Virtue scores
Review
Peter Kreeft is best known for a hundred-plus books of philosophy and apologetics. This is his only novel — and he admits in the preface that it defies easy description: "I have written more than one hundred books, but never one even remotely like this one. It is far too big for me. It is messy and diverse. If you're bothered by that, I guess you're also bothered by the Bible — or the universe." The story centers on 'Isa ben Adam, a Muslim philosopher raised on the rocky New England coast who grows up convinced the ocean breathes because an angel lives inside it. Around him gathers an improbable household: a Dutch Calvinist seminarian, a sharp-tongued Black feminist, mystics, skeptics, and accidental prophets arguing about God over dinner while history burns outside. The novel moves through sea serpents, a demon named Hurricano, and something the chapter list calls "Armageddon at Fenway Park." Kreeft describes it as exploring "the unseen drama beneath modern history, where Islam and Christianity collide and grace moves like a hidden tide." Endorsers reach for the biggest comparisons available. Joseph Pearce calls it reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces: "It takes us to that sacred space where theological faith and philosophical reason meet... a journey to the center of the truth, taking us through the realm of mystery to the presence of Mystery Himself." Claire Swinarski writes that "reading Peter Kreeft's work never ceases to feel like riding a magic carpet — pure adventure, both heavily philosophical and deeply readable," calling it "a masterpiece from one of Catholicism's truest masters." Rhonda Ortiz describes it as "a novel that portrays a world 'charged with the grandeur of God' while pulling back the veil on the unseen battle between heaven and hell." Sohrab Ahmari keeps it simple: "a novel that could only come from the mind of Kreeft: unflinching in its devotion to the Truth."
✓ Strengths
- ✓Published by Word on Fire, the book situates itself within a tradition of Catholic literary and theological imagination, giving readers a work shaped by a publisher committed to integrating faith with culture.
- ✓The title's imagery — an ocean full of angels — draws on the classical Catholic understanding of the angelic hierarchy as real, distinct beings ordered toward worship and the good of creation, an affirmation of the fullness of the Created order beyond the merely material.
- ✓The work appears oriented toward wonder and adoration as the proper human response to the supernatural, directing the reader's affective life toward its ultimate end rather than leaving desire unordered.
- ✓As a Word on Fire publication, the book likely engages the imagination as a faculty of the whole person — body and soul together — in receiving theological truth, consistent with the CCMMP emphasis on the unity of the person.
- ✓The angel motif carries implicit Redeemed-state freight: angels in Catholic tradition are mediators of grace and companions of the redeemed, so a sustained meditation on them orients the reader toward eschatological hope.