00:00:00.000Hey everybody, it's And the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:01.000Andrew Clavin, who talks about the truth and beauty, how English poets can help you better understand Jesus.
00:00:08.000A very interesting conversation, and I think you're going to really enjoy it.
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00:01:26.000With us right now is someone I have a lot of respect for, and he has a podcast for the Daily Wire and also a new book that is really interesting, The Truth and Beauty, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus.
00:01:57.000I agree with one of your statements here that you find sometimes what he said to be a little bit confusing, and you can't always get to the deepest level what Jesus was trying to say.
00:02:07.000Walk us through why you wrote the book and we'll go from there.
00:02:12.000You know, it's not a book written for people who read poetry, actually.
00:02:14.000It's a book for people who want to know Jesus better.
00:02:17.000And it started with my noticing that a lot of the things that Jesus says, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, but throughout the Gospels, are not as clear as we think they are.
00:02:26.000We say them because we're taught to say them and we have faith that they're true and we trust that they're true, but we don't always know what they mean.
00:02:32.000And I myself was just looking at that and I was talking to my son about it.
00:02:37.000And he said to me, you know, I think the problem may be that you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.
00:02:45.000And the minute he said that to me, I thought, wait, that's the smartest thing anyone ever said to me.
00:02:49.000Because when you know somebody, when you actually know someone like, you know, your parents or your wife or someone who's really close to you, you don't really think, oh, you know, my wife has this philosophy of life.
00:03:00.000What you think is, if my wife were here, she would like that or she would not like it or she would think about it this way or she'd feel it this way.
00:03:37.000You know, the one thing that is in my hands is what I do with my life.
00:03:41.000And so that's how I set out to read it, just to get to know him, like you would if you were reading a novel and you get to know the main character.
00:03:48.000You're reading a biography and you get to know Ulysses S. Grant or whoever it is.
00:04:02.000And I thought, why should that be true?
00:04:03.000And I realized it's because these guys, these particular poets, they're called the Romantic poets, and they wrote at the end of the 18th century.
00:04:11.000So they wrote right around the French Revolution and afterwards.
00:04:14.000They were dealing with a lot of the same problems that we have.
00:04:50.000Well, when it failed, like the Soviet Union failed, the same attempt to do the same thing in the Soviet Union failed, the intellectuals didn't let it go, just like now.
00:04:57.000You know, they thought, well, if we just tweak it here and do this, it's going to work eventually.
00:05:02.000But some of them, one or two of them, risked being canceled.
00:05:05.000And boy, oh boy, were they ever canceled?
00:05:07.000And they decided, no, this was a mistake.
00:05:09.000One of them was the great poet William Wordsworth.
00:05:12.000There are poems written about him saying what a terrible person he is because he went from being a radical to being a conservative.
00:05:18.000So these guys were facing a lot of the same things.
00:05:21.000They were facing gender roles, were up for grabs.
00:05:23.000People were saying, you know, should we get married?
00:05:25.000Shouldn't women be allowed to sleep with everybody they want to?
00:05:28.000The same kinds of things that we're talking about now.
00:05:30.000Politics, the same kind of radical politics.
00:05:32.000Everything should be swept away and we should rewrite the entire world.
00:05:36.000And God, you know, science, this was the first time that science really started to have some successes in the world.
00:05:43.000And people started to lose their faith, not because science disproved the Bible, but because it gave you the feeling that it had disproved the Bible.
00:05:49.000You know, it sort of gave you the sense that things are different than they are in the Bible.
00:05:54.000And so these poets had to reconstruct the world, just like we have to right now, just the same way.
00:05:59.000I mean, the same way we have to start to ask basic questions.
00:06:41.000I saw the words of Jesus in an entirely new way, not throwing out anything that he said, not changing or twisting anything that he said, but simply seeing getting into it from a different direction that gave me a fresh perspective and deeply increased my joy.
00:06:55.000So I wanted to spread that around a little bit.
00:06:57.000Give us some examples, maybe one or two that our audience might be able to resonate with.
00:07:02.000Well, the classic thing was, you know, love your enemies.
00:07:06.000I saw that and I thought, I don't even like my enemies.
00:07:08.000You know, I don't even like some of my friends.
00:07:11.000And why should I love my enemies when some of them are really awful people?
00:07:16.000Well, when I looked again, I realized that Jesus said, love your enemies because it will make you a son of your father, because that's the way he sees your enemies.
