aren’t just a simulated brain-in-a-vat who woke up yesterday with false memories, or that your deepest feelings and emotions aren’t simply implanted by a hostile actor injecting neurotransmitters into your brain?

Reductionist materialism cannot save us because it destroys the source of all knowledge. The man who cannot trust his senses certainly cannot use those same senses to examine chemicals in a laboratory. Modern scientism tells us “man is just an animal, like the beasts,” and yet the scientist says this as if he is an angel, as if his judgment does not apply also to himself.

“A purely unsurpervised learning agent can never learn what to do, because it has no information as to what constitutes a correct action or a desirable state.” - Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig

Which Justice?

Atheists often say “You were born a Christian, so how can you judge whether it’s true?” But what they do not realize is that they, too, were born into atheism. Naturally following the spirit of the times, the precocious atheist simply reads between the lines and "rebels" against the watered-down faith handed to him by his parents. But he doesn't examine whether the times themselves are true, and whether the framework of his rebellion is even a sensible default position to take.

I first learned about the history of ideas from After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre, which thoroughly discusses the problem of modern secular discourse. Most people in the modern West rely on concepts like justice, fairness, right-and-wrong, and most egregiously, “human rights,” without having a serious philosophical theory about where those concepts come from. Many people who say “That’s not fair” do so out of empty emotional sentiment, and their words are devoid of substance unless they consciously possess a consistent theory of equity.

Tracing backward from the paucity and emptiness of our modern discourse, MacIntyre talks about how the “universal secular values” of the modern world were actually birthed in the provinces of Western Europe and crafted by the hands of highly-peculiar elite scholars during the “European Enlightenment.” These scholars tried to create a world where ethics could exist without the idea of transcendent truth, without God, and in so doing, they sawed off the branches of the tree they were sitting on. Despite the philosophical inconsistency of these theories, they became very popular among nation-builders and revolutionaries who reshaped the ethics of modern Europe to suit their own beliefs and wishes. Eventually these values were exported across the entire globe, giving birth to modern atheism, and we, in America, are all the spiritual children of this small cohort of thought-leaders, even if we do not acknowledge them as our fathers.

Reading MacIntyre and tracing the history of my own beliefs was like eyesight being restored to the blind. To neglect this science, to be ignorant about one’s own unconscious metaphysical presumptions, is like taking medicine from a doctor whose credentials you've never seen. Although atheists harshly criticize Christianity as being a historically-conditioned desert religion, they fail to see that they themselves are the pious worshippers of the Post-Enlightenment Faith, which demands so much out of its believers — immolating the ideas of truth, love, and beauty on the altar of materialism — and is itself the most historically-conditioned of all.

Waking Up From the Dream

I had finally unplugged myself from the matrix of the European Enlightenment and became, for the first time, a “neutral” person with very few unexamined convictions. I didn’t want to believe in any irrational propaganda that only became popular because of arbitrary historical conditions, such as modern atheism. I wanted to be like Zhuang Zi, leaving unknowable things to be in the realm of the unknown. I still performed my duties as a son, citizen, and student, but viewed it as a “social game” that you do for enjoyment and self-benefit, as articulated by Camus and Hermann Hesse.

Within this context, I started introspecting a lot on what I truly believed and on what was precious to me. I thought about my family, whom I loved very dearly in a real way. I never thought of them as materialistic chemicals but as full-fledged human personalities who filled my life with love and happiness. When people in philosophy chats occasionally asked “Would you wipe your memories and enter a simulation that made you perfectly happy?”, I would always answer “No” because I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my family behind in the un-simulated world of inferior happiness.

I also thought about truth, the object of my great obsessions and the whole reason I was even at this stage in my life to begin with. I didn’t think that truth was unreal. How can anyone believe that? Can we use truth to say that truth is untrue? If someone is trapped in the framework of lower understanding, isn’t it our duty to lift him up to a higher level? That was a core belief of mine, and I was unwilling to compromise that. When I thought about “Would you rather be a happy pig or a sad human?” I always chose the side of truth, even if it made me miserable, and even if it was against the ethics of brain chemicals and hedonism.

