YOU ASKED FOR THIS
On Education, Capacity, and the Gift of What We Actually Learned
by
Nathan Christopher Sawatzky
Preface
Math has always been a unique challenge for me. Strong in understanding it, abysmal in translating it. What it actually communicated to me was order, and order is a strange word, because it can't be defined in the absence of the chaos it's organizing.
The first thing I ever wanted to be was a fighter pilot. I wouldn't shut up about it. I dreamed it, played it, fantasized it. Then a small thing entered my life, called algebra, and math went bilingual overnight. Bilingual meant I didn't understand it anymore. When the people around me spoke it fluently, I was left standing in the dark. It stopped being fun. It started asking me to assign letters and values to problems I didn't see the need to understand. I lost the motivation to learn it correctly because of a misjudged means of being taught it, not a lack of interest. It was fear of change. Suddenly being a fighter pilot was terrifying. Too much math was involved.
If I'd been told, back then, how much math was actually behind drumming and photography, I might not have pursued either one as a passion. Not because the math wasn't there. Because the fear of misunderstanding it would have changed the lens I first saw it through.
You asked for this, the title says, and I mean it exactly as bluntly as it reads. This is what happens when a person actually goes back and asks what they were taught, and why they believed it, and what they've quietly unlearned since. It has to start somewhere small enough that nothing gets to hide behind a credential.
The Queen's Digestion
Even a royal takes a shit every other day. Process is process. Strip away rank, title, reputation, everything performed and believed about a person, and what's left standing is process, the body doing what a body does regardless of who's inside it. That's the one thing genuinely hard to doubt about anything, that something is happening. Descartes ran the same test centuries ago, doubt everything possible, and see what's still standing once the doubting is done honestly. What's left, for anyone, human or otherwise, is closer to activity than to certainty. A queen's digestion doesn't check her crown at the door. Neither does mortality, hunger, or exhaustion. Process doesn't negotiate with hierarchy. It happens, to everyone, on the same schedule biology assigned, regardless of what anyone decided that person was worth.
Education, most of the time, gets built entirely on top of the part that isn't process, the crown instead of the digestion. Status, credential, the letters after a name, all of it layered over the one thing every single student actually shares with every other student in the room, a body doing what a body does, a mind doing what a mind does, regardless of whose classroom it's sitting in. Strip that layering away and the actual question underneath any education gets a lot simpler. Not who taught this, or who's certified to teach it, but what's actually true, and does it hold up once the crown comes off.
What Only One Thing Can Do
Nearly every human function, examined closely enough, turns out to be an expression of self first, even the functions that look selfless on the surface. Service, looked at honestly, is rarely a purely animal response to an environment. In nature, an animal serving another out of conscious recognition of the selfless benefit of it is genuinely rare. What looks like altruism in the wild resolves, almost every time, into helping a relative share its own genes forward, or a transaction, help now in exchange for help later, self-interest running quietly underneath something that looks selfless from a distance. Furthering, choosing to elevate something beyond your own survival math, is close to a purely human category.
Cause and effect, on its own, is a limiting concept. It becomes the broadest and most enlightening concept available the moment selflessness gets introduced into it. A person has to understand what they are and what they could be before they can consciously run away from the thinking that got them to where they currently stand. That's not cause and effect. That's understanding the effect and what caused it, then making a distinct change in behavior before moving forward. That's the actual basis of what gets called education, the building blocks required to understand what a building block even is, so it can be used to understand a selfless self.
Nearly everything created moves, digests, ages, processes. Only one thing in this whole account has ever claimed not to change at all. I the Lord do not change[1]. The same yesterday, today, and forever[2]. Motion is the signature of everything made. Stillness, real stillness, not the absence of activity but actual immutability, belongs to exactly one thing. Recognizing that isn't the same as recognizing that something is moving. It's recognizing that only one thing can be truly still.
The Cave and the Doubt
Plato staged this exact question twenty-four centuries early. Prisoners chained facing a wall their whole lives, watching shadows cast by objects behind them, mistaking the shadows for the whole of reality, because shadows are all they've ever been shown[3]. Education, in that story, isn't filling an empty container. It's the painful, disorienting process of turning around and discovering the fire that was casting the shadows the entire time.
