In this episode of Review Area, we are joined by Fr. of the Archdiocese of New York, to discuss why Orthodoxy in the West is not only compatible with, but compatible with Oswald Spengler's theory that Christianity is a fundamentally Eastern religion that conforms to a Magian worldview, and that therefore it is doomed to failure and is totally civilizationally incompatible.
00:04:43.300So we're glad that you haven't been thrown at the gulag just yet so that we can get into our discussion for today, which is on orthodoxy in the West and their compatibility.
00:04:53.100Before we continue, I promised some friends of mine that I would shill and pimp their very excellent product.
00:05:00.340And so this is some good friends of mine in Europe, various European nationals and organizations, including the Russian imperial movement, DSSS, Czech Social Justice Party, Serbian fellows, Bulgarian fellows have launched an online youth nationals magazine by the name of Spear-National.
00:05:17.920So, and so I'm going to include a link to that in the description as I promised my friends that I would.
00:05:23.020So I would implore you and encourage you to go check it out.
00:05:24.940I've got some good stuff going on there.
00:05:26.880And as I record this, we're about a week away from Holy and Great Wednesday.
00:05:31.540So about a week out from Orthodox Easter.
00:05:33.720Catholic listeners will be coming up on that as we speak.
00:05:37.140So I wish you a blessed end to your Great Lenten fasts and a very, very blessed Pascha.
00:05:44.780And if you have the opportunity to listen to this while the ascetic labors are still going on, I would encourage you to stay true because we all fail.
00:05:54.620And I'm certainly making somewhat of a confession here.
00:05:57.620We all are inconsistent with the application of our discipline.
00:06:01.820But the retention of the rule is absolutely essential.
00:06:06.080Okay, so with that kind of out of the way, unless you had any sideways comments you wanted to interject, Father, I thought that we'd get right into the main subject.
00:06:16.840I think pimping might be a little strong.
00:06:36.600And so the topic for today, perhaps the best way to introduce our listeners to it, is I can recount how it was brought up with me.
00:06:44.660So a good friend of mine, a fellow by the name of Phil, excellent man if he's listening, he suggested this topic to me, and I thought it was worthy enough to make a whole episode on, and I think that you're exactly the guest to have to discuss it.
00:06:55.080So what he essentially wanted me to address was the claims from adherents of Oswald Spengler and his historiographical theories that orthodoxy is a fundamentally Eastern religion, which conforms to this kind of Magian worldview, and is – that's distinct from the kind of – as Spengler defines it, the Western Faustian worldview.
00:07:18.680And that, therefore, orthodoxy as a religion is incompatible with the life and nature of Western peoples and is doomed to failure and is totally civilizationally incompatible.
00:07:28.680And so that's a big subject, and so there's several different aspects to it.
00:07:35.440But that's essentially the tipping point for us to discuss more generally, I think, the situation for orthodoxy in the West and its history, its prospects, its integration, and the ultimate compelling reasons for why orthodoxy is correct and should be adopted by Western peoples, even if it's inconvenient.
00:07:58.400So, Father, do you have any initial comments you'd like to make?
00:08:02.560My biggest problem is that I know too much.
00:08:05.440You know, I hardly even know where to begin on a topic this – this is why we're all here, this whole question.
00:08:12.580It's so broad that it's very difficult to even come up with a starting point.
00:08:18.020But the way that you term that – now, I've never heard anyone say that before, but I also isolate myself from most people anyway.
00:08:25.640I first got into Spangler years ago, many years ago, actually, because I loved his distinction between culture and civilization.
00:08:37.360I had a similar dichotomy, you know, but he was the first guy I read that actually, you know, developed it as a philosophical understanding.
00:08:47.740And the person that you're talking to doesn't know very much about this topic because in terms of being doomed to fail, the whole point of the decline of the West is that it's a Faustian civilization that's doomed to fail.
00:09:00.980The problem with people like Spangler and Danielewski and, you know, Toynbee and these guys is that they make such heavy generalizations.
00:09:16.220I mean, that's the nature of their work.
00:09:17.460I mean, this is, you know, meta, meta, meta history that it's – you have to take it all with a grain of salt because to bring entire civilizations under a few words is just not possible.
00:09:31.160And Spangler refers to things like the Polinarian or Magian.
00:09:34.520He's referring to a deep background tendency that may or may not show itself in how we actually function.
00:09:43.440It is so – people like Losev would refer to it as a myth, the story that we tell ourselves in the back of our minds that informs our actions.
00:09:55.560And the way that he describes things is accurate except that the Magian culture has a tendency to be dualistic.
00:10:06.080He doesn't say much about Russian orthodoxy and decline of the West compared to what he says about other peoples.
00:10:16.280When I first read Spangler, I was struck by the fact that he thought that the huge onion dome was a way to keep something inside, like a plug, the protection from the outside world, which I thought was kind of nice actually.
00:10:33.000But we are not dualists whatsoever, and that's central to his understanding of the Magian culture.
00:10:42.560I guess he – we can interpret him to mean that we have virtuous acts and we have sinful acts.
00:10:49.640But the problem I have with Spangler and all these guys that – Eric Volklin is another one who have these huge metahistorical surveys is the danger of bringing an entire millennia of development and many, many nations coming and going under – within a few pages.