00:07:24.000So I thought, ah, Jesus is trying to get us to see the world the way God sees the world.
00:07:30.000He is trying to make us part of his creation.
00:07:36.000So he's trying to make us a branch of his vine.
00:08:41.000So you don't know what your inner world is all about.
00:08:44.000Does it mean anything when I think something's good?
00:08:46.000What if I think something's good and you think something different is good?
00:08:49.000What if I think it's nice to live in a country where women are free, but you live in a country where women have to wear a dark hood and they can't go out without an escort?
00:09:40.000And when you start to think about it, you realize that just walking down the street, just Charlie Kirk walking down the street has never happened before.
00:09:47.000That experience that you're having, just looking around at the trees, the people, the cars, that's never happened before and it will never happen again.
00:09:53.000It's a unique thing that God has made and that you are making as part of God's creation.
00:09:58.000When you start to deal with life that way, and it's not easy, you have to do it a little bit at a time, you have to work at it, everything becomes incredibly beautiful.
00:10:35.000And so I'm asking for a reason is that sometimes romanticism can be categorized or characterized, I should say, as a rejection of order or harmony or calm.
00:11:15.000If it was an age of reason, we have to remember that the age of reason ended with a reign of terror, that the age of reason led to the revolution, the French Revolution, which ended with people being guillotined, with priests being killed, with kings being killed, and with a 12-year world war, the Napoleonic Wars.
00:11:32.000So the Age of Reason wasn't all it cracked up to be.
00:11:35.000And it gave to a new generation an assignment.
00:11:38.000How are we going to rebuild the consciousness of man for a new age, a scientific age, a free age, an age when people start to feel that maybe there shouldn't be kings and maybe people should be equal?
00:11:49.000And each one of them dealt with it differently.
00:11:53.000There's no one person who represents the romantics because each, it's really the task they were trying to create that brings them all together.
00:12:00.000So, for instance, Wordsworth became a deeply conservative person.
00:12:06.000He was an atheist and he believed in free love and all these things.
00:12:11.000Whereas Wordsworth had this wonderful marriage and ultimately became a Christian.
00:12:14.000He didn't start out as a Christian, but he became one over time.
00:12:17.000So each one of them approached it differently.
00:12:19.000What brought them together was their understanding that the inner life of human beings matters.
00:12:26.000You cannot have reason as some kind of like machine.
00:12:30.000You know, you can't, reason is not some kind of perfect thing that's going to explain the world because we're not entirely reasonable creatures.
00:12:38.000We're creatures who appreciate beauty.
00:12:40.000We're creatures who are broken and sinful and do what we don't want to do, what we think we shouldn't do.
00:12:44.000We do, and what we think we should do, we don't do.
00:12:47.000All of those things, we're living in a complete creature, and each part of us is important.
00:12:53.000It's not just our reason that is important.
00:12:56.000We all know that is important, but it's not the only thing that's important.
00:12:59.000And that is really what it's what the book is about, and it's what the title of the book is about.
00:13:04.000You know, you asked me to discuss some of the poetry specifically.
00:13:09.000And the title of the book comes from a very great, very famous poem called Odona Grecian Urn by John Keats, who was, he died extraordinarily young.
00:15:30.000It was about a man who builds a monster, builds a creature out of human body parts and brings it to life.
00:15:36.000And even Mary said, this is a story about a man who usurps the power of God to create life.
00:15:44.000Now I've read Frankenstein many times and I don't think that's what it's about because Frankenstein doesn't usurp the power of God because we all can create life.
00:15:51.000All men and women can come together to create life.
00:16:18.000At one point, the creature, Frankenstein, hides out with some peasants, basically, out in the countryside, and he learns about life and he learns about what a mother is.
00:16:29.000He learns about what a father is, what children are, and how much the mother and father love the children, how much they guide them in life.
00:16:35.000And he comes back to his creator, to Dr. Frankenstein, and he says, I want to be fully human.
00:16:46.000And this is the story of what happens to people when they lose the humanizing influence of motherhood.
00:16:55.000And this was something all these poets wrote about because almost all of them lost their mothers young.
00:16:59.000Wordsworth writes this beautiful passage in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, where he talks about how a mother, by looking in her baby's eyes, creates its humanity, connects it to the world through her love.
00:17:15.000This, it turns out, to be literally true.
00:17:18.000It turns out that we have these things called mirror neurons, and they are set on fire by our interactions with our mother when we're a baby.
00:17:24.000And so mothers don't just turn matter into life.
