“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” — Jesus Christ, Mark 8:36 (KJV) Nearly 2,000 years ago, Jesus asked a question that remains one of the most unsettling in human history. Consider where the conversation took place. Jesus and his disciples were in the region of Caesarea Philippi, a city named in honor of the Roman emperor. Rome commanded vast territories, controlled enormous wealth, and possessed military power on a scale few civilizations had achieved. In that setting, Jesus challenged his followers to consider what a person truly gains by acquiring everything the world offers at the cost of his own soul. History gives us reasons to take that question seriously. Around 110 BC, the Numidian king Jugurtha discovered how easily powerful men in Rome could be bribed. According to the historian Sallust, he departed the city with a devastating observation: “A city for sale and doomed to speedy destruction if it finds a purchaser!” Rome continued to expand. Its wealth grew, its armies conquered, and its monuments became grander. Yet Sallust, writing in the first century BCE, argued that the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC had removed a common enemy and allowed greed, ambition, and corruption to flourish. Rome was gaining power while its own historians questioned what that power was doing to its character. Centuries later, Florence faced a different moral crisis. On February 7, 1497, followers of the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola gathered in the Piazza della Signoria for the famous Bonfire of the Vanities. Mirrors, luxury goods, books, and works of art were thrown into the flames. Florence had become one of Europe’s great centers of banking, commerce, and artistic achievement. Its wealthy patrons had commissioned some of the Renaissance’s greatest masterpieces. Yet Savonarola believed that the city’s pursuit of wealth and pleasure had corrupted its Christian foundations. His methods were extreme, and his movement eventually collapsed. In May 1498, he was executed in the same square. How does a society preserve its moral character while enjoying the prosperity its achievements have produced? And how far should it go in trying? The words of Jesus also changed individual lives. In sixteenth-century Paris, Ignatius of Loyola reportedly repeated Mark 8:36 to Francis Xavier, a young man with considerable academic and worldly ambitions. Xavier eventually joined Ignatius and became one of the founding members of the Society of Jesus. He would spend much of his remaining life as a missionary in Asia. For Xavier, the question became deeply personal. What was he willing to surrender for something he considered greater than worldly success? Perhaps that explains why this verse has endured for nearly two millennia. Christianity itself has inspired some of history’s greatest works of architecture, music, literature, and art. Jesus understood the temptation to measure success by what we acquire. His question asks us to consider what we might sacrifice along the way. If a man can gain the whole world and lose his soul, can a civilization do the same?