00:11:11.980And that's always going to be dangerous, and that's why at one time I was deep into Spangler.
00:11:16.960Now I realized that you can't be a specialist in everything.
00:11:21.380The problem with these huge metahistorical surveys is that when you come across a specialist in one of these areas, you're going to have a lot of problem with these overarching statements.
00:11:31.600Well, that's exactly correct, and I think before we go on, I can read you a couple of quotes from Spangler for our listeners' benefit of him to kind of – yeah, to illustrate this point.
00:12:01.740The light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness.
00:12:08.400He's referring to John here and speaking of the Magian conception of the cavernous universe.
00:12:14.000Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and contend with one another.
00:12:17.820But these polarities, in the most primary sensations, mingle with those of refined and critical understanding, like good and evil, God and Satan.
00:12:25.840Death, for the author of John's Gospel, as for the strict Muslim, is not the end of life but something, a death force, that contends with a life force for the possession of man.
00:12:34.740But still, more important than all this is the opposition of spirit and soul, referencing the Hebrew Ruach and Nefesh, and the Persian Ahu and Urvan, and the Mandean Manumuhed and Gayan, Greek Numa and Psyche, etc., which comes out as the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, and then pervades the whole of the apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world contemplations of the awakened culture Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandeans, Augustine and Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah.
00:13:03.380Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:13:06.540I mean, I can read you a couple, I won't get into a couple of other quotes, but essentially, when you read this, one of the things that stood out for me is that he doesn't actually have a very deep understanding of, like, orthodox theology.
00:13:18.060And so, I mean, the predicate of his whole, like, theological claim of the religious-cultural synthesis of the ancient Mediterranean world is that it was, that orthodoxy is, like, dualistic.
00:13:31.640And that it is a religion of, you know, dialectical tension.
00:13:37.320And that seems to be the key kind of theme that he advocates as the underpinning of the Magian worldview, that there is this, you know, great sphere under which this dialectical tension is, you know, unraveling its battle.
00:13:49.680And that man is just a part in it, and he just subsumes himself to this whole great morass of, you know, Magian evil and good energy that permeates and does all this stuff.
00:14:02.540Well, he doesn't understand that the first line of that quote, that darkness doesn't have any real existence.
00:14:09.960It's not a – I mean, darkness in the sense of emptiness, of evil.
00:14:13.180It doesn't have any real – you know, it's not substantial in and of itself.
00:14:20.080The demons would love you to believe that they're autonomous and they rule their own world, but, you know, everything is under God's control.
00:14:28.160Now, that is something that most Christians probably don't even stop to think about.
00:14:32.300Now, evil really doesn't exist because, at least for his remnant and for his church, everything comes into existence for the sake of the progress of our people.
00:14:46.220So, claiming that the darkness somehow has a substantial existence, so substantial that it's at war with the light is kind of a – it's a strange way to approach it.
00:14:59.140So, again, I could make identical claims with the Polymerian culture as well as the Faustian culture or civilization, I should probably say in this case because they all have a story where, you know, there's their list of virtues against their list of vices.
00:15:17.720There's nothing – you know, the myth of Faustianism is that it is – you know, the rational mind is at war with something like superstition.
00:15:29.480Or maybe I could say it's at war with the primitive.
00:15:32.040That's probably a better way to put it.
00:15:34.580So, medulism, I could find it everywhere.
00:15:36.360So, you know, I just – it's – yeah, it comes from his lack of knowledge of the East, which is – you know, you could spend 20 lifetimes studying just one small aspect of Islam.
00:15:50.140And bringing and calling it a culture in and of itself is really dangerous.
00:15:55.640Any of his generalizations about the Magian culture, I could find elsewhere.
00:16:00.280That's the problem he – I think he has.
00:16:01.700Yeah, I mean, this is another – this comes out also extremely heavily if you read the works of Julius Evola.
00:16:09.060And, like, Evola has this – he'll do this thing where he'll be discussing a certain, like, esoteric philosophy or mode of religious expression.
00:16:18.140And then he will describe, like, what is literally analogous to, like, a Christian practice or Christian understanding of the world.
00:16:27.140And then he will say, ah, yes, but this is – the Christians, they don't believe this.
00:16:30.660And I remember what I would – and, like, in Ride the Tiger, like, he'll talk about, like, sacramental marriage, right, and sacred, you know, sexual union.
00:16:40.260And he will describe, you know, some of the basic ideas behind, you know, any culture, including Christians' understanding of sacramental union and fleshly unity and so on.
00:16:49.760And then he'll say, but this is absent in the Christian worldview.
00:16:52.620And I can remember, like, literally laughing.
00:16:54.920And this is a very common error that I see in a lot of these different metahistorical writers or worldly writers is that often they are not, as you say, specialists in especially the area of theology, which is kind of what the show is discussing about at the end of the day.
00:17:10.300And it leads to a lot of these errors.
00:17:14.080Well, reading any of the traditionalists – and some of the traditionalists, you know, cite Spengler all the time, or at least you're influenced by him.
00:17:22.300You know, the traditionalists are great reading.
00:17:24.880There's a lot of problems with them, as you well know.
00:17:26.920But the tendency – I think I said this before on this show – they'll mention a phenomenon, and then they'll list the parallel phenomenon in, you know, Buddhism and Islam and, you know, pagans from the Zulu land or something like that.
