Printed in the Spring 2026 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Trull, David "Arete after the Gods: Virtue between Worlds" Quest 114:2, pg 24-26
By David Trull
I feel the smallest and darkest I have in years. Pungent incense smoke snakes through the crowd. Monotone chant echoes in the heights above, a background hum of coughs, creaks, and baby cries below.
The “mass of the ages,” Christmas Eve, ’24. Midnight.
I grew up Catholic. We spent most of my mass-going years attending standard-issue, Novus Ordo churches. The kind with pancake breakfasts and citizen choirs and handshakes and hugs for the sign of peace. But my family went through a multiyear Latin Mass era, and in her empty-nester years, my mom has returned to it with aplomb. She adores the reverence, the chant, the timeless unchanging rhythm.
I never resonated with it, even in my youth, and left it behind long ago. The further it receded into the past, the more rose-tinted my glasses became.
Until I immersed myself in its presence once again.
I agreed to accompany the family to midnight mass because I love my mom, and she wanted everyone to be together on Christmas. That’s reason enough for me. I went into it with as open a mind as I could muster. It would be midnight deep in the depths of St. Louis, a remnant gathered to chant and pray. I would get something out of it, I was sure.
But as soon as I set foot in that cavernous cathedral and smelled the incense and the century-old stone, I felt a crushing weight descend, as if someone had hooked anvils onto my limbs. My nervous system grew restive, ceaselessly scanning for threats. As the mass plodded forward, I felt a burning desire to shout something profane, to rebel somehow. Or just to bail. Run out the door and never look back.
When it concluded, I was the first out the door. I took eager sips of the frigid 2 a.m. air, savoring the star-speckled open sky instead of the medieval stone.
But the majority of the crowd seemed transported by the whole thing. I felt a grinding unease: why did it crush my spirit while elevating others? Why did I feel hunted merely by setting foot within those walls?
The dissonance struck an especially sour note because I’d recently been on an extended run of growth and expansion. An “upward spiral,” I’ve been calling it.
I’d recently made a resolution to reinvest in “home.” After several years of nomadic living, spurred by the pandemic and the immense blessing of remote work, I’d finally grown weary of rootlessness. Despite the countless rich adventures that crossed my path, I felt a deep yearning to find fertile soil in which to take root.
So I resolved to stay home—not as a consumer, but as a participant in my Santa Barbara community.
One quality I’ve noticed in myself is that when I’m a stranger in a strange land, I have no trouble striking up conversations, saying yes to experience—crafting nourishing relationship ecosystems. I’m a different person.
Once I return “home,” I tend to shrink. Postmodern America has largely lost the art of community—our bonding rituals hover on the brink of extinction. I fell victim instantly. Not that I sat alone in my house. I just found it an immense struggle to know what to do or where to go to feel at home.
But I decided to invest on spec. Although the first steps were a slog, I steadily found my footing.
I knew I needed to jettison my overintellectualizing habits: I’d neglected embodiment for far too long.
So I got to know the baristas at my neighborhood coffee shop. I started playing beach volleyball and found a bright, loving little community built upon sunshine and motion.
I joined a local ecstatic dance circle and learned to express myself through unfiltered movement and music in ways that had felt painfully awkward before.
I began to practice tantra, sensing the presence of subtle energy and the power of human touch, absent society’s strings.
I embarked on numerous medicine journeys, which helped address festering wounds lodged deep in my psyche.
As this upward spiral unfurled, I noticed a shifting physiology. Open arms, firm eye contact, a new sensitivity to my space and surroundings (and an urge to beautify them). I began to think in terms of arete, the Aristotelian notion of excellence: an excellence in fulfilling one’s nature. I see this era in my life as getting better at being human. Balancing emotion, intellect, and body in a harmonious interplay—allowing right action to flow naturally.
I saw myself as a gardener, tending an ecosystem of practices that kept me aligned, flowing, and exuding life energy. Friends and family commented on the difference in my demeanor, and my new relationships became one of mutual opening—seeing and being seen.
This spiral’s ripening fruit crystallized into a new spiritual ethic: a normal human life, lived fully and with integrity, is as good as it gets.
Is virtuous, even. Existential angst (which I have acutely felt at times) has a habit of vanishing in the face of human thriving. Live well, live fully, and the “problem” vanishes. Virtue becomes the deeper meaning. You can feel it in your bones.
