https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Eu0RFzknY7Y
And I’d love to hear a bit more about your experiences with people like Gino and the Perennialist school. I had a somewhat chaotic background, Dublin, with say, Sanatana Dharma, Sufi Islam, stuff like that. And what is good and bad in some of those persons? Now you’re looking back on it as a question. Yeah, well, okay, so I mean, I think what’s good about the Perennialist, especially in my opinion, Gino, is that Gino is a great tool against the modern. Illusion. I mean, he’s the best tool. If you read A Crisis of the Modern World, it will just, it smashes, you know, if you read that with an open mind, it will smash so many of your presuppositions about modern reality and its accomplishments, let’s say. So I think that I don’t know if there’s anybody better at doing that than he did. You know, The Rain and the Quantity is just a ruthless book. I even warn people, I say, don’t be careful. Like you read that, it can drive you crazy because it’s like, if you smash, if I smash your worldview, I can leave you teetering. I’ve seen people reading those, I’ve seen people reading, you know, become insane, like become paranoid and become like, just weirdly paranoid because it really does smash, smash something, which is holding your world together. So I think, but I think that that’s still what’s good about the work in the sense that we need that, especially if you’re like in your 20s and you’re exploring and you have a lot of space and time to think, then it can really be helpful. I think that the negative part of the work is that what ended up happening, and I don’t know if that’s what Gino wanted. Well, first of all, there’s a lot of remainder of weird occult stuff in his work, just like, you can imagine like Origen, he fought the Gnostic so much that he was tainted by them, and I think that that’s something you see in Gino as well. He remained a Martinist his whole life and he had, let’s say, suspicious relations, let’s say, and so I think that that’s one part. And then the second part is that what ends up happening with perennials, and this is something I’ve seen, especially in the kind of Schuontite perennialist, is that they don’t realize that they’re participating in the breakdown of the world. They don’t realize that they are actually part of, they are fueling the kind of New Age mush and New Age breakdown that they themselves oppose, because the perennials act as if they stand above all these religions, and we’re wondering like, where are you standing? They stand above these religions and then they look upon the religions and then they compare and contrast them and they point to all these different things as examples of the transcendent principles, but they do so in a way that ends up being almost like another religion. It’s almost as if it’s a religion in itself, and they obviously would deny this, they would say that’s not what they’re doing, but that’s the result that it ends up causing, and it fuels the universalist mush, like the kind of, I believe in the universalist thing, therefore I’m nothing, and I’ve seen it happen, and I really do think that that’s a serious problem, and that it leads to, it’s fueling the chaos, and it’s fueling weird things, like it’s fueling weird things like the idea of, it’s fueling the opposite of what Guignol said, like the perennials seem to be somehow part of globalization, if there seemed to be a perennials thread in kind of this globalized culture, and this idea of a one world, one world government, one world this, there seems to be some perennials that are in that thing, like Prince Charles is a good example of that, or Prince Charles is obviously a perennialist, but he keeps talking in these weird globalist terms that are weird and surprising, and he speaks as if he is, again, above and appreciates Islam, and appreciates Christianity, and appreciates all these different traditions, as if he’s floating above all of this, and so that’s the problem with perennialism, and I don’t see an easy solution about it. Thanks for that, Jonathan. And what then are some of the lessons that maybe we should take away from the fact that people like us really look to these figures before we actually turn to our own Christian riches then? Well, I mean, it’s just like anything on the way that can feed you, in the sense that I think truth is truth, truth, you get your truth, get the truth wherever you can get it, I don’t, I always tell people that, like I don’t think that, I don’t like people who tell me something like, like a good example is Origen, it’s like Origen said some heretical things, but then people, if you quote Origen, or if you make a gesture towards him, or if you’ve read something in his book, then all of a sudden you’re suspicious, like Origen said a lot of amazing things, a lot of amazing, insightful, powerful things, so much so that the fathers you love are the ones who published his book, his books, and so, but there are things that he said that are wrong, and let’s point to those things, and you know, and I feel, I think it’s fair that he’s not a saint, and all these things I think are fair, but it’s the same for everybody, and so whatever Origen said which is true, I think is fine to recognize, and whenever he said it’s not true, there is problematic, I think it’s fine to just set aside, because I don’t identify with them, it’s actually easy, it’s like if I read, it’s harder for things that I actually identify with, so if let’s say, I don’t know, if Saint Basil the Great says something problematic, it’s actually more of a difficulty for me than if Guenel says something problematic, because I’m not in his body, like I don’t have, I’m not in a body with him, like I’m not, he’s like a spice on the side that I can kind of sprinkle on, and I can really see insight into, but I don’t