00:17:43.860And every time I read that, I have to wince because, you know, there's no doubt that specialists in these areas will have a lot of problem with that.
00:17:52.040Now, of course, remember, guys like Danielewski or Spengler or Toynbee, they're not giving you details.
00:18:00.180Their purpose is to see civilizations as these huge overarching things.
00:18:04.920And I think that they're aware – I mean, and I'm positive they're aware that they're being wildly simplistic.
00:18:10.400But they're not referring to the day-to-day actions of people living in these societies, but the myth, so to speak, that underlies – deeply underlies their – the deepest subconscious reasons for their action.
00:18:25.620That's probably the best way I can put it.
00:18:27.760So I think they're very much aware of the problems that they have.
00:18:30.600But when I first read Danielewski, for example, a very similar set of works to Spengler, I said, you know, throwing an entire civilization into a sentence is – I'm sorry, it's no way to do history, despite the tremendous insights that Spengler and Danielewski have – Toynbee have for that reason – for that matter.
00:18:49.060But civilizations are real, nations are real, and they should be discussed as such, almost as individuals.
00:19:00.040And the term myth – I keep going back to the term myth used in Alexei Losev as this meta-historical story that a civilization will have, that a nation will have, that justifies itself, that most of the time people are unaware of.
00:19:14.180But they assume it in everything that they do in a very, very deep subconscious sense.
00:19:20.500But their biggest weakness then, and they're aware of this, is throwing very deep descriptive terms.
00:19:27.900And, you know, the problem with these meta-historians too is – again, as I said, the specialists will have a lot of problem with this.
00:19:35.200When he starts talking about Russia, he starts talking about the East, I wince, because it's so broad that it really damages his argument in general.
00:19:43.860He has great insight with the difference between culture and civilization.
00:19:54.060But really what it comes down to is that he's talking about subconscious reasons for action that are deeply, deeply embedded in the person born and raised in this civilization.
00:21:29.400Okay, so I think that the best way to go at it would just be to – when I talk to people about this, essentially what the subtext of this argument is that Western man has his own particular soul that has its own archetype and expression.
00:21:44.600And that if we attempt to adopt worldviews or systems of thought that are against this archetype, then it's just going to be incompatible.
00:21:52.580It's basically – it's doomed to fail and it's just a waste of time.
00:21:55.960And so that's kind of what I see sometimes.
00:21:57.840I sometimes see this argument used by like Protestants and by Catholics and Nietzschean types against orthodoxy, which is back to the original point.
00:22:10.120Not so much that it's doomed to fail, but rather that a movement alien to the civilization can succeed, but it will inevitably develop similar traits to the civilization that it's functioning in.
00:22:26.900In other words, it will – like the early – the National Bolsheviks said that the Communist Party in 1917, eventually they will become Russian.
00:22:39.140Eventually they will become – it will become a native movement.
00:22:42.040You know, once the Jews are out of the way, it will become a native movement.
00:22:44.680And any of these movements in a certain civilization will – even if it's foreign, even if it's strange to people, if it is to succeed, it will take on, in a very general sense, some of the traits of the civilization almost inevitably that it develops in.
00:23:01.120So it's not so much doomed to fail, but it's doomed to be modified.
00:23:04.840And I guess the – that's never how they present it, though.
00:23:08.580Usually it's like a dialectical opposition, you know.
00:23:11.780But my point is that – I mean, it's like a rhetorical flourish, essentially.
00:23:17.600So they could wave their big, big-brained Spengler caps and look down on unorthodox people.
00:23:23.460And so the – like I would start with basic like philosophical truths of the orthodox worldview.
00:23:31.600I mean, so is there universal truth, right?
00:23:35.740And so, I mean, like how – if there is universal truth, if that is the foundation of the worldview and that this truth is noble and that humans can interact with this spiritual reality objectively and that many people can participate in the same overarching order, then –
00:23:56.560And that order is universal, like logic or mathematics.
00:24:01.180You know, there's – and this is – I've seen people like critique Spengler is that, you know, Greek mathematics and – are not different from modern mathematics in the sense of the actual forms of the numbers and the equations.
00:24:14.580That the internal logic is that the internal logic is the same.
00:24:18.500Obviously, these – there's no such thing as, you know, kind of brute facts.
00:24:21.540They have to be interpreted according to one's own worldview.
00:24:24.200But there is a lot of empirically demonstrable information that's not relative and that's not shifting.
00:24:31.660And so the claim of orthodoxy essentially is that, yes, this – it is true.
00:24:35.200There is this transcendent logos or world order and that this is universally applicable.
00:24:40.780This is the firmament for all of life.
00:24:42.800This is the very personality and substance which sustains rationality or meaningful conduct at all.
00:24:51.340That to speak – to use words – this is where the logos and word are identical in Greek.
00:24:55.160To use words itself presupposes meaning and actors and ends and objects which are separate but linked to the body intimately.
00:25:05.200And so the claim of orthodoxy is that this substance slash personality, I mean, is Jesus Christ.
00:25:13.040And that because this is a universal truth, it's applicable to all civilizations and societies.
00:25:19.900Now, but what orthodoxy also teaches is that there's not a conflict or tension between local ethnic tradition, the kind of product of the spiritual, physical communion and adaptation to the environment, the land.