This stands in stark contrast to the inherent lack baked into the traditional religion of my youth, with its foundational tenet that humans are fallen, that life is a journey of finding our way back to worthiness, and that even then, we’re insufficient to do so. Our troubled souls cry out for sacred fire to purify them.
Looking back to that midnight mass, I think that’s the dissonance that struck me. The physiology of the ritual (silence, bowed posture, rigid body) was one of passive submission: the sense that authorized parties obtain and dispense virtue in a practice of passive reception. Sit still, stay quiet, let the priests perform the rite, receive the virtue. You don’t attain salvation by living as if you’re saved, but through unmerited grace conjured for you by a higher caste.
Now I feel the seed of salvation lies inborn in us all, ready to bloom in the springtime of action and participation. At the intersection of self-knowledge and a regulated nervous system.
That church was full to the brim that night, however: I have to account for that. Especially in the chaotic 2020s, what drew so many believers to that medieval midnight ritual?
The answer, I think, emerges from two contrasting takes on virtue.
On the one hand: virtue descends from order. In this age of ephemera and dislocation (which I feel acutely myself), the ancient mass offers a refuge, a sturdy shore unbeaten by the great unmaker that is time. The ritual safeguards the soul from chaos by bathing it in order, which resides above, in the pure, divine realm.
From the other viewpoint, virtue blossoms from the soil of internal coherence: A well-tended ecology of practices, shared life, and psychic repair. The habit of granting every inner voice a voice. Rendering life its own, self-evident work of art. Movement, a balanced nervous system. Mutual care in place of competition. Over time, you find there’s no void to fill. You’re enough.
Both paths aim for the same end: coherence.
One path achieves its aim by constraining the self, letting God do the work. There’s definitely wisdom to this. And in the face of the ceaseless sand shifting of postmodern times, its eternal sameness does help defeat time, however briefly. Within this context, the body and mind stand as vessels awaiting grace and awe.
The other path cultivates coherence by integrating the self: by letting it find freedom in the chorus of creation. From the outside, this approach can appear frivolous. After all, I’m putting beach volleyball ahead of millennia-old liturgy—sure looks like late-stage void filling, huh? Distraction to repress angst?
I’ve wrestled with that question, to be sure. But I’ve come to feel that its fruits are self-evident: the ecology of practices—whether it comprises intentional meditation, medicine journeys, or simply saying hello to your neighbors—eventually strikes a chord in the human soul that lets this inner harmony give rise to action. Action that betters existence, both your own and others.
Perhaps virtue, in any age, is our attempt to craft coherence in the face of chaos. We access it by submitting to a constructed spiritual order, or through living life consciously—letting the mind forget itself in immersive action.
During our Latin mass era, some families would drive two or three hours both ways, every Sunday and feast day, for that particular mass. They dreaded its loss, whether from financial collapse (the church’s maintenance costs were stratospheric) or papal decree. Without it, they’d find themselves marooned on an unforgiving shore.
I acknowledge the power of traditional religion, as embodied in forms like the Latin mass, to offer profound peace, clarity, and a refuge from the ravages of time. But its most glaring shortfall, to me, is its gatekeeping. If salvation lies in reception of grace from a properly performed rite, and only the anointed ones can perform that rite, that leaves humanity at the mercy of the availability of that rite.
For me, and perhaps for all of us yearning to flourish in this time between worlds, the path forward lies in trusting inner coherence and cultivating its container. Your interior church, activated by participation in life’s immediacy. Integrating order and chaos (and rehabbing “chaos” from its stature among the virtuous as a dirty word).
That’s the answer furnished by this 2020s Aristotelian ethic that I’ve been steadily stumbling upon. We all get a life to live, whatever its conditions. It’s in the steady quest to actualize ourselves across the dimensions of personhood that virtue and coherence emerge.
Great minds and souls fashioned those ancient systems, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for quelling Bronze Age chaos and ushering in civilization. But human thriving, here and now, calls for boldly stepping into life as it finds you. And I think you’ll find the joy of what I’ve recently begun to taste: a normal life, fully lived, is its own reward.
David Trull has worked as a fireworks salesman, forensic tax researcher, railroad logistician, teacher, songwriter, and musician. He studied philosophy through a Great Books immersion program at Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, California. A lifelong autodidact, he has advanced his explorations through a self-designed curriculum focused on the intersection of philosophy and theology.