Descartes offers the other half, method instead of metaphor. Strip away everything that could possibly be doubted, culturally inherited, assumed, handed down without ever being checked, and see what's actually still standing once the doubting is done honestly[4]. But there's a competing answer to the same question, worth holding alongside his rather than instead of it. The philosopher Gadamer argued that inherited tradition, a text or practice that's survived generations of actual use and scrutiny, carries real epistemic weight precisely because it already got filtered by that survival, not sifted by one person's doubt in a single afternoon, but tested by centuries of people actually checking whether it held[5]. Burke made a version of the same argument about inherited social wisdom versus reason rebuilt from zero[6]. Both are real, competing, defensible answers to how a person actually knows what they know, radical doubt for what needs rebuilding, something closer to reverence for what's already survived being tested.
Neither answer, on its own, actually settles the harder question sitting underneath both of them. Knowing something and merely believing it aren't automatically the same thing, even once the doubt or the reverence has been applied correctly. There's a third piece here, sharper than either, the philosophical difference between knowledge and mere belief. The classical definition treats knowledge as justified true belief, but philosophers have identified real cases, called Gettier problems, where someone believes something true, has what looks like solid justification, and still doesn't actually know it, because the justification and the truth were connected by luck rather than anything real[7]. A person can be taught something true, believe it confidently, and still not actually know it, if the reasoning behind the teaching was flawed even though the conclusion happened to be correct.
Comforted in Isolation
Confession time. I barely passed high school. I only scraped through Math Essentials 10 because I stole the answer book, photocopied it, and passed the results off as my own work. I cheated, and then I lied about how much I actually knew.
Somewhere earlier than that, I'd been told I wasn't smart enough to learn it. That likely wasn't premeditated on the part of whoever said it. But I also can't put the whole weight of what happened next on somebody else's careless sentence. I was listening to my own dopamine-addicted mind by then too, looking for the easiest exit from a feeling I didn't want, and cheating was exactly that, an exit, not an education. Both things were true at once. A bad sentence got planted early, and I'm the one who chose what to grow from it.
That's one data point, not the whole case. Stepping back from it, school, looked at plainly, taught me reading, writing, basic math, some geopolitical and moral positions, and how to navigate a social network. What I actually learned, unequivocally, through the whole process, had almost nothing to do with the curriculum and everything to do with what I learned about how I learn. I was comforted in isolation, and what I actually retained was based on what I wanted to learn, not what somebody wanted to educate me with.
There's real research behind why isolation works that way, not just a feeling about it. Being observed genuinely improves performance on simple, well-rehearsed tasks and measurably impairs performance on anything complex, novel, or still being learned[8]. Self-monitoring, managing how a person is coming across, consumes real cognitive resources that would otherwise go toward the actual thinking. Remove the audience, and that whole budget of attention returns to the task instead of to managing how the task looks from outside. Tutoring built around a person's own specific gaps, rather than a uniform lesson aimed at an average student, has been shown to outperform standard instruction by two full standard deviations, a gap so large one researcher spent the rest of his career trying to find a scalable version of it[9]. A system built on aversive correction, wait for the pain, then adjust, produces compulsion. A system built on actually understanding a starting point before the pain happens produces comprehension, and there's a real difference between adjusting your actions to hit the same fixed goal and actually questioning the goal itself[10].
This isn't the same aloneness essay three already argued fails. That essay said private, unwitnessed choice fails, because nothing checks it. This is different, unevaluated, not unwitnessed. Someone can still be present without demanding a performance. That's the exact difference between eighteen years spent with no further public confirmation needed, an identity already settled before anyone required it to be proven[11], and a choice made where nobody's checking it at all. One is freedom. The other is exactly what fails.
Photorealistic drawing takes real geometry, proportion, perspective, negative space, all of it math in a different uniform. I never once resented learning that math, because arriving at the finished drawing let me take my own time, correct a mistake along the way without anyone watching the correction happen, and the whole thing simply wasn't finished, or correct, until I said it was. Algebra, a drawing, and a Tom Clancy war front are all the same discipline underneath, math applied to a problem. But arriving at a drawing's peaceful conclusion is a drawing. War is a bad answer to a math problem that was never smart to solve that way in the first place. The difference was never the math. It was who got to decide when the equation was actually finished, and what it cost to be wrong along the way while getting there.
That's the war and peace of my own mind, and isolation is where I actually found both versions of it. Nobody got to tell me when it was over but me.
