In this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by my good friend Jonathan Goldstein, the author of The Three Fairy Tales Trilogy, a series of books that tells the classic tales of Snow White, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk.
00:00:56.000We haven't done Jack and the Beanstalk yet.
00:00:59.000Jack and the Beanstalk, I now tell the story.
00:01:01.000When we last spoke, Jonathan, I said to you, oh, it seems to me there's less folk tales for men than women.
00:01:08.000And I sort of proselytized on why I thought that would be.
00:01:11.000And then you listed a few and I said, but I don't understand Jack and the Beanstalk.
00:01:15.000And gosh, I've just come off a podcast, Jonathan, where I've just publicly claimed on record, I go, I don't think I ever talk to anyone and think that they're cleverer than me.
00:01:25.000I said, like, sometimes I talk to people and they know stuff I don't know.
00:01:28.000Of course, that happens every second of every day.
00:01:30.000But like the faculty, and I used like Jordan as the example, like I don't often, I'm not often listening and thinking, I don't understand this unless they're talking about maths or astrophysics or something like that.
00:01:41.000And now God has put me in front of you because like when we spoke and I said, Jack and the Beanstalk, I don't understand that.
00:01:48.000And you said, you said to me, he has to exchange the milk for the seed.
00:01:52.000And I was like, oh, man, that's so cool.
00:01:55.000And since then, I've been telling, I've been telling when I have to mentor or advise or chat to young men, I tell them that story.
00:03:02.000And so I thought this is a sign for us that those of us that actually love these stories, that care for them and they care for our heritage, you know, it's time to pick them up and to tell beautiful, celebratory, smart versions of the tales.
00:03:17.000Not cynical, not trying to make them into some kind of political commentary, but rather just kind of tell them in a celebratory way.
00:03:30.000I love the copies that you've sent me.
00:03:32.000And normally when I interview people, I haven't looked at the thing that I'm meant to be promoting, you know, like sometimes quite complex things like films that are about COVID or, you know, great tracts about geopolitics.
00:03:46.000And I have to sort of go, yeah, yeah, I get the idea.
00:03:49.000But this, I've actually read it and engaged with the material.
00:03:54.000And I can't recommend it heartily enough.
00:03:56.000And there's a link in the description and a QR code if you want to get Jonathan's books, these sort of beautiful triptych, this trilogy of excellent retold fairy tales, then you can get them here by clicking on that link.
00:04:11.000And one of the things I want to say, one of the things, I want to say one thing is that one of the problems we have too is that a lot of the people that are complaining about culture that are complaining about the state of culture, that's where they stop.
00:04:22.000They just complain and then they don't do anything.
00:04:25.000And so I've been complaining for a few years about the state of culture, but there's something nagging in the back of my mind saying, well, Jonathan, if you don't like the state of culture, what are you going to do about it?
00:04:35.000And so that's why we started the Symbolic World Press and we started telling these fairy tales, but we're going to take it into a larger direction where we're going to try to retell all of the great tales of our heritage, you know, from the Greek myths all the way to King Arthur and try to tell them in a beautiful, celebratory way that's also relevant to modern days.
00:05:07.000Now, a minute ago, in your first answer, you said that Disney is not retelling folk tales well.
00:05:15.000I think I know why that is, but will you tell me why that is?
00:05:20.000Well, I think one of the things that happened, of course, in Disney is that it got taken over by, I guess, what you could call the woke mind virus.
00:05:27.000It wanted to, it started with a kind of feminism trope where they wanted, they didn't like the idea of the princess that meets her prince.
00:05:36.000It started with, I think, with Rapunzel, actually, where this whole story is about her own self-development and the guy is just a detail in the story.
00:05:45.000And then it just kept getting worse and worse as they moved down the progressive line to a point where the images in the fairy tales didn't make sense to what they wanted to make anymore.
00:05:56.000So by the time they got to Snow White, that's why it took like, I think, three, four years to make Snow White is because the first version they made was so political and they realized that no one is going to want this because it's Disney, Disney is, you know, that's that story, particularly Snow White, it was the first full-length animation.
00:06:14.000It was a massive moment in culture when Disney made that movie.
00:06:17.000And they were basically dragging it through the mud by making it into a kind of postmodern commentary.
00:06:43.000Yeah, in a sense, they've been stymied by their own peculiar and sort of spiraling gen agenda there.
00:06:51.000I was just thinking, though, how do we align these peculiar parcels, Jonathan?
00:07:01.000Like that, you know, initially, Disney takes a cultural artifact like a Grimm or a Hans Christian Anderson fairy story that's redolent with relevant imagery and ideas precisely because it's somehow presumably accessing deep archetypal truths.
00:07:19.000Then Disney in its earlier incarnation is somehow able to, in a sense, amplify or at least reiterate those principles through the medium of animation.
00:07:33.000A hundred years later, Disney is not even able to stay true.
00:07:38.000Isn't it amazing how fast our culture moves?
00:07:40.000It isn't even able to stay true to its own interpretation of source material.
00:07:48.000I watched like the live action Pinocchio and I see it seemed like they weren't comfortable with lying or something like that or consequence.
00:07:55.000So I was like, this is fucking pointless.
00:07:57.000What are they even talking about now at this point?
00:07:59.000And it's a shame because, you know, there's a darkness in human beings.
00:08:02.000And there's four, there's a darkness in fairy stories and folk stories because there's a darkness that has to be addressed.
00:08:09.000And if you'd sort of deny that darkness, I wonder what happens to a culture.
00:08:12.000But now I've like this is my set of questions, having made that point.
00:08:26.000How do we as Christians, Jonathan, align pagan cultural artifacts with Christian interpretations in a culture that's in a sense a neo-modern progressive paganism?
00:08:42.000And one would think that the original paganism of some of the source material, taking paganism to mean the worship of entities and essences found within nature, both inverted commas, external and internal.
00:08:56.000How do we as Christians, and how did you as a Christian, given you've been doing it, how did you manage that?
00:09:02.000How do you make sure that Christ and the truth of Christ is present in these pagan artifacts as well as tackling the political sort of vicissitudes of political thought?
00:09:16.000Well, there are a few things to your question.
00:09:18.000I would say the first thing is that I don't think that that's, I don't think it's true.
