Religion and Politics in the Ancient City ｜ Guest： Chad Pecknold ｜ 5⧸18⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
165.75941
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Chad Pecknell joins me to talk about his new book, The Ancient City, and why religion is so important in ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. He also shares his thoughts on why religion should be considered an alien concept.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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So I've been reading this book, The Ancient City, and I think it's a really fascinating book.
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It kind of explains the traditions of ancient Rome and ancient Greece in a way that really
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helps us to understand how central religion was to pretty much everything that existed
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inside the cities, how it informed the law, how it informed politics, how it informed
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pretty much every institution that they had in that time.
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And so I wanted to talk to somebody who is very familiar with that book.
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He is an assistant professor over at Catholic University of America of Theology.
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Yeah, my pleasure to be with you as always, Aaron.
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Yeah, I think this is going to be really fascinating.
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You wrote a piece for the post-liberal order on this book, or at least incorporating a good
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amount of this book, which I thought was very interesting.
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And so I definitely want to bring your perspective in here as we kind of look at what Collage had
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to say about the ancient city and the way that religion really informed everything that
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So one of the things that I think is very helpful in this book is at the very beginning,
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Kalanj kind of encourages the reader to look at the ancient city as kind of an alien place,
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He says, a lot of people look at ancient Rome and ancient Greece, and they think of these
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This is kind of how Western civilization evolved.
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And so we kind of push our own understanding of how these societies worked, our kind of
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modern understanding onto the rituals, the religious beliefs of these people.
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But he encourages us to really think of them as kind of an alien people because their ways
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are so different, so radically set apart from the way that many modern people think about
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religion and its role to be kind of very different, drastically different role.
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Yeah, I think to make the ancient world strange, especially to Third Republic French liberals,
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you know, like Robespierre and people who wanted to, you know, in a sense, have this ideal
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We'll go back to, you know, Aristotle and Plato and we'll just be pure naturalists.
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And I think one of the victories of this extraordinary study is not only that he got, this was written
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in 1864, by the way, before there was such a thing as archaeology.
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And it's an extraordinary book because Fustel gets all of his information from studying classic
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And so he kind of, he kind of unearths the archaeology of Greek and Roman religion before
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there was such a thing as the archaeology of religion.
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But one of his aims is, in a sense, to demonstrate for his countrymen that,
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in a sense, the ancient world that they're going, that they want to go back to is not
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I mean, that's what the, that's what the philosophes are kind of after is some atheistic kind of
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And he writes the ancient city in part to demonstrate to them that that is quixotic.
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You're not going to go back to the ancients and find a religion-less world.
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In fact, when you go back to the ancients, what you find is that, as he says, religion
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Religion is, has the kind of architectonic power, explanatory power for the whole thing.
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It explains everything from marriage and, you know, family ties, kinship ties, how a family
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is held together, how, how families of families are held together, how philosophy is held
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together, uh, uh, how generations are held together, all by the bonds of religion.
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And so part of the project here is to demonstrate to 19th century philosophes that there's no doing
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Which I think is a particularly useful project for, uh, many today who would like to abandon
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this crazy wokeness and get us all the way back to the classical liberalism of the 1990s,
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uh, thinking that we can kind of just, uh, purge ourselves of this crazy new religion and get
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back to the good old days, uh, where everything was objective and scientific.
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And I think it's really important for people to understand that that's just not how humans
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It never has been how humans operate in the ancient city is most certainly a study on how
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Interestingly, he does say repeatedly, this is not a society that you can go back to in
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general anyway, that this is very much kind of of its time, uh, of its people, uh, you
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And so, uh, the, the caution about thinking that you're just going to return to a particular
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time is useful, even as it comes from somebody in the 1860s.
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Uh, but that said, let's kind of go ahead and get into some of the beginnings of his
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explanation of the religion here, because I think most people, they think, you know,
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the, the Romans, the Greeks, it's all about Zeus.
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It's all about, uh, you know, Poseidon or something.
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And he really goes, he really goes back and starts at a very ancient form of the religion
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in, uh, kind of Greece and Rome talking about something that was much more akin to ancestor
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worship and was rooted very much in the idea of a sacred hearth, a sacred fire that the
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family would tend to kind of honor, uh, you know, their ancients that visit the tomb that
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was in the land where they're that he even says things like property rights are developed
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specifically, not because of any idea of individual ownership or, you know, a kind of autonomous
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use of something, but very specifically because you had to own the field your family was buried
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in because their spirits literally lived there.
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And, and yeah, I mean the, and the, the, the hearth I'm pointing at my hearth and many
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people still today, I mean, some contemporary homes are built without fireplaces and hearths,
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but, but the idea even of in a single family home where you have a kind of classical eggs and
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dental kind of structure around your fireplace, that is religious for the ancients that, that
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there's a place in which the, the Vesta, the, the living flame of the family is the root of all
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ancient civilization. And that sacred flame is the thing which binds together the family and then
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binds together the city. And as you say, uh, it binds you not only temporally,
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but also binds you to over across time to your ancestors and to the future. And, and that
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hearth as it were has to be rooted somewhere. It has to, it has to be rooted in the place of your
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ancestors. And so you have to have land, you have to have property. And so the very idea that, uh,
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you know, the sale of property is a kind of religious event. Uh, it's, it's, it's extremely complex in the
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ancient world to sell property. And we think, well, they didn't know about the free market and,
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you know, uh, if, if only they, if only they had realtors, but, uh, but in fact, uh, the reason,
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the reason why they don't do that is because, uh, even property is religious property has this religious
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significant, um, inheritance, um, inheritance, the same way inheritance laws and primogeniture and the,
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the connection between a father and the eldest son, uh, how things are passed on from one generation
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to another is all bound by religion. And I mean, one of the interesting things is you might not see
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it in the ways that you expect to, right? You're, you're looking for a place in which people are
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gathering, you know, for, you know, singing hymns, you know, uh, passing, passing the tithe plate
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around or something like that. And I think like Emil Durkheim, uh, uh, Fustel shows, I think that
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religion is more suffused into everything. It's just kind of baked into everything.
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Yeah. It's, it's the language by which kind of everyone communicates. It ties every different
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social interaction together. And I think most interestingly, uh, at least for me,
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because I spent a lot of time on kind of politics and political theory and the origins of these
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things. Uh, it, he talks a lot about how all of the law in the ancient city is tied to religion.
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So as you kind of alluded to there earlier, you, you had, it was considered, it wasn't just considered,
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uh, bad for, you know, someone to stay celibate to not have children. It was, it was literally an
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interruption of the worship. It was an interruption of the ability of father and son to pass along the
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worship and to continue to care for the ancients and to continue, uh, to provide the, the things that
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the ancestors would need once they had passed on. And so it was your moral duty to have that looks
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like we might've lost, uh, Chad there for a second guys, but I'll just continue with explaining some of
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these aspects and hopefully we'll have him back here soon. Uh, but the, uh, but the ancient world
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is a place where you are continuing, uh, bloodline is not just there for your, you know, the, uh,
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carrying on property or something, but very specifically because they will be, have a duty
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to care for you in the afterlife. And so inheritance is not something you can just hand off through
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something like a will, because the son, if you, if you were to, to hand this off to some random person,
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this property off to some random person, that person would not be part of your worship.
