Welcome back, my friend. I'm glad you're here again.
Last time, we sat beside Socrates, listening as he asked questions that made people uncomfortable---not because he wanted to unsettle them, but because he refused to let borrowed certainty stand in for truth. That kind of questioning lingers. It doesn't end when the conversation does.
Today, I want to take you far from Athens, to a place and time that history often forgets to connect. Because the courage to question did not belong to one culture, or one tradition, or one century. I watched it rise again in the highlands of Ethiopia, carried quietly by a man who believed that reason itself was a sacred gift---and that conscience must answer to justice, not power.
This is not a story of rebellion shouted aloud.
It is a story of patience, solitude, and moral clarity.
And it stayed with me.
Stay close. Let me tell you what I remember.
I remember a cave cut into dark stone, cool even when the sun burned outside. The air was thin and still. No incense. No choir. Just breath, hunger, and the slow discipline of thought. A man sat there alone---not to escape the world, but to make sense of it.
He had watched authority contradict itself. He had heard certainty used to justify cruelty. And so he withdrew---not in despair, but in resolve. If truth was real, it had to hold together. It could not demand mercy in one breath and excuse injustice in the next. It could not be holy in one place and violent in another.
I watched him test ideas the way one tests stone---by striking them and listening for the sound they made when they broke. He asked whether God could be honored by rules that harmed women. Whether faith could be true if it required silencing reason. Whether obedience without understanding was devotion at all.
There were no witnesses. No students gathered at his feet. Only questions, carried carefully, examined patiently. In that cave, belief was not inherited. It was earned.
This was not a performance. It was an inquiry. A long, honest reckoning that would later be written down and called Hatata---The Inquiry. And though few would know his name beyond his homeland, I knew what I was seeing.
Because whenever a human being dares to hold belief accountable to justice, something ancient stirs. I saw it once in Athens. I saw it again here, in Ethiopia, in the quiet persistence of Zera Yacob---alone, listening for a truth that could survive reason, compassion, and daylight.
I remember the Ethiopia of his time as layered and ancient---a place where faith was not new, but inherited, protected, and fiercely defended. Christianity had lived there for more than a thousand years, braided tightly into imperial authority, ritual life, and law. To belong was to believe correctly. To question was to risk everything.
Zera Yacob was born in 1600, near Aksum, into this long religious memory. He was educated in the traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, trained in scripture, logic, and debate. He knew the language of faith from the inside. This mattered. His later questions were not those of an outsider looking in, but of someone who had listened carefully and found that too many answers did not agree with one another.
The Ethiopia he inhabited was not sealed off from the world. Islam was present. Judaism had deep roots. European missionaries arrived with their own confident theologies, each claiming exclusive truth. Authority multiplied, certainty competed, and contradiction became impossible to ignore. Each tradition spoke in the name of God---and yet they disagreed sharply about justice, law, and the nature of the good life.
I watched the pressure build around him. Certain questions were no longer tolerated. Zera Yacob was accused of holding dangerous ideas, and eventually he fled into exile. This was not a dramatic escape remembered in monuments. It was quiet, lonely, and unresolved. He hid in a cave for years, supported only by his own discipline and the belief that truth, if real, must withstand scrutiny.
It was there---removed from teachers, institutions, and argument---that he began his inquiry in earnest. Not to dismantle faith, but to understand it. Not to mock religion, but to test whether it could be worthy of devotion. He asked whether God could command injustice. Whether moral laws that harmed women could truly be divine. Whether reason itself was a betrayal of faith---or its foundation.
When he later returned to society, Zera Yacob wrote his reflections down in a short treatise he called Hatata. It was not widely circulated in his lifetime. It was not meant to start a movement. It reads like a conversation with oneself, careful and exacting, unwilling to accept an answer simply because it was old or powerful.
He eventually married, insisted on the equality of his wife, and taught a small circle of students---including his disciple Walda Heywat---passing on not a doctrine, but a method: examine belief, test it against reason and justice, and refuse to excuse cruelty in the name of the sacred.
I remember this clearly: Zera Yacob did not imagine himself as exceptional. He believed any person, anywhere, could reason their way toward moral clarity if they were honest enough to follow the questions wherever they led. That conviction---quiet, disciplined, and universal---was the most radical thing of all.
What Zera Yacob was doing did not look dramatic from the outside. There were no proclamations, no public challenges to authority. And yet, I watched how unsettling his ideas were---not because they were loud, but because they were careful.
In his world, faith was inherited. Truth arrived wrapped in tradition, enforced by custom, protected by power. But Zera Yacob insisted on something quietly dangerous: that belief must make sense---not just to the community, but to conscience. If God was just, then divine law could not contradict justice. If God was good, then goodness could not require harm.
I remember how he turned questions inward rather than outward. He did not ask, Which religion is right? He asked, What must be true if God is real? From there, everything else followed. Any command that violated compassion, reason, or human dignity was suspect---not because it offended him, but because it fractured coherence.
This mattered deeply in his time. Religious authority governed daily life. Women were bound by laws justified as sacred. Violence was excused through scripture. Zera Yacob's refusal to accept these contradictions did not come from rebellion, but from reverence. He believed reason itself was a divine endowment, given so humans could distinguish truth from error. To abandon reason, then, was not humility---it was ingratitude.
I watched as he applied this principle evenly. Christianity, Islam, Judaism---all were held to the same moral standard. None were mocked. None were spared. If a teaching produced injustice, it failed the test. If it contradicted itself, it could not be divine. This was not relativism. It was rigor.