00:17:27.000They also turn life into individuality, into individual humanity.
00:17:32.000Now, this is something that Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley, as this teenage girl, created the science fiction novel.
00:17:37.000This is the first real modern science fiction novel.
00:17:39.000And if you look at science fiction over time, it tells a story about science's antagonistic relationship to motherhood.
00:17:46.000If you look at dystopian novels like Brave New World or The Giver, almost always the first thing that happens is the mother has to go.
00:17:54.000In Brave New World, they have children in machines.
00:17:56.000In The Giver, they relegate motherhood to the lowest woman in the society.
00:18:02.000If you look at a great science fiction movie like Terminator, The Terminator, remember, the machines are running the world.
00:18:09.000The human beings are rebelling against the machines.
00:18:12.000They send a machine back in time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, back in time to kill the rebel leader's mother.
00:18:18.000They understand that that's where his power comes from.
00:18:20.000That's where his training, his abilities come from.
00:18:24.000And the point that I think Mary Shelley was making, she may have been making it unconsciously, was that women have a special role to play in the creation of humanity, not just the obvious physical creation of humanity, but in the creation of true humanity, of deep humanity.
00:19:18.000At this period that the Romantics were writing in, the Industrial Revolution had destroyed and was in the process of destroying much of that economic power that women had.
00:19:30.000Suddenly clothes, which women created, women were called the distaff because they used this distaff to make clothes with.
00:19:39.000Suddenly food could be created in a factory.
00:19:41.000Suddenly children were leaving the farm to go and work in the city in a factory and not coming back.
00:19:46.000So the value of children, which was something women supplied, went down because they no longer helped in your old age and they no longer helped took over your farm.
00:19:54.000All of these things serves to strip women of their place in society.
00:19:58.000So that's why feminism got started right there.
00:20:01.000That's why the feminists start to say, you know, we need more rights.
00:20:04.000We need to be more involved in the world.
00:20:06.000And ultimately say, get out of the house.
00:20:08.000And what Mary Shelley came over time, she was one of the few of these writers who actually lived into the Victorian age and became a Victorian and started to write books about the urgency of women's domestic role, of the homemaking role, of the motherly role.
00:20:22.000She started to become more religious in her writing because she understood that this free love and this attack on the feminine nature, the nature of femininity, was destructive, not just to women, but to the humanity that women produce.
00:20:37.000And when you read Frankenstein that way, you get a very strong answer, a very strong response to these guys who are telling us now that a guy can become a woman, that there's absolutely no, absolutely no difference between a man and a woman.
00:20:50.000And if you want to just switch over, all you got to do is snap your fingers.
00:21:04.000It has been going on at least since the Romantic period.
00:21:07.000And they were dealing with it in that moment.
00:21:09.000Some of the people who experienced the free love movement were some of the women were absolutely destroyed by it.
00:21:16.000Shelley's wife, the woman he left, drowned herself and the child she was carrying in her belly by another man.
00:21:22.000She drowned herself in the serpentine or a body of water in the park.
00:21:29.000The woman who had an affair with Byron had a child.
00:21:33.000That child was taken away from her and was separated from her and died young.
00:21:37.000At the end, a lot of these women looked back on this era of free love and said these men became monsters, controlled by lust, basically saying that women were no different than men, that they needed nothing from men.
00:21:50.000And so we've been through a lot of this before.
00:21:52.000You know, it's not like this is a new thing that suddenly these guys discovered, oh, we can mess around with gender roles.
00:21:58.000This is something that's happened before and these people had to deal with it.
00:22:01.000And I think Mary Shelley dealt with it as a nightmare.
00:22:04.000And she dealt with it in one of the most powerful, I mean, Frankenstein's one of the great novels, and it's certainly one of the greatest horror novels ever written.
00:22:10.000But it's a beautiful, thoughtful book.
00:22:13.000It's a very beautiful, thoughtful book.
00:22:14.000And this, I think, is its real subject.
00:22:16.000So what is the takeaway from that era of how they defeated that sort of gender confusion or the role reversal?
00:22:23.000You've kind of touched on this a little bit, but how does it apply directly to our times today as we live through almost identical the same issues?
00:22:30.000It's really a hopeful thing because one of the things that this gave way to, a time of radicalism, a time of gender role confusion, a time of disbelief, became the Victorian era.
00:22:41.000And whatever you think of the Victorian era, some people think it's the great.