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And therefore them possessing your land would rob your ancestors and the future of your line of the
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ability to continue to participate in the worship. And so as Dr. Pecknell was talking about, that's not
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just something that you lose as a possession, but it's actually a lineage and a future, uh, that you're
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denying to your family, as well as a denial of your ancestors of the worship that's due to them.
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I think you're that back there, Mr. Yeah. And I think who still is very interested in
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Yeah, I think, I think who still is interested in this question of, of the family structure
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as the fundament of, of everything that, that the family structure is inherently religious
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and that, uh, it's the relationship between families, which is also going to be religious.
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And so one of the, one of the problems that who still talks about is the, the way in which
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religion is essentially private, you know, and in a way, sometimes a liberal might think
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religion is a private thing. Um, in a very, very special way in the ancient world, uh, the domestic
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heart, the, the vest of the, of the, of the domestic religion was just for you, just for you and your
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family. You didn't, you didn't pray to your ancestral gods for your neighbor, right? You wouldn't, you
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wouldn't, don't pray for your city. You just, it's very private. And Fustel talks about the development of
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the civic religion, uh, as itself a problem is you, if everything's religious and, and you have this
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development of a connection between families and here, he has an, has in mind the primitive movement
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was the connection between aristocratic families that the, the, what bound the aristocratic families
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together was also a new civic hearth, you could call it a civic altar. And that that civic altar was
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to a God that would protect that group of families as a, as a tribe and then as a city. Um, and so
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everything for Fustel kind of expands off of that. So you move from the domestic religion, which is private
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to a civic religion, which is totally public, but it's publicness is, uh, once again, jealous. So you would pray to the
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God of that city for people in that city. You would never pray to that God for people in another city.
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And so you have this kind of way in which the religion starts to build up. And, uh, this is how he,
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he describes the movement of both Greek and Roman civilization as a movement of religious order that
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is kind of organically, uh, grows up as the binding instrument, as the, the relegare, the thing that,
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that knits things together, uh, each according to their capacity.
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Yeah. And I found that particularly interesting because I think it also plays, uh, into something
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that Bertrand Juvenal talks about with his metaphysics of power and how for the state to expand, it must
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collapse all competing spheres of social authority. But I don't, I don't want to get too far into that
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yet. Cause I think there's some other things I want to hit before we get there. But I, I think that
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interesting thing about this book is it, it lays out the development of these societies so well that
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I think it brings together a number of different threads of kind of political theory and, and it
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becomes a showcase for, for a number of kind of how these mechanisms work. Uh, but I do want to go
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ahead and touch before we get to some of that stuff about the power of the, of kind of how laws have to
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follow the religious order. The laws, uh, for, uh, for style are basically things that come into being
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because they are formalizations of what already is religious doctrine, which already is kind of the
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tradition and that the laws couldn't be anything else. He specifically says the idea that the, uh,
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that the Senate or that the, the legislative body would legislate something that was against the
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religion or an opposition or restriction on the religion was crazy because the, the families had
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so much authority and the worship of the families had so much authority that the government did not
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have the ability to kind of basically enshrine anything else. And so things like the ownership
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of the children, kind of a radical ownership of children where you could sell your, your, your son or
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daughter. Um, you could choose to kill them. Uh, all of these things are, uh, things that the,
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the society could not change the, the, the government could not change because the authority of the
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families themselves was ultimate. And so that meant that the laws, as they came into being,
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were purely kind of reflections of this religious order in many ways.
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Yeah. I mean, specifically not just the power of the families.
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All right, guys. Well, exciting, uh, issues with connections. I guess I'll just continue to talk
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about this again until we get him back. Oh, he's back already.
00:17:47.700
Sorry. All right. No problem. No, but the, the power of the fathers, the power of the fathers
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absolute. And, uh, the, the power of the fathers fundamentally a religious power. And, uh, the
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reason why the Senate won't intervene is because it's precisely the, the fathers who constitute the
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regime. And so there's a kind of implicit classical sense of subsidiarity here that,
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that, um, that, um, there's something inviolable about the power of the father to rule. Um,
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even who still talks about how the father sits in the judgment seat in the court of his own home
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and his judgments are supreme. So, you know, a father is like a Supreme Court justice in his own home,
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and he can decide his own disputes. Now, uh, so the state, the, the government can't, uh, decide any,
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I mean, we have civil disputes, disputes between families in our courts. There would be none of that for them.
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Um, now a father could be judged, right, uh, by the Senate, uh, but his children couldn't be,
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his wife couldn't be. Um, and I think that gives you the sense of, of the, uh, the way in which
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the civilization is structured is, you know, Catholics have one way of saying that the family
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is the fundamental unit. The ancients have another way of saying that it's, it is both the fundamental
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unit and it's, it has, uh, it's already political, if I can put it that way. Some conservatives like this
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idea of the pre-political, that the family is pre-political to the civic order, that is not an
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ancient view at all. Uh, the ancients absolutely view the family as political. It's political all
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the way through. It's religious all the way through. Um, and, uh, the Senate respects that, uh, respects
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that the family is the basic political, social, religious unit of, uh, and, uh, doesn't, doesn't,
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in a sense have rights over, uh, the father. Yeah. And it's very interesting that even as
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many of these families kind of bind together and what he calls the gins here, kind of the, uh,
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the, the old families, uh, the patrician families inside of them, they still have this order where
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there, there are judges and priests and it's kind of sacred rights that only belong to that family,
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only belong to that gen. And so there's basically, uh, even once we start seeing more of the
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formation of the state, there's still all these subdivides inside these families that have
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more weight, that have more authority, uh, than the, than whatever the top government level of
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government would have. And so, like you said, that, that level of subsidiarity where kind of each level
00:20:42.940
has an authority that can't be breached by, uh, kind of the formal state is a constant, uh, theme
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throughout here. Um, and, uh, he really also breaks in to the fact that a lot of what he's,
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talked about is from kind of the nobility, uh, that you had, you know, your, your patrician families,
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and then they had the clients that got to share the religion of those families. And then you had
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the, uh, the plebs who had kind of no religion at all, or did not have a connection to this religion.
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And so in some ways, slaves who were brought into the worship of these households were considered
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kind of more citizens or part of the ancient city than the plebs were because they were initiated
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into the worship in a way that these outside, uh, plebs without a religion were not.
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Oh, got a re, uh, relocation and lost him again. Okay. Well, he'll probably be back right away.
00:21:45.940
But, uh, yeah, guys. So that was a big part of what he talks about that. Oh, and we're back again.
00:21:52.380
Okay. Hopefully that's. I hope this is better over here. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, no, I was just,
00:22:03.140
I was just talking about this, uh, patrician client distinction versus the plebs and how
00:22:07.920
the lack, the big, uh, delineation was the lack of religion on the part of plebs. They were not
00:22:14.180
considered part of kind of the original ancient city, mainly because they did not have this connection
00:22:19.140
to the ancient religions. They didn't have the worship that the other families had.