00:09:23.000I think that the idea that these are pagan stories, I think is something that was made up by 19th century anti-Christian thinkers that tried to do that for everything.
00:09:35.000They told us that Christmas is pagan, Easter is pagan, pretty much everything that's Christian is pagan.
00:09:43.000I think that these stories, although they clearly take sources in pre-Christian stories, like they're a development, they're a continuation of pre-Christian stories.
00:09:55.000But by the time that they're transcribed, they have a very, very deep Christian structure, right?
00:10:02.000They've been transformed, you could say, from these ancient, ancient Greek myths, and they've been in some ways fiddled with, they've been retold, they've been remembered in a manner that in fact has a deep Christian root to it.
00:10:15.000And so when I told Snow White, for example, I tried to pull the threads of the story that would make you see that this is a Christian story.
00:10:24.000I mean, the story of Snow White is a story about resurrection.
00:10:26.000It's a story, you know, it's like it's a song of songs.
00:10:29.000It's about a bride that finds her lover.
00:10:34.000If you watch the early Disney version, you can see that when the prince kisses her and wakes her up, he actually takes her to heaven.
00:10:41.000Like he takes her to a castle in the sky.
00:10:44.000And so Disney knew very well that this was a resurrection story, that it was a very deep Christian story.
00:10:51.000And so, but I can, if I can back up a little bit and say, how is it that Christians deal with these?
00:10:57.000You know, early Christians and the kind of late classical Christians, they had no problems with the Greek myths in the sense that they, you know, St. Basil said that you had to read the Iliad and the Odyssey before you read the Bible because you had to be a cultured person to be able to have a kind of story track in your mind.
00:11:16.000You had to have these stories kind of ingrained into your thinking so that when you read the Bible, you could understand the stories there.
00:11:23.000It's the same with the supposedly northern myths.
00:11:26.000You know, everybody talks about Thor and Odin and how these pagan myths, but you know who wrote those stories down?
00:12:12.000Because I suppose to truly be Christian, you accept his atemporal and a spatial nature, meaning that even pre-incarnate, his presence will be felt in story and myth and culture universally.
00:12:32.000I mean, I wonder sometimes, as someone that's read a little of the Maharabha and some of the Vedas, that when encountering aspects of, say, well, specifically the aspect of Krishna, Krishna is very Christ-like, a very Christ-like deity.
00:12:51.000I mean, he sounds like Christ, and there's a child, Krishna, and he's kind of a playful kid.
00:12:58.000And, you know, I don't know that it has the sort of key and necessary tropes, but I'm not making the claim that it's absolute.
00:13:04.000But are you saying, are you in a sense, and did C.S. Lewis to some degree do this too, collapsing the separate category of paganism?
00:13:14.000Because to accept it as a separate category would be to deny the universal nature and ubiquitous presence of Christ.
00:13:24.000I think that's the right way to see it.
00:14:00.000So I think that that's the way to think about it is that, yes, sometimes there's some things in the pagan stories, obviously, that we can't stomach and that we kind of have to weed out.
00:14:08.000But the things that point to that which is true, sometimes even in the negative, even sometimes there are things that are kind of a counterpoint that you can understand as an image of evil or an image of excess, that those things can be, I think that those things can definitely not only be preserved, but they can be part of the story.
00:14:25.000You know, we just finished reading Dante's Divine Comedy, which is in some ways the great synthesis of medieval thinking, of the great synthesis of medieval Christianity.
00:14:34.000And the pagan references are everywhere in Dante's Divine Comedy.
00:14:38.000All the way up to heaven, he will reference these kind of pagan images as a deep cultural baggage that he can use to talk about the Christian mystery that he's encountering.
00:14:50.000And so I don't see a problem with that at all.
00:14:53.000You find, you almost describe them as notes in the symphony and melodies that to do without would be, would create a kind of deprivation.
00:15:06.000So if there is these kind of symbolic truths that somehow, if not lose their luster, become less articulate when transferred into language, do you believe, helping me with my new journey into scripture, Jonathan, that there are points where in, like, say, at the moment, I've been spending some time in like Daniel and Ezekiel and I'm reading Revelation.
00:15:30.000And we are clearly in a terrain where building the sort of narrow bandwidth of language, whether you're talking about, you know, obviously I only speak English.
00:15:46.000Whether it was in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic or King James Version or New International Version, the primary translation you're dealing with is from the mind of God to the mind of man.
00:15:58.000So when I'm encountering whether it's burning bushes or apples or lampstands or the potter and the clay, and actually, Jonathan, I'm having an empirical experience of this.
00:16:14.000I was meditating under instruction on the light, on the coming of the light, that I am the coming of the light, and that we are not separate.
00:16:27.000And somewhere in the midst of this experience, the Isaiah, I think it's in Isaiah, but I think it's in Psalms also somewhere.
00:16:36.000And I think Paul references it, of the clay, I feel like I felt the prima materia of me that is not language, that is, that is expressed in language, but not language, being changed and molded.
00:16:55.000So to read, whether it's folk tales or the Iliad or the Odyssey or Norse myth or whatever, are we saying that the point of it is to allow it to lure you into a pre-verbal state?
00:17:14.000Okay, there's a lot in what you said there.
00:17:18.000You could say for sure there is this sense definitely that all that which is communicated, that is all the revelations and then everything that's downstream from the revelation is pointing to something which is beyond.
00:17:33.000And so if you think of the hierarchy of the tabernacle, you get a sense of that, which is in the deep center, right?
00:17:39.000In the center of centers, there is a place that is inaccessible to anyone except for one person.
00:17:47.000And that person, you know, is in great danger going there if they're not completely pure from all their sins.
00:17:53.000And so this is where the glory of God appears and the glory of God is beyond, like you said, all of expression, all of word, all of language.
00:18:04.000And then it unfolds within the world through images and then through structures and then through laws and et cetera, et cetera.
00:18:14.000And so in Orthodox theology, we have this idea of what we call apophatic theology and cataphatic theology.
00:18:23.000And therefore, this idea that God is always beyond, like what you're saying, that there is the true reality of God is beyond all expression, all word, you know, even being itself.
00:18:34.000And then we have what we call cataphatic theology is also understanding that all things are in some ways expressions of God.
00:18:41.000You know, all things that are good are expressions of God because he is the source of all things.