feel like I have to follow him in any way, and so I think that that’s the way that I approach all these thinkers, like I still have insight from Jacques Derrida, or Heidegger, for example, like I get a lot of insight from Heidegger, but I wouldn’t, I’m not going to spend my time talking about Heidegger, and so that maybe that’s the thing, it’s like what I tend to talk about things that say through Christ, and then once in a while, I’ll mention this as an example, something odd, or something off as an example, just to help people see that this is a universal pattern, and it appears all over, and I think it’s the same for other traditions, I think it’s like sometimes you encounter Christians that weirdly talk about other religions more than they talk about their own Christianity, because they want to show, like they constantly want to show how these other religions are okay, but it ends up making a weird upside down thing, but I think it’s fine to once in a while say, oh, you know, I don’t even know, I said this very powerful, thoughtful thing, or you know, like in the Bhagavad Gita, there’s this interesting idea that is worth considering, but I do so as it not being my own, right, it’s not my thing, it’s something I’m pointing to on the outside, let’s say. And some people from secularist backgrounds even have told me how much that they have been moved by your work, and I’m not going to say the name in case they want me to, but someone I mentioned to you before said that they were drawn to it because of how you betray the Christian story, it’s genuinely inclusive of all people, for all intellects and all backgrounds, it’s a real and meaningful universalism. How does this universal Orthodox Christian faith differ from the phony universalism that we mentioned before, whether inside or outside the church? Yeah, well I think that there is a recognition of the particular in Christianity, which is very important, and there is an idea that the body of the church, like let’s say the body of your parish, that your actual parish, that’s it, like that’s where you encounter everything. And so the problem with a lot of universalism is that it deals in abstractions, and it deals in abstractions for reasons that are sometimes not the right reasons. So I would say, I mean I might disagree, but I would say many universalists that I’ve met, they are universalists out of a kind of embarrassment, out of a kind of embarrassment of being Christian. And so they, like I’ll give you an example, like if someone asks, like you probably had that experience all the time, like if someone comes up to you and asks you, well what about Muslims? That’s what they ask you. It’s like, do you think that Muslims are also saved? And that question, that’s the devil, that question. That question is the devil, because why are you asking me this? What is your purpose? What are you trying to accomplish? Right, if I see myself as a sick person that is going to the hospital, and I’m going around and then I, let’s say I have a way to get to the hospital, and then you come to me and you ask me, how do you get to the hospital? And I tell you, I’m like this is how you get to the hospital. And then you ask me, well isn’t there another way to get to the hospital? And I’m like, what? What are you trying to accomplish? What is your purpose? It’s a very subversive type of attitude. And so that’s what I see in a lot of universal moves and a lot of people who want to have that type of stance because it makes them socially acceptable, and it makes them palatable to the modern thinking. But it’s not a good, it’s a, I think people who are tempted by that, I think we need to kind of look at our own reasons for doing that. Like what is the, why am I asking myself the question if others are saved? Like ask yourself if you’re saved, like ask yourself what are you doing? Like what are you urgently praying to God? Like are you sacrificing your passions to something beyond you? Are you loving your neighbor? Is that what you’re doing? But if you’re asking me like, I want to know if some child who dies in India, if they’re saved, tell me what you think of that. And then they look at you smugly, like they trapped you into some kind of like moral dilemma. I just, I really, that to me is the worst. And so the idea is that Christianity, Christianity formulates its universalism, or its universal story from within the Christian story. And there’s no other way to do it. And it does it through the manifestation of the incarnation as something which can reach to the end of the world and participate in bringing together all of reality. And we recognize that we don’t know how that works completely. Like I don’t, and it’s also not my, the specifics of how someone in somewhere else is going to be saved or not is really not my problem. Like it’s just, it’s just, it’s a dishonest question. It’s a distraction to what you really need to ask, which is, you know, do I love the people around me now? Like am I involved in the community that I’m bound to? I hope that makes sense. Yeah, that does make sense. Thank you, Jonathan. I think that’s one of the things, like I don’t agree with a lot of what, say, Father Sheriff Amrou says, but I think he’s right about that kind of spirit of the age. And Dejakalu, I think, talks about that too, with this kind of world opinion, which is kind of pure abstraction, as it were, and actually dehumanizing in that respect then. And I think another thing that I read this article, The Scandal of Christ by this nuclear scientist from Sri Lanka, an theologian, and he talked about those other worldviews don’t even offer salvation. So it is a trick question even in that respect. They’re offering maybe nirvana or things like that. It’s not salvation that they even offer themselves within their own stories. It’s a ridiculous question on all those levels.