00:25:35.720That these – this reality and these folkways and customs and language and sense of national identity are not to be suppressed by the spirit but rather integrated and deified by the spirit.
00:25:48.660That there is not a tension or a clash between one and another.
00:25:52.620And this is precisely the rationale why we have liturgy in local languages.
00:25:56.900Well, you know, I've made this a centerpiece of so much of my research over the years and it shows you the difficulty in Spengler where you can have something – let's just, for our sake, use the term Magian movement that comes into – that goes elsewhere and without eliminating its universal truths, begin to take on the traits of its home culture.
00:27:05.720Now, if you're a carpenter there, you do your buying and selling in Sepphorus, in the Greek city.
00:27:12.540And this was the cultural – despite the fact he was educated at the temple, the fact that he's from a Greek area is extremely significant.
00:27:22.420I mean, this is why the first New Testament was written in Greek.
00:27:26.500And people living there, obviously, as Christ proved, were multilingual.
00:27:32.520But Greek was a dominant language in much of Deocopolis, especially in the urban areas.
00:27:39.840That's something that really is a problem for Spengler because, you know, it's really uninteresting to say, well, two plus two equals four in all civilization.
00:27:50.660That's not really an interesting point.
00:27:52.040So the point is, what's the significance of that in other places?
00:27:58.340So in the concept of number in the ancient world, actually in both the Apollinarian and the Magian world, numbers are figures.
00:28:08.540They have a meaning that's far deeper than just as a numeral.
00:28:14.280And this was the ancient understanding.
00:28:15.860The Middle East, where Christ was born and raised, really is an exception to Spengler's theory because the Magian and the Greek or, you know, the Apollinarian were living not just side by side, but very deeply intertwined.
00:28:33.620We could use the example of Philo, for example.
00:28:35.920We could use the example of Justin Martyr, one of my favorite church fathers.
00:28:40.380So, again, that's why these civilizational terms are so problematic.
00:28:43.420But, you know, these two, you know, there's very little in the Magian world in the Middle East that wasn't heavily influenced by Plato, even the things that came before Plato.
00:28:58.000So, you know, and Justin Martyr, as you know, made the argument that Plato was heavily influenced by the prophets.
00:29:33.640And this is – I guess this is – the difficulty is that there is an attempt to construct this false dialectic between this – the integrated Mediterranean civilization and then the Christian order which came after it, which is just not really how the history played out.
00:29:49.900I mean, we might get into the history, you know, in the East and in the West a little bit later on.
00:29:54.800But I wanted to focus on kind of the philosophical points to continue.
00:29:59.120And so the issue is that, I mean, if you – you know, you can either acknowledge this universal truth and try to appropriate it into your own life or you can reject it.
00:30:10.360I mean, this is a basic philosophical problem.
00:30:12.340And the difficulty is that, especially in far-right circles, in order to make appeals to universal truth claims and to, you know, philosophical categories like ethics and justice and things are right and wrong, I mean, you actually have to have, you know, a transcendental system of philosophy and of theology.
00:30:32.040You have to justify, you know, why these things are real.
00:30:34.660And so most people operate on the presumption that, yes, there is, in fact, objective truth that we can apprehend and that we can try to live our lives by and implement in our own lives.
00:30:45.760I mean, especially, you know, people who describe themselves as nationalists or national socialists, this is the overt foundation of the ideology, that there is a world order that each nation can adapt itself to in its own kind of organic and unique way.
00:31:04.660And I know you mean it not in a strict philosophical sense because these entities would have to be opposites to function as actual dialectic motion.
00:31:44.320Alejandro Dugan has made a career now on something that's extremely important to me, that it's unprecedented what Faustian culture has done.
00:31:52.900There were no smartphones in the Roman Empire.
00:31:54.840Yet no one denies that they were highly advanced in lots of other areas.
00:32:03.680And then for Spengler to remove the Kabbalah from the development of the Industrial Revolution, as we know, is simply not tenable.
00:32:12.920You know, not only did it manifest itself in the Faustian world, it's a foundation of the Faustian world.
00:32:23.660So, you know, these things, you know, it bothers me, and this is a problem when you get these hyper-general understandings, that the Faustian world is unprecedented.
00:32:35.060You know, he wrote this book, he wrote Decline of the West at the end of World War I.
00:32:37.760Now, obviously, you know, he's going to be upset about where Faustian civilization has gone.
00:32:43.240Why didn't the Roman Empire develop the machine gun?
00:32:46.100They certainly had, I mean, they didn't have the numeric system to do it.
00:32:51.080But then why didn't the Hindus develop it?
00:32:52.900Because they did have the numeric system to do it, or, you know, et cetera.
00:32:57.400There was something else, something added to European civilization that made it Faustian.
00:33:02.240And it is, in fact, the dominance of these so-called mystical regimes like Kabbalah.
00:33:09.100And, you know, of all the years I've been reading on and off again Spengler, I start, as much as I love many things that he says, I start moving farther and farther away from him, precisely because of the things that we're talking about.
00:33:28.080And so I think that that's, that's why with the show, I mean, we try to get back to these theological realities, because most people just, they, the people who make these kind of arguments, they basically like read a little bit of Spengler, or they've heard people in talk about Spengler, and then they just repeat it to justify, you know, their own worldview, right?
00:33:49.800I mean, it's not, it's not the result of, of real critique.
