I was fifteen when Peter Weir’s movie Fearless came out, and I saw it in the theater with my dad and his girlfriend. This was in Dallas in January 1994, and it was the last weekend before my sophomore year resumed. We had just celebrated my grandmother’s birthday at her house and wanted to take in one last movie before the holiday season ended. I wasn’t prepared. The film tells the story of a plane crash and the relationship that forms between two survivors: Max, a wealthy San Francisco architect, and Carla, a Latina from the Mission District whose infant son died in the crash. The promotions made it seem like the story of a man possessed of the idea of his invincibility, but the reality was a drama of marital strife and life crisis, not your typical teenage fare. Yet it wrenched something loose inside me. Over the weeks that followed, I replayed its devastating climax in my head during laps at swim team practice. Recollecting the strings of Górecki’s Third Symphony led me to tears. I confirmed its V.H.S. release date with Blockbuster later that spring and made everyone come over to my house to watch it after school that day. I remember it was the day Kurt Cobain died.

Fearless is a survival narrative, but it’s also a story of estrangement and reconciliation, and how the shape of a life depends on its constraints. I didn’t understand any of this at fifteen, even though I had suffered a traumatic experience of my own two years earlier when my mother died from cancer. Her final months at home were terribly painful. She could no longer eat, so she had a tube through her nose that constantly pumped the contents of her stomach into a nearby vat. The house was saturated in sickly smells and a sadness my dad did his very best to manage. I hid in my room most of the time, but I was alongside her at the hour of her death and held her as she expelled her last breath. I had the sense of a soul leaving her body, but I don’t think I told anyone that. I cried inconsolably in the moment and during intermittent nights that followed, all the while failing to register the event as the catastrophe it so evidently was.

The teenage years beckoned. I grew a foot taller and lost my braces in the weeks after her funeral and was soon gripped by new appetites. I had been baptized and confirmed in the Presbyterian church during the period of her illness, but you wouldn’t have known it from the antics of my high school years. I still recall the nice church elder who interviewed me before confirmation. It was evening in our living room and he was asking me about the Gospel, but movies were all I wanted to talk about. I had just seen Flatliners, a thriller about medical students who induce death for each other to get glimpses of the afterlife, and was drawn to its theme of atonement and the sense that we are responsible for the ills that befall us.

Movies often provided the script for my young life. Flatliners I left behind, but Fearless merited repeat viewings. As I got older, different scenes would strike me in new ways. The last time I saw it, one scene stood out. A psychologist has brought Max to Carla’s house in the hopes that he might get through to her. Since the crash, Carla has left the house only for Mass and confession. She prays and weeps incessantly. To prepare Max for what he’s about to encounter, the psychologist explains that Carla “is very old world, you know, full of guilt and shame.” To which Max responds, bemused: “I’m full of guilt and shame. How’s that ‘old world’?”

That was ten years ago. Between high school and this last viewing, I had gone to college and graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in European intellectual history. I was unsure whether history or philosophy was the path to truth, and this seemed to split the difference. I had produced a dissertation and book on the influence of Spinoza on twentieth-century French thought. I was drawn to Spinoza’s grandiosity and the vast disagreements over the meaning of his work; I credit a one-of-a-kind high school teacher for my fondness for the French avant garde. Along the way, I’d married my wife, a friend from high school who somehow missed the mass viewing of Fearless. She had the same high school French teacher and would also become a French scholar. Our efforts to find academic employment in the same place in the early days of the global financial crisis had led us to Australia, a country with which we had no prior connection. After several uneasy years, we were starting to feel settled. We welcomed a daughter into the world. We bought a house.

Then things started to go wrong. Two years earlier, I had won a coveted national research grant at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, where I’d been a postdoc. But I chose to move the grant to the Australian National University in Canberra, where my wife had landed a permanent position. Despite blithely expecting a continuing appointment to follow—I had proven I could win grants, after all—I learned there would be no work for me at the conclusion of my fellowship.

This was destabilizing, but the truth is I was already feeling unmoored. I hadn’t been writing the book I was supposed to be writing, on Spinoza and secularism, but was instead trying to ingratiate myself with the analytic philosophers at the A.N.U. My work was scattered. Fatherhood was a rough adjustment, and I’d mysteriously lost my ability to handle alcohol, which was only really a problem because I’d begun to drink so much more of it. Unhappy at home and facing unemployment, I did the rational thing and auditioned for a play with a local theater company, resuming a path I’d abandoned after college. Instead of redoubling my academic efforts or spending time with my wife and our baby, I took on the role of Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge, an old-world man in a new-world setting whose passions destroy him and his family. Along with my drinking tolerance, I had apparently also lost my sense of irony.