So I decided to take a leap of faith and fully believe in Love and Truth. Actually, it wasn’t a leap of faith. It was something I had believed in all along. I used my rational mind to articulate and accept the unconscious beliefs of my soul. Having thrown away the garbage of the fake intellectual inheritance of our times, I discovered the treasures of authentic belief hiding within my heart. Because of this, it became mandatory for me to seek a philosophical theory by which Love and Truth were actually coherent and meaningful ideas.

I finally became an abstract believer of a pre-Western, Greco-Chinese “religion,” where Love and Truth exist as transcendent realities beyond our material and rational world, held in place by an Absolute Idea which some people might recognize as “God.” I began reading Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics with intellectual seriousness, and felt a breath of fresh air in seeing the confidence, precision, and moral accuracy of his writing, which was overflowing with the beauty and substance of the men who lived in the world before Nietzsche said, “God is dead.”

"Beauty is the splendor of the true.” - Plato

The Empty and the All

Being an abstract “virtue believer” was an alright and decent life, but I was still curious to learn about world religions, as I no longer had a materialist basis by which to deny their validity. I studied Buddhism, Islam, Neoplatonism, and Christianity and drew inspiration from what I learned. My friend pointed me to Frithjof Schuon, a philosopher associated with the theory of “perennialism,” who argued that all orthodox, traditional religions lead to God.

“When the divine Light descends onto the human plane — embodying itself, as it were — it undergoes an initial limitation, resulting from human language and from the requirements of a given collective mentality, or cycle of humanity.”

- Frithjof Schuon

Schuon possessed everything that I needed at that point in my spiritual journey. He was very “rational” and intellectually sophisticated, but his idea of “rationality” included the supernatural world too. He differentiated the “exoteric” aspect of religion — that which seems superficial, dogmatic, particularized, and external — from the “esoteric” core — which is the intellectual, universal, and hidden truth of all religions. For example, he argued that the apparently irrational phenomenon of miracles are “inevitable” in the divine economy, since God is so vast that He eventually will pierce through our crude and mundane world simply by His nature, similar to how the geological processes of the earth eventually cause diamonds to be formed out of common carbon. Schuon also did not think that every religion was valid, but he only believed in the orthodox versions of great religions with blessed spiritual fruit that defined human civilizations.

Learning from Schuon, and also the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblicus, I came to believe that religion was not just a common communal “activity” but a way of integrating traditional philosophy into the human life through practice. This greatly resonated with me, as I had already grown to dislike how many modern western “philosophers” had zero skin in the game of their own theories and also didn’t practice what they preached. And I was also confounded by the fact that Lao Zi and Plato wrote great treatises on the Absolute but did not actually explain the path by which an ordinary man could come to integrate the True and Beautiful in his life. Iamblichus wrote of religion as being a type of “theurgy,” where the idea of God was expressed through art, music, and ritual, and could enlighten the human soul through repeated practices. The Zen Buddhists were also particularly clear on using religious activities as spiritual “exercises,” almost like a muscle in the soul that can be trained with repeated effort.

Schuon also described how the Eucharist of the Christian faith — where bread and wine is transformed into the Body of Christ to be consumed by the faithful — was filled with deep metaphysical significance, with God, the Absolute, descending into our relativized world in order to nourish the human soul. “God became man so that man might become god.” From this, I concluded that the Christian Eucharist is itself the Elixir of Eternal Life pursued by all the great Chinese emperors.

As I learned more about the symbols and mysteries of ancient Christianity, I saw that it did not resemble at all the silly human religion that I saw in mass-media evangelicalism. Instead, I encountered a tradition with great intellectual sophistication and literary beauty. I became convinced that, without some sort of religion, we cannot truly “know” philosophy in the depths of our souls and practice it in our lives. And we need to pick a particular religion, just as a linguist must choose a particular language if he wishes to write a speech. Taking a leap of faith, this time for real, I decided to pursue Christianity… (Continued in Part Two.)

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