00:18:47.000And therefore, we have to always find a balance between those two.
00:18:50.000If we're not careful and we focus too much on the apophatic sense, we become Gnostic.
00:18:58.000We start to have, we believe that the world is Maya.
00:19:01.000We believe that the world is illusion.
00:19:03.000We believe that all the things in the world are evil in themselves.
00:19:07.000And that is definitely, that's an error, at least from a Christian point of view, because God is a God of love.
00:19:12.000But if we focus too much on the external parts, then we become idolaters.
00:19:15.000We start to confuse the expressions for that which is being expressed.
00:19:22.000And so there's always a kind of sway between those two.
00:19:25.000There's a play between both understanding how God is beyond all things and that God is present in all things and being careful of not going into only one direction.
00:19:37.000Is that the sort of transcendent and imminent argument in some way recounted?
00:19:48.000Like the idea that transcendence and imminence are not opposed, but that in fact one is the cause of the other.
00:19:53.000It's because God is transcendent that he is fully imminent in all things because he is the source and the origin and the kind of transcendent source of all that exists.
00:20:17.000It's very difficult, isn't it, to try to physically track what we're talking about when we say that vibrations appear to create mandala and symbol.
00:20:29.000And at some point, these detectable mandala and symbol undergird more discernible and detectable reality.
00:20:39.000And at some point, must transform, become flesh is a very difficult thing to understand.
00:20:46.000And what I want to sort of say as well, as I'm sort of as I touch the hem of esotericism as best as I can, at least, is that while I'm in all this, Jonathan, I feel myself like it's close to not, I don't want to say madness, but a kind of, how does, how do we keep our feet on the ground?
00:21:21.000In the sense that you have to be part of a body and you also have to acknowledge some kind of authority.
00:21:29.000And of course, we understand that these relationships, like let's say the body, the participation, the going to church, the liturgy, and also the structure of authority is not everything.
00:21:41.000It can become, but it's necessary in some ways to keep you grounded and to avoid what the church fathers or the ascetic fathers call prayless, which is spiritual delusion.
00:21:51.000Because that's the problem if you're alone and you're just kind of having these spiritual experiences and you have nothing against which to test it.
00:21:59.000You have no one to help you discern and to help you know how to live it.
00:22:04.000You have nobody that you're knocking your elbows against that have, you know, that are annoying you at church and that are being, you know, all these things that happen in the community.
00:22:13.000Those things are there to help you ground you so that you don't start to have spiritual delusions.
00:22:31.000Now, like, are we then to assume that like that actually, well, given, let me try and sketch out.
00:22:40.000You know me well enough to know there's not going to be any sort of actual questions, just sort of a great deluge of sound that I want you to make a tune from.
00:23:08.000And this weird concerto of matter that seems like someone trying to track and trace vibration becoming form and the interstitial material between it, vibration and form.
00:23:21.000How does that connect to something that seems so boldly literal, like Elijah seeing and hearing and actually being able to take it to the test and burn up altars and stuff like that?
00:23:37.000Do you feel, Jonathan, that in this age, we're gonna, it's not gonna be enough to be getting some sort of geometric clandestine insight in the way that Jung did.
00:23:48.000Aren't we gonna need like Elijah to start blowing shit up?
00:23:55.000I mean, I think that we definitely need holy people, that's for sure.
00:24:03.000And a lot of holy people are they can become very harsh.
00:24:07.000You know, there are, there's a, you might not know about him, but there's a monk, an Archimandrite who passed away recently, Elder Ephraim.
00:24:19.000And he started, you know, dozens of monasteries all across North America, came from Mount Athos.
00:24:25.000And his monasteries are known for being quite harsh.
00:24:28.000And a lot of people kind of fear his monasteries because they're quite demanding of the monks there.
00:24:34.000And in some ways, he's establishing that harshness as a root, you know, a kind of living in the desert and living out the more difficult aspect of Christianity.
00:24:45.000But then those monasteries have been quite fruitful.
00:24:47.000We have one that's close to my house, maybe about 45 minutes.
00:24:50.000And it's actually a wonderful place where you can feel the fruits in the community.
00:24:54.000You can feel the transformative effect of that holiness on the people.
00:24:58.000And so I do think that we need kind of Elijah type characters.
00:25:06.000But you have to remember that Elijah, although it feels to us like he's alone in the story, it says that he saved the prophets, you know, that he hid them in a cave and he wasn't alone.
00:25:16.000He was actually in a kind of, we don't know the structure exactly, but the structure of prophetic brothers that probably lived somewhat like monks at the time.
00:25:27.000And so I think that we still have that.
00:25:29.000You know, I met the abbot of a monastery in Mount Athos just a few years ago.
00:25:36.000And when I saw him, he was glowing, you know?
00:25:39.000I mean, he wasn't like, I mean, it's hard to explain because obviously he wasn't glowing like if you had taken some kind of measuring tool that you had seen if there was, but there's no other word I can use besides that he was glowing because his presence was so arresting and his and his eyes were so piercing that it reduced everyone in the room to absolute silence.
00:26:04.000And I was there with like two billionaires and Jordan Peterson and all these like very, very high level people.
00:26:12.000And everyone was reduced to absolute silence and everybody became teary-eyed.
00:26:17.000And if you and if it's weird because if you had, if you had like a transcription of what was said, you know, what the monk said, you would say, well, this is just, you know, it's just saying what Jesus said.
00:26:28.000He's not saying anything that sounds so intellectual and extremely, but it was really just his presence and him saying the words of Christ and saying simple words of encouragement with so much presence that made you feel like, yeah, you were standing in front of someone like Elijah, you know.
00:26:53.000You'll get additional access to Monk Club, that's Crowder's Geek, Tim Cast, that's Tim Paul's racket, and Glenn Greenwald's additional content.
00:27:39.000Presence is the word, I suppose, that presumably, I suppose, in that instance, one might try to understand that he must have undertaken so many practices and disciplines that by the time you had that encounter, there's yeah, more Christ than, you know, less of the man and more of the Lord.
00:28:02.000And yeah, okay, I'm trying to think of my own encounters with that.
00:28:05.000Say when I think of someone like Amma, the hugging saint, when I met her, very earthly, very warm.
00:28:13.000And I can tell she's, you know, as best as I could tell, she's living like a saint.