00:33:53.260And so this is, this is what it comes back to, is that, I mean, if you believe in objective truth, I mean, the claim of orthodoxy is totally lucid and valid.
00:33:59.980It's that this truth is essentially spirit, and that this spirit is the, can be universally accessed.
00:34:08.240It's, it's Catholic in the original and true sense.
00:34:10.500I mean, and so this is like a, and this is the reality that logically follows if you admit to an organized, transcendent, and potentially, and spiritually, potentially perfect reality, which are, which is, you know, the dominant presupposition of most of our ancestors for the last 2,000 years.
00:34:28.980And so I, the, you know, in order to make this claim that there's, that there are these kind of mutually exclusive, and this is, this is not necessarily what Spengler's arguing, but this is where this is taken, and that, that, that I see people express.
00:34:47.040In order to make this claim, you essentially have to reject this reality, this, this, the Logos doctrine that we've talked about since the very first episode of this podcast.
00:34:55.200So, all, all, all, all these civilizations, you know, I could, I could find the commonalities here very easily.
00:35:05.380All civilizations have a concept of virtue and vice.
00:35:09.060All civilizations have a concept of, you know, or usually a very strict concept of good and evil, including the Faustian.
00:35:17.240All concepts have, have an idea of some kind of, of legitimate development versus illegitimate development.
00:35:23.840They all have a concept of, of essence and energy.
00:35:27.940They all have a concept of, of, of the need for, for some kind of techniques to make life livable.
00:35:37.220They all believe in saints and sinners.
00:35:39.120I mean, you know, this may take very different forms over time, but the old slogan is, is that we can find more difference within than among.
00:35:48.780Remember, civilization is a bunch of nations that have some vague, very general elements in common.
00:35:57.280It's a legitimate concept historically.
00:36:00.640But when you describe it, you end up with a sort of generality that you start wondering just how useful it is.
00:36:05.760One of the reasons I focused on nation rather than civilization, that it's far more compact.
00:36:12.020There's far more content to it than civilization.
00:36:16.020But my, my contention, and, and it's always been this way, is that, um, it, with the exception of our present Faustian destruction, which by the way, yes, Spengler completely agrees.
00:36:27.720Again, writing in 1918 is very significant.
00:36:30.380You know, he's seeing what science can do.
00:36:32.680The machine gun, poison gas, the tank, uh, the airplane is invented and immediately becomes a weapon of war.
00:36:39.140And the complete destruction of, of, of human life, almost for its own sake, with that exception, these are very, you know, you can, you can interpenetrate these with, with absolutely no problem.
00:36:51.340Um, so many of the people that you're referring to, who I know very well, they, they want to come off as, as scholars, you know, without actually doing the work involved.
00:36:59.680And it makes them sound intelligent to refer to these civilizations and, and refer to them as, as Apollinarian, you know, as if that's, that's meaningful.
00:37:08.200I could find the Apollinarian idea everywhere.
00:37:13.900Uh, I guess, uh, the only argument is that, you know, they, it may be more dominant in one place than another, but even within nations, uh, I could find it.
00:37:22.540The only difference, and I'll repeat myself here, because it's extremely important.
00:37:26.220And this is an absolute truth here that Spengler accepts is that there's something different, uh, especially destructive about the late Faustine.
00:37:35.140And that's manifest itself among other things in warfare.
00:37:39.860And we've actually, we've gone on to, um, at length and other episodes of this podcast, exactly what those problems are.
00:37:46.600I mean, I guess we can go into it briefly here.
00:37:48.780Um, and we've talked about, you know, the history of the development of the natural sciences in the West after the great schism.
00:37:56.080And the Protestant, uh, Reformation and the wholesale integration of Kabbalistic and esoteric systems of thought into these, these natural scientists grows directly out of alchemy.
00:38:08.220We've demonstrated, um, uh, I think one of our episodes that we did, we, we talked about and demonstrated the history of the Royal Society in England.
00:38:17.420And there through John Dee and then the connections through all of these different courts in, in Europe.
00:38:21.640And so the, this is, I need to point out quite correctly that the great irony is that the, the worldview of the West is one of deception because it masquerades under the pretense of this kind of, um, you know, atheistic materialist, you know, objective, um, nominalism.
00:38:38.960This, this, this kind of detached, you know, rational sense data-based worldview, but it actually relies upon a bunch of these really radical, directly esoteric doctrines that had, they've kind of, you know, perverted over time to suit their needs.
00:38:51.480I think E. Michael Jones talks about the, um, you know, the, the development, Adam Smith's development of his economic theory as an appropriation of, uh, Isaac Newton's, um, worldview essentially to the economic theory.
00:39:07.120Yeah, I, I, I've read him in that respect.
00:39:09.520This is one of the reasons that E. Michael Jones is so absolutely essential and critical to my personal economic, uh, my intellectual development.
00:39:15.500But his argument, just like Michael Hoffman, is that the Magian, uh, civilization is everywhere in the development of the Faustian mind.
00:39:25.820That's what makes this society so different than the height of the Persian empire or the height of the Chinese empire.
00:39:33.280No one would dare to claim that, that they were any less, um, scholarly, uh, and, and rational than, than the modern Westerner.
00:39:48.100And this is our, Spengler's argument is that you have this constant striving that could never be satisfied.