What Never Made the Syllabus
What I really learned in high school, or in all the hours I wasn't actually in it. I learned how to draw. I learned my own expression of art. I learned how to write a love letter. I learned how to apologize. I learned how to stop a game when somebody got hurt. I learned what it meant to miss a friend. I learned what it meant to fall in love. I learned respect for my peers, and respect for authority. I got an education in the social hierarchy. I learned time management. I learned how to prioritize myself. I learned how to follow the rules, and I learned how to break them. I learned how to get suspended, and I learned how to get an F. I learned what didn't work.
There's an actual name for this, coined by a sociologist in 1968, the hidden curriculum, everything a school actually teaches that was never on the syllabus, social hierarchy, how authority works, how to follow rules and how to survive breaking them, taught constantly and never once graded[12]. While the assigned reading covered cell biology and equations, I was privately reading Tom Clancy, books about conquest and war and the specific human failure to empathize across difference. That wasn't truancy from my real education. That was my real education, self-selected, running in parallel to the official one, and by any honest accounting, it taught me more about how people actually fail each other than anything on the assigned list did.
Some of what got self-taught this way was never really about failure at all. Some of it was about noticing something true that nobody had assigned yet either.
The Collision of da Vinci
Around 1490, Leonardo drew a man with his arms and legs stretched into two overlapping positions, inscribed inside a circle and a square, and called it after a Roman architect named Vitruvius, who'd written centuries earlier that the human body was the model for ideal proportion in architecture itself[13]. It's usually presented as art, and it is, but look at what's actually written above and below the figure. Integer fractions. The face is a tenth of the total height. The hand is a tenth. The foot is a sixth. This wasn't decoration wearing the appearance of precision. It was precision, expressed the only way available at the time for showing that the human body and mathematics were describing the same underlying structure.
A popular claim deserves correcting before this goes any further, since it's repeated constantly and doesn't actually hold. The Vitruvian Man is not built on the golden ratio, whatever the internet keeps insisting. It's built on Vitruvius's own integer proportions and Euclidean geometry, and the golden ratio only shows up in a handful of coincidental measurements, not as the drawing's actual foundation[14]. That correction matters, not because the golden ratio myth is offensive, but because the real story is more useful than the myth. Leonardo wasn't reaching for a mystical number. He was doing math, carefully, in service of understanding a body, and calling the result art because art was the only vocabulary precise enough, at the time, to hold both the measurement and the wonder of it in the same image.
Art, in Leonardo's hands, was never separate from progress. It was the instrument progress used before progress had better tools of its own.
The Angle That Meets Alignment
Leonardo's proportions only worked because they were measured against something that didn't move. A tenth, a sixth, integer fractions holding steady regardless of which body got measured against them. Take away the fixed measure and the whole drawing collapses into guesswork, since nothing left would be checkable against anything else.
Order works the same way at a much larger scale, and it's worth being precise about where the actual reference point sits. Not a rule imposed from outside on something that resented it. A measure that never needed correcting in the first place, because it was never dependent on anything else to be what it already was. Classical theology has a specific word for that kind of self-sufficiency, aseity, existing completely, needing nothing outside itself, true before a single created thing existed to reflect it back[15]. That's not a small technicality. Everything measured against a fixed point in this essay so far, a body against Vitruvius's proportions, a note against a pitch, a character against a Creator who doesn't change, depends on that same principle holding somewhere underneath it. A ruler that could shift wouldn't be a ruler at all.
Most measuring systems people actually live by don't have this problem solved. Currency drifts. Reputation drifts. Even a culture's own sense of what counts as beautiful drifts, generation to generation, without anyone noticing the ground had moved. A fixed point isn't just convenient for drawing a proportional figure. It's the only thing that makes comparison honest at all, across people, across centuries, across a body measured against a standard five hundred years old and still holding.
The Loom That Learned to Count
In 1801, a French weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard solved a problem that had nothing to do with computers and everything to do with pattern. Complex woven designs, brocade, damask, had required a second person, a draw boy, manually lifting threads by hand for every single row. Jacquard replaced the draw boy with a stack of interchangeable cards, punched with holes, each card corresponding to one row of the design[16]. A hole let a thread through. No hole stopped it. That's the entire mechanism, and it's also, precisely, binary, one and zero, decades before anyone called it that.