00:22:44.000I happen to think it's one of the pinnacles of mankind, but some people think it's terrible.
00:22:48.000But whatever you think of it, it was a deeply conservative, deeply family-oriented, deeply patriotic, and deeply God-fearing time in England, in the England these poets lived in and created in and came from.
00:23:01.000And so it actually is quite a hopeful thing that while the Romantics are frequently disdained and disrespected and dismissed, really the world changed in ways that certain of the Romantics, like Wordsworth, the more conservative ones, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, that they foresaw and they wanted.
00:23:38.000New innovations in science and consciousness destroy, but you can rebuild those truths that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.
00:23:46.000It takes mental effort and it takes soul effort, and it takes each person kind of contributing to that culture, but it can be done.
00:23:52.000And is that also a call for new art as well?
00:23:55.000I mean, this was all done in a form of art.
00:23:58.000And so I would imagine that that's a massive vacuum right now in our society, which is who's actually creating the art to, you know, communicate this to the population.
00:24:09.000Well, now, Charlie, you hit on one of my favorite topics, one of my rocking horses, because I left this country for seven years.
00:24:18.000I went to England for seven years in the 90s.
00:24:20.000And when I came back, I just saw absolute ruin.
00:24:24.000I saw a country that could be bombed by Islamist fanatics on 9-11.
00:24:28.000And the elites would say, well, why do they hate us?
00:25:27.000They read stories of real life and real human beings and how twisted and broken we are.
00:25:33.000We got to tell those stories honestly.
00:25:35.000We've got to tell them from a point of view that understands there is a purpose to being a human being, there's a purpose to creation, and yet is honest about life.
00:26:14.000Stephen Meyer, who I have a ton of respect for, says, quote, not since reading C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce in College, has a single book induced such deep and constructive theological reflection in me as I suspect it will for many other readers.
00:26:44.000Andrew, we have a couple minutes remaining.
00:26:47.000I'll just kind of leave the floor to you right now.
00:26:49.000What about the book or about what's happening in the world?
00:26:51.000Do you want to make comments on that we didn't have a chance yet to touch on?
00:26:54.000Well, I guess the only thing that I want to talk about is when I talk to people your age and younger, I find that they have a really difficult time, a lot of times, embracing faith.
00:27:06.000We live in an atmosphere, a default atmosphere of non-belief.
00:27:11.000And that's kind of what I wanted to address.
00:27:14.000I know a lot of people, a lot of people who know they need God and they know the world needs God and they know society needs God, but they can't believe.
00:27:23.000I noticed it actually over a decade ago.
00:27:26.000A lot of intelligent writers, a lot of intelligent young people saying, you know, yeah, we cannot sustain this society without God, but I don't believe.
00:27:38.000And I guess I was hoping to find a way to speak to believers about a fresh take so you'd see something new that you hadn't seen before.
00:27:47.000And to talk to people who have that problem, have that problem that, yes, they see it, they want it, they desire it, but they can't have it.
00:27:54.000Because, you know, when we talk about the fact that our rights come from God, you lose God, you lose your rights.
00:27:59.000When we talk about the fact that we are connected, that our spirit is connected to the spirit, that we're a branch of his vine, you fall off that vine, that branch dies.
00:28:09.000You know, you will not have a creative, beautiful life without that.
00:28:39.000He started as an atheist and followed his own thinking and actually made it back.
00:28:45.000And so I guess I just wanted to show you sometimes when you take a machine apart and you put it back together again, you sometimes understand it better.
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00:30:41.000I want to end on a note of optimism here about something that involves us and involves your country.
00:30:47.000So you could tell a lot about where a country is and where the country is headed based on what people are consuming.
00:30:54.000And so I check something fairly regularly, which is the top podcasts in the country.
00:31:02.000And, you know, you feel as if that the country is taking a left-wing liberal turn, especially with young people.
00:31:09.000And but then you look at the top podcast charts of who's actually doing well, who's succeeding, what podcasts are popular in Apple podcasts.
00:31:18.000Are conservative ones getting blown out of the water?
00:32:04.000If you look at it, you're like, wow, even with all the nonsense, CNN, all that sort of stuff, you have something that's really exciting that's happening here that I think isn't getting covered at all.
00:32:18.000And if young people are gravitating towards center-right pro-American podcasts at this clip, there's a lot more hope out there than I think that will be ever communicated in the mainstream media.
00:32:30.000So give us a subscription, Charlie Kirk Show Podcast, and hit subscribe.