00:39:54.820Uh, and even Dostoevsky has a problem here, um, with this, where he says, you know, even if you were to find the end of what we might call a Faustian civilization, and you know, he might not have used the term, but he talked about it all the time.
00:40:06.920Even if you were to find it, even if you were to find it, and you reach, and you, you reach the point where, you know, you get the Baconian new Atlantis, and you're, and you know, everyone has whatever they need.
00:40:15.840And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and that, and, and that might even be Faustian in and of itself.
00:40:24.460And not only can, can, can these ends not really be ever reached, but no one really wants to reach them.
00:40:29.360Because the struggle is what defines human beings.
00:40:33.200I mean, if we lived in a, in a utopian world, um, we would all be absolute idiots.
00:40:39.260It's only struggle and pain that bring us to, um, uh, to any kind of, any meaning or, or knowledge whatsoever.
00:40:45.120Uh, I wonder, you know, the, the utopian, um, obsession with Faustian man, which, you know, Francis Bacon and laying out that, that idea, and he is critical and essential to understanding that idea.
00:41:38.520And so this is, um, I think that this kind of gets back to the larger, um, topic that I've been trying to address, which is that the history, historiographical worldviews and ideological worldviews, you know, have to be tempered by, like, theology.
00:41:54.260And you're, you're, you're the highest levels, the highest echelons of your, your worldview and basically the way you live your life.
00:42:01.280The, the presuppositions behind, you know, getting up for the morning are theological.
00:42:06.160Whether or not, you know, you can, um, theologize those explicitly, uh, using, you know, complicated words or whatever.
00:42:13.460That's, that's how people live, um, because people, people wake up every day as if life has meaning and that their actions are working towards some tail of some end and that, you know, they have, uh, you know, rationality and individuality.
00:42:26.560They participate in a broader world that's real.
00:42:29.280These are all, you know, assumed qualities that present themselves to, to civilizations fairly universally.
00:42:36.000Um, that, you know, you can't just, you know, we, in the, I guess the, the perniciousness of the, this kind of decayed Faustian civilization is that these are just, um, they're all at once denied and then assumed.
00:42:48.600And this is the difficulty is that there's not, there's like an anti-world view, the, the very negation of the possibility for a worldview, uh, is itself this worldview.
00:42:59.360This is, uh, like the, the insanity of the kind of nominalist end-stage philosophy.
00:43:05.160I first came across that, uh, in Leo Strauss, um, the very first time I, I, I read him.
00:43:11.300It was, was precisely in, in rationalism, uh, where, um, you can talk about the scientific method.
00:43:19.860Uh, you can say the scientific method is the only way to real, um, communicative truth.
00:43:27.180That is the only method, uh, that we can come to any kind of truth until you ask them the question, well, why should I care?
00:43:34.180What is your purpose in this kind of research?
00:43:38.340And they may say, at some point, if you press them enough, they'll say, well, I want to make the world a most better place than it is now.
00:43:45.100Then you say, well, is that goal a scientific goal?
00:43:49.520And if they say no, it comes from outside of science.
00:43:53.440Therefore, science doesn't, can't create its own ends.
00:44:32.500And so the, anyway, the same error in this worldview is ironically infected, I think, a great morass of, um, people who are dissenting against it,
00:44:42.040because we ourselves are products of this, like, civilization.
00:44:45.800And we have its scars and its marks stamped upon us, um, you know, without even realizing it.
00:44:51.420And so that's the thing is that what's required in order to, to react against this kind of totalitarian world system that, that we've spent the last, you know, 49, 50 episodes talking about,
00:45:04.500is, um, is, um, like an examination of that, of the full spectrum of your worldview.
00:45:10.600Because the methods of control are indeed full spectrum, all the way from, from food to media and everything in between.
00:45:17.460And so, you know, the, the solution, or to even begin to discern what is correct, what's not correct, requires an analysis and requires a worldview as a replacement that takes into consideration all of these different realities.
00:45:32.960Um, and so if you, you know, are not, if you haven't just, like, lost your, your mind, you know, you accept, uh, I mean, you accept, you accept it, as most people do, that there is truth, that, you know, we do operate, uh, you know, some sort of substantial way that we can apprehend and come to, to grips with this, uh, real metaphysical form, you know, then the, uh, it is our contention, you know, essentially that orthodoxy has absolutely no conflict with the rest of the areas of life.
00:46:02.760Um, that people in the nationalist community are, are presenting.
00:46:06.380And so that the, the, the necessity is for a worldview truth in these fundamental characteristics, right?
00:46:16.100And this is, you know, and, and memes are not like a solution to like an actual argument or, or, or a verifiable tradition that provides the solution to these questions.
00:46:26.100And that's what orthodoxy is able to offer uniquely.
00:46:28.440I think, and it's just one of the most eminently compelling reasons for its truthfulness is that it can, in fact, adequately address every single problem in the totality of the human experience.
00:46:39.260And, and all of life can be integrated into it.
00:46:41.560And this is part of its fundamental, foundational doctrine is that, that the, the savior, Christ is, uh, the logos, that he is the, the key principle to, um, the cosmic personality.
00:46:52.860Well, I've already stated that the, the, um, uh, all civilizations, all cultures have this notion of, of good and evil, have this notion of natural law, except, except for late Faustian, which is radically different.