00:28:18.000She's not going around the back and having sex or something.
00:28:20.000You know, there's not some secondary motive.
00:28:24.000And another person, Krishna consciousness man, I met Radhanath Swami, who I became friends with actually and spent times with.
00:28:31.000The first time I encountered him, Jonathan, I like, I sort of got very elevated and enervated.
00:28:39.000I was young and I was only just off drugs, huh?
00:28:41.000And like, and I remember I goes, oh, so what?
00:28:43.000This isn't the final level of reality.
00:28:45.000You know, it's just like a video game and there are other levels of reality.
00:28:48.000And I started talking real quick and stuff and he just laughed and held my face and I sort of then I nearly cried and I felt embarrassed, like as if I was attracted to someone like I would be sexually.
00:28:58.000It wasn't sexual, but it was a level of attraction, you know.
00:29:01.000And then, so like, and that His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when I met him, because he was such a sort of sanctioned figure of holiness, I was trying to think, right, Russell, objectively, come on, is this holy what you're encountering, or is this because you've been told in advance it's the Dalai Lama?
00:29:18.000And man, I tell you, Jonathan, I was so fascinated by the amount of paraphernalia, you know, the followers, the literal carpet being laid down, like shit like that.
00:29:28.000You know, so it's interesting because almost part of the deal with Christianity is you, one has to sort of enter into what one might regard as a sect like, you know, even Eastern Orthodoxy for its scale and then sort of monasteries within that.
00:29:45.000And then an individual, like you said, with the tabernacle, the holiest of holies, you know, you have to, it seems like to encounter it somewhat pure, you one has to undertake that kind of journey.
00:29:57.000And what I feel like, you know, my mission, ministry, some sort of felt pressure internally, externally, I don't know anymore.
00:30:05.000Like where you've gone, I'm going to contribute to the culture by do it.
00:30:10.000Mine, it feels so like fast and karming and so radical, Jonathan.
00:30:17.000This has all happened from, you know, like in such a succession of harsh, real incidents that felt like I've been dragged out of one life and just thrown into another one like that.
00:30:31.000Like I was going one direction and God went, you're going that way.
00:30:36.000And, you know, and I'm just acclimatizing to it and trying not to impose my hubristic, egotistical, selfish rustleness all over it again.
00:30:51.000Because, you know, I've always known grace.
00:32:44.000I mean, he wasn't the same kind of person as you, but he's had a similar experience as you had, a kind of being just pulled out of his life and thrown into the life of Christ in a way that he didn't, that he could never have predicted, you know?
00:32:57.000What I feel like my offering is, and I don't know, because, you know, who knows, but I feel like when what surprised me most is that I thought I knew what was in the Bible and I thought that it wouldn't be robust enough to cope with my, I don't know, anti-authoritarianism, my poeticism, my psychedelia, my mysticism, you know, all of these things.
00:33:20.000And then I get deeper and deeper into the word and I become more, it's transforming me.
00:33:27.000I'm being transformed by the word and by the experience and by Christ.
00:33:31.000And I can't believe how it's sort of like the, I feel some protein thing within me being reformed around it.
00:33:38.000But of course I feel the additional tension of my flesh, of my humanness.
00:33:43.000You know that bit you alluded to in Elijah when like God or Yahweh or whatever, excuse me, Yahweh says like, yeah, there's 70 others.
00:33:52.000I remember now I'm like, how dare you?
00:34:44.000Someone who gets to know you, someone who you can trust, but then you, that, that can, that you also are willing to, to in some way submit your will to their wisdom, you know.
00:35:31.000I try to do my, we have, I have morning prayers, you know, the I try to do my morning prayers, and then I mostly do the Jesus prayer on and off during the day.
00:35:41.000You do you know about the, I mean, I'm sure you know about the Jesus Prayer, right?
00:35:44.000It's a, it's like the basic spiritual practice of the Orthodox Church.
00:35:51.000Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
00:35:54.000And usually it's, it's done with just a kind of breathing, or you breathe in the first part of the prayer and you breathe out the second part of the prayer and you kind of try to still your thoughts and to not, you know, to get rid of the all of the noise.
00:36:09.000You know, and so it's a good way to resist temptation, but it's also kind of a good, good, just a good practice to have during the day.
00:36:15.000You know, and a lot of Orthodox Christians practice that.
00:36:30.000Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
00:36:32.000Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
00:36:35.000How do you align those words in English with the idea that Christ may be hosted within the field of your individual consciousness?
00:36:52.000Well, the idea is that in some ways Christ is, of course, Christ is in you, that Christ is your center, you know.
00:37:02.000And so, but there's also this sense that you're always falling short of that, you know, in your individuality, you could say.
00:37:09.000Sometimes we differentiate the idea of person and individual, that is, as a person, as a full kind of embodiment of a human in the center of you because of Christ's incarnation.
00:37:20.000You could say that Christ is in you, he's in your heart.
00:37:23.000You know, that's a nice kind of even Protestant way of saying it.
00:37:27.000But that with all the distractions and everything else.
00:37:30.000And so, in the invocation, if you think of the prayer, there's two parts, right?
00:37:46.000You have to enter into your own heart, and there you will find Christ.
00:37:51.000And then, in some ways, you ask Him to compensate for your insufficiencies.
00:37:54.000You say, Have mercy on me, a sinner, because I know that I'm not always in my heart.
00:37:59.000I know that I'm not always in that center.
00:38:01.000I'm not always in that place where I'm fully myself and fully united with God, but I'm distracted, I sin, I'm prideful, all of these things.
00:38:12.000And so, I think that that's the best way.
00:38:19.000I wonder how we are to for you, like you've chosen or been chosen for the path of Eastern Orthodoxy.
00:38:28.000And I understand as best, you know, peripherally and superficially, I suppose, what you're saying, the advantages of that.
00:38:38.000And as a person that lives in the Florida panhandle, and I attend a kind of a, what I feel like the jargon, the language to describe it is an Acts 29 church.
00:38:52.000That's the vernacular, an Acts 29 church, you know, and it's kind of, it seems like much of the focus is ethical and moral.
00:39:00.000And even in this relatively small and not super populated area that I'm in, there's churches everywhere.
00:39:06.000Like up one road, there's like a vision church, which, as best I can tell, they're more into the flags and the speaking in tongues.