Charles Babbage saw the loom and understood immediately what he was looking at. He adapted the same punched cards to feed instructions into his Analytical Engine, generally considered the first design for a modern computer, and Ada Lovelace, watching the two machines side by side, wrote the sentence that closes this whole argument: the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves[17]. Not a metaphor she reached for because it sounded elegant. A literal description of the same underlying operation, expressed once in silk and once in mathematics. Computing didn't borrow a clever comparison from weaving. It borrowed the actual mechanism, card for card, hole for hole. Art, again, arrived first, carrying the structure something else would eventually need, long before that something else existed to need it.
Forty-Five Pounds, Then Four Hundred Fifty Million
In 1958, a painting believed to be a damaged copy of a lost Leonardo sold at a London auction for forty-five pounds. Nobody in that room thought they were looking at anything real. It disappeared for decades, resurfaced at a small regional sale in 2005, still dismissed, still doubted, and was bought by a group of dealers for less than ten thousand dollars. After restoration and years of expert argument over its authenticity, some of which continues to this day, it sold at Christie's in 2017 for four hundred fifty million dollars, the most ever paid for a painting at auction[18]. The image itself never changed. Same canvas, same brushwork, same face. What changed, entirely, was what a room full of people had been convinced to believe about it.
What the painting actually depicts isn't incidental to this whole argument. Salvator Mundi. Savior of the world. A portrait of Christ, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding the earth inside a small crystal orb, sold for an amount large enough to be its own kind of headline, by people who may or may not have believed anything about who the painting depicted, purchasing an object whose worth and whose price had, by that point, almost nothing left in common. The image was worth exactly what it had always been worth, whatever that actually means for a five-hundred-year-old painting of a face. The price was worth whatever forty minutes of competitive bidding between two people decided it should be. Those aren't the same number, and this whole essay has already spent a great deal of time explaining why they were never going to be.
The Fillet and the Fig
I'm a God-fearing Christian, and I love bacon. My favorite thing to eat is a properly cooked, well accompanied filet mignon, wagyu specifically, a delicacy I order in moderation, consistently, because I enjoy the experience of eating it. I also love vegetables, fruit, nuts, and combining all of it on one plate for an experience that's educating, enlightening, and genuinely life giving to me, and every bit of it, in the end, becomes a steaming pile of shit regardless of which choice got it there.
This isn't an argument for or against being a carnivore, an omnivore, or a vegetarian. I understand the reasoning behind all three. What's unique to me is having the capacity to make that decision for myself. If I looked at it purely through a lens of love, sacrifice, and empathy, I might never take a knife to that steak. But I'm human, I love the taste of it, and I've arrived at a conscious understanding that says it's fine. I'll never fully know if that conclusion is perfect. I just know I lived the life that arrived at it.
Scripture addresses this directly, believers disagreeing over what's permissible to eat, and the resolution isn't a ruling on which side is correct. Each person should be fully convinced in their own mind[19]. Whatever is not from faith is sin[20]. The sin was never in the eating or the abstaining. It was in acting against an honestly examined conviction, either way.
That same conviction is where the actual identity question underneath this whole essay finally gets answered, not in theory, in an actual decision.
Camera, Knife, and Drumstick
Look closely at the actual tools handed to a person for expression, and they turn out to be different in kind, not just in shape. A camera is a complex assembly of mechanical parts, designed for precision and exact timing calculations that only conscious thought could have formulated in the first place, built specifically to capture something more efficiently than the eye alone ever could. A knife exists to cut, refined from something already doing that job in nature, a sharp rock, a broken edge, the tool enhancing the doing of a thing rather than capturing anything at all. And drumsticks need to be wood, specifically, almost universally, carried for exactly one purpose and nowhere else, never mistaken for a walking stick or a kitchen tool the way a knife or a camera might slip into other uses without anyone noticing.
Three different tools, three entirely different relationships to the person holding them. It's not odd to walk around with a knife. It's not odd to walk around with a camera, strap or no strap. It would be genuinely strange to walk around carrying drumsticks everywhere, because a drumstick only exists inside its one specific act. That specificity isn't a limitation. It's the clearest possible evidence of what the tool was actually made for, the same way a cymbal, struck for no purpose but the sound itself, has no other use waiting inside it either. Some tools were built to serve almost anything. Others were built to serve exactly one thing, honestly, without pretending to be anything more useful than that.
An education that only ever hands someone one kind of tool produces a narrower person than one that hands them all three, a camera's precision, a knife's refinement, a drumstick's single-minded devotion. Knowing which one is actually in hand, and what it was actually built for, turns out to matter more than how many a person happens to be carrying at once.