So life wasn’t entirely bleak: I had the play, and I eventually landed another fixed-term appointment, this time at the University of Melbourne, a position which I managed to accept more with bitterness than relief. I started a weekly commute by plane and was much more concerned for what this meant for me than my family. When given the chance to teach an honors seminar in my new department, I opted for Althusserian Marxism, the most esoteric, provocative, and irrelevant tendency in modern French Spinozism. Tensions simmered at home throughout the semester and finally erupted over the break. I brought in the new year alone on our porch, drunk and staring into a sparkler, muttering, “I never want to feel like this again.”

I decided to get clean the way fortyish men do, by working my way through an array of fad diets. I downloaded a meditation app—and I have to resist the temptation to be arch about it because it proved beneficial, as did the new attention to my health. I also decided that next semester’s honors seminar should be of more general value. I chose Spinoza’s Ethics as our sole text, to be read slowly and methodically over the term. I watched students fall in love with this masterpiece, enchanted by Spinoza’s orchestrations. His geometric method integrated rationalism and mysticism in a vision of Deus sive Natura—God, that is to say, Nature—as the one and only substance that exists. There is no sense in which we are apart from substance. We are finite modes of it, expressed in the two attributes of thought and extension. Substance, being infinite, has infinite attributes, but these are the only two available to finite modes such as us.

Meanwhile, I was falling out of love. At some point Spinoza’s arcane language had become self-evident to me. Of course I’m a mode; what else would I be? In this I was like the undergraduates I saw nod vigorously as Hume helped them realize something they had long suspected, that their personhood was nothing more than an illusion of continuity stemming from rapid-fire sense impressions. But Spinozism was beginning to lose its charm, especially the French variant I’d done so much to promote. Seeking a new approach, I had become interested in Spinoza’s relationship to political realism, a tradition associated with his near contemporaries Machiavelli and Hobbes. I see this now as a kind of salvage operation. Spinoza and I just needed a reset. This turned out to be a risky move because it led me to Reinhold Niebuhr and his essay “Augustine’s Political Realism.” On the matter of appetites and their tendency to discord, Augustine sounded a lot like Spinoza. But that was impossible. Spinoza avoided the language of evil and corruption and certainly had no truck with sin, at least not as understood theologically. Definition six in Book II of the Ethics is clear: “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing.” If reality is perfect, any sense that something is wrong or disfigured is a failure of imagination or optics.

I had not thought about sin directly in years, maybe since I tried to explain Flatliners to the church elder. But just coming across the concept stirred something in me, not unlike the old-world guilt and shame Max and Carla were working through in Fearless. I had thought there was no concept of sin in Spinozism, but I investigated further and discovered Spinoza had a compendium of Augustine’s writings in his personal library and that he makes some grudging concessions to original sin in his final work, the unfinished Political Treatise. Here Spinoza confronts the doctrine directly, challenging its metaphysical coherence—“They say [the first man] was deceived by the Devil, but who deceived the Devil?”—only to proffer an alternative account of Adam’s actions not as a failure of will but of reasoning. The cause? “Like us, he was subject to affects.”

This seemed like splitting hairs, and it was consistent with a growing suspicion I had that a large part of Spinoza’s appeal lay in the absolution on offer in his system. As modes of substance, everything we do follows from God’s nature, up to and including the instincts, emotions, and affects that bridle us and prevent us from doing as we ought. This so-called necessitarianism is not unrelated, incidentally, to the radical Protestant milieu in which Spinoza found himself after his excommunication from Amsterdam’s Jewish community in 1656. In taking the action out of our hands, Spinoza was telling us that it wasn’t our fault. There are no bad choices because there are no choices, only causes and effects ad infinitum. The question then is why Ethics? In this vision, living well is a matter of striving to render our passive affects active, to no longer be subject to them. More consoling still, such striving—the conatus by which “each thing seeks to persevere in its being”—is built into the order of things. The paradox is precise; such striving happens as a matter of course. You just need to wake up to it.