00:39:14.000Then there's like a destiny church, which has a like that's really gotten it down with the music.
00:39:20.000And, you know, the one I go to is in what I think they call a set up, tear down church, Redeemer, where they're, again, that, but you see this thing you mentioned about authority.
00:39:32.000I can see how what I might regard as the sort of institutional paraphernalia, the outfits, the candelabras, the sigils of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy might lend themselves to sort of submission.
00:39:50.000And isn't that the nature of apostolic authority and of these symbols and the paraphernalia?
00:39:59.000Is it sort of like, does it, is it about authority?
00:40:02.000And is it about submission, submission of the culture and submission of the individual?
00:40:09.000I mean, yeah, there's a way of seeing it that way.
00:40:12.000In some ways, there are two ways of understanding the outward aspects of the church.
00:40:16.000Let's say the way that the way that the priest dress, let's say the music, the architecture, the icons, all of that.
00:40:23.000In some ways, you could say it is a manner in which we submit to God, obviously.
00:40:29.000But we can also understand it also as a way that it's a celebration.
00:40:33.000It's actually the way that creation can celebrate, can worship, can, you know, resonate in, if I use a language that you would understand, in God's will.
00:40:44.000And so it's like God's will has a, looks like something in the world.
00:40:49.000And therefore, when we kind of shape the world like that, then we're celebrating God's presence and we're participating in God's presence in the world.
00:41:00.000But in terms of the actual hierarchy, let's say the hierarchy of bishops and of priests, of course, there's an aspect of that which has to do with authority.
00:41:10.000But the church also has saints, you know, and saints are more like they're more like the prophetic, you could say, in the sense that they, because the hierarchy is always corrupt, you know, the hierarchy, the priests and bishops.
00:41:22.000I mean, there are wonderful priests and bishops, but there will always be corrupt bishops.
00:41:27.000There will always be bishops who make decisions for the wrong reasons.
00:41:33.000We know that we have all the stories of all the corrupt bishops from the beginning.
00:41:38.000But then you also have then ascetics and saints that come and shake things up, you know, and usually get abused by the church somehow and ultimately get vindicated.
00:41:48.000So there's a way in which these things end up balancing themselves out.
00:41:54.000So there's, yes, of course, you have to have to submit to authority and participate in that, but there's always other things around that are there.
00:42:02.000You know, we even have the tradition of holy fools in, you know, especially in the Russian church, where you actually have characters that act completely out of line, that they do all kinds of wild things in the church in order to break the sense that this is just an institution with just a kind of simple, simple submission, you know?
00:42:23.000And so we have all kinds of things to balance things out.
00:42:27.000Because if it can't incorporate chaos, how can the institution endure?
00:42:32.000What about when St. Francis says, if like in response to his father's condemnation in court, as I understand, this is based on Chesterton's writing about St. Francis.
00:42:45.000If I am to be a fool, I'll be the fool in the court of King Jesus Christ.
00:42:52.000I like that, of course, for obvious reasons, I suppose.
00:42:56.000But also, also, anytime that we pick an institution or a lineage or a livery, it's, of course, many doors closed.
00:43:06.000Hopefully it's the doors that he wants closed that are closed and the doors that he won't open open, as David says.
00:43:14.000But I do, as I've said to some of my friends that are Catholic, like, do you think then when Christ returns in the cloud and the light and the bronze boots and the, you know, however we're to understand these images, is it going to be like, okay, who's Catholic?
00:43:39.000You know, so do what do you, how do you, how do we reconcile the improbability of that outcome with a personal decision to belong to one particular discipline, Jonathan?
00:43:50.000Yeah, I mean, the way that I see it is I tend to see it rather in the positive, you know, which is that if you ask me what is the tradition, what is the church that is the fullest, that has the fullest of the revelation of Christ, that has the most sure way towards, you know, theosis and union with God, I would say that that's the Orthodox Church.
00:44:19.000And that's also why I would tell people to become Orthodox.
00:44:23.000As for the others, it's just not my, it's not my prerogative.
00:44:27.000Like, I'm concerned with my salvation and I'm concerned with, you know, living that out as best as possible.
00:44:35.000And so that's all I can really speak for.
00:44:37.000The rest, you know, how God's mercy functions and how these divisions in the body of Christ, what they mean and what fruits they're going to yield.
00:44:49.000In some ways, I kind of leave that up to silence, you could say.
00:44:57.000What do we, I've got two areas that are on my mind.
00:45:01.000One is our mutual friend, Jordan Peterson, and my prayers for him and his wellness.
00:45:07.000And I don't know even if this is the right sort of thing to talk about in this context, really.
00:45:14.000And then the other thing I'm thinking about is recurrent, again, recurrent images and how one might be spoken to and through from and through image.
00:45:28.000And, you know, like the appleness of an apple, the burning bushness of a burning bush, what we're to do with this language of symbol and whether that, once you've made the choice, of course, no, yeah, once you've made the choice that you're Eastern Orthodox and that you're concerned with your own salvation, then why have a venture about folk tales?
00:45:53.000You know, because I'm having these conversations with the people around me.
00:45:57.000I'll tell you, I'll give you as much background as I can and as quickly as I can.
00:46:00.000We watched this movie on Netflix that's called Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays an actor very much like himself, experiencing a crisis of confidence and meaning towards the end of his career.
00:46:14.000And it's very difficult not to sort of watch the film, which is brilliantly made by Noah Baumburg, who's an excellent filmmaker.
00:46:20.000He's got a great cast, Adam Sandler, like brilliant actors and stuff.
00:46:24.000What's weird, though, when you watch the film is you think, well, this is a film about the kind of hopeless meaninglessness of being inside an institution like Hollywood, and in this instance, specifically Hollywood.
00:46:37.000And yet there is the possibility of real friendship within it and things that are real.
00:46:42.000And yet the artifact and object itself is a film.
00:46:46.000That's what you've ended up with, is a film.
00:46:47.000Now, any story, one of the things I've sort of felt like I've understood about Christ is the, and, you know, which I guess is merely an extemporization on C.S. Lewis's observation that the maker of meaning, the reason that there is meaning, appears to instantiate and incarnate meaning.
00:47:07.000And he tells stories during his mission and ministry that further illustrate meaning.
