St. John's

Graduation Essay

10 June 2026

For my wife, who let me take a seminar the night our daughter was born, and for my sister, whose countless hours of free babysitting made my graduation possible.

I.

In the summer of 2018 I wrote an admissions essay arguing that a St. John's education would be the ideal hammer to break through the limits of my technical training. My engineering education had given me tools. I assumed St. John's would give me new or better ones. I now understand that to be at least in part a category error. St. John's did give me skills that improved my reading, writing, and public speaking, but those are ancillary to what the program actually did. It did not give me better instruments. It worked on the man who holds them.

II. Shadows of Virtue

I arrived at St. John's in January 2019. I was twenty-seven years old. I had served in the navy and I had completed a B.S. degree in engineering that took longer than it should have.

More importantly I was restless. I had attempted many religions and found them all lacking in the same way. None of them helped me find and achieve Arete.

I wanted Greek excellence. Not knowledge about virtue but virtue itself. My study of Buddhism had exposed me to its Greek roots and this led me to believe the Greeks had a system for pursuing excellence and that St. John's would give me access to it. Though I will admit that the cult of Dionysus held particular appeal for a man who had developed a sincere appreciation for his primary sacrament.

III. First Semester

I was out of my depth from the first seminar.

The program begins with Plato. Not a book about Plato, not a survey of Greek philosophy, but Plato. The Meno, the first half, handed to a room full of people expected to discuss it without being told what to think about it. I had arrived believing the Greeks had a system for pursuing excellence. The Meno opens with Socrates demonstrating that nobody in the dialogue knows what virtue is, including the man who called the meeting. My hopes for a rational system to achieve virtue went on life support that first evening.

And then in tutorial I found the system I had come for. The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's answer to the question the Meno refuses to answer. Virtue as habit, excellence as practice, the doctrine of the mean. It was what I wanted. It was not what I needed. Aquinas, who we read next, described concupiscence in the pursuit of justice not as a balance or a mean but as a tension. That was more accurate to my lived experience than anything Aristotle offered. You can know the good and still not do it. Aristotle's explanation of vice did not describe my internal experience the way Aquinas's did.

My first elective was Joyce's Ulysses. I chose it because it sounded serious. It humbled me. I had thought I knew how to read. Ulysses suggested otherwise. The novel is saturated with Catholic imagery, Catholic guilt, Catholic ritual, and I had none of the context required to follow where Joyce was leading. It was Sherry who solved this problem with the simplest possible invitation: come to mass and see the context you need for class.

Patrick, my future godfather, and Sherry, Patrick's confirmation sponsor, were in that Joyce class. On a Friday evening after a classical music performance at the school, the three of us ended up at a bar. I had not attended many of the Friday evening lectures but I had not missed any musical performances.

I was in my cups and I was belligerent about it. I wanted to know why Jesus was necessary for virtue. Why salvation. Why atonement. Why am I not good enough. What I was really asking, though I didn't have the language for it yet, was whether the fall was real. Whether human nature was structurally broken or merely imperfectly developed. Whether a man could, through sufficient effort and the right education, make himself good. I had come to St. John's believing the answer was yes. The Meno had put that belief on life support. My limited encounters with Christ had killed it. I was looking for a resurrection.

Patrick and Sherry did not win a debate that night. I don't remember what they said. I remember how they made me feel. I was difficult and they were kind. I had asked whether human nature was broken and they demonstrated, in the manner of their response, what unbroken human nature might look like.

IV. Second Semester

I had chosen math and natural science for the second semester. After the Meno, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ulysses I needed familiar ground. My father died just before the semester started.

Courtney was in my seminar and my Stendhal elective. She and her husband Jonathan and their two children would go on to become some of my favorite people.

Euclid was comforting. There is something to be said for a world in which things can be proved. Lobachevsky was new and exciting. There was Bacon's New Organon, which I should probably revisit now that I am writing about economics.

I read Stendhal for my elective. I enjoyed him. I am not sure I understood him. The French have odd ideas about love.

V. Third Semester

History was supposed to be a fun semester. Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus. I was running experimental philosophy, the full contact Greek themed boffer group. I was intent on learning with my books and my spear. We fought in phalanx formation and learned the difference between Homeric courage, which charges forward for individual glory, and classical courage, which stands firm together despite fear. The men I stood in formation with became close friends. One of them, Jack, attended RCIA with me and I had the honor of serving as a groomsman in his wedding. Another, Francis, in true Irish fashion helped catechize me in a bar. I still turn to him for help understanding scripture and church teaching.