00:22:24.500
I think that, I think that's some, one of the striking things here is, is the class distinctions
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that come up very strongly in this history that, that the political religious nature of families is
00:22:35.880
primarily a aristocratic thing. The plebs don't have this strong connection. Uh, they, they might
00:22:42.260
indeed have religious practices, uh, uh, uh, but, uh, they're, they're not constitutive. They don't
00:22:48.180
give them power. They, they, they might, you know, they, they, they might engage in, in various
00:22:54.260
religious exercises, but, but they're alienated from the central rights, the central rights of the civic
00:23:00.900
religion. Um, and I think he, he rightly, you know, draws out the way in which the, the relationship
00:23:09.540
between the, the potters and the plebs plays out in the various revolutions, both the Greek
00:23:15.460
revolutions and the, and especially the Roman revolutions. Uh, the, he does a very, very good job
00:23:22.180
of, of, of kind of tracing religion through the different revolutions from, from the monarchical
00:23:29.220
period to the Republican period to the Imperial period and in the Roman history. And, and helps
00:23:35.620
you to see, uh, you know, in a sense, how the civil wars between that developed between, uh, you know,
00:23:44.500
the, the sort of few and the many, uh, the, the war that develops between the few and the many is
00:23:51.220
partly a religious war, uh, partly a war between those who have access to, uh, to the, you know,
00:24:00.500
the hearth, the Vesta and, and those who don't. Yeah. And I think that's particularly interesting
00:24:06.180
because, you know, Joseph de Maestra talks about how law, uh, should, that constitutions are really
00:24:12.740
only a reflection of, again, the traditions, the folkways, uh, the, the religious beliefs of the
00:24:18.820
people that you can't really, uh, you know, just create these things out of thin air. And the more
00:24:24.580
you try to write them down, the more they lose their power because the real binding power was
00:24:29.460
that shared tradition, that shared origin, that shared religion. And so what's very interesting
00:24:34.740
is kind of, as the plebs want to participate more in society, they start demanding law because the law
00:24:41.540
of the city did not apply to them. The law was only for the religious and those who shared the worship.
00:24:45.780
And so as they demand kind of their own law, they almost kind of demand a secular, secularization
00:24:55.060
in some ways of law was still wouldn't be secular in the way we're talking about,
00:24:58.420
we would think of today, but, but something that is not of the original worship and due to the
00:25:04.020
formalization of that law that otherwise would have been kind of perpetuated through the gins,
00:25:09.540
perpetuated through the families, perpetuated through the tradition and religion,
00:25:12.340
and instead placing it kind of outside that tradition, you kind of start to see the first
00:25:17.620
crack in kind of the, the, the control or the complete, uh, inclusion only based on the worship
00:25:24.980
there. That's right. You, you get a kind of pulling away, uh, and, and Fustel has a very interesting
00:25:32.740
explanation for this. He says explicitly that this happens because the religion has lost power.
00:25:38.660
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Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Uh, when, when religion loss loses power, when it,
00:26:13.380
when it loses its kind of explanatory hold on the gins, on the kind of aristocratic structures,
00:26:21.860
um, it generated alongside of it, um, uh, laws, a law of politics, which were not so tightly bound,
00:26:34.340
not so suffused. And so you get, he kind of describes a kind of unraveling, which begins to
00:26:40.260
occur. But the reason why you get the unraveling and you get this just prior to the advent of
00:26:45.620
Christianity, you get this unraveling of religion and politics, um, at just the point at which religion
00:26:51.620
is losing its power. Um, and as religion loses its power, then, uh, the plebs actually make, uh,
00:27:00.020
a play, uh, for power, um, and succeed in, in a large part. Well, and I think it's really interesting
00:27:07.780
because he talks about the interplay throughout these different revolutions. You talked about,
00:27:11.460
you know, how he kind of details these different revolutions and he describes each one,
00:27:15.300
I think is an interplay between both the religion losing hold and, uh, the desires of those who
00:27:23.060
were outside the religion to be integrated into the city. So he specifically says in the book,
00:27:28.980
in order for the state to grow in power, the, the power of the families had to be lessened,
00:27:35.060
right? Had to be dissolved. And so, yeah. And so I think there's an interplay here where the,
00:27:40.500
the religion is weakening, but also it is in the material interests and the political
00:27:45.220
interests of many to see that authority weakened. And again, this is kind of, uh, the, this is
00:27:50.980
Bertrand de Juvenal's high and low versus middle where the, where the, you know, the king or the,
00:27:56.660
those that wish to, uh, kind of, uh, remove the aristocracy, the established middle from their
00:28:02.580
positions of power can offer new enfranchisement or new attachment to the lower classes to garner power
00:28:09.940
for themselves. And this is specifically done through religion because religion, like you said,
00:28:15.140
was so essential to this. So instead of just offering people, you know, the, the, the franchise
00:28:20.020
or something, which did eventually happen, but very specifically religion is offered to the plebs.
00:28:25.460
And so the, in order for the plebs to have a role in the society, they have to acquire their own
00:28:30.100
religion and it has become part of the civic religion for them to kind of then enter into the
00:28:35.460
ancient city. So for instance, they have these, um, you know, uh, these citywide sacrifices where
00:28:41.780
they share the meals that have been burnt to the city gods. And this is what then allows kind of
00:28:46.820
the larger integration of, uh, those who were not politically enfranchised into the whole.
