Reading plan
Faith, Doubt, and the Soul
A path through God, sin, reason, and inward life
Works
12
Time
About 174 hours
Pace
One work per month makes this a one-year plan.
The religious and inward side of the Great Conversation asks how human beings stand before God, death, sin, reason, suffering, and hope.
The Syntopicon grounds this route in God, religion, theology, sin, soul, immortality, will, good and evil, love, and eternity. Those chapters do not give one doctrine. They gather revelation, philosophy, poetry, theology, skepticism, moral religion, and the modern crisis of faith.
The sequence begins with biblical creation, law, suffering, and grace. It then moves through Plato's soul, Plotinus's ascent, Augustine's restless self, Aquinas's ordered theology, Dante's moral cosmos, Pascal's wager and misery, Hume's critique, Kant's moral religion, Kierkegaard's ordeal of faith, and Dostoyevsky's trial of God.
The plan
1.Biblical writers, Biblical selections
c. 10th century BC-1st century AD
Format
Read Genesis 1-4, Exodus 20, Job 1-3 and 38-42, Psalms 22 and 51, Isaiah 53, Matthew 5-7, John 1, Romans 7-8, and 1 Corinthians 13 and 15.
Why this work
The Bible gives the first grammar: creation, command, fall, covenant, prophecy, incarnation, sin, grace, and resurrection. These selections do not summarize the whole Bible, but they supply the passages later writers keep answering. God is not an abstract principle here; God commands, judges, creates, speaks, hides, and promises. The human soul appears under law, grief, guilt, longing, and hope.
Why start here
Start here because Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky cannot be heard without these words in the background.
For Job, write down what each friend thinks suffering proves. Then compare their speeches with God's answer before deciding what the book has settled.
2.Plato, Phaedo
c. 380 BC
Format
Complete work.
Why this work
The places the soul before death. Socrates argues for immortality while his friends watch him prepare to die, so the dialogue never becomes merely abstract. Philosophy appears as a purification of the soul and a training for death. Plato gives a Greek account of immortality before Christian resurrection enters the argument.
The connection
The biblical selections place death under creation, judgment, and promise. Plato asks what the soul is and whether it can survive the body's dissolution.
Time
About 6 hours
Hold the arguments and the drama together. The setting matters because Socrates is not merely talking about death; he is meeting it.
3.Plotinus, Enneads
c. 270 AD
Format
Read First Ennead I and VI; Fifth Ennead I and IX; and Sixth Ennead IX.
Why this work
Plotinus traces an ascent from soul to intellect to the One. The divine is beyond ordinary being and speech, yet the soul can turn inward and upward toward it. Beauty, unity, contemplation, and purification become ways of thinking about return. Later Christian theology often speaks near his borders, even when it changes his terms.
The connection
Plato asks whether the soul survives death. Plotinus asks how the soul belongs to a higher order and how it may return to its source.
Do not force Plotinus into a diagram too quickly. Let the movement of return, inward and upward, become clear before naming every level.
4.Augustine, Confessions
c. 397-400 AD
Format
Read Books I-XI.
Why this work
Augustine makes the self a problem before God. Memory, desire, grief, ambition, lust, friendship, conversion, and time all become evidence of a soul that cannot rest in itself. The joins philosophical inwardness to biblical sin and grace. It teaches the plan how a life can be read as an argument.
The connection
Plotinus turns the soul inward and upward. Augustine turns inward too, but he finds a will divided by sin and healed by grace rather than ascent alone.
Do not treat the pear theft as a small moral anecdote. Augustine is asking why the will can love damage for its own sake.
5.Augustine, City of God
413-426 AD
Format
Read Books XI-XIV and XIX-XXII.
Why this work
The expands Augustine's inward drama into history. Two loves make two cities: love of God and love of self. Creation, angels, fall, sin, resurrection, peace, and final judgment become part of one providential account. Faith is not only private experience; it interprets history and human community.
The connection
The shows one soul being searched by God. The asks how every city and every history should be judged by the soul's final end.
Keep the two cities tied to two loves, not two institutions. Augustine's distinction is deeper than church versus state.
6.Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
1265-1274
Format
Read Part I Q2, Q12-13, Q75-83; Part I-II Q1-5, Q90-97; and Part II-II Q1-4, Q23, Q58.
Why this work
Aquinas gives theology an ordered argumentative form. God, the soul, happiness, law, faith, charity, and justice are treated through objections, authorities, answers, and replies. The article form disciplines disagreement rather than hiding it. He joins Aristotle's philosophy to Christian doctrine without pretending they are the same thing.
