From Ben-Hur to the Fall of Constantinople: Lew Wallace, Faith, and the Limits of Historical Imagination

The literary career of Lew Wallace, who had previously served as a Union general in the American Civil War, reveals a remarkable development in both religious reflection and historical interpretation. His two most ambitious works, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) and The Prince of India; or, Why Constantinople Fell (1893), are not merely historical novels; they represent distinct stages in Wallace’s engagement with Christianity. The former emerges from a personal search for faith and expresses theology through narrative experience, while the latter attempts a sweeping interpretation of world history and religious decline. Taken together, these works trace a movement from lived religious encounter to abstract historical speculation—a movement that ultimately reveals both Wallace’s strengths and the limits of his perspective, particularly in his understanding of Orthodox Christianity and the Byzantine world.

To understand this development, one must begin with the circumstances that gave rise to Ben-Hur. Prior to writing the novel, Wallace was not firmly grounded in Christian belief. A decisive moment occurred in 1876, when he entered into conversation with the noted agnostic lecturer Robert G. Ingersoll. Ingersoll’s confident skepticism exposed Wallace’s own uncertainty and lack of theological clarity. Confronted with his inability to articulate or defend Christian doctrine, Wallace resolved to undertake a serious study of Christianity. Rather than producing a theological treatise, however, he turned to narrative as his medium.

Observations About Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale from "The Scarlett Letter"

"Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I am!" (17.18)

The fictional character of Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is the most fascinating character, next to Hester Prynne herself, created by Nathaniel Hawthorne for his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. Arthur was a Puritan minister in Puritan New England. This means that he believed in predestination, where one believes that one cannot choose salvation, for it is the privilege of God alone. All features of salvation are determined by God's sovereignty, including choosing those who will be saved. The Puritans distinguished between "justification," or the gift of God's grace given to the elect, and "sanctification," the holy behavior that supposedly resulted when an individual had been saved. Keeping the commandments of God was proof of your faith and salvation, but falling short of living in accordance with the commandments of God could prove that you were not among the elect.

The Role of Conscience in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"

"Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they knew! --they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony!"

Possibly the most obvious and most stated of all themes presented in this tale is one of guilt. The guilty conscience of the narrator is typically viewed as the central, overarching theme of the entire story. It presents a very unique set of questions about the duality of the narrator's character, and perhaps Poe's point is that fine line that exists between the good and evil in all of us. This being, if the narrator is the insane, horrible, psychopath that we think he is, does the sane part of his being show through in his guilt? Is this a redeeming quality, or is this just the act of a raving lunatic, thinking he can hear the heart of a dead man through the floorboards?

Sanity in an American City

“To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you – from the cradle to the grave and beyond – which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up – before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whisky, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.”

-- Christopher Isherwood, “Los Angeles” from Exhumations (1966)

J.D. Salinger and the Jesus Prayer

By John Sanidopoulos

The famous American novelist J.D. Salinger, is most famous for his best-selling classic The Catcher In The Rye, which gave us one of the great icons of teenage angst in the 1950's. Less known is a book he wrote a few years later and published after he retired into seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire, which is titled Franny and Zooey. Franny and Zooey is a book many credit with first introducing them to both the Jesus Prayer and the Russian tale The Way of a Pilgrim, which is essentially an introduction to The Philokalia. It is a modern American tale that explores the path from existential depression to spiritual illumination, and in this way serves as a conclusion (or remedy) to The Catcher In The Rye, whose main character's teenage existential angst lands him in a mental hospital (which could be why it has been so loved by the insane of our time such as Mark David Chapman, for whom the main character Holden Caulfield was a hero, and John Hinckely Jr). Franny and Zooey is not an Orthodox book, as it more corresponds to a Zen Buddhist form of philosophy, but it does have some worthwhile moments. Its significance for English speaking Orthodox is that it may be the first time the method of the Jesus Prayer and the book The Way of a Pilgrim were exposed to millions throughout the world.

Ernest Hemingway On the Catastrophy of Smyrna in 1922

By Richard Carriero

Disorienting flashes of light and dark, that's how Earnest Hemingway's "On the Quai at Smyrna" begins.

"The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We'd run the search light up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it."

On August 30th, 1922 after smashing the Greeks at Afyon, Mustafa Kemal ordered his troops to Smyrna. Before him the survivors of the disastrous Greek invasion poured onto ships in terror. Not everyone escaped. The invasion's chaotic conclusion would bring Hemingway to Istanbul and provide the subject matter for his first work as a war correspondent.

Photios Kontoglou on American Writers (Emerson, Poe and Dana)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

By Dr. Constantine Cavarnos

On November 21 [1958], the day after my first lecture on American philosophy, which was on Ralph Waldo Emerson, I visited Kontoglou at his home. He had not come to my lecture. As I noted earlier, he hardly ever left home in the evening. And, so far as I know, he never attended public lectures. He had some acquaintance with Emerson's essays and regarded him as a great philosopher. Emerson was one of the few American writers that really interested him. The others were Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882).

He asked me to tell him some of the things in Emerson's philosophy that I considered a special significance and which I discussed in my lecture. I mentioned Emerson's emphasis on the soul, his ethical and metaphysical idealism, his distinction between "beauty in nature", which is perishable, and "inward and eternal beauty", and his views on the fine arts, particularly his conviction that higher art is characterized by simplicity, universality, and spirituality. With all these features of Emerson's philosophy he was in sympathy, and he was glad I brought them to the attention of my audience.