00:28:53.540
Right. And you notice that, that at that, at that point, religion becomes public. You've moved from
00:28:59.300
having religion, which is private in the domestic sphere to having a kind of, you know, friendly
00:29:05.940
dynamic between the domestic hearth and the civic hearth to then the civic hearth dominating at the
00:29:12.580
expense of the family institutions and the expensive in a family religion. So I think that, that this
00:29:19.140
expansion of power, um, is, is kind of a zero sum game with the family institutions and the family
00:29:26.340
religion, uh, and the, the tensions of the civil wars are marked by this. I also think it's, you know,
00:29:34.820
notable that the, the civic religions, as they progress, get more and more vicious. The civic religion
00:29:43.380
gets more and more, um, perverse. Um, so the, the demos' religion is not necessarily elevated for being
00:29:50.820
more greatly shared. Yeah. Yeah. And in, in many ways it's, uh, a bastardization. So for instance,
00:29:59.780
uh, he talks about how the, uh, the consul ship or the, the, the, the kingship had to be stripped
00:30:07.940
of its religious connotations. Once the plebs started entering into the equation, because the plebs
00:30:13.700
wanted to be able to have a savor, this have a vote, have a voice, but if they were having a voice that
00:30:19.360
would have ruined the worship. And so they had to separate what had once been kind of a, the,
00:30:23.900
the chief and the priest were the same and that they were integrated and they had to be separated
00:30:29.480
so that the wider populace could participate and the religion could be protected. But once the
00:30:35.100
religion had been separated out of these leadership positions, people forgot that it should have been
00:30:40.780
integrated in the first place. And so the, the, the religion, the, the weakness of the religion
00:30:46.660
allowed for the separation, but the separation then created further weakening of the religion
00:30:51.960
because once people no longer understood these offices as religious in nature, uh, and their
00:30:57.940
authority as religious in nature, the religion then itself also starts to receive. Yeah. No,
00:31:03.700
there's a kind of feedback of, you know, feedback loop of the, the loss of, of religious strength
00:31:10.060
and political expansion of power. Yeah. So, uh, I also wanted to touch on the fact that, uh, he
00:31:20.000
again, repeatedly talks about how these different ways of religiosity, uh, each one of these revolutions
00:31:26.320
that brought the, uh, you know, that, that brought the plebs in that brought more outside elements in
00:31:31.560
that reduce the, the authority of the family also, uh, you know, fundamentally changed the way that the
00:31:38.700
religion was practiced. And it, it's funny because a lot of people today, it's very popular, especially
00:31:44.480
for a certain, uh, segment of kind of the online, right to say, well, Christianity undid all this
00:31:51.660
stuff, right? Christianity is for the downfall of the Roman empire. It's what brought about all this
00:31:57.040
bad stuff. It's the problem. Now this is the nature of Christianity. But I think, uh, he shows in this
00:32:03.740
case study is actually, this is just the nature of power and how it interacts with religion and that
00:32:09.740
for power to grow and centralize, it needs to subsume these different parts of religion. And
00:32:15.020
so Christianity does show up at the end of this weakened religion, like you were saying, but it is
00:32:19.880
not the cause of the weakening, uh, the weakening of this religion. The religion had already been
00:32:24.200
weakened through these many different revolutions that came in many ways due to the interests of the
00:32:29.360
state. I think, I think he, he demonstrates the, the natural tendency of, of power and religion to go
00:32:38.380
together, but also the natural tendency of power to want to dominate religion and to control religion.
00:32:45.640
And, um, and, and finally for, for the priests to be subject to the pontiff or to the king, uh, is the,
00:32:56.060
the, the essential movement of ancient civilization and the narrative that he tells it's, it's the,
00:33:01.580
you know, the, the triumph finally, the, the ruling of the, of the temporal over the spiritual,
00:33:09.540
if we want to put it in contemporary terms, the, the way in which, uh, uh, politics, um, uh, triumphs
00:33:17.680
over the spiritual. Um, it's interesting cause I have, I did, I don't talk about this in my piece
00:33:23.480
at post-liberal order, but I do, I do find it interesting that, uh, he has about a, you know,
00:33:29.820
10 page conclusion from which I dissent. Uh, I really, I really like, uh, Fustel's study. It's
00:33:37.260
just, it's just so helpful for all the reasons that you say. And, and I think it's also illuminating
00:33:41.700
for our own times and thinking about the relationship between, you know, our aristocracy and, and what,
00:33:47.920
what, what are aristocracies fighting for and what are, you know, what our few are fighting for and
00:33:52.780
what our many are fighting for, uh, have some similar dynamics. But one of the things that Fustel
00:33:58.960
concludes, um, and I, I think it's, doesn't follow from his, his argument throughout is that
00:34:07.440
Christianity changed everything by separating religion and politics. Um, that's his kind of
00:34:15.140
final conclusion, um, without any evidence. Uh, he doesn't, you know, it's, it's as if the,
00:34:21.880
it's as if Charlemagne never existed for Fustel somehow at the end. And I, I think there's reasons
00:34:28.580
for that. I think, I think it goes back to who he regards as his audience in the third Republic
00:34:34.980
in the 19th century. Um, and he, he has a really complicated, uh, agenda. One is to just totally
00:34:44.760
destroy the idea that you could have some religiously neutral regime. You could have some
00:34:50.280
political order without religion, but also to, uh, also to, in a sense, caution, uh, his French
00:35:01.820
philosophic friends, uh, about the idea of power overtaking religion, power commanding religion,
00:35:09.980
um, power dictating religion. And so he has this almost, I think, liberal Catholic idea of protecting,
00:35:18.620
protecting the Catholic church, um, from the power of liberal politics by, by insisting on another kind
00:35:25.600
of separation, which doesn't really map onto, you know, the other, the 2000 years he misses or the,
00:35:33.340
you know, 1900 years he misses, uh, uh, in, in terms of Christian history, because he just doesn't touch
00:35:40.800
Christian history. But I think he has, he has his eye on that question of, you know, how should liberals
00:35:47.100
regard the Catholic church? Well, they should regard it as set apart, as separate, separate from,
00:35:53.680
from the liberal order and respected, and that, uh, you should, you should be forewarned because
00:36:00.780
religion is, is powerful and, uh, you should, you should let it be its own, especially let
00:36:07.160
Christianity be its own separate transcendent thing above your laws and above your attempt to command
00:36:13.560
and control, uh, Christianity. Yeah. I have to say, this is something that continues to baffle me,
00:36:20.580
uh, when people talk about, uh, history and Christianity, that there's just this always
00:36:27.020
been the separation between Christianity and the law or governance, uh, particularly when they pretend
00:36:32.300
that like Christianity never, you know, allowed for like, for the protection of the state, uh, you
00:36:37.140
know, uh, through, through force and these kinds of things, like no one ever heard of Charles
00:36:41.260
Motel. Nobody knows about Charlemagne, like none of this stuff ever happened. It is, it is fast.
00:36:46.300
Yeah. It is fascinating that this is something I hear from both left and, and very far right,
00:36:51.940
that, that the Christianity is this soft, squishy thing that never got involved in politics and
00:36:55.960
was never able to protect itself or others. And I, I just don't know what history they're looking at
00:37:01.780
because it's just in no way, uh, reflected in the actual record. Uh, but I do want to talk about
00:37:07.460
what you mentioned there, uh, which I think, uh, for the next half of our, uh, uh, kind of broadcast
00:37:13.100
would be what lessons we can draw from this. What should modern people see from this? Now that
00:37:18.900
we have a better understanding of kind of the relationship and, uh, and the weaving of religion
00:37:23.600
into all of these things, what are, what are some lessons right off the top of your head that maybe
00:37:28.000
people should understand in the modern day when we're looking at our politics and the way it might
00:37:31.980
relate to religion? Well, I mean, I think it, you know, the, the, one of the, the really big
00:37:40.680
takeaways for me was, is, was to understand, uh, that in our contemporary terms, we, we have the few,
00:37:49.100
uh, we have our own kind of gens, uh, who, uh, are kind of trying to institute a very kind of pseudo
00:38:00.140
religious account of their power, call it wokeness or whatever. Um, and this kind of pseudo religious
00:38:07.820
sentiment, um, has rights that goes with it. It has sacraments that goes with it, the sacrament
00:38:15.600
of abortion, um, uh, the, the pride flag, the progress flag. These are all highly religious
00:38:22.480
kinds of commitments, uh, that are being promoted by the few, the corporate few, C-suite boards,
00:38:31.060
uh, aristocratic, uh, power is engaging in, uh, essentially the, the use of religious power,
00:38:39.640
uh, to, uh, establish, um, their control over civilization. And we see, you know, the party
00:38:49.920
of the many kind of pushing back against that, you know, the Bud Light's a kind of, you know,
00:38:55.660
great example of this where you, where you have, you know, okay, they, they, they realized
00:39:01.720
it didn't go well and they said, sorry about, you know, Dylan Mulvaney. Um, but, but ultimately
00:39:07.840
they, they, if they would have gotten away with that, they would have been perfectly happy
00:39:10.960
with that campaign because it was, it was a classic example of the few using religion, a
00:39:20.980
kind of religious, a sentiment, uh, to try to create a new way of binding people together.