The Photographer Who Decided
This loops back to essay one's opening claim, that I arrived at my identity as a photographer through understanding, not through grace, at least not understood as grace at the time. If I looked at it purely as an educational outcome, aimed at a specific target, that identity becomes a mathematical result of an equation somebody else told me to walk. But nobody ever told me to become a photographer. I decided to become one, using tools handed to me by somebody else's education, aimed at capturing an environment I felt compelled to express, mirroring something much larger than the environment I happened to be standing in.
That's education born from grace, not despite the mistakes made getting there, but because of the room grace leaves for them. It's the grace to recognize I didn't quite get it right the first time, and to keep going anyway. Something received, worked with honestly, and actually given back, is the one kind of link in any chain that ever really holds.
That's human.
Final Thoughts
It starts with recognizing that a person is made in the image of God. Everything else in this essay, algebra, cheating, a drawing corrected until it was right, a five-hundred-year-old painting, a filet mignon eaten in good conscience, is complexity built on top of that one simple line, not a substitute for it. An education aimed at a fixed outcome can't survive a wrong turn, since the wrong turn was never part of the plan. An education that's actually grace was built to expect it.
You asked for this. Now you have it.
-Nate
Postscript
Gossip is what actually cleared the ground for the cross. Not the trial. The trial was only the final procedural step. Years earlier, he was already being called a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of the wrong kind of people[21]. Already being accused of acting on power borrowed from something demonic instead of divine[22]. Reputation did the groundwork, not evidence. By the time false witnesses twisted what he'd actually said about the temple, and a crowd got talked into demanding his execution by the same leaders who'd been dismissing him from the start, the character everyone was reacting to had already been swapped out for one that never existed. Gossip doesn't need a trial to convict somebody. Most of the time it's already finished before one starts.
I want to be precise about what gossip actually is, because I think it gets confused with something related but different. There's a real evolutionary case that most human conversation, gossip included, works as reputation tracking, the way large groups hold members accountable to shared norms without needing to physically groom each other the way smaller primate groups do[23]. That version isn't malicious. That's just constructive knowledge, passed down to accomplish something. What I'm actually talking about is narrower and darker than that. Information detached from verification, spread specifically to gain an advantage without doing the work verification requires. Same word covering two completely different behaviors, one that holds a community together and one that quietly takes a person apart from the inside.
A quote gets treated exactly the same way, and it's worth catching one in the act rather than just describing the mechanism abstractly. Carl Jung is widely credited with saying that until a person makes the unconscious conscious, it will direct their life and they'll call it fate. It sounds smart. It's quotable. It has never once been found with an actual citation, because Jung never wrote it[24]. What he actually wrote, in a much denser and less quotable sentence, is that an inner situation left unconscious happens outside instead, as fate. Somewhere between that sentence and the version now attributed to him on every quote page in existence, precision got traded for quotability, and nobody checking the exchange noticed, or cared enough to ask what had been lost in the trade.
And it works precisely because of something already true about how people are built. Negative information gets remembered harder and longer than positive information of equal weight. A story about someone's failure spreads on rails a story about their success never gets. Once a community's already judged someone for something that was never true, the environment that person has to function inside has already been decided for them. Not by evidence. By how easily the story fit a bias everybody listening already walked in with.
The painting is the same mechanism, just wearing a price tag instead of a rumor. A room full of people held onto a canvas for four hundred fifty million dollars, not because the image changed, but because enough people got convinced to believe a story about what it was. Is this true? Can I actually rely on this? Is the right answer actually sitting in front of me? That's the same question gossip asks and never quite answers. It's the same question the person on the receiving end of a false story never gets to answer either, because the room's usually already decided before they're given a hearing at all.
After all of this, everything that could've been learned, everything that actually was, everything that caused pain along the way, it all comes back to one simple equation. What's true, and what isn't. Truth doesn't require validation. It simply is, the same claim already sitting at the center of this whole series, a burning bush answering a question about its own name by refusing to be defined by anything smaller than itself. If that's the actual floor everything else has to be built on, then every equation that follows it needs to start there too, not with what's popular, not with what's been repeated the longest, with what's actually true.