00:47:13.000And then his story is all about meaning, whether it's the vulnerability and innocence of the child Christ or the crucifixion of the Antichrist.
00:47:20.000Anyway, so how do I, and of course the resurrection, an ascension, like, how do I, though, as me, old Russ in the world, reconcile these like these sort of concussive and successive and endless sort of tidal revelations with, right, now I'm going to sell reborn supplements or now I'm going to, you know, do my job.
00:47:53.000So I would say that I find great joy every time I see, let's say, the light of the Logos refracted in anything.
00:48:05.000You know, every time I see the light of God reflected in anything, I find great joy, whether it is the way in which, you know, we can find joy in our own stories, you know, our own heritage, whether it is in our own family, in our own friendships, in our relationships.
00:48:26.000You know, it's like every time I encounter someone who has become a Christian, I rejoice no matter what, even if I think that Orthodoxy is better than their version of Christianity, I still rejoice.
00:48:38.000Every time someone finds meaning, someone who is an alcoholic, who finds sobriety in some kind of submission to a higher reality, I rejoice because every place where I see, you know, the light of truth refracted, I find joy.
00:48:53.000And so I would say that's how I live my life.
00:48:57.000And that's what motivates all the things that I do.
00:49:00.000You know, of course, I'm particularly concerned with beauty.
00:49:03.000I believe that in some ways, beauty is a way in for many people, you know, through the fairy tales or through the icons or, you know, all kinds of ways.
00:49:12.000And that's a way in which a film can play that role because a film can be an object of beauty, not in the saccharin way, but in, you know, but it can be even harsh beauty, but it can elevate certain aspects of the world and help us see them properly.
00:49:28.000You know, and if you have to, if in order to make a living, you have to, let's say, sell things or you have to advertise for things, you know, I would say to just choose them properly, you know, to not be a hypocrite and to pick the things that you believe in and things that you think are powerful.
00:49:49.000Like if you're, if you're, I don't know, if you're selling beef tallow, you have to, you have to think that beef tallow is a good thing.
00:49:55.000You know, don't, don't, don't try to sell things that you think are, that, that you're cynical about, you know, and I think that would prevent kind of schizophrenic, you know, a kind of breakdown of your psyche.
00:50:27.000So, yeah, because I guess what that was with that film to unpack it a little bit is, you know, I've been an actor and I've had an entourage and I've had lots and lots of attention.
00:50:40.000And it's a world that I've ultimately been, it felt like in some ways, expelled from or exiled from or left in a, you know, and I, and what is interesting for me, particularly since being charged with rape and knowing like I'm standing trial in June, knowing that I, through my objectification and selfishness, have obviously hurt people.
00:51:04.000Obviously, I've hurt women with my conduct, but very faithfully believing I've never done anything that was non-consensual, never needed to, never wanted to, don't feel like it's even in the flow of what I'm about or what I do.
00:51:19.000But plainly, here I am in this situation.
00:51:23.000I must have done something and God must want it to be happening because here it is happening.
00:51:28.000And already I can read the obvious benefits of the situation.
00:51:31.000You know, I feel differently in my marriage now.
00:51:54.000It's both a positive and negative attribute in some ways.
00:51:57.000So when I look at things that glorify celebrity, I feel a kind of anger towards it.
00:52:03.000I also do think that the world is not, what do you do with the scriptural assertion throughout the New Testament that the world is in the thrall of the evil one?
00:52:42.000Well, I think, I think really think that the best way of thinking about it is that, you know, in the book of Revelation, as you said you were reading the book of Revelation, you could say that there are two images of civilization.
00:52:54.000You know, one is a beast with a whore on its back, you know, and so it's a mix of dilapidation and power and greed and corruption, but also control and power and all of these, you know, both of like the kind of loose aspect of civilization and the very harsh controlling aspect of civilization.
00:53:15.000And then you also have this image of the heavenly Jerusalem as being the one which is properly submitted to God, you know.
00:53:24.000And I believe that those two realities are always there.
00:53:28.000These are always present realities and that the same, the same world both has an aspect which is pulling it apart, you know, which is making it with bringing it to submit to evil forces.
00:53:40.000And there's also in that there are true things that can shine.
00:53:45.000And, you know, I would say that, you know, how do I go through it?
00:53:50.000I think that I try to focus on those things that are bright and those things that are truly that are truly moving towards the good.
00:54:00.000Obviously, I don't succeed all the time.
00:54:02.000You know, like all people, I'm sinful and I have all my all my faults, obviously.
00:54:09.000But hopefully, you know, in the end, that's the play, you know, is to try to focus on those things.
00:54:16.000You know, and then like there are certain disciplines that I've developed, you know, and everybody has their own kind of practice.
00:54:23.000Like I, but these are not necessarily appropriate for everyone.
00:54:27.000Like I actually practice forms of anti-attention, you could say.
00:54:31.000And so I actually try to not comment on events in the world.
00:54:38.000I'll wait like three weeks before I comment on anything that's happening, if I'm going to even comment on something.
00:54:45.000And so, and so, you know, and obviously it's a competition because obviously I do have to have attention or else I won't be able to do this.
00:54:52.000But it's always trying to find the balance between, you know, obviously being able to do what I do and say the things that I think are insightful, but then not being in that whirlwind of attention that the, especially the internet, can cause, you know, because it's like a, it's like a wheel and you have to feed it, you know, or else, or else it starts to, the algorithm kind of pushes you out and you know that's true.
00:55:14.000And so you have to keep the outrage and the excitement and the and the and the clickbait going.
00:55:20.000But but, you know, I mean, you can also accept the kind of lower level of attention and just find joy in that.
00:55:28.000I feel like I'm, I love the place that I'm in.
00:55:30.000I, I, I'm not famous, like in the sense that I have people that respect me and sometimes people recognize me once in a while.
00:55:38.000I make enough money to support my family, but that's that's great.
00:55:42.000I don't, I would, I would actually flee from being super famous because it's probably not good for me.
00:55:50.000No, it's not good for I'm not sure that it's who it's good for.
00:55:53.000And, you know, like in the Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, when he sort of contests that if you come to our Lord, you will look back and see that your whole life was heaven or the holy city.
00:56:06.000And if you reject our Lord, you will look back at your life and see that the whole thing was.
00:56:11.000He sort of is offering sort of purgatorial, I think, rather than a beast with a whore on its back.
