https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2OX2cHwDRVI
You know, it’s really interesting if you look at the history, Jonathan, for the first millennium, you know, we in the West were so used to thinking the West dominates the West, you know, kind of leads the way. Culturally speaking, everything kind of comes from the West. And if you go back in time, it’s like an onion peeling an onion, you start to see that there’s no West. There is a West, but it’s not really, it’s not the center. If you go back far enough into the first millennium, you find the center is the East. And one of my chapters in the book, Age of Paradise, is called When the West was Still Eastern. And I talked there about how for two centuries, the popes of Rome, which we think essentially, you know, the kind of symbols of Western civilization at that time, were all recruits from the East, from Syria, and especially from Constantinople and eastern parts of the empire at that time. Famous, important fathers of the church, theologians who contributed to our understanding of culture, especially what it means to be human, anthropology, and what it means to what the world is, cosmology, such as Maximus the Confessor. They were eastern, they came to the West, Maximus helped organize a council in Rome itself. And these are people, they’re just forgotten, you know, Gregory the Great, the Pope of Rome. I have a son named after him, actually. He was just a fantastic example. Having lived in Constantinople for a few years, he came back and became Pope of Rome. And he’s recognized, certainly in the West, by Roman Catholics, for instance, as the most important person of his generation and beyond. But he had a very eastern understanding of the cosmos and the place of culture within the cosmos. But it’s interesting. There’s such a polemic reason why we’ve come to learn history this way, right? Let’s say one of the tools or one of the weapons of the Enlightenment has been to paint this idea of the Dark Age, this idea of the Middle Ages as this dark, regressive, you know, backwards age. And usually what they mean is basically England and Northern France. Like, it’s France and England basically that they’re talking about. Maybe Germany is the kind of, and it’s only for a few centuries. And if you take into account Constantinople, the very idea of the Dark Age completely vanishes. There is no Dark Age. It’s actually that, you know, Constantine sets his capital in the East, and then that capital becomes the cultural center for all of Christendom. And the influence of Constantinople reigns all, and even at the conversion of Charlemagne, you can actually see how Charlemagne takes on the tropes of Constantinople visually in terms of artistic history. You can notice how he takes on the imagery that he gets from Constantinople. And so like Constantinople had running water and had, you know, education and had all the things of a civilization. And so I think that the reason, one of the reasons why we don’t know about it is a polemical reason, is that we don’t want, we don’t, that the secular, modern secularism doesn’t like the idea that the Middle Ages don’t exist the way that you portray them. Yeah, you know, the term medieval is interesting. I’m actually writing about that in the Age of Utopia as we speak. The whole concept of the Middle Ages, of course, as you say, is a polemical concept. It’s a weapon of the Enlightenment. The term wasn’t actually coined and then became kind of established in Western culture only after about 1700 during the courts of the Enlightenment. And it was really the product of the so-called Renaissance when First Petrarch, father of Renaissance humanism, likened the whole history, the thousand years that preceded him, as a darkness, a cultural darkness that overcame the West from which he needed to escape. And his escape was into the seculum, into the secular, non-religious, non-Christian, un-Christian kind of realm of the pre-Christian culture of pagan, of pagan Greece and Rome. And others, after him, coined this idea of light and darkness and then this became kind of consolidated by the Enlightenment. It really dismisses a thousand years of Western history. Yeah. That’s effectively what it does. And you can, it’s funny because in a way, if you look at the context, you can have some sympathy for Petrarch because he’s coming out of the plague. And so you can understand that here he is, like, seeing these bodies dead, all these dead bodies and this whole breakdown of culture that’s happening because of a disease and then projecting that back onto history for a thousand years. And so, I mean, I can kind of have some, a little bit of sympathy for Petrarch, but I don’t necessarily have sympathy for those who weaponized his vision in the Enlightenment. And how can you look at a Gothic, even in terms of the West, like how can you look at a Gothic cathedral and say dark ages? And I don’t understand how that’s possible. I mean, there was a breakdown in terms of these non-Roman pagans who were kind of taking over for a little while, but as soon as they become, as soon as they become Christianized, you see the transformation start to happen. And that’s one of the interesting things that you explore, I think, in your book is that on the one hand, you’re not afraid to show the dark side of some of the things that happen, even in terms of Constantine’s conversion or Charlemagne and all of these figures that convert. And you can see that there’s still some elements that they have to deal with that has to be transformed. But nonetheless, you can point to actual fruits of the changes which occurred in their conversion, even if it wasn’t total. So yeah, Constantine did kill his son, and that’s a horrible thing. But in that change from a pagan world where it was absolutely normal to do that kind of thing, or this constant destruction of the hairs and these horrible emperors that were doing monstrous things, you can nonetheless see the difference. And you can see the transformation, even if it doesn’t bring us into the Holy of Holies, let’s say, right away. And it won’t. Yeah, for sure. It won’t in this world. And I try to emphasize that the age of paradise so-called is not an age when everyone lived in paradise and everything was just happy and beautiful and holy and good. No, there was darkness everywhere. I mean, it was darkness everywhere, and there always will be darkness, as I understand it, as someone who reads the scriptures and thinks about the Christian revelation seriously. I think there are always going to be that darkness that Petrarch spoke of, that tenebrae in Latin. What’s interesting there, Jonathan, is it wasn’t just, as I understand, as I do the research and think about it, when Petrarch had this reaction to this kind of reaction to his culture, it wasn’t, I think, driven just by the plague, the Black Death, which he did live through. One of his sons actually perished as a young man from the plague, so he knew it quite well. But I don’t think that’s really the main thing. I think what’s going on there, and this is what I bring out in the second volume, The Age of Division, is that once that disconnection between West and East took place, once the West no longer was rooted in Eastern Christendom, there’s a real change, a real shift in the culture. I do believe this is extremely important for understanding why we’re dealing with out-of-control abortion and why we’re dealing with political correctness and all the other stuff that afflicts our modern culture today, because that detachment from a civilization with a supporting culture in the East that directed its members toward heavenly transformation of the world, when that happened, a great pessimism began to seep into Western culture. You can see this in what I call the Stavrocentrism, or the cross-centered culture of penitential pessimism, the rise of the Doctrine of Purgatory, for instance, which I look at real closely in the second volume. All of this, of course, following the Great Schism, I call it the Great Division, between East and West, and you start to see a culture that’s very pessimistic. I think, Jonathan, that’s really what was driving Petrarch’s turn, almost desperate turn, because he was a smart, brilliant man and so enjoyable to read. His turn toward what is called the Seculum, the Secularity, the Secular World, a world that is spiritually untransfigured, untransformed, a world that exists only for its own sake. That is the beginning. It’s a flight from pessimism, the pessimism of the Christian culture of the West, having become detached from the culture of the East for a few centuries now. That’s really the beginning of what became the Renaissance and its humanism and the Enlightenment and the de-liturgification of art. When art no longer had a liturgical role to play and it just became an end in itself, the Renaissance being the classic example of that.