The Wounded Prophet

When alienation reveals what conformity conceals: why our most profound truths often come from those most deeply wounded

Rod Dreher has a knack for putting his finger on the pulse of what people are going to be talking about next. He did this with his Benedict Option, and I believe has done it again with his work on re-enchantment.

But that comes with a heavy price. Rod is a deeply wounded man, one alienated from many of the institutions and people who shaped his life. He’s written about this publicly many times, including again recently:

As you longtime readers, as well as readers of Living In Wonder, know, I did not understand what St. Galgano had to do with me until 2020, when, in the depths of my depression over my failed marriage, I stumbled upon Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia, in which I encountered myself as an alienated writer who was marooned in his head, unable to fully live in the present because he longed deeply for the past.

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After JBP’s [Jordan Peterson] talk the other night, it has come back to mind. I have traveled far from the paralyzing nostalgia I had for family and marriage that had been lost to me, but I have not yet made the full transition into what my life is supposed to be, in God’s plan. I have a lot of new subscribers here, and what you new folks may not know is that my experience over the last two decades has been one of sustained radical loss.

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Then, in early 2002, the Catholic sex abuse scandal broke big; by 2005, I had had my capacity to believe in Catholicism stripped from me, in an experience that was like a flaying. I also lost faith in my ability to be certain about Truth, as I had never imagined — literally, had never thought possible — that I could lose my Catholicism. But it happened. (As you know, I became Orthodox, and though I believe in Orthodox Christianity, the palms of my hands were burned so profoundly from 2002-05 that I can never grip, with my painful scars, any form of the Christian faith with the same ease and feeling that I did Catholicism.)

Around that time, I lost faith in the leadership of my country, and in the Republican Party and organized political conservatism, because of the Iraq War, which I had fully supported (this was another reason I lost faith in my own epistemological capabilities.)

Then, in 2012, when I learned the dark truth about how my Louisiana family regarded me and my wife and kids (as “city people,” not to be welcomed or trusted), and their refusal to admit that they had been wrong, the basic emotional base for my understanding of the world vanished overnight. That same awful year, because of the trauma of that catastrophe, my marriage began to collapse, a drawn-out process that immiserated me and my ex-wife for a decade.

It’s so often the case that the people who have the deepest insights into our world and our institutions are wounded men, those deeply hurt and alienated in important ways.

Ross Douthat wrote a column about such a man back in 2018.

The first time I ever heard the truth about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., finally exposed as a sexual predator years into his retirement, I thought I was listening to a paranoiac rant.

It was the early 2000s, I was attending some earnest panel on religion, and I was accosted by a type who haunts such events — gaunt, intense, with a litany of esoteric grievances. He was a traditionalist Catholic, a figure from the church’s fringes, and he had a lot to say, as I tried to disentangle from him, about corruption in the Catholic clergy. The scandals in Boston had broken, so some of what he said was familiar, but he kept going, into a rant about Cardinal McCarrick: Did you know he makes seminarians sleep with him? Invites them to his beach house, gets in bed with them …

At this I gave him the brushoff that you give the monomaniacal and slipped out.

That was before I realized that if you wanted the truth about corruption in the Catholic Church, you had to listen to the extreme-seeming types, traditionalists and radicals, because they were the only ones sufficiently alienated from the institution to actually dig into its rot. (This lesson has application well beyond Catholicism.)

This link between woundedness and insight is almost a cliché in the world of art. We fully expect great artists to be tortured souls, or certainly at least strange. But it’s true of intellectuals as well.

This is actually one of the great themes of science fiction: Some truths are too terrible to know. Learning them will drive one insane. Conversely, one must already be insane to apprehend them. Thus these stories play with the question of who is really sane or insane.

I don’t know who invented this but the first example I know of in modern SF is George O. Smith’s fantastic 1958 pulp novel The Path of Unreason. It’s the theme of Darren Aronofsky’s superb psychological thriller Pi whose protagonist, the genius mathematician Max Cohen, is driven insane as he starts to discover the identity and significance of the 216 digit true name of God (all the while surrounded by those hoping to steal and use his discovery). Lars von Trier’s art film Melancholia, about the destruction of the Earth in a collision with a strange planet, treads the same territory of who is really sane and who is insane.

The typical outcome of this reality is a very well known archetype: Cassandra, the true prophet destined to never be believed. The misshapenness produced by wounding that illuminates makes it all too easy for others to dismiss that insight.

It’s not always necessary for the insightful to walk with a Jacob like limp. Douthat himself is an insightful writer who, despite having had his share of the experience of suffering, appears well adjusted.

But it seems to be helpful, particularly for “prophetic” type insights. Naturally, we see it among the prophets of ancient Israel, perhaps most paradigmatically in Ezekiel. But think also of Jeremiah, forced by God to be a prophet against his will, with a failed ministry, and who wished he’d never been born. (Certainly today he has a different perspective on the matter). It is Jeremiah to whom was revealed insights into the character of God that most of us prefer not to think about. For example:

I [the LORD] have wounded you [Judah] with the wound of an enemy,
With the punishment of a cruel one,
Because your iniquity is great
And your sins are numerous. [Jer 30:14]

Judah, of course, believed instead the false prophets who cried “Peace, peace” when there was no peace, undoubtedly saying, “The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

Plato tells the same story in his allegory of the cave. A man is compelled to undergo the painful process of being set free from the cave and forced to look at the reality of things, on the sun itself. Upon then returning to the cave to tell the prisoners there:

Socrates: Consider the following as well, I said. If this person coming back down were to sit in the same seat again. Having come suddenly out of the sun, wouldn’t his eyes be filled with darkness?

Glaucon: To be sure, he said.

Socrates: If he were once again forced to compete with those who were always prisoners, forming judgments about the shadows while his vision remained weak—before his eyes had fully recovered, given that the time needed to get used to the darkness would not be very short—wouldn’t he appear ridiculous? Wouldn’t people say that he ascended and returned with ruined eyes, and that it’s not worth even trying to go up out of the cave? And if they somehow managed to catch the man who attempted to free and guide others upward, wouldn’t they kill him?

Glaucon: No question, he said.

The ironic effect being used here is that the audience knew that the Athenians had in fact killed Socrates.

While I’m far from the most wounded person, I have a touch of this myself. I went through a three year period of my life that I still cannot make sense of or process in which everything went wrong. This produced an alienation that allowed me to see what I could not see before. Believe me, knowing truth is often as much curse as blessing. While I’m not tempted in that direction, I can see why Aronofsky’s Max Cohen chose the solution he did.

It’s not always easy to decide which seemingly crazy or strange people should be believed. But it’s important to recognize that the deepest insights, and most contrarian yet true thinking, often comes from deeply wounded people. They are often the only one who have been sufficiently awakened to the reality that the shadows on the wall are just that. People, institutions, and society at large ignore this at their own peril.