00:56:18.000You know, sort of so awfully diabolical, it almost might be quite good.
00:56:24.000When so it gets that evil, you might enjoy it.
00:56:27.000Like a beast with a whore on its back.
00:56:28.000That sounds like a potentially good evening.
00:56:33.000So like this idea that you say that it's, I mean, I guess when he's talking about my ways are not your ways, I guess it might be beyond comprehension, only understood in the most peripheral.
00:56:51.000I guess when I say lucid, I actually mean the opposite of how it's normally meant, like a kind of light, like you say, the eminence and the eminence from the abbot of the monastery you described.
00:57:01.000And I was when some of something I'm reading at the moment talks about the light by which we even experience light, the light that is beyond light, a kind of light that's not photons.
00:57:14.000It's difficult not to see it as analogous or to consciousness, to the consciousness itself, that this might be our participation in the kingdom may be that we are co-creators with him through consciousness itself.
00:57:31.000And that do you think of the cross as having some geometric?
00:57:37.000How do you break down in a Jonathan Pagot way the cross?
00:57:43.000I mean, I mean, the cross is a union of heaven and earth.
00:57:47.000You know, it's a vertical and a horizontal.
00:57:48.000It's a very simple symbol, but it actually is a cosmic one.
00:57:53.000And then, you know, the union of the vertical, which is the hierarchy of heaven, and the horizontal, which is the expanse, yields a heart, a center, you know, and that center is, you know, it's in Catholic thinking, it's the sacred heart of Christ, you could say, you know, and it's the holy of holies.
00:58:14.000It's the, it's the place where the glory of God, you know, reveals itself.
00:58:21.000And I think that, you know, the surprise in some ways that Christ reveals is that that appears as a, as a self-giving, as a sacrifice, you know, because we tend to think of the center as something that is real and is radiating, you know, like the center is this real thing that's radiating.
00:58:39.000But Christ reveals that that center is actually an offering.
00:59:59.000I've had a little go, you know, like I've had a little go at that.
01:00:02.000Now, so I wonder what you feel is the significant revelation in the story of Christ that seems to bring us into such strong adversity with the world, such clear combat, such conflict.
01:00:18.000That why is it that telling the truth if that's what you take Candace Owens to be doing, you know, and of course, any person, as you say, the logos refracted through a person, it's going to bear some, it's going to pick up some flesh, you know.
01:00:36.000Because I, what I feel like is I'm doing turning point.
01:00:39.000Like on the 18th, I'm going there with Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.
01:00:44.000Any one of these people now, there's probably, maybe there's people, Jonathan, in the world, maybe there's people in the world, Jonathan Pajot, that regard you with like fury.
01:01:03.000What this tussle for power that seems extraordinarily to center around the holy land, its inhabitants, have you got a way of handling that?
01:01:20.000I mean, I think that, you know, for sure, what we're seeing happening is, I mean, it's been happening, been happening for a while, which is that we're seeing the breakdown of a common story, the breakdown of the, it's really the World War II story that's breaking down, and it's breaking down in all kinds of ways, ways that actually don't care about your political allegiance.
01:01:49.000They don't care about whether you're right or left or conservative or liberal, whatever.
01:01:52.000It's like it's the narrative that's kind of breaking down.
01:01:55.000And, you know, in that moment of chaos, there's obviously a desire to retell a new story and to kind of find a new story.
01:02:04.000But it's something that you can't totally force, something that in some ways will only just happen, like a Kairos or revelation.
01:02:15.000But I think that that's what's going on.
01:02:16.000And, you know, in some ways, you know, Israel is the World War II consensus.
01:02:25.000And so all of the contradictions, all of the taboos of that consensus, all of the, you know, all of the ways in which it served us and the way in which it betrayed us are all contained in that place and in that imagery.
01:02:41.000And so it's not surprising that that's the place where the narrative combat is happening.
01:02:51.000And I don't know what the solution is.
01:02:55.000I can see the problem and I can see that it's breaking down and it's going to continue to break down.
01:03:02.000And that's going to lead to possibly war, possibly, yeah, at least more and more conflict.
01:03:11.000But I don't completely know it seems like an intractable problem until the solution starts to become clear.
01:03:22.000And not just about Israel itself, but the entire story of the liberal West since World War II and the way in which we advocate for open societies, that we advocate for diversity, that we advocate for that we are afraid of identity, we're afraid of nationalism, we're afraid of race, we're afraid of all these categories.
01:03:39.000And now they're crashing back and we don't know how to deal with it.
01:03:42.000And they're crashing back in all kinds of insane, wild ways.
01:03:56.000You probably saw the Fuentes Piers Morgan interview that was the last one.
01:04:02.000And when you watch it, you realize that these two worlds, they do not, they're not, they're talking and they don't know what they don't understand what's happening on the other side.
01:04:13.000You know, Piers Morgan doesn't understand anything about the world of the Groypers.
01:04:27.000And he doesn't know what's happening because all of these stories are kind of crashing together right now.
01:04:34.000Oh, that's a brilliant bit of analysis to take it all the way from World War II to Nick Fuentes and Piers Morgan.
01:04:40.000I mean, that's, clip that, send that out.
01:04:43.000I mean, because as best as I could follow it, it's like the World War II, even though it was, of course, an incident of conflict, was in its own paradoxical way a unifying event.
01:05:00.000The great, it seems, enduring symbol by your analysis there, and I recognize you're just a man on a podcast.
01:05:07.000You know, it's not like a treatise you were offering, was like that Israel is one of the sort of offered up consequences, results, some would say, objectives of the Second World War.
01:05:19.000But of course, the total collapse of British imperialism and colonialism could be another one and the rise of American imperialism, one might argue.
01:05:27.000And of course, communism, Russian Soviet communism.
01:05:33.000But what I see and think is interesting because we've got a conversation that's sort of been fused with conversations, even though it's only been an hour, a discourse diverse enough to include why Disney can't make fairy stories no more.
01:05:48.000That's a good title for a video, a clip, by the way.
01:05:52.000And related to the World War II consensus, too, by the way.
01:05:56.000Yes, because there's no agreement on what reality is and what myths are and what stories we should be telling each other.
01:06:02.000And, you know, like, and I'd love to throw this your way, even though I'm supposed to be going and doing something else.