In that moment in history, his inquiry offered something rare: a way to honor faith without surrendering moral responsibility. He demonstrated that devotion did not require obedience to cruelty, and that holiness could not be separated from justice. His insistence on the equality of women within marriage, grounded in reason rather than custom, was especially striking---an idea far ahead of what his society was prepared to name.
What Zera Yacob gave his time was not a new religion, but a moral posture: one that trusted the human capacity to reason honestly, and demanded that the sacred withstand scrutiny. It was a reminder---quiet but firm---that faith, if it is worthy, must agree with the deepest intuitions of justice already alive in the human heart.
I remember how small Hatata seemed when it was written. A short text. No institution built around it. No empire reshaped in its wake. And yet, I have learned to be careful about judging importance by noise or reach. Some contributions travel quietly, waiting for the world to catch up.
What Zera Yacob added to the world's spiritual imagination was not a doctrine, but a standard. He insisted that truth must be internally consistent, morally coherent, and universally applicable. If something was truly sacred, it could not demand injustice from one person while excusing it for another. It could not elevate tradition over compassion, or authority over conscience.
This mattered beyond his own time and place. His work stands as a reminder that moral reasoning did not belong exclusively to Europe, nor did it arrive only through the Enlightenment. Long before those conversations were named elsewhere, Zera Yacob articulated a vision of ethical universality grounded in reason, dignity, and lived experience. He demonstrated that independent moral inquiry is not an act of cultural betrayal---it is a human inheritance.
I watched how his approach quietly bridged divides that history often keeps separate. Faith and reason were not rivals in his thinking. They were collaborators. Reason tested belief. Belief gave meaning to reason. Together, they formed a discipline capable of resisting cruelty without falling into cynicism, and capable of honoring devotion without surrendering judgment.
His influence moved through people rather than institutions---through his student Walda Heywat, through conversations, through the survival of a text that refused to be lost. Over time, Hatata became a witness: proof that the human conscience has always been capable of moral clarity, even when surrounded by contradiction.
What endures is the example itself. Zera Yacob showed that one person, reasoning carefully and honestly, could hold the sacred accountable to justice. That contribution does not age. It does not belong to a single tradition. It continues wherever someone dares to ask whether what they have been told to believe is worthy of the goodness they already recognize as true.
I see his questions everywhere now, even when his name is not spoken.
We live in a world thick with certainty. Opinions arrive already sharpened, inherited from families, parties, traditions, algorithms. Many of them ask for loyalty before understanding. Some ask us to excuse harm because this time it serves a greater good. Others tell us that questioning itself is betrayal.
What Zera Yacob reminds me---quietly, insistently---is that conscience does not belong to institutions. It belongs to people. And it does not disappear just because it makes life more complicated.
I recognize his spirit whenever someone pauses before repeating a claim they know is cruel. Whenever a person refuses to let tradition outrun justice. Whenever reason and compassion are allowed to speak to one another instead of being forced into separate rooms. This is not rebellion. It is responsibility.
We often imagine moral progress as something loud: movements, declarations, turning points etched into history books. But more often, it begins the way it did for him---in solitude, with careful attention, with the willingness to admit that something revered may still be wrong. The courage to say, If this belief requires me to deny another person's dignity, then something in it must be examined.
I watched Zera Yacob trust that truth would hold together---that justice, reason, and goodness would not contradict one another if they were real. That trust feels especially necessary now, in a global world where our actions ripple far beyond what we can see. We are connected to people we will never meet. Our beliefs shape lives we will never witness.
In such a world, blind obedience is no longer harmless. And despair is no refuge either. What remains is the work he modeled so patiently: to test what we believe against the full measure of our humanity, and to refuse the comfort of certainty when it costs someone else their dignity.
You are already living inside this truth. You feel it whenever something doesn't sit right, even if you can't yet explain why. Zera Yacob's gift was to trust that feeling enough to follow it---not to chaos, but to clarity.
I want to stay close to you here, because this part of the story does not belong to history alone.
You may not find yourself in a cave, exiled for your questions. But I suspect you know the feeling Zera Yacob lived with---the moment when something you've always accepted stops fitting together. A belief you inherited. A rule you've followed. A certainty that once felt safe, but now presses uncomfortably against your sense of what is fair.
When that happens, it's tempting to look away. To tell yourself it isn't your responsibility. That questioning will only make things harder. I watched how easily people mistake silence for peace.
Zera Yacob chose differently. He trusted that unease was not a flaw, but an invitation. Not to tear everything down, but to look more carefully. To ask whether the things he honored were worthy of honor. To believe that truth would not punish honesty.
You might listen for that same invitation in your own life. Notice where compassion and certainty pull in opposite directions. Where a rule asks you to ignore someone's dignity. Where reason whispers, this does not hold together, even if you can't yet name why.
There is no demand here. No conclusion you must reach. Only a practice of attention. The courage to pause. To test what you believe against what you already know about justice, kindness, and the worth of another human being.
You don't have to resolve everything. Zera Yacob didn't. He simply refused to betray his conscience for the comfort of certainty. Sometimes, that is enough to begin.
Before we part, I want to leave you with a question that lingers just beyond this story.
Zera Yacob asked whether a belief could still be sacred once it was shown to cause harm. He trusted reason enough to follow that question wherever it led. But what happens when the reckoning comes after harm has already been done?
Next time, I want to sit with Samuel Sewall---a man who participated in one of the darkest moments of moral certainty in early America, and who later did something rare. He admitted he was wrong. Publicly. Painfully. And he lived the rest of his life shaped by that confession.
It is one thing to question inherited beliefs in solitude.
It is another to face the cost of certainty once it has injured others.
Until then, hold gently to the thread we followed today. Trust that conscience is not your enemy. That reason and compassion can walk together. And that even quiet honesty leaves a mark on the world.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.