https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=r8TZxaBAp6E
Applause What an amazing ending to our discussions. Can I just get another round of applause for all our panelists? Applause So, it’s 8.47 right now, but just letting you guys know, even though the event says that the event ends at 9pm, we do have the room till 10, so we have plenty of time for questions. So with that said, if you guys have any more questions that develop along the way, you can just write them down and pass them up, and I will try to get to as many as possible, and I’ll also try to ask questions that kind of answer as many other questions as possible. So, with that said, and this question does not address to any panelists in particular, but whichever of you feels like you would like to answer this question, please do so. A statue in Rome depicts the suffering of the Trojan priest Ladokan, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, and his sons. Unlike the noble suffering of Christ, Ladokan’s suffering seems neither awarded nor justified. Do these two differing visions of suffering form part of the divide between postmodernists and their opponents? And do the postmodernists justify their nihilism and or believe in other ideologies by pointing to the pointless suffering of Ladokan and others like him? Meaningless suffering. Is that the core of the postmodern understanding of the problems in the world? I don’t know if it’s at the core of the postmodernists’ view. I think it’s at the core of the problem that every human being has with manifesting sufficient faith to engage fully in life. We look at our lives and the lives of others and we see that the one certainty is suffering and loss. And we’re, at least in principle, the only creatures that are aware of that. That’s really the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve, right? Because Adam and Eve wake up and become aware of their own nakedness, their finitude, their mortality, and that throws them out of the paradise of being. And that’s precisely right. That’s the situation we all find ourselves in. The fundamental question is all that without ultimate meaning. And it’s a very profound question. The answer seems to be something like it’s without meaning unless you take it on voluntarily. And I certainly don’t understand the full implications of that answer, although I know that insofar as you can test that as a theory in your own life, it seems extraordinarily robust. To the degree that it’s a postmodern issue, I think that the postmodernists feed us very thin gruel because they offer nothing in the face of that suffering except the collapse of everything into the sand that Jonathan spoke of. That’s the best I can do with that. To Mr. Pajot, how do your icons and icons in general function on their day-to-day search for the logos? I think there’s many ways in which they function. One of the things that I talked about is the idea that the path of logos is a path of coming together. And one of the things that icons provide is that image of coming together. So when you engage with an icon, especially in a church where there are many icons and many saints, then you get that sense of your path being one in which you are in communion with others. So for Orthodox Christians, for example, when we pray before icons, we pray before them because through those images, we can… How can I say this in a way that everybody can understand? So the image becomes a vehicle for the presence of that person into our prayer lives, and there’s this relationship which is set up. So that is how we live with icons, and icons become a vehicle for that path towards unity. So I hope that helped. That’s on, let’s say, on an experiential sense. I think on a technical sense in terms of the making of icons for myself, for me that’s what they have done exactly, is that my struggle in life before I became Orthodox was how to fit art that I loved into my life, how to make that fit and how for it to all come together. And in discovering the language of traditional Christian art, I found how here’s this art which is both grounded in absolute practical use in the lives of people. It’s used in people’s devotions. It’s used in the church to teach and to participate in the liturgy. And at the same time, I can participate in that by making them uniting me with the tradition of all the fathers before me, uniting me with the church. And at the same time, these images, what they’re talking about and what they’re revealing is that ultimate reality, that reality that is beyond all realities. And so being able for myself, I feel a great blessing to have the chance and have the blessing of the church to be able to do that for a living. It’s amazing. Every day I get to participate in that process. And so that’s my other answer to that question. Just quickly to add to that point, icons in the Orthodox Church are not merely seen, but they teach us to see. You will have noted that there is a, they are not just an aesthetically beautiful medium. They have a kind of stylization to them. Even though the many styles of iconography, they share a characteristic and there is something about them that forces the viewer to reflect and to come to a new way of seeing. So icons are not merely symbols as such, but they teach us to understand all of reality in that symbolic sense that I spoke of earlier, that everything ultimately isn’t referencing itself. That’s the problem that we’re in, that