Becoming a Vampire

The nature of transformative experience.

I opened the Metanoia conference in D.C. last week with one basic question: “How would you go about making the decision about whether or not to become a vampire?”

It’s the question posed by the Yale professor L.A. Paul in her 2014 book Transformative Experience. I admit that I initially dismissed both the book and the question as ridiculous when I first read it last summer—but I’ve since warmed up to it. I find the question highly generative, even if I find holes in Paul’s theory.

I was at least disturbed enough by the question that I took it into my undergraduate class this spring—a course called The Foundations of Agency, which I taught with the novelist Jordan Castro—and asked our students to help me decide whether or not I should become a fabulous vampire, hosting lavish parties in my new Embassy Row mansion before I dine on unsuspecting guests each night. Wouldn’t that be fun?, I asked?

Being a good Girardian, I ramped up the social pressure after some initial hemming and hawing and a dose of skepticism. “But all my friends are becoming vampires, and they tell me it’s the best decision they ever made. Are you telling me not to trust my friends?” By the end of the class, students were roughly split on whether or not I should move forward with my plan.

I consider that a huge win.

What the vampire thought-experiment finally convinced me of is this: the biggest decisions in life can’t be solved by rational calculus alone. At some point you leap—then keep leaping, day after day, learning who you are only by becoming it.

Paul’s basic idea is that there are some decisions which a person cannot make by rational analysis alone. Certain decisions like becoming a first-time parent, or undergoing a religious conversion, or making a life-altering decision to change one’s gender, are at least structurally similar to becoming a vampire in two senses:

(1) becoming this new kind of creature involves epistemic transformation: the person who undergoes the change gains access to knowledge they simply couldn’t have without first having undergone the experience;

and (2) the experience of the transformation itself is personally transformative, not just epistemically, because it leads to an entirely new array of values. It doesn’t just marginally change your preferences, usually, but radically alters your sense of self.

You can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be this future person or make a decision about whether or not to be that future person because you are making a decision today, without any true epistemic or experiential contact.

L.A. Paul—and I sincerely appreciate this about her—is challenging the rationalist framework of decision-making. She comes right up against the edge of true discernment.

She seems to accept that in many of life’s major decisions, like becoming a new parent or converting to a new religion, there is something involving a “leap” of faith, since we do not have, and can never have, all of the information we need to fully understand what our life will be like afterwards.

Jordan and I chatted with Ross Douthat as part of a Trialogue on his new book, Believe, in the

Cluny Journal

last month, and I have to say: if there is anything that was nagging at me about his book, it’s the extent that the rationalist case for belief seems so important today. What about transformative experience? What about those rites of passage about which we can know only through a glass, and darkly, about who it is we are about to become?

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I’ve often told the story, at least in casual conversation and in some public talks—but always keeping names anonymous—about a well-known entrepreneur I had drinks with in downtown Las Vegas one night in the early 2010s, who asked me, half-quizzically, half-sad: “How would you ever know whether or not it makes sense to get married?” Neither of us was at the time. We were at Michael Cornthwaite’s Downtown Cocktail Room, just off Fremont Street (sadly, it just closed last year, after well over a 15-year run), sometime in 2010.

I’ll share here for the first time who that entrepreneur was: it was Tony Hsieh, the former Zappos CEO, who tragically died in 2020. He was fascinated by the idea that I had recently walked away from my company (in which he was an investor) to enter seminary formation, and he was pressing me about how I could have possibly made that decision. This led us on a meandering path into a conversation about epistemology.

I gave him a rather weak answer about how “the heart knows things that the mind cannot”, or something along those lines, but he pressed me extremely hard and then challenged me: “If you can prove to me scientifically that my getting married will make me happier than if I don’t get married, then I’ll consider getting married.”

I knew that Tony had just devoured Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, and he was on a metrics kick: quantify delight, graph it, optimize it. The whole Bentham-lite program left me cold. When “happiness” turns into an engineering problem—Do X three times a week for a 12 percent uptick in subjective well-being—something vital leaks out, like carbonation from an uncapped bottle. I appreciated Arthur Brooks more when he was talking about economics, not happiness science. I just can’t do it.

But in the dark corner of the Downtown Cocktail Room that night over medicinal-tasting glasses of Fernet, I wish I had Paul’s framework to draw on. What Tony wanted, or at least needed, was a transformative experience for which he could not have all of the certitude he wanted ahead of time. He would later turn to brain-altering substances for that.

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L.A. Paul’s thesis is that, in her words, “We do not know what we are becoming until we have become it.” This comes close to the Christian idea of being transformed into new creatures through baptism, but not really understanding the depth of our transformation until we come to the end of our life. This was summed up by the apostle John when he wrote: “We are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

But for the apostle John, it’s not so cut and dried: we can both know (we are God’s children), and not know (what we will become at the end). We participate in a process of becoming, and the end cannot be fully seen—at least not in this life—but we know things by analogy.

That is one of the clearest gaps in L.A. Paul’s framework. There is no “knowledge by analogy” for her, it seems. I understand where she’s coming from. Think of first-time parenthood. You spend nine months reading manuals, but the real knowledge arrives the moment a squalling newborn is placed on your chest. Every veteran parent you trusted was speaking in parables—analogies that only click when you’re suddenly running on two hours of sleep and still humming with awe. Analogy doesn’t give you certainty beforehand; it gives you orientation once you’re in the thick of it, and it can give you confidence to understand, at some anagogical level, what you are in for.

But here is where Paul’s epistemic map feels stubbornly two-dimensional. She treats testimony and analogy as thin approximations of future experience, when—at their best—they are deeply significant participations. In the classical Christian tradition, this is called anagogical knowledge: hints that lift the mind toward its ultimate horizon, and allow one to even experience a taste of what a future life might be.

A pilgrim studying a medieval Mappa Mundi did not confuse the inked Jerusalem with the real one, but the image still magnetized the journey. In the same way, a parent cradling another couple’s infant, a catechumen kneeling at the Easter Vigil, or an engaged couple watching fifty years’ worth of wrinkled hands entwine at Mass all receive embodied foretastes of the life they are about to enter. The taste is partial, but it is not illusory; it is directive and even experiential. It equips the will to say “yes” in advance of full comprehension, and to keep saying yes as understanding deepens.

Paul allows only two epistemic currencies—pre-experience data and post-experience reflection—and finds both wanting. She misses the third: the durable wisdom carried by symbols, rituals, and the second-person testimony of those who have already crossed the threshold. That testimony is not a spreadsheet of utility projections; it is a living invitation to inhabit a story that has been true for others and can therefore be trusted. It is the cloud of witnesses.

Paul’s framework also leaves little room for ongoing agency—our need to keep consenting to the change we start. Vampires conjure, at least for me, a kind of transformation against my own will—like a demonic possession—without my consent. A one time bite.

One of our more popular modern memes—one of our shorthand ways of speaking about transformative experience—is the idea of taking pills. (You can read an essay in the

Cluny Journal

on this topic—it’s a long read, but I highly recommend it.) I continue to be haunted by that concept: getting “pilled” by an idea seems to be something similar to what L.A. Paul is trying to get at when she implies that getting bitten by a vampire can effect a transformation that may even be against our will; it’s something that just happens to us, as opposed to something we actively participate in, or something we have to keep choosing to undergo day after day.

I know that in my own life, I have to say “yes” every single day. I didn’t wake up one day in a coffin with a new set of teeth.

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One area where Paul is strongest is in her solution to the conundrum of transformative experience: she places a kind of absolute value on revelation. There are certain things that will not be revealed to us, she seems to say, until we’ve made certain commitments. And so we have to decide who we want to be, and make some commitments. Then, and only then, do we both understand certain things—and come to understand ourselves—in such a way that we can have some kind of retroactive confidence that we made a good decision.

But until then, we stand here, in the place where we are today, without that perspective. We make decisions imperfectly, with imperfect knowledge, as the imperfect creatures that we are, knowing full well that some of our decisions have existential stakes which we do not yet fully understand.

There’s something ineffable about transformative experiences. The best language I’ve found to explain my own experience of conversion is Rudolf Otto’s two-sided quality of the holy, which he summed up with the phrase: the “Mysterium fascinans et tremendum”: a mystery that is “fascinans” meaning it attracts, fascinates, draws us in. And “tremendum” because it simultaneously makes us tremble. It’s the simultaneous pull of dread and attraction. Terrifying in majesty, yet magnetically lovable.

The terrifying and trembling aspects fit the criteria of the vampire transformation. Where Paul is lacking in depth is the part of the mystery that my friend Tony never fully felt: the sheer joy and gratitude of being loved, fully, completely, mysteriously. I still wonder to this day whether I did enough to communicate that mystery.