00:47:07.220Um, they all have, you know, uh, virtues and vices and enlightened, or they all have this, they all recognize that human beings are imperfect, that they all recognize that, that human beings are, are struggling.
00:47:18.740You know, you know, you know, the truth that, that Christianity, um, uh, addresses itself to are absolutely universal.
00:47:26.480Um, these are the reasons that civilizations come into existence in the first place, or I should say cultures come into existence in the first place.
00:47:33.180Is a human being in such a weak, a human being in such a weak, uh, entity and, and needs this whole complex of, of, uh, networks to exist.
00:47:41.260Um, but let me go on, out on a limb here.
00:47:45.560Um, I think the ultimate goal of the decline of the West is to make the argument that I agree with in, in every, every, uh, uh, detail.
00:47:58.100That while earlier civilizations, well, different from one another, aren't opposites by any means, there is something special about the late Faustian culture,
00:48:09.420which is the reason that he wrote this book in the first place, that it's the negation of everything else, that it is because of, of the industrial revolution, things like world war one, no one can match it.
00:48:21.800Uh, we, we live in a society that never existed anywhere.
00:48:25.520There are no analogs to our world, um, anywhere in world history.
00:48:30.520Um, the evil that we suffer with, uh, just the very existence of a mass media and their use of psych, psychology to, to control people.
00:48:40.740Uh, no other civilization even dreamed about that kind of power.
00:48:45.340Late Faustian life is completely unique.
00:48:48.920There you have, uh, something that's a so-called civilization and can only be a civilization.
00:49:55.040And so I, I think that it comes back to, I've discussed before on the show that a lot of, um, arguments that people make against, uh, orthodoxy or against.
00:50:04.920Like conspiracy theories or against any sort of worldview dissection that destroys the, uh, mainstream come from a place of, uh, I guess you could say like, uh, appealing to normality.
00:50:21.940Like people, people want to be perceived as just like kind of a regular person as not kind of, you know, crazy, a crazy person.
00:50:30.340And when you advance ideas, which is, which conflict in essence with the local norm of the civilization around them, the milieu in which the totality of their life exists, then that makes it very uncomfortable.
00:50:43.280And it has the potential to seriously disrupt their, uh, their whole life.
00:50:47.620Um, and I mean, you know, who can blame them?
00:50:49.620I mean, cause if you really accept, I mean, if you believe in orthodoxy, then living in the West is already like hell because it's so far away from what you, the ideal that you're trying to instantiate is.
00:51:00.140And you yourself are a product of a civilization, which has formed you and molded you into a fashion that is far, far, far away from the ideal that you yourself subscribe to.
00:51:10.180Right. And this is the, the eternal torture, I guess, of sin.
00:51:42.080If we lived in medieval China, if we lived in ancient Rome, you know, you would have far more, we have far more in common with the Stoics, um, and the Confucians than we, than we do, uh, the, the insanity of, of late Faustian culture.
00:51:58.480Late Faustian culture, or I'm sorry, civilization benefits really, you know, the top 5% of human beings.
00:52:08.320Um, and because they have a piece of paper that says they are free, therefore they think they are free.
00:52:13.720Uh, there's absolutely nothing like it.
00:52:16.580Um, the, the redefinition of words, um, the massive public ignorance, despite the fact that they are overloaded with information.
00:52:24.960These are, these are, these are curious in their notions.
00:52:28.320Um, this is a, a civilization that benefits a tiny group of people who now know how to use, you know, psychology and media and academia to maintain their control over people.
00:52:38.740Um, and, you know, we should be proud when we don't fit in.
00:52:45.600And I think that, um, unfortunately, a lot of this comes from an attempt to try and glorify and reclaim the legitimate virtues and goodness and impulses of Western civilization.
00:52:57.840And, and it's conflated essentially with this, this Faustian era or this, I mean, you could say almost this like anti, the anti-Christ system, basically, that, um, you know, infiltrated its way gradually into the West's, uh, mode of being over the course of, I guess, a thousand years, pretty much.
00:53:18.760I don't know how you get away from natural law.
00:53:21.500Natural law, with the exception of this late Faustian, um, morass.
00:53:27.840Is found and accepted in all civilizations, because they have no other choice.
00:53:30.920The very existence of a communal culture comes from natural law.
00:53:35.700Um, there is no real civilization that ever celebrated cowardice.
00:53:41.740All civilizations, um, recognize the importance of marriage and the family.
00:53:48.060Uh, they all recognize the necessity of warfare and had laws and rules of war.
00:53:53.240Um, they all had law codes, you know, that laws are such a, such a thing that they have to be written down, understood, and meant to, um, cohere with one another.
00:54:04.000These are all manifestations of natural law.
00:54:46.860And so, and I think that the, and this is the, the essence of orthodoxy is that as it exists and the doctrine that it preaches is radically, uh, diametrically opposed to the philosophy of the, the modern world of this, this kind of antichrist system.
00:54:58.620And so, I mean, people usually come to this kind of area of thinking because they're dissatisfied with the product of the system, with the modern world and its degeneracy.
00:55:07.780And they're looking for a solution against that.
00:55:10.780And, you know, you get into all of these kind of alternative thinkers that are trying to provide people a worldview that is able to, you know, sustain them with life and also serve as a useful implement for, for reconstituting our people or to, to heal the wounds as a medicine to the disfigurement that we've experienced over the last, you know, four or 500 years.
