Fowler’s stages still sound familiar: the fantasy-filled, imitative faith of early childhood, followed by the more literal faith of schoolchildren; then the conventional faith of adolescence, largely inherited, followed by the individuated faith of young adulthood. Plenty of people stop there, he says, while others go on to stages he finds harder and harder to describe. At the fifth stage, which Fowler says is unusual before midlife, people know “the sacrament of defeat.” They live with the consequences of choices they cannot unchoose. They
