https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9G9AgIy-tD0
So basically my new thing is just reminding people of the Middle Ages was a Christian period and that there was a sort of a narrative and original context for all of that. And that that should actually affect the way we read these stories. Exactly. And I think that what we wanna do now is part of helping people understand, one of the things that I, the Middle Ages act as a kind of mythological substructure to the modern world, whether people want to or not, even though people are trying to kind of move away from it, so much of our dark, like even the idea that it’s kind of went into the dark place where we have these dark stories and these fairy tales and these strange misunderstood stories, cause the fairy tale, even if it’s not medieval, it’s medieval in its structure and it’s medieval in its illusions, let’s say. So all of that shows us that the Middle Ages are acting as this kind of, just like for the Greeks of the times of Athens, the Trojan War and the Odyssey were like this mythological backdrop to who they were. The Middle Ages are the mythological backdrop to who we are. And so we need to diving back into it and having a clear vision of what it can tell us and how it can structure our, more consciously structure our reality, can be one of the solutions to the disenchantment that we’re facing. It’s funny because somebody asked a question and this might’ve been on an episode, I think this is on an episode of the Edmund Swoole podcast. Somebody wrote in with a question of basically like, well, why is all fantasy or like the vast majority of fantasy, why is it set in a medieval setting? And it’s for exactly the reason you just described. And this is what I was trying to explain. It’s that that’s where we look back to, right? That’s where our meaning comes from. Even that’s where our monsters come from that we’re dealing with right now. Like it’s all sort of contained in there because there’s this big medieval synthesis where basically it’s the only time in human history when we’ve really had everything sort of come together and mesh together and fit together. That’s amazing. Cause you say that and everybody, so many people who are listening will think, what? The dark ages had a synthesis where everything came together and it just shows how ignorant we are of what the Middle Ages had. Well, and that’s really, we’re gonna be talking about universal history today. That’s really what universal history is about. It’s about showing how the Christianity of the Middle Ages. Chesterton in his poem, The Battle of the White Horse, he said, it’s only Christian men who, where is it? It’s only Christian men who protect even pagan things. In other words, only Christianity has the, let’s say the Catholicity, the universality, right? To actually take in the entire pagan world and integrate it, find a place for everything. And that’s what you see basically happening in universal history. It’s a way of fitting our story, right? The story of my people, whoever my people are into kind of a master story, a master narrative. And this is something which was already there, let’s say before Christianity. That is, we have to understand that the ancient pagans had an intuition about other peoples, which is that when they would encounter other peoples, they would always be trying to pinpoint, for example, like, okay, so they have these strange gods, let’s recognize the strange gods, right? So, okay, so when they talk about this God, they’re referring to Zeus, or they’re referring to Aries, but they’re referring to different, the same gods we have, they just had different names. And some of them, and it wasn’t like a perfect system. Sometimes it was like, well, their God seems to be like a joining of these two gods that we’re worshiping, let’s say. But there was a sense in which it’s not like the, like this strange modern idea that somehow things are so arbitrary that they just pop up and you people can have all these traditions that are arbitrary, but rather that there is a common human experience, whether we’re connected historically or just in terms of our nature, that will bring about similar stories, that will bring about similar principalities, that will notice different principalities in the world, and we end up worshiping the same gods. And so, even it was there before Christianity, but then when Christianity arrived, there is almost this idea that all of this now culminates into Christ, and all the good elements of these ancient traditions can be kind of pulled into this one story. Yeah, in the discarded image, Louis says, I think it’s in the preface or like the introduction to the book, he says that there was of course, and he actually divides it into right and left. Obviously, you’ll understand, and your listeners have been paying attention for a long time will understand. The symbolism of the left hand really is to sort of push something away, right? So he says there’s a Christian left that was always trying to get rid of these things. But then there was always a Christian right who would say along with St. Justin Martyr, or Justin the philosopher, whatever true things have been said by men at any time belong to us Christians. Of course, you could look at that now and say, oh, that’s just appropriationism or something like that. And first of all, technically, yes, right? There is this university in California that has this proposed class that they wanna start teaching that actually Christianity is guilty of what they call theoside, which again, yes, sort of our deal, right? But also what people don’t always understand there is that when these things die, that they have a capacity to be resurrected in a way that allows them to participate within the larger story of the Christian world. So you do see the seeds of this happening. I mean, for instance, Herodotus, when he encounters Egyptian society, spends a whole lot of time trying to figure out how do the gods that the Egyptians worship match it to the map to the gods that we worship, right? But then what Christianity does is it integrates it in a more complete way, right? So that you don’t have competing principalities so that everything is able to kind of lay itself out in a hierarchy that lets you figure out where your story fits into this larger narrative. Yeah, exactly. And the idea that we’re appropriating, it’s so hilarious. It’s like you think that these were copyrights or that the purpose of the world is to be original and to come up with the new thing that hasn’t been done before. Every time someone says that Christianity has elements of things that are there before them, I’m thinking, are you patenting these things? What reality do you actually live in? That’s how it works. We take the things that are given to us and then we try to fit them in a way that will be more real and that will be more conducive to a universal history, like the one that Christianity finally ended up coming towards. You know, that this was actually a process, a historical process that wasn’t done by one person, that was kind of, we don’t even know who was doing it sometimes. It just is this organic thing that happens and pops up in legends and pops up in different texts. But it’s just a funny thing, to think that somehow these stories, once again, that somehow reality is so arbitrary that we could be stealing ideas from other, companies steal tech ideas from each other. Yeah. One way to think about the development of narrative in the Middle Ages is that it’s not until a very, very late stage, basically until Dante, right? Dante is kind of the first self-conscious author, right? In the sense that he’s really the first person. I mean, obviously there’s a lot of, there are a lot of works which will begin with, you know, oh, pray for the poor wretched sinner whose name I’m not even going to give you because I’m so unworthy because I’m going to now relate to you these great things or something like that. But Dante is really the first sort of like, in one sense kind of, you know, he’s standing right there on the cusp of the medieval and the modern because he’s the first person who sort of writes himself into the story. But before that, the writing in the Middle Ages is characterized by two things. One is a deep respect for authority. And authority really, at the end of the day, means anything else written down, right? Because writing is very expensive, people don’t write stuff unless it’s important. So a deep respect for the authority of the earlier text. And then also secondly, basically no concept of the idea of authorship. Like our ideas today of authorship, plagiarism, things like this would not even make sense back then. That’s why when people get a little hung up on things like, well, you know, who’s the real author of this pseudo-apigraphal text? Like only a modern person can ask that question and it’d be meaningful, right? You know, so I wrote an article on the symbolism of St. Dionysius the very apigite, right? And his story basically just takes all of, everything I’m saying right now and just kind of combined it, right? So there’s this whole body of text. And the question is, you know, most scholars today say it, it was actually authored by somebody that they’re gonna call pseudo-Dionysius, you know? So in other words, not Dionysius, but somebody else writing under his name, right? Well, that’s essentially just a modern hangup. Yeah. And also it’s the idea, it’s also because it’s the idea that text exists in a vacuum because the person who wrote that, pseudo-Dionysius, so whatever, who knows who wrote it, didn’t write it just out of his own mind. He didn’t just sit down and think up something new to write. He was writing it based on things that had been handed down to him. And even if we don’t know exactly how these things were handed down, they reveal themselves as they’re received by the church and integrated in the church as appropriately transmitting certain things which were already there in the tradition. Right.