00:55:29.980And so it's our claim basically that orthodoxy is this worldview, um, and that it, it is able to account for, for all of the various aspects of human life that essentially, and this is because it has the true doctrine of Christ.
00:55:42.660It has the true dogma of, of, you know, post-Chalcedonian orthodoxy.
00:55:48.140It's fully God, fully man, and that everything in the divine realm can be integrated into the human life and vice versa.
00:55:53.620And so this very radical claim, I was reading a, an art, uh, an article the other day, I think David Bentley Hart, and he was, wrote an article just on this subject.
00:56:02.720And he said that the nature of Christianity's universal, um, recapitulation in its orthodox theology, that everything is in Christ, everything is coming back to Christ.
00:56:12.160Christ is the creator of everything, the purpose of everything, that everything that's proper to man is in God.
00:56:16.360Um, this is essentially where true nihilism comes from, that this is why there has not been the development of kind of a radical new religion or, or successful, um, totally divergent religious movement in the West in the last 2,000 years, is because everything is already operating based on the all-encompassing reality of the Christian worldview.
00:56:35.800I, I, one of, one of, one of, a big pet peeves of mine is when someone uses the phrase, European civilization.
00:56:44.520This is not something that Spengler ever used.
00:56:48.020Uh, Donalevsky splits it in half, at the very least, that there is a, a Eastern European and Western European worldview.
00:56:54.940But usually when someone says that we are here to defend European civilization, I say, which one?
00:56:59.880I say, you know, the Faustian world of Francis Bacon and what came after him, defined itself and understood itself as at war with the Middle Ages.
00:57:14.520It was a negation with, deliberately, they didn't call it the Middle Ages at the time.
00:57:18.780That came from Plutarch, but, um, that Christian era, Francis Bacon and Newton, these guys, um, define themselves as the anti-medieval.
00:57:29.880Um, the, the modern mentality in terms of metaphysics couldn't be anti, any, any less platonic.
00:57:38.400The, the nominalist idea that's necessary for, for modernity is a negation of Plato.
00:57:44.380So you ask these people, what civilization are you talking about?
00:57:47.000How can you even refer to it as a civilization when you have mutually exclusive elements, important elements within it?
00:57:54.680And then they, they usually call me a name and that's the end of the discussion.
00:57:57.720Yeah. Well, and this is, um, this is the critical mechanism of control because if you can condition the language and cultural outlook, then you don't have to control the message, right?
00:58:11.560So that's, you can't even, you almost can't even explain the gospel to people anymore without giving them like a couple of lectures in cultural anthropology of the ancient world because it's so different from our own.
00:58:21.460Well, I said this, my last Orthodox nationalist on the two great, um, uh, one Romanian, one Georgian monastic of the 20th century, that we're at a point now where the late Faustian idea has defined itself as, you know, against natural law in every respect, certainly against Christianity.
00:58:43.520Um, and this is, this is absolutely where we're, you know, where we're forced to live, but because of the degeneracy.
00:58:59.420And I, we use that word very carefully, um, if everything else is falling apart, then so do words and so do meanings and words change meanings.
00:59:09.260It seems every decade or so in, in the late Faustian idea, um, you know, usually you refer to, you know, say a young person wants to know about the faith.
00:59:19.040And the first thing that starts talking about is sex, because this is what the late Faustian idea, you know, grabs a male sex drive and, and uses it to, to pitch products and control the most powerful force in the world.
00:59:31.160Um, so given these facts and given the, not just the, the, um, exultation of the passion, but the ideology that the passion's role that exists, um, that automatically means that reason, I don't mean logic, but reason.
01:00:19.500Um, when I think of someone, you know, sort of an ordinary person, ordinary education, picking up and reading Leviticus, I say, please put it down.
01:00:28.520You know, this is something that, you know, this is why the church really comes into existence.
01:00:34.560It has, this has to be interpreted by people competent to interpret it.
01:00:39.200We don't have anything in common with that civilization.
01:00:43.000So even though these translations are wonderful, it still doesn't matter.
01:00:59.180And this fundamental problem where people's worldviews are theologically preconditioned before they even engage with the world around them is precisely, uh, I guess the critique that we're coming at here is that.
01:01:10.240And what I've tried to talk about is that, you know, when you're trying to interpret ideology or you're trying to, to discuss, you know, nationalism or national identity or ethnicity or life.
01:01:20.420I mean, these are, these are integrated concepts with your worldview and the way you interpret the world around you.
01:01:29.380And so if you want to have a worldview that makes sense, that's orderly and you, you know, you want to have a healthy nation that, that's structured, hierarchical, all of these natural values.
01:01:39.160These people seem to adopt more, uh, mostly based on instinct rather than, than reason.
01:01:46.420Well, you actually have to have an, and analyze yourself the way that you come and approach these issues in your, the, the ideas that you imbibe from the modern world before you even begin to analyze the, these ones of the ancient world.
01:02:00.780And so, I mean, I guess this is, uh, I think we're going to park it here because the next segment I wanted to get into, and the only way I think that we can properly explain this is to discuss some of the history of the ancient church and discuss some of the ways in which people looked at the world in those times and how that influenced the development of and spread of Christianity throughout the rest of the Roman empire, including the Western parts.