We went to a battle with other groups over a long weekend. When we returned, Sherry and her husband took me to mass that evening. I might have an anxiety problem and a weekend of even simulated combat had left me overstimulated and edgy. Mass brought me back to where I needed to be.

In seminar I read Augustine, who seemed to say that you cannot do history without some metaphysics of time. This was mind-blowing. I wrote a paper on Vico, trying to understand what divine providence even means. Maddie, another classmate, provided valuable insight and editorial feedback for my Vico paper. The night I met her I called a friend from undergrad and told him I met the woman he was going to marry. They are currently expecting their third child. Many of the texts we read in history took it for granted that the divine was active in the world. Even Herodotus has the oracles. Secular history became legible to me as a modern construct, not invalid but a construct rather than a default. I was not yet a devout man but I was beginning to understand what one might stand on. I started RCIA that semester.

My elective was Musil's Man Without Qualities. We never finished it. The professor never intended us to. The book itself is unfinished. Musil set his novel on the eve of the first world war. We started reading it on the eve of a different catastrophe.

When the pandemic arrived and the in-person seminars ended, I did not know I would never have another one.

VI. The Gap

The degree took six years. It was supposed to take two.

I met Catherine. I brought her to Annapolis to introduce her to my friends. Jonathan and Courtney were at that dinner. Sherry and her husband Alin were at that dinner. I valued their opinions on whether she would make a good match. Sherry and Alin told me that if I broke up with Catherine they were staying friends with her not me.

Patrick was my godfather at my baptism in August of 2020. It was a season of weddings and babies. Patrick got married. Maddie got married. I was a groomsman at her wedding. I got married. Maddie gave birth the day before. Patrick was a groomsman at my wedding. I started an MBA. Our first daughter arrived. I changed jobs several times trying to figure out where the new changed me fit into the world.

VII. Remote Semesters

When I returned to St. John's it was over Zoom. I was a baptized Catholic, a husband, a father. The friends I had started with had moved on. There were no more in-person seminars for me after the pandemic, only screens, only the strange experience of discussing Aristotle's Metaphysics in a grid of talking heads. It was a diminished version of what the program is meant to be. It was still more than I had found anywhere else.

Metaphysics was brutal. Almost as hard as Ulysses. I tried to write about the connection between cosmology and theology. The new atheists should make the same attempt.

In philosophy and theology our class spent considerable time on Romans and the question of faith and works. The class was not all Christians. There were Jews, atheists, deists, seekers of all sorts. I learned Faith is a particular grace. It comes when it comes but we also have to accept it when it comes. Some might assent and obey but not believe. Augustine in the Confessions could believe but could not bring himself to assent and obey. I think Augustine's weakness of will is perhaps more common or at least makes for a better story but the class had a few people who clearly could bring themselves to assent and obey but not to believe. I do not know which is the harder position.

In literature I returned to Homer. The Iliad in the light of Christ looks like bronze age Sopranos. A bunch of bloodthirsty sociopathic narcissists. It can be compelling storytelling just like the Sopranos but there is no arete to be found. I had arrived at St. John's wanting the virtues of those men. I could no longer see any.

Chaucer was an unexpected delight. The Middle English is easier to understand if you read it aloud. I read it to my wife in the hospital while she was in labor with our second daughter. The first class of my final semester I attended by Zoom from that same hospital room, my wife having just given birth.

VIII. What Was Waiting in the Sun

I came to St. John's wanting the virtues of Alexander. I learned from him. I learned from Achilles and Socrates and Alcibiades. I learned from Aristotle and Plato and Augustine and Aquinas. I learned from Herodotus and Joyce and Euclid and Chaucer. I learned from Bacon and Darwin and the American founders. I learned from Hobbes and Locke and Kant and Nietzsche and even Marx. I learned from the whole panoply of antiquity and modernity.

I also learned from Patrick and Sherry and Jonathan and Courtney and Maddie and Francis and Jack. I learn every day from my wife and my children. I learned more about gratitude than I thought possible from my sister's selfless babysitting so I could finish these courses.

In 2018 I suspected that another kind of education could prepare me to be a better friend and father. I was half right and half wrong. I had never before had education, only job training. Finally having some education, it did prepare me to try and be the man I want to be.

I hope my mother will not be offended if I say that St. John's truly is my alma mater.