That floor explains why one thing keeps holding value that nothing can reproduce. Any replication of something is always going to come out slightly different from the original, never the exact same thing twice. Not because the copyist lacks skill. Because the same artist, at a different hour, with a different day's understanding, a different day's conviction about what even made the first version worth painting, is already a slightly different person than the one who painted it the first time. That's part of why a single, unrepeatable original still holds a weight no copy of it ever manages to hold, a philosopher writing about mechanical reproduction called it the work's aura, the one thing copying can never actually transfer along with the image[25]. The original carries something in it that was only ever true once.
Darwin didn't actually sail to the Galapagos hunting for proof that species change under pressure. He went as a young naturalist aboard a surveying ship, collecting specimens broadly, and the finches that later became the textbook symbol of his whole theory weren't even significant to him at the time, barely mentioned in his own account of the voyage. Their real importance only became clear years afterward, back in England, once an ornithologist sorted through what he'd actually brought home[26]. Even that correction proves the same point rather than undermining it. What actually mattered wasn't Darwin's stated intention going in. It was what was already true on those islands, waiting to be recognized, whether or not the person standing in the middle of it knew yet what he was looking at.
If we're actually made in the image of God, then the capacity for grace, empathy, and goodness sits exactly as real in us as the capacity for sin, selfishness, and gossip. Both are equally available. Neither is compelled. The only equation that was ever going to matter, underneath every other question this essay has asked, comes back to what's true about the living and what's true about the dying, what's life giving and what's life taking. That's the simplest possible question, and it's the simplest possible answer, to the simplest possible creation.
-Nate
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-References and footnotes
1. Malachi 3:6, "I the Lord do not change."
2. Hebrews 13:8, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever."
3. Plato, The Republic, Book VII, the Allegory of the Cave.
4. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), on the epistemic authority of tradition and effective history.
6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), on inherited social wisdom versus reason rebuilt from first principles.
7. Edmund Gettier, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963).
8. Robert Zajonc's research on social facilitation and inhibition (1965) found that being observed improves performance on simple, well-learned tasks but impairs performance on complex or novel tasks.
9. Benjamin Bloom, "The 2 Sigma Problem" (1984), found that one-on-one tutoring tailored to a student's specific gaps outperformed standard classroom instruction by two standard deviations.
10. Chris Argyris's concept of double-loop learning distinguishes adjusting actions to meet a fixed goal (single-loop) from questioning and revising the underlying goal or assumption itself (double-loop).
11. Luke 2:52, "And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man," the single verse covering the eighteen years before his baptism.
12. Philip W. Jackson coined "the hidden curriculum" in Life in Classrooms (1968).
13. Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man (c. 1490), based on the proportional system described by the Roman architect Vitruvius in De Architectura, Book III.
14. Contrary to popular claim, scholarly analysis (including the Accademia Gallery's own account) finds the Vitruvian Man is built on Vitruvius's integer proportions and Euclidean geometry, not the golden ratio, which appears only coincidentally in a few measurements.
15. Aseity, from the Latin a se ("from itself"), is the classical theological attribute of God's complete self-existence, requiring nothing outside himself for his own being.
16. Joseph-Marie Jacquard's automated loom (patented 1804-1805, operational after 1810), using interchangeable punched cards to control woven patterns, one of the earliest practical applications of binary encoding.
17. Ada Lovelace, notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (1843): "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves."
18. Leonardo da Vinci (attributed), Salvator Mundi (c. 1500), sold for £45 in 1958, believed a copy; rediscovered and authenticated by some experts (disputed by others) after restoration; sold at Christie's, New York, in November 2017 for $450.3 million, the record price for a painting sold at auction.
19. Romans 14:5, "Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind."
20. Romans 14:23, "everything that does not come from faith is sin."
21. Matthew 11:19, "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.'"
22. Mark 3:22, "He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons."
23. Robin Dunbar's "social grooming" theory of gossip (Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, 1996) argues that gossip evolved as a reputation-tracking mechanism that allows large social groups to hold members accountable without the physical grooming smaller primate groups rely on.
24. The quote "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" is widely attributed to Carl Jung but appears in no citable source. What Jung actually wrote, in Aion (1951), is: "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate."
25. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), argued that an original work possesses an "aura," a unique presence in time and space, that no reproduction can transfer along with the image.
26. Darwin sailed on HMS Beagle (1831-1836) as the ship's naturalist on a general surveying voyage, not specifically to study evolutionary change. The Galapagos finches were not central to his own account of the voyage; their significance for his theory was only recognized after ornithologist John Gould examined his specimens back in England, and they go unmentioned in On the Origin of Species (1859).