Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation Marjane Satrapi was six years old when the Shah fell and the Islamic Republic began rewriting the rules of daily life in Tehran. Persepolis is the graphic memoir she drew decades later from that childhood: 160 pages of black-and-white panels covering ages six to fourteen, from the 1979 Revolution through the Iran-Iraq War and into adolescence under a theocratic state. Satrapi is the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors and the daughter of committed Marxist intellectuals, which places her at exactly the fault line where private conscience and public ideology collide. Her aim is not polemic but witness: she wants Western readers to see Iranians as individuals with interior lives, not as abstractions attached to a geopolitical crisis. The result is one of the few political memoirs in which the argument is carried entirely by specific human moments — a girl hiding Western pop cassettes under her veil, an uncle sentenced to death explaining ideology to his niece with a patience that makes the injustice more unbearable, not less. The audience is any reader interested in moral formation under pressure, the transmission of values across generations, or the experience of adolescence inside a collapsing social order. SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created**: Satrapi's family embodies the original human impulse toward truth-telling and solidarity. Her parents maintain honest speech inside the home even as the public sphere demands ideological performance, and this domestic faithfulness reads, through the CCMMP lens, as the imago Dei at the level of the household: the natural law written on the conscience, refusing full erasure even under sustained coercive pressure. - **Fallen**: The Revolution's violence is not random cruelty but systematic disorder — concupiscence institutionalized. The state exploits the legitimate human desire for justice and redirects it toward purge, surveillance, and enforced conformity. Marjane's childhood is shaped by what Aquinas would recognize as disordered appetite operating at the level of a whole society: the irascible passions of a population weaponized by leaders whose own will to power has been severed from any ordered end. - **Redeemed**: The partial redemption the book offers is not supernatural but it is genuine: Marjane's parents insist on her freedom even at risk to themselves, and that insistence is a form of grace in the natural-law sense — a gift that does not earn its recipient's virtue but creates the conditions in which virtue can survive. The humor Satrapi deploys throughout is not escapism but a form of what Aquinas calls eutrapelia, the virtue of appropriate play, which preserves the human spirit against the dehumanizing weight of an absurd regime. - **Redeemed**: The very act of drawing the memoir — of converting traumatic memory into form, sequence, and image — is itself a prudential act: the retrospective ordering of experience so that it can be understood, transmitted, and grieved properly. This is what memory as an integral virtue of prudence looks like when it is working as it should. SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon Augustine's Confessions is the most useful interlocutor.[^1] Augustine's autobiography is also a retrospective account of a self formed under disordering external pressures — the rhetoric schools of Carthage, the Manichaean community, the imperial court at Milan — and the Confessions proceeds precisely by tracking how the interior life persists, distorts, and eventually reorients itself against that pressure. Satrapi's project shares the retrospective structure and the commitment to interior honesty, but without Augustine's theological horizon: where Augustine narrates a self finally addressed by a divine Other whose love reorganizes all prior experience, Satrapi's narrator remains at the end of childhood without any such reorientation. The memoir closes on departure rather than conversion. That contrast is instructive for readers working within the CCMMP framework: Persepolis shows what memory and truthfulness can accomplish as natural virtues — the ordering of experience, the refusal of self-deception, the transmission of family witness — while also showing, by its own silence on the question, what those virtues cannot accomplish alone. The supernatural horizon Augustine supplies is precisely what Satrapi's account, for all its moral seriousness, does not reach, and the distance between the two books maps the distance between the Created-Fallen arc and the Redeemed state the CCMMP holds as the telos of the person.
✓ Strengths
- ✓Satrapi's child's-eye narration makes visible the specific mechanism by which totalitarian regimes distort moral formation: when the state redescribes obedience as piety, children must develop a double consciousness to survive, and the book traces that split at the level of concrete, daily experience rather than political abstraction.
- ✓The graphic memoir form — spare black-and-white panels, minimal dialogue — disciplines the reader's attention toward what is actually shown rather than asserted, which is itself a training in prudential reasoning: the reader must interpret, weigh, and judge alongside Marjane.
- ✓Satrapi's parents model a form of domestic prudence that holds together love of country, honest dissent, and protection of their daughter, showing how moral courage is transmitted through household witness rather than formal instruction.
- ✓The book takes seriously the question of legitimate versus illegitimate authority — a live question in Catholic social thought — by showing children being conscripted into ideological performance (the veil, the chants, the mourning rituals) and the interior resistance this generates.
- ✓Satrapi's account of grief, humor, and perseverance under conditions of genuine political repression illustrates what Aquinas calls the irascible appetite rightly ordered: anger at injustice that does not collapse into despair or harden into hatred.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's moral framework is largely Marxist-secular and nationalist; there is no supernatural horizon, no redemptive theological register. Grace, in any recognizable Catholic sense, is absent. Readers should bring that horizon with them rather than expect to find it in the text.
- ⚠Satrapi's treatment of religion is consistently skeptical and at times reductive: the Islamic Revolution is portrayed as religion weaponized, which it partly was, but the book offers no corrective account of what authentic religious practice might look like, leaving a portrait of faith as essentially coercive.
- ⚠The book stops at age 14 and does not show any mature integration of the suffering Marjane endures; the arc is one of wound and departure rather than wound and transformation, which limits its usefulness as a model of the Redeemed state.