things have become self-referential, that everything in the world is an icon, is a symbol of God and is referring to something much more than what it is beyond itself, without losing its identity. So icons teach us that vision, not just depict it. That makes sense. Teach us a way of seeing. Just to quickly add to that. Following up on what Professor Peterson said, the average person wants to take the easy route. So when you take a look at icons in Orthodox Churches, a lot of people have never seen them before. They say, well, those are weird, they’re not realistic, they’re very strange looking. They’re done on purpose because the icon involves you. It forces engagement with the logos, what we’ve been speaking about tonight. Because from the colors that are used to the subtle code that exists within iconography that, okay, if you haven’t studied it, you wouldn’t know. But for the people who read up on it and begin to engage, it forces you to read the icon and to get deeper and deeper into what it’s trying to tell you. Even the perspective, and Jonathan knows this very well, in most icons, not all, but in most Byzantine icons, the perspective is even reversed. And if those of you who have taken basic art, you know, vanishing point is far away, right? Things get farther away when you look into the distance and things get bigger when they get closer to you. But if you look at the geometry of an icon, a lot of times you’ll see that it’s reversed. Why? Because the vanishing point is actually pointing towards you, towards the viewer. Which means that when you look at it, you become part of it. And the orientation of the icon is actually looking at you. You’re not just looking at the icon. The icon is looking at you. And that forces a type of involvement, and it’s hard work because you have to learn how to read it. You can’t just look at it. And I don’t want to contrast it as with, for example, Renaissance painting, as better or worse. It’s just two different things. But when you look at Renaissance painting, it’s realism. It’s just, it’s there to depict what exists as it is. And there’s not a lot of work there. There’s a lot of work from a technical point of view. But to look at it, you know, it is what it is. It stops there. Whereas the icon, as Jonathan was saying, kind of reveals another world, the world that could be, the world that we would want to be. And that is a beautiful thing because it’s a constant engagement with our hope in the eternal. Thank you. This question is for Jordan Peterson. Can you comment on the cyclical or non-cyclical pattern of history? And if our society is doomed to decay, or can it be renewed culturally? In order of society, state, and laws? Well, I would say it’s cyclical at every moment in some sense. It’s nested patterns of cyclicality. I think you can hear that best. And the best representation I’ve ever seen of that is in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. They’re really worth a listen. The new videos I’m going to release that I’m doing with interviews use Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, which is an absolutely phenomenal piece of music because it cycles and climbs continually and stays in the same place. I have no idea how he managed it. It’s absolutely overwhelming. And that’s what history is like. The apocalypse is always on us, right? I mean, you all confront an apocalyptic destiny because you’re all going to die. And everything comes to an end and everything is continually regenerated. And so that cyclicality is built into every moment. That’s the U-shaped journey that Northrop Frye talked about too, which is order, the descent into chaos, and the reestablishment of order. And everyone knows what that means in their own life. You’re somewhere stable where you understand everything and things are going well for you. And then the rug is pulled out from underneath your feet and you don’t know where you are. You fall into chaos. Someone close to you dies or you don’t get the promotion you were looking for. Some dream collapses on you or you discover a new fault that you were never aware of before. And you fall into this chaotic state. And in that chaotic state, that’s the underworld of mythology. And one of the suburbs of the underworld, the most horrific suburb of the underworld, is hell. Because when you go into the underworld in chaos, it’s easy to become desperate and then angry and then vengeful and then murderous. And that happens to people with tremendous, tremendous frequency. If you haven’t observed that in your own life, you haven’t watched your own interior landscape with any degree of accuracy. And so that cyclicality is built into everything. And it’s the structure of being. That’s the right way to think about it. And now I think the optimistic part of that is that there is a spiral upward, as far as I can tell, or at least there can be. And you get some sense of that when you participate in your own life in the sense that you’ve found a good direction. And that’s imbuing you with a sense of positive meaning. And I really regard, I don’t regard positive meaning as an epiphenomenal manifestation of a deeper material reality. I don’t believe that’s true at all. I believe that there is nothing more real than that sense of engaged meaning. I think your nervous system has actually evolved to tell you when you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s something that informs you that’s literally