00:39:28.180
And Bud Light, that's a, that's some, that's a pleb product, right? That's not a product for
00:39:34.100
aristocrats, uh, our own progressive aristocrats. That's a, that's a NASCAR beer. So if, if the few
00:39:43.540
could go in and capture the religio, the religion of the plebs and turn it to their own hearth,
00:39:53.620
as it were, uh, they would have gained enormous power, um, enormous power. Same Miller-Light's
00:40:00.740
very interesting, the different on the, on the same question is you see, you see a kind
00:40:05.880
of a gens of the progressive aristocrat, uh, working out its religious power, uh, to gain
00:40:13.800
political control of the plebs. And then you also see the plebs fighting back.
00:40:19.040
So I think there's a really interesting transition happening here. And I think it's, what's giving
00:40:23.140
a lot of classical liberals whiplash. So Alistair McIntyre talks in After Virtue about how managerialism
00:40:30.740
is kind of the, the political, uh, theology of our day. And that like the extraction of expertise
00:40:39.500
and the ability to plan and, uh, create this miracle of progress is, uh, kind of what, uh,
00:40:47.140
gave them their, uh, their political formula. And it feels like wokeness is here because that's
00:40:54.380
failing because we can't, uh, they can no longer produce that efficiency. They can no longer justify
00:41:02.520
the idea of objectivity and, and kind of material progress from what's happening. And so instead we
00:41:09.720
need a new kind of faith to enter in. And, uh, the reason that a lot of classical liberals are lost is
00:41:16.900
they never thought of managerialism as a fate. They never understood it as the kind of the, the
00:41:22.860
religious substrate that, that kind of bound, uh, their world together. And so now they see this
00:41:29.380
new, maybe perhaps more clearly religious to them sentiment being, uh, created by the same caste that
00:41:37.160
was supposed to be completely bought into kind of the managerialism, managerial liberalism, and they
00:41:43.080
are lost. Uh, they are confused in that moment. Do you, do you think that that tension will find a way
00:41:50.800
to ease itself or is that going to be a showdown, uh, that we're, that we're going to see here?
00:41:56.140
I mean, it's interesting because, uh, the first thing that popped in my head was, was precisely
00:42:01.280
Fustel's phrase is, is they lost power because their religion lost power. Yeah. Um, and I think this
00:42:09.720
is true for classical liberals as well. I think they're losing power because something about how they held
00:42:15.720
the world together and there was something religious about how they held the world together, that, that
00:42:22.140
kind of separation that they imagined that kind of neat sort of, here's politics over here, here's religion
00:42:28.520
over here. I think that neat separation, um, and which, um, you know, is, is kind of baked into liberalism
00:42:39.800
has, has lost its power. Nobody believes it anymore. I mean, the whole kind of, everyone, everyone is now
00:42:46.440
used to hearing, you know, neutrality is a myth, you know, uh, it's, it's, it's very hard to find people
00:42:53.560
who will push back hard on, I think one of the central theses of liberalism, which is that you can
00:43:00.480
have this neutral public space, uh, that's not religious, that's indifferent to religion. Nobody thinks
00:43:06.660
that anymore. And in a, in a sense, that's the loss of its religious power. And I think that's why
00:43:12.920
classical liberals, you know, are, are back footed on all of this because as, as you say, in a sense,
00:43:20.120
they, they had assumptions that have crumbled. Yeah. I, so here's the thing. I hear what you're
00:43:26.220
saying and I think you're right that I think a lot of people who talk about this a lot may not say
00:43:30.420
that, believe that anymore, but I think most people still do believe that. Like I think, I think,
00:43:35.480
and that's why I think so many of the classical liberal kind of opponents of wokeness play to
00:43:41.300
wider audiences because most people are still bought into this idea and it's, and it's falling
00:43:47.560
apart. There are pieces of it falling apart. Uh, ironically, the postmodern moment might be the
00:43:52.740
best thing to kind of shake up the idea, you know, religious people, very afraid of postmodernism,
00:43:58.280
but it, it might be the thing that, that shakes a lot of people out of this idea that you can't avoid
00:44:03.040
this, this, uh, religious scenario that there is a secular society, but I think we're in an
00:44:09.460
interesting transition where that is becoming more apparent, but it's still not, I think,
00:44:13.340
understood by the vast majority of people. Um, and so there's still this idea that we'll be able to
00:44:18.720
create this liberal consensus, uh, once again, we'll, we'll be able to reconstitute it once everybody,
00:44:24.780
you know, stops being crazy and gets over the wokeness and you know, whatnot, uh, that we'll,
00:44:29.220
we'll be, we'll be able to kind of reform it again. Um, and I wonder, do you, so, uh, obviously
00:44:36.420
we just get enough critical race theory, anti-critical race theory legislation through,
00:44:41.760
then people will come back to their senses and the managers in the C-suite will stop producing
00:44:47.340
Dylan Mulvaney or whatever. Right. Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing is like, look, don't get me
00:44:52.880
wrong. I'm for the use of state power to stop this. I agree. Yeah. But, but the, you know, again,
00:44:57.920
as we, as, as Demetra asserted, as, as, uh, uh, Fastell says, you know, once you have to write
00:45:03.560
this stuff down, it loses its power. Like the reason this stuff has power is that it was already
00:45:09.120
stood. It was already understood and practiced and believed in by the people. And so you can't
00:45:14.180
just legislate out this stuff. You, you have to understand the kind of the level at which it's at.