My embrace of a carb-free diet a few months earlier had been consistent with the good news Spinoza had to offer. Amending my life was a matter of using reason to better manage my affects with all the material levers available, a reason made reciprocally more perspicuous by these affective enhancements in turn. Because it was not disobedience that got Adam in the end. Subject to affects, his “power to reason correctly” was held in check. He could not have done otherwise. Surely an active embrace of his powers, had it been possible, would have led him to appreciate the negative consequences of ingesting the apple and its high glycemic index. No longer an abuse of free will, the Fall is now understood to have been a simple misunderstanding. When Spinoza finally delivers his new and improved definition of sin as “an action that cannot be rightly done,” we can only be pleased by his cleverness. He’s telling us that there is no sin because, seen sub specie aeternitatis, there is no action that qua action is not rightly done. Because truly to act is to act truly; it is to do rightly. The only error lies in inaction, subjection, passivity—in a word, suffering. This is what is to be avoided at all costs.

Faced with Spinoza’s conclusion, my thoughts took a strange turn to The Smiths, whose songs were another script for my youth. The tune was “Panic” and the message was clear: this says nothing to me about my life.

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Meditation, reading Augustine, one awkward visit to an A.A. meeting in Melbourne: all these things led me to consider going to church again. I opted for a Presbyterian one in Canberra because it was the tradition I knew. I met lovely people and heard good sermons, aided by the Scottish brogue of the pastor. A few months later my family returned to Paris for a few weeks of work. I was set to deliver a paper on sin in Augustine and Spinoza, one that was unintelligible in the end because of my handwringing. Knowing a Presbyterian church would be hard to find, I persuaded my wife that we should all go to a Sunday Mass somewhere. At the very least, it would be a good cultural experience. Spoiled for options, I selected Saint-Eustache in the first arrondissement.

This was not without personal significance. Years earlier, I’d found my way to this church after a night of debauchery and had sat in silence for a very long time. It didn’t occur to me to speak to anyone, much less to go to confession. But the episode stuck with me.

I had a college girlfriend who was Catholic, so I had been to Mass before. This experience was different. Like my first cigarette, it was slightly nauseating, but I was soon thinking about the next one. In our remaining time in Paris I went to Mass every day, bouncing around on the metro to take in as many churches as I could. I was astonished to learn Pascal was buried not two hundred yards from a flat where I had lived for two years as a graduate student. I read Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission, whose protagonist is an expert on Huysmans. All I remembered about Huysmans was the fatally bejeweled tortoise in Against the Grain, symbol of decadence. But now I was searching the bouquinistes for a vintage copy of En Route, the first volume of his conversion trilogy. Looking back, it all seems a little too on the nose, too cute. But I was enthralled.

When we returned home, I continued going to Mass and started attending an R.C.I.A. program at my local parish. I found a copy of En Route at the university library, read the first page, and put it back on the shelf, thinking the juice would not be worth the squeeze. With the majesty of Paris fading, I settled into the rhythm of the liturgy and read all the things nascent converts read. I told a few close friends about what was happening. I voiced my indecision to one who had been raised Catholic and who explained to me that my desire for a lightning bolt of illumination was too Protestant. What I needed to understand was that Catholics just go through the motions and that’s it. Here something clicked. A throughline of my work on Spinoza and his French reception “contra phenomenology” was that experience itself was not an authenticator of truth claims and that what was true was certainly not made true by whether you believed it or felt it to be so. This continuity comforted me. I didn’t want my turn to the Church to be a break from my past but a consequence of it.

I was beginning to hear about sacramental reality and what it means for sacraments to be efficacious. You can imagine how pleased I was to learn that you feel nothing when you receive them; that’s how you know they’re working. The mystery is why my distrust of experience led me to trust the Church more, when my own experience in Saint-Eustache had played such a catalytic role and vindicated my inchoate sense that something was missing among the Presbyterians. The delight that comes with intellectual discovery was one I knew well, as was the elation I always found in Paris. I knew these were crucial contexts for what transpired in those three weeks, but I also knew they were not what mattered. I had come to Paris reckoning with sin, and I knew, even if my auditors didn’t, that Augustine and Spinoza were a means and not an end in this regard. But what I found was another reality that I had long sought to deny, or better put, a reality I didn’t even know I was denying. Even as I had every possible explanation for what I was feeling—from psychology, sociology, or Spinozist affect theory—nothing could explain away that what had transpired was an encounter with grace.

This is why, once we returned to Canberra, the more my enthusiasm waned, the more confident I was in this reality and its durability. Attending Mass and R.C.I.A. classes and meeting and visiting with other Catholics, I felt tired, distracted, and bored at moments. I positively cringed at others. But it never occurred to me to stop showing up.