beyond your senses, but it’s absolutely central to proper being. You can tell when you’re engaged with the world properly because all of a sudden the world becomes worthwhile around you. And that’s not an illusion. We’ve been taught for so long that meaning is some sort of illusion or an epiphenomenal. I think it’s absolutely central. And certainly no one ever thinks that suffering is an epiphenomenal. Everyone acts as if their own suffering is the most real thing there is. And no wonder. So if you experience something that enables you to transcend that suffering or to justify it in your own life, which is that sense of meaningful engagement, why wouldn’t you regard that as even more real than pain? The only thing more real than pain is that which can transcend it. And you can experience that in your own life. You do that all the time when you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s a real thing. And I also think that’s the place that truth puts you. Well, now how that relates to the cyclicality. Well, that’s the pathway out of it. You know, that life is order, chaos, reestablishment of order. And you could say, well, you’re the order. Or you could say you’re the chaos. Lots of people are the chaos. Or maybe you’re even a denizen of hell inside that chaos. Or you’re the reestablished order. And all of those things are reasonable things to be. But the most reasonable thing to be is the thing that constantly moves along that pathway ever upwards, like that staircase at the back, which is what that represents. It’s that spiral upwards that leads us up into the beyond. That’s the stairway to heaven. That’s cyclicality. And it’s a genuine thing. And you know it, but you don’t know you know it. And some of these stories, the icons that Jonathan produces, and these stories that we’ve been talking about are humanity’s attempts to make that pattern articulate. And all we’ve really managed so far is to capture an image and story. We haven’t been able to make it fully articulate. But the time for that, I would say, is approaching because we need to understand these things consciously so that we can participate in them properly. Thank you. This one, I suppose, would be most appropriate for our Reverend Fathers. What role does Jesus Christ and the Church play in helping us become more like God? Is it possible to become like God without this person and this institution? This one wants to start. This is obviously one of the hotly debated subjects in Church history. It’s also a major subject in the New Testament. I’ve been teaching New Testament this term and reading Paul recently, and Paul wrestles with this question. How is it under the law, outside of the law, how do people come to this sort of center of being, this fulfillment of humanity’s potential, human flourishing with or without Christ? And depending on how the question is asked, you will get different answers. But I would just recall one of the main themes from tonight, which is that logos is inherent. This isn’t something that’s been concocted and posited as some sort of philosophical premise. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all agreed with this idea and then moved towards it together? Even if it was that, it would be a good thing. But it’s so much more fundamental than that. Every human being, not just those who adhere to this philosophy, has the image of God within them and is operating to some degree or another according to their logos. In fact, the Eastern tradition would tend to argue that our very existence is good, and therefore every human being is good insofar as they exist. If there was no goodness in us, we would not exist. Evil is an eclipsing, not actually a tangible force, not a real thing. And so, is it possible for someone without Christ to somehow come into touch deeply with logos within them, therefore with Christ? I think the argument would be ultimately yes. The best means would be to hear the gospel proclaimed, Jesus Christ is Lord, and to respond to that in faith, as the New Testament talks about. But even apart from that, everyone already has logos, and therefore everyone already has that pattern etched into their very existence. And so, that’s how we could possibly see the capacity outside of the sacramental boundaries of the church, people coming to a position of harmony with their being. One of the early church fathers, St. Justin Martyr, refers to, and it picks up actually, this is a pre-Socratic idea, the logos spermaticos, the seeds of the word, which are all through creation. And so, this is the fundamental essence of all of reality, not only in us, but in all of creation. And so, he was dealing with the fact that people were pointing out, well, how come there’s dying and rising gods in all sorts of different cultures? How come all of the things that you find in the Christian faith are already present in many myths and cultures and so forth? And he said, that’s brilliant. You know, of course they are. This is true. If it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t be so. And so, in that sense, absolutely, what we are trying to do as Orthodox Christians is simply live in complete harmony with who we are as human beings. This isn’t an outside imposition. This is the very core of what we are. This is the fulfillment and trajectory of creation. And so, that’s why, coming back to the earlier point about how can we have this dialogue, this engagement with the world, with