00:45:20.320
So I guess that brings us to kind of the next point. If we, as people who are reading this book
00:45:25.560
and understanding the centrality of religion to, you know, kind of these processes of society,
00:45:32.080
of the city of law, all this stuff, if we know that we cannot have a neutral society,
00:45:38.800
many people who then hear me make this argument or you make this argument, other people say this
00:45:44.720
argument immediately come back with, Oh, well then it's just gotta be, you know, uh, it's gotta be,
00:45:50.000
you're the only one who's right. You're, you're the only one who's right. How do you,
00:45:53.300
in a society steeped in religion, in, in liberalism and that kind of using that still,
00:45:58.980
even though they now find themselves ruled by wokeness, how do you work against the ruling
00:46:04.920
ideology without, you know, kind of letting people know like, yeah, no, something has to
00:46:09.300
replace this. It's not just going to be neutral once this is gone. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think in a
00:46:15.200
way, um, I mean, if I, if I were to have written the last 10 pages, uh, on Christianity for Fustel,
00:46:22.520
one of the things I would have said is that, uh, that Christianity didn't, didn't really change the
00:46:31.640
notion that religion, uh, and politics go together. Didn't really change that. What it changed was the
00:46:41.600
superiority of the, the true religion over a bad religion to hold a society together. And so I
00:46:49.800
think the, the, the reason why Christianity kind of delivers us, uh, a civilization, which draws up
00:46:58.740
the Greek and the Roman, right? It doesn't, it, it, the Christianity doesn't, on some level, it's a
00:47:04.400
massive break from, from the ancient world, but another level, it just delivers all this
00:47:09.680
back to us, uh, under the, under true religio, true religion. And I think, I think the proper
00:47:17.180
conclusion to, to Fustel's book, if you weren't a liberal Catholic is that the, the, the natural
00:47:24.280
conclusion is Christianity, uh, raises the whole question of, of divine revelation. Has God spoken?
00:47:31.260
Do we, do we have true religion? And if we do have true religion, it should produce a better kind
00:47:36.740
of society. It should produce a more just society. Um, and, uh, I think that's the kind of level of
00:47:44.620
conversation that we need to have. What kind of society do we want to pass on to our children? What
00:47:50.600
would, what would it look like? What, uh, and what, what religion would be good at producing that?
00:47:56.660
Um, and, um, and then, then you have to face the question of, well, only a true religion, uh, could,
00:48:06.940
could produce good results. Um, and, and I think that's, that's kind of, that's kind of the best
00:48:13.880
answer I think you can give to the, to the person who says, well, we can't know the true and the good.
00:48:19.180
Um, uh, the, the, that's immediately falsifiable because you don't like the bad religion and what
00:48:27.460
it's producing. The reason why you don't like the fruits of, of the woke, you know, empire is
00:48:34.880
because it's religion's false, you know, and, and so the, you're, you're going to have an unhappy
00:48:41.500
society and we have a massively unhappy society. Why do we have a massively unhappy? Why do we have
00:48:47.760
these deaths of despair? We have these deaths of despair because we're operating on a totally false
00:48:53.400
ersatz religion. And so that's, I think that's the only way in which you can, you can address the
00:48:59.720
person who says which religion, um, at the very least you have to have the conversation. Well,
00:49:05.000
not this one, right? Cause this one's making you very unhappy.
00:49:09.760
Sure. And, and, and, you know, for so many of these people, they, what, one of the, I think the bad
00:49:15.520
lessons that a lot of these, uh, kind of reformed liberals or post liberals or, you know, kind of
00:49:22.220
atheists who saw the problem with kind of wokeness and what was going on is they just kind of took the
00:49:27.500
lesson that, well, if wokeness is a religion, then it's just bad because it's a religion and all
00:49:32.240
religions are bad. Yeah. And so we should just kind of eliminate all of them. And this is something
00:49:38.700
that I've, you know, argued against many times. I'm sure many people who are listening to this now
00:49:44.100
are very familiar with this argument, but it's, it's just that there is, you can sit around and
00:49:49.960
talk about like how you need to ally with people and you need to form coalitions. And I'm with you
00:49:55.040
on this, but like at some point, if these people do not have an answer to this problem, then they
00:50:01.520
kind of have to listen to the people who do right. Like you've got to find something to bind people
00:50:06.720
together. And if you don't have anything and you understand the thing that's binding kind of the
00:50:10.620
current regime together is bad, then maybe you should listen to the people who have something
00:50:14.580
that does actually do this. I think that's right. And, and the flip side to everyone who always
00:50:19.720
raises a pluralist, you know, pluralism, but what about pluralism? I mean, the flip side to pluralism
00:50:25.100
is what about the kind of unity that would enable us to be truly plural? Like you need, like the flip
00:50:31.020
side of plural is unity and what gives us our unity in which we could be actual. Nobody, I mean,
00:50:38.060
pluralism today just means being progressive or something. I think pluralism doesn't, doesn't
00:50:45.980
mean that everybody's different. It kind of means everybody has to think the same way is what is
00:50:51.120
what pluralism seems to me to mean. As soon as you're starting to talk about diversity, inclusion
00:50:59.160
and equity, I, I think I know exactly what you think. I know exactly what you think. And you think
00:51:07.940
exactly the same as somebody else who says diversity, inclusion, and equity. Um, the, if that's what
00:51:15.040
pluralism means, I know it doesn't really mean pluralism. It just means uniformity of thought. Um,
00:51:21.740
and so you need, you need to, I think, answer every kind of cry for pluralism with a cry for, yeah, but
00:51:28.680
what gives us unity? What, what's the, what's the generative unitive thing that makes us a people? Uh,
00:51:39.920
and, uh, uh, I, I think the classic ancient answer is religion. Uh, it's bad religion for the ancients
00:51:48.040
from a Christian point of view, but, uh, uh, the, I think Christianity's great innovation, great radical
00:51:55.760
revolution is, uh, not in saying that religion isn't our unity, but that, uh, we can only be united by,
00:52:03.240
uh, uh, God himself coming down into the person of Jesus Christ, uh, that that's true religion.
00:52:10.600
And that's the, that's the source of unity and also the source of any true pluralism.
00:52:17.140
Yeah. It's interesting. You know, in the book, he talks about how basically a son is only a son
00:52:22.580
because they are initiated into the worship. And even if, you know, you have a biological son,
00:52:28.900
if he's not, you know, uh, of the mother who entered the family through religious rights,
00:52:34.540
or if the son, uh, leaves for another family, renounces the name of the family and it's worship,
00:52:40.580
uh, then it doesn't matter. He doesn't have any rights anymore. And then adopted son who is entered
00:52:45.920
through these kinds of religious rights gains legitimacy in a way that the biological son doesn't
00:52:52.340
have. And, uh, if they, if they've kind of, uh, left the worship. And I think it's really
00:52:58.600
difficult to find another way to bind kind of a large community together because, you know, the,
00:53:05.160
the civic nationalism of so many of these classic liberals is kind of obviously, uh, you know,
00:53:13.500
useless in the long run. Cause it's like, okay, well, what binds the nation together? Oh, well,
00:53:17.600
they all say, share the same idea. Okay. Well, what happens if someone in America decides they don't
00:53:22.660
share the idea anymore? Do they lose their citizenship? Well, no. Okay. Well then what does your civic
00:53:26.700
nationalism mean? Like of what value is it? Like you need something that is deeper and, you know,
00:53:33.380
eternal, more connected to identity and who you are. If you're going to actually have any kind of
00:53:38.460
useful bond, uh, binding of a nation, you know, just, Oh, we all happen to agree on something for
00:53:44.040
10 seconds. And then everybody parts ways on it is nowhere to actually have any kind of functional
00:53:49.020
society. Exactly. And it's not like, it's not like he, Fustel completely recognizes that the family's a
00:53:56.520
natural thing, you know, a woman coming together and creating new life, but it's what binds, you know,
00:54:03.360
the family together as, as a unity, as a, as something which is generative. That's what, where the, the
00:54:10.200
gens come, comes from. And for that, he says, you need religion. And if you don't have religion to bind
00:54:17.000
together, you're going to reduce the blood and blood is just not a sufficient supplier of, you know,
00:54:25.360
and I think when, when I hear that, I think, well, this is why we're obsessed with race being white or
00:54:31.380
black or, you know, um, that, that all of these kind of nationalisms that work on blood on a unity of
00:54:40.100
blood, um, are, are not going to work. They're not going to work. They're just not going to hang
00:54:47.080
together. Um, and Fustel's kind of gives you 2000 years of classical history to show you that the
00:54:53.780
blood unity just doesn't work. You need religio to bind a family together, to bind a city together,
00:55:00.800
um, to, uh, bind philosophers together, everything to, to bind, um, uh, just about
00:55:12.180
everything business even. Well, and I think it's interesting that, you know, maybe even those who
00:55:17.980
are not Christian guys like Spangler or Avola thought that, uh, reducing race to simply biological
00:55:25.160
or blood ties was a mistake, that it was a tragedy of understanding. They understood race as a,
00:55:30.060
as kind of a cultural continuation, a binding metaphysical spirit, not simply a direct descent
00:55:36.780
of genetic lineage. Right. Even, even they recognize that it has to be religious, whatever it is.