My teaching load had me focused on the early moderns. I did the next honors seminar on Bishop Berkeley, a good Christian philosopher. But the thinker who truly captivated me was the one I had so long overlooked in Paris and who helped me to make these realities intelligible in a way Spinoza never could. I had always carried with me, as a kind of treasure, a phrase of Pascal’s that served as an epigraph to John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, a novel I first read when I was way too young for it: “The motions of grace, hardness of the heart, external circumstances.” I never understood what the connection between the three phrases was; it just sounded nice in my memory. But now it was as if everything were illuminated. I saw three phenomena, distinct but related, whose seemingly fortuitous relationship to one other provides shape to a life. It’s a vision of life as a puzzle, one whose pieces may or may not fit, a set of contingencies.

The mystery of grace to me was and still is its indiscriminate distribution combined with its selective reception. So, faced with this mystery, what is to be done? Elsewhere Pascal says kneel and you will believe. Belief is a knowing that takes the form of unknowing to the extent that it is not thought but lived. Pascal is not inviting us to consider kneeling to see if we might believe. If you seek to know first, you will never believe. The injunction is deliberately unreflective. A leap of faith suggests one and done—way too Protestant. Kneeling is a motion that takes time. It is also significant that Pascal does not suggest, much less promise, that you will feel anything.

I exhausted myself trying to understand prevenient grace as distinct from sufficient grace in Pascal’s outlook before my intellectual labors took me elsewhere. But through it all I kept kneeling. And eventually I discovered I was praying, finding intermittent repose in the cloud of unknowing and truth in the image of the Church as a barque or a shelter. This is a far cry from Spinoza, whose contempt for unknowing is summed up in his description of the will of God as “the asylum of ignorance.” This is asylum in the legal sense, as sanctuary. The will of God is a cover for our ignorance of the causes of things, which is the source of our sad passions. Were it exposed to Spinoza’s reasoning, this ignorance would be vaporized and, the cloud dissipating, we would come to acquire an “intellectual love of God” that sees God as all power and no purpose. This is a vision of love as dependent on knowledge; the more you know, the more you love. Where Spinoza saw an ethics, Pascal saw concupiscence. The desire for love gives us a reason to put all our effort into knowing more and knowing better. The trouble is that when that effort is exhausted, it also gives us an alibi for withdrawing love from what we cannot finally understand and replacing it with fear.

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The plot of Fearless, the duration of the film, is a space between death and life: descent and something like resurrection. In a pivotal moment in the third act, Carla is bereft at her knowledge that she loosened her grip on her son as the plane first touched ground and hence is responsible for his death. To show her otherwise, Max buckles her into the center seat in the back of his Volvo, gives her a metal toolbox from his trunk to clutch to her chest, and then drives the car full speed into a brick wall. Both survive, but not before the toolbox shoots through the windshield like a projectile. Spinoza says, “We do not know what a body can do.” The meaning of Max’s act is the complete inverse. In this moment of intercession—Carla later calls him her angel—he is trying to show her that we do know what a body can’t do, which is to say, the limit of our capacities.

As he races toward the wall, Max speaks the end of a Hail Mary. This is but one of many Catholic elements in Fearless—the wound on Max’s torso, talk of “forbidden fruit”—and I recall them now, amused at how meaningless they were to me before. When I first met my parish priest to discuss joining the R.C.I.A. program, I told him I couldn’t care less about the culture of Catholicism. I only cared if it was true. When I was finally received into the Church several months later, I still did not know if it was true. When a fellow student in the R.C.I.A. asked me for my thoughts on the eve of our reception, he noted a name curiously missing from my response.

Seven years on, I still find it easier to talk to Jesus than I do to talk about Him. The reasons for my faith remain unknown to me. I believe they are bound up with all my relationships, but anyone who has seen Fearless and remembers its final frame will know which among them has counted most. I also believe they have something to do with my baptism and the death that surrounded it and the aura this event threw over the awakening to the power of images and words that took place in the years that followed. I believe the birth of my daughter brought me back to the truth of this moment, as holding her in my arms made it impossible for me to go on rejecting the reality of the soul, notwithstanding my desperate attempts to cling to falsehood. I believe that guilt and shame and sin were a path to hope and mercy and grace. I know the apologetics. I know why we have sufficient reason to trust the Gospel accounts. I am with Saint Paul in the knowledge that if Christ is not resurrected, then our faith is in vain. I believe that conditional to be true. I also believe that our faith is not in vain, but I so often find myself unable to communicate this to anyone, to make my love for Our Lord, His Church, and Our Lady understood. And I am sure there is so much that I have not understood.