social sciences, with physical sciences, with pure physics and mathematics, we can do that because it all ties in anyway. We are hoping, as Orthodox Christians, we are in touch with what is fundamentally true of creation and of our own human personhood. So, hopefully that will join you. Thank you for that. Well, I suppose Dr. Peterson would be best equipped to handle this. Are, or anyone, are Jungian archetypes in accord with or opposed to Orthodox theology? I don’t know too much about what that means, but maybe you do. Well, the problem with answering that for me is that I’m by no means an expert on Orthodox theology. So, but from what I understand of it, I would say Jung believed that, Jung was a student of Nietzsche. It’s something that isn’t well known about Jung because most of the history of psychoanalytic thought was written by the Freudians, and they think of Jung as a student of Freud, and of course that’s true. Jung was really introduced to the idea, profound idea of the unconscious through Freud, and also, at least in part, to the idea that there was an interior world of symbols. But at the same time, Jung was a student of Nietzsche. And you see, Nietzsche announced the death of God in the late 1900s, and what he meant by that, in some sense, was that he meant that the spirit of truth that had been instantiated by Christianity had turned against the dogma of Christianity and destroyed it. And what he meant by that was that the emergence of science in the context of Western culture and the elaborate description of physical reality that was developed as a consequence ended up in apparent contradiction with the truths of our religious tradition, and we picked the most developed truth and let the other one go. And Nietzsche was not celebrating that, contrary to what most people think. I mean, when he spoke of the death of God, he said that it was an absolute catastrophe and that we would pay for it with millions of lives. And that was his prognostication for the 20th century, which happened to come true in precisely the manner he indicated for exactly the reasons. Nietzsche believed that we would have to invent our own values because the old values that we had lived by had bled themselves out and died. But the problem with that, and this is something Jung picked up on, the problem with that is that you can’t invent your own values. And you know that, because all of you have tried on New Year’s Day to decide that you’re going to eat less and go to the gym. And you’d think if you could create your own values, you know, being this sort of demigod, that as soon as you told yourself that you would eat properly and go to the gym, you’d be up at six in the morning, you know, eating carrots and rutabagas and then going off to lift heavy weights. And of course you’re not. You’re sitting in your chair at night eating Cheetos and watching pornography. So how in the world is something like that supposed to create its own values? You’re not in control of yourself to that degree. And so Jung’s answer to that problem was essentially to look partly within and partly to look in the symbolic domain. And what he realized as a consequence of doing that was that there was a profound answer to the question of the resurrection of value. And for him that was really the embodiment of the pattern of Christ. That was the self as far as Jung was concerned. There’s no difference between the archetypal self and the symbolic Christ. They were the same thing as far as Jung was concerned insofar as Christ is the vision of the perfect man, right? Which is a symbolic vision. So you could say, well, what is Christ? And the answer to that is, well, Christ is whatever you think of as the perfect man. Now you’re going to have diverse representations of that. So you could think about it, Christ as the totality of the visions of the perfect man. It’s something like that. And then that the goal of life was to embody that as deeply as possible. And Jung also believed that the world would transform itself around you to the degree that you did that, to an unspecifiable degree. And that’s where the symbolic reality and the historical reality unite. And we know it’s true. We also know this is true. If you look at people like Gandhi or you look at people like Solzhenitsyn, for example, these are great people who stood up as moral icons, let’s say, in the midst of absolute chaos. And they transformed entire civilizations by doing that, by standing up for what they believed to be true. They transformed the entire world around them. And of course, they’re only partially perfect. Someone like Solzhenitsyn or someone like Gandhi or perhaps someone like Nelson Mandela. They’re only partial incarnations of perfection. But even to the degree that they were flawed, they were perfect enough so that despite their remnant flaws, they were able to reorganize being itself around them. And we don’t know what the ultimate limit of that is. We really don’t. It could be that everything will align itself around people to the degree that they put themselves together. And I actually, I’ve had experiences that make me convinced that that’s the case. I truly believe that that’s the case. And that’s also what gives me some belief in these strange Christian ideas about the harrowing of hell and the overcoming of death. It’s like we have no idea what we could do as individual embodiments of the logos, which is clearly what we are because we’re all