00:55:44.280
Right. And so, and so I think that idea is, uh, I think the modern conception, uh, is one that, uh,
00:55:51.980
ignores many people, even those who wouldn't have been Christian, uh, and their understanding of kind
00:55:57.260
of what actually tied a civilization together and what made a race in their constitution,
00:56:01.900
their, their definition of that, uh, which I think.
00:56:04.540
And what makes a race is always, is always going to be something, uh, that is trans temporal.
00:56:11.980
Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Well, I think we hit most of what I wanted to talk about there.
00:56:18.800
Uh, we have a few questions from, uh, the audience here that we might hit real quick before we do,
00:56:25.140
is there anything that we didn't get to touch on that you wanted to cover?
00:56:30.520
Well, I think I, I mean, the, the only thing, uh, that, uh, you know, is, is interesting is a phrase
00:56:39.940
I use in, in the, the piece, um, at post liberal order is, uh, pseudo integralism. We hear a lot
00:56:47.060
about integralism and people have very strong views about integralism and they think it's one thing.
00:56:52.100
Um, and I, I call wokeism a pseudo integralism because it's the, the question of, of integralism
00:56:59.100
is in a sense, the same question of, of what will integrate, uh, what will unite, what will make
00:57:06.780
a society whole? And the question of integralism is really just that question is what's the religio
00:57:13.960
that's going to give integrity to a society as a, as a common thing, as a thing that everybody can
00:57:20.300
share in. And, and what, what I think makes wokeness a pseudo integralism is it is actually trying to
00:57:27.100
unite us all in a common view. You know, let's all share the, a view of abortion. Let's all share a view
00:57:32.640
of, of, of gays. Let's all share the same view of, you know, trans drag queen story hour. Let's all
00:57:38.740
get on the, on the progress train. Um, because they have a vision of an integrated society in which
00:57:45.980
everyone, you know, is sharing in the common faith. Um, and it's precisely what the many are
00:57:52.360
resisting. And I think they're, they're resisting for both political and religious reasons.
00:57:56.560
Yeah, I think that's right. And it's also, I think important for people to remember that,
00:58:01.420
you know, they, you need to dissolve, if you're going to manage a large amount of people, if you're
00:58:05.760
going to create this kind of globalism that they'd like to have rule everybody, you need to dissolve
00:58:11.460
moral and cultural particulars. You have to collapse again, those competing spheres of, uh, social
00:58:17.700
authority and moral authority. And so it's really important to dissolve, uh, you know, all these different
00:58:23.260
ideas and make sure they're unified under kind of this one cosmopolitan and hedonistic understanding
00:58:30.140
of kind of human wellbeing and, and, and, and good. And so it's really important to understand that
00:58:36.600
the, the, the wokeness is in many ways has a political utility to these people, but they also
00:58:43.780
believe it very deeply. It's, it's, it's, it's not just one or the other. It's, it's both. Uh, it is a
00:58:49.580
binding religion and also something that has political, a high degree of political utility.
00:58:54.920
Yeah. And I, and I think part of the reason why it has, has power too, is, is that in some ways it's,
00:59:03.460
it, it's a parody of Christianity. It's, it's still tied in, I mean, whatever you want to call it,
00:59:09.520
cathedral or the, the, the way in which, you know, Puritanism expresses itself through Boston
00:59:15.540
and through elites, uh, and through the, the few, uh, communicating, uh, in a kind of cell division
00:59:22.880
of ideas that descend from, descend from a kind of moral purity and a Puritanicalism. I mean,
00:59:30.080
that's, we see that very, very strongly. And the, the, the way in which wokeness is parasitic on
00:59:37.500
Christianity is also what explains a lot of its religious power.
00:59:40.760
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, it is definitely a Christian heresy and
00:59:45.680
it would have to be because Christianity is what had bound the West together before it. And since
00:59:50.840
it has, I don't think any particularly generative qualities of its own, all it can really do is
00:59:56.900
bind together the kind of the fumes, the remaining, uh, Christian ethos, but once it's kind of deracinated,
01:00:02.500
uh, Christianity, then it just is, it's eventually going to die. And that's, that's the upside is,
01:00:08.520
and I think that's what we're seeing for a lot of people is, uh, the, the power of that religion is,
01:00:15.360
is, uh, very, very, uh, shallow because it, it calls on forces. It doesn't really control
01:00:22.800
and separates them from things that are actually meaningful. Uh, and so it can only really push,
01:00:27.820
uh, push those things so far, especially because it's denying truth about not just the metaphysical,
01:00:32.920
but the directly biological at this point. So. Yeah. And I, I think we've seen, we've seen it in
01:00:38.140
history before with Arianism. I mean, Athanasius woke up one day and said the whole world's whole
01:00:43.120
world has become, you know, Arian, um, and Arianism wasn't defeated by, you know, holding hands and
01:00:50.500
singing Kumbaya. Um, and same with Albigensianism, you know, it just, it, it ran through Europe,
01:00:58.360
uh, like wildfire. And, um, I think we, we have to, we have to come to terms with how important
01:01:07.700
it is to fight heresy. Um, this is something that the, that the liberal conscience does not
01:01:14.540
like this idea that you would fight heresy, uh, but there really is religious heresy. Um,
01:01:20.500
and it's important to know what religious truth is in order to know how to defeat it.