01:06:06.000Like that Breitbart, Andrew Breitbart says, of course, famously, you know, politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of technology.
01:06:14.000And what is technology other than human ingenuity, unmanifest consciousness being instantiated into matter and systems, i.e. the system of mass communication now has gotten so vast and efficient that it's collapsing time.
01:06:33.000How can you measure time in the same way in the pre-Gutenberg print and press era and now when we can simultaneously make a claim, have that claim go around the world, have it debunked, dismantled, reinstantiated, sects emerging from it?
01:06:51.000I mean, you can sort of see it happening now, like that, like one unified object for a minute.
01:06:56.000Like once you would have said Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, that's one thing, Ben Shapiro, one thing.
01:07:05.000Now that thing, those people you put them in a room, they might kill each other, you know, like it's extraordinary.
01:07:18.000Like I had an argument with Chat GPT because I'm writing a book, How to Become Christian in Seven Days, asterisk, make take 50 years of sin and fake rape allegations to get to day one.
01:07:39.000And then anyway, so like I was writing, I was doing my best because I end up like a lot of my time, Jonathan, is I talk to like working class men because of the conditions of my origin about scripture now.
01:07:53.000So like from telling my mate Joe the story of David, I'm like, right, so what it is is, you know, then David, he obviously fights Goliath and we all know that, but his quality was he was happy to die either way, but also he did have the skills, he had the skills, you know, from killing the lions or whatever, but he was also, he was like, if God wants me to win, this motherfucker's got no chance.
01:08:13.000And like, and then, but then Bathsheba, and then the consensus, and the place where the atonement for the census is made is where God will come and live with you eternally.
01:08:26.000The site of the temple will be the site of your deepest, where you atone for your deepest wound.
01:08:32.000And maybe even the father, but God, how do you break that down into metaphysics?
01:08:36.000Where the father atones for his greatest transgression is where God will finally come to live in all perpetuity, or at least till the temple is sacked and ransacked and bought down.
01:08:46.000Anyway, so I'm telling these stories as best as I can in working class vernacular to working class men, and it forms a big part of the book.
01:08:54.000There's one bit where obviously I'm checking in with Chat GPT, Jonathan.
01:08:58.000Like, oh, what order did that happen in?
01:09:00.000And is that story told different from Chronicles and Kings and Samuel?
01:09:18.000And ChatGPT goes, well, may it, no, actually, you might actually categorize it as rape because the differentiation, this is by the way, this is Disney execs talking, right?
01:09:31.000The pattern, the differentiation in power dynamics between David and Bathsheba means that it might as well consider it a rape.
01:09:38.000Now, obviously, that touches a nerve with me, right?
01:09:45.000And ChatGPT is like, well, even that could be imposed, particularly in the hindsight of how our culture has evolved and progressed in our understanding.
01:10:34.000I mean, that's what I want to, you know.
01:10:36.000Look, I want to, look, one of the things I'm trying to offer to this medium is my raw authenticity, my confusion, my bafflement, my doubt, my wild oscillation between certainty and total collapsing doubt.
01:10:50.000And where I suppose I was going with that, well, maybe, I mean, that is a good question, Jonathan.
01:11:30.000And as you say, there's not one story that can accommodate, well, there is one story that can accommodate it, but people are denying that story.
01:11:38.000And it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be wild.
01:11:43.000But you went from, listen, you went from World War II to Fuentes and Piers Morgan.
01:12:00.000Let's just talk about the, I think that your insight is right.
01:12:05.000That is that the stories are breaking apart and that we, you know, even in even in the supposedly right or the conservative or the people that are supposed to in some ways be this, those that like the center in the sense of something solid, something, you know, that because of how the story of World War II is breaking apart, now we don't know where to look and we don't know how to,
01:12:33.000let's say, reconcile some of the problems that are being presented to us, you know?
01:12:38.000And so I do believe that Christ obviously is the solution.
01:12:44.000I do believe that Christianity is the only thing that can really, because the problem, okay, so think about it this way.
01:12:50.000So the problem that's coming towards us is that since World War II, and for good reasons, we've objected to tribal identity.
01:13:00.000We've ultimately then moved to objecting even to family hierarchies, to religious hierarchies, actually to anything that is kind of identity that stabilizes.
01:13:11.000And we've moved towards openness and diversity and difference, right?
01:13:16.000This celebration of difference ever since rock and roll, this idea that rebellion and difference and you have to show how different you are from everyone else.
01:13:39.000And so the question is, how do we reintroduce identity into the world without repeating the fascist mistake, without repeating a kind of absolute identity, right?
01:13:52.000Or a kind of absolute nationalism or all of the problems that started appearing at the beginning of the 20th century.
01:14:00.000How can we now reintegrate identity without falling into the problem that we had?
01:14:26.000And the tribal identity, not necessarily so, right?
01:14:29.000So if you fall into a kind of nationalism or tribal identity, it can just be, and you see it a little bit in Trump, a little bit in like America only.
01:14:39.000It doesn't matter as long as my thing is solid.
01:14:42.000And you see that even in some of the right-wing commentators now.
01:14:45.000They're like, you know, I only care about my thing.
01:14:48.000And as long as it's solid, I don't care about anything else.
01:14:52.000That's not a proper that you can't exist in the world that way.
01:14:55.000There has to be, obviously, you do have to care about your thing, but you always have to care about your thing in a way that is in communion with others.
01:15:01.000There's no other way or else you're going straight towards war.
01:15:05.000Like, let's just, let's just plow towards war.
01:15:07.000Let's just, let's just not care about anything else that happens in the world.
01:15:10.000Just care about ourselves and screw everybody over until we've accumulated so many enemies that now war becomes inevitable.
01:15:18.000And so, anyways, this is to say, this is the issue that we're facing: how do we reintegrate identity in a manner that doesn't lead us down the dark path that happened in the 20th century?
01:15:32.000The technology affords decentralization and the church can be localized.
01:15:38.000I think it's, Jonathan, I could talk to you forever, especially when I ask very long and may I say brilliant, if difficult to follow questions, if you're not clever enough to concentrate.
01:15:49.000Say it might come across as incoherent to someone who spends their time writing children's books, but to me, I'm dealing with grown-up shit.
01:16:00.000I put aside childish things, Jonathan.