The connection
Augustine writes as a soul and as a bishop reading history under God. Aquinas arranges the questions so that faith and reason can meet in ordered dispute.
Read each article in order: objections, contrary authority, answer, replies. The replies often show exactly what Aquinas thinks the objection got right.
7.Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy
c. 1308-1321
Format
Read Inferno I-V, X, XXVI, XXXIII; Purgatorio I, XVI-XVIII, XXVII-XXX; and Paradiso I, X-XI, XVII, XXXIII.
Why this work
Dante makes theology visible as a journey of desire. Hell shows souls fixed in false loves, Purgatory shows love being healed, and Paradise shows love as the order of reality. Philosophy, politics, poetry, confession, and doctrine become one movement. The moral universe becomes something the reader has to walk through.
The connection
Aquinas argues in articles. Dante takes a related theological world and turns it into vision, movement, memory, and song.
Use notes for names, but do not let notes break the poem into debris. Read each canto as a whole before chasing every allusion.
8.Blaise Pascal, Pensées
1670
Format
Read the sections on diversion, misery, greatness, the wager, the hidden God, prophecy, and Jesus Christ. Numbering differs by edition, so use section headings if available.
Why this work
Pascal writes from the wound between reason and need. Human beings are great enough to know they are miserable, and miserable enough to seek distraction from that knowledge. The wager is only one part of a larger apologetic built around the hiddenness of God and the divided condition of man. His faith knows how fragile its hearer is.
The connection
Dante presents an ordered cosmos that can be journeyed through. Pascal writes for readers who no longer feel that order as obvious and must be reached through their instability.
Do not isolate the wager from the fragments on diversion and misery. Pascal is arguing with a reader who does not yet want the argument.
9.David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
1779
Format
Complete work.
Why this work
Hume tests natural theology through dialogue. The design argument, analogy, skepticism, evil, and the limits of human inference all come under pressure. The form matters because no single voice simply delivers Hume's conclusion. The work forces the plan to ask what reason can and cannot say about God from the world.
The connection
Pascal argues that the heart, misery, and history matter where proof fails. Hume presses the rational proofs themselves and asks whether their analogies can bear the weight placed on them.
Track Cleanthes, Demea, and Philo separately. The dialogue becomes sharper when you see which kind of theology each speaker defends.
10.Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone
1793
Format
Read Books I-II and IV.
Why this work
Kant moves religion into the field of moral reason. Evil is radical because it concerns the ordering of the will, not only bad acts. Historical faith must answer to moral religion, yet moral religion still needs symbols, community, and struggle. The question shifts from proving God to asking how religion relates to moral freedom.
The connection
Hume limits what speculative reason can infer about God. Kant accepts limits on speculation and turns toward the moral meaning of religion.
When Kant says evil is radical, do not hear melodrama. He means that disorder reaches the root by which maxims are chosen.
11.Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
1843
Format
Complete work.
Why this work
Kierkegaard returns to Abraham and makes faith strange again. The command to sacrifice Isaac cannot be reduced to ethics without losing what makes it terrifying. Faith appears as trust in God beyond public mediation, beyond proof, and beyond the security of being understood. Religious inwardness comes under trial.
The connection
Kant judges religion within moral reason. Kierkegaard asks whether faith may place the single individual in an absolute relation to God that ethics cannot comprehend.
Read the retellings of Abraham slowly. Kierkegaard is teaching you how much is lost when the story becomes familiar.
12.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
1880
Format
Read complete work. If time is short, do not skip Books V, VI, and XI-XII.
Why this work
Dostoyevsky closes the plan by putting faith, doubt, guilt, freedom, suffering, and love into a family trial. Ivan's rebellion against innocent suffering cannot be answered by easy piety. Alyosha and Zosima do not refute doubt as much as live another form of response. The novel gathers the plan's questions into persons who wound, accuse, confess, and hope.
The connection
Kierkegaard makes faith an ordeal before God. Dostoyevsky sets that ordeal inside modern doubt, family guilt, legal judgment, and the suffering of children.
Ideas touched
Time
About 34 hours
Read Ivan's chapters and Zosima's teaching as answers that do not cancel each other. The novel's force comes from refusing a cheap victory.
Where to go from here
After these twelve works, faith should look less like a single topic and more like a long dispute over the whole human person. Reason can seek God, resist God, limit itself before God, or become desperate for what it cannot prove. The soul appears as intellect, will, memory, love, guilt, freedom, and hunger.
A good next move is Milton's , which makes creation, rebellion, obedience, and freedom into epic poetry. Another is Augustine's , which narrows the question to evil, responsibility, and divine foreknowledge.