01:01:25.740
I mean, they don't, they do love, uh, fighting heresy, you know, just the, the, their current
01:01:31.760
version of it is, you know, they're all on board with it. It's like, you, you need to know what
01:01:35.820
they, what, what they, they, they, they, they believe that they have true religion, but, uh,
01:01:41.680
if you press them, they can't really support it. Right. All right. Well, we'll go ahead and
01:01:47.160
jump over to, I think a question or two we have real quick before we do. Is there anything you
01:01:51.440
want people to check out the post-liberal order or anything else that you want people
01:01:55.380
to, uh, to read or follow you or anything? Yeah, of course. Uh, come, come find us, uh,
01:02:00.940
my friend Patrick Denny and Gladden Tappen and I have, have, uh, this, uh, post-liberal order
01:02:06.380
that we're having a lot of fun with. And, uh, yeah. And if you know anybody who would like
01:02:10.940
to submit to us, uh, shoot us an email, uh, I'm just pechnold at cua.edu and you can find
01:02:17.320
post-liberal order at Substack. All right. Let's go ahead and jump over. Super chat real quick.
01:02:23.740
Uh, Colin for $5. It makes some very large assumptions around origins and customs that
01:02:29.780
ring true to me. Are there modern refutations or criticisms of this work? Uh, so yeah, I
01:02:35.920
know that a lot of this, like you said, a lot of this existed before archeology, uh, and
01:02:39.980
he's, it's, uh, it's thoroughly footnoted, but it is all based on a lot of Livy and such.
01:02:45.320
And, uh, I understand that he is filling in a lot of the logical holes here kind of with
01:02:51.580
his own understanding. I think he does a pretty good job with that, but it is of course, you
01:02:57.000
know, not a document of complete exact historical accuracy, I guess. I'm sure there are people
01:03:01.860
who have, uh, some, uh, some problems with kind of the conclusions he draws.
01:03:05.880
I think that's right. I think, you know, there there's, he, he, he gets it largely right.
01:03:12.240
I think is, I think the, I think the consensus in the, amongst classicists and now you probably
01:03:18.560
get classicists calling in, but my, my sense is that, well, one is that religion and antiquity
01:03:25.560
is not the biggest field in classics and it doesn't get as much treatment as it should.
01:03:30.700
Um, uh, you know, there, there have been studies, uh, Mary Beard comes to mind, uh, uh, ID Collins,
01:03:41.340
I think, uh, but the, the, the classical studies, I think generally remark on how right he gets
01:03:49.760
things considering that he has no archeological evidence before him. All he has are the old
01:03:54.920
texts and he's kind of piecing things together from firsthand accounts.
01:04:00.600
of their world. Um, and, uh, he gets it right like 80% of the time. And that's remarkable
01:04:08.200
in itself. You know, does he get things wrong from time to time? Yes. Um, but in the, on
01:04:13.640
the main, it, I think it remains the best book on ancient religion, um, uh, from the primary
01:04:23.160
Yeah. And guys, just as a thought on kind of how you view many of these texts when you're,
01:04:28.940
when you're trying to understand a lot of this stuff, there's a very modern impulse to say, well,
01:04:34.560
if there's something wrong here, then it's all useless. Right. If there's, if there's, yeah. If
01:04:39.800
there's a bad interpretation somewhere, if the footnoting was wrong, if we discover something
01:04:45.100
else, you know, it was written in 1860. So, you know, we might've figured something else out
01:04:49.100
between here and 1860, people will say, oh, well, you know, that that's wrong. So just the whole
01:04:53.700
argument falls apart. None of it's worthwhile. And I think it's really important to agree with
01:04:58.080
those last 10 pages. I think it's the most important book on Roman religion.
01:05:03.140
Sure. I've, I, there are many philosophers, many theorists that I think get certain things
01:05:09.200
wrong that, that make certain shortcomings, but are still extremely valuable. And I just
01:05:14.660
really encourage people not to throw the baby out with the bathwater with so much of this stuff
01:05:19.340
that everyone's looking for, oh, well, this, this one guy had a crackpot idea or he got one,
01:05:23.720
one part of an analysis wrong. And so therefore it's just not useful. No, find the useful parts,
01:05:28.860
find the things that are mostly right. Find the things that hang together, connect them to other
01:05:33.060
things that are useful rather than just trying to find one particular flaw. And then suddenly
01:05:39.300
discarding something that otherwise has a lot of explanatory power or is very useful in, in many ways,
01:05:45.620
just because again, you find, you find one thing that it turned out not to be correct.
01:05:50.200
There's a new translation, which I haven't looked at by Jody Bottom's daughter. I can't remember her
01:05:57.240
first name at the moment, but, but if you, if you look up, there's a, there's a new translation,
01:06:02.340
which I'm interested in looking at for myself. But the thing I was going to say about it is that
01:06:08.020
it's just beautifully written and you learn a lot about the ancients, you know, whether or not you
01:06:15.660
agree with everything, you just get a treasure trove of texts, you know, both read and like.
01:06:21.740
Yeah. I've got this edition, which I actually wouldn't recommend. It's poorly formatted,
01:06:25.820
but, but I've heard Empyrean Press has a good one. I'm sure there's other others that are out there.
01:06:31.420
Um, but yeah, it, it is, it is well-written. It is, I think very cogently put together again,
01:06:37.340
it's, it's heavily footnoted. So if you want to, uh, go back and look through primary sources,
01:06:43.080
you can do so. Uh, so I do think even again, if, if everything isn't perfect, if you don't agree
01:06:48.100
with every part of it, it's still well worth your time. I think it does. Um, it does open up your mind
01:06:53.700
to a way of being that is very hard, hard for modern people kind of wrap their, uh, mind around.
01:07:01.420
And it might even have you thinking more about, okay, what is the religion of my city? Uh, what
01:07:06.380
is, you know, what, what, what rituals are we performing together? What things are we centering
01:07:11.620
and what are we using to kind of bind our culture together? And are those things actually revealing
01:07:17.240
the good and the beautiful and the true? Are they really connecting us to things of value?
01:07:20.920
Is it really going to last in the long run? So. I think that's, that's the really crucial thing
01:07:25.800
is he makes you attentive to what's going to be durable. Absolutely. All right, guys,
01:07:31.240
we're going to go ahead and wrap this up, but once again, I want to thank, uh, Chad Pecknold
01:07:36.860
for coming on. I want to thank all of you guys for joining us. Had some good, uh, chat going on
01:07:41.940
there. Really appreciate it as always. Of course, if this is your first time coming by, make sure that
01:07:46.940
you subscribe to the channel. And if you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that
01:07:51.780
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01:07:57.060
please go ahead and leave a rating or a review. Uh, that'll really help out with everything. Uh,
01:08:02.260
guys, I also was on Tim cast last week. That's why all of my normal streams that were usually live
01:08:07.640
weren't live. Cause I was traveling during that. Uh, but we will be live again tomorrow. I'm actually
01:08:12.580
going to be finishing up my series with Michael Millerman on the fourth political theory and
01:08:17.500
Alexander Dugan. So if you want to go ahead and check that out, you can turn into tune in tomorrow
01:08:23.180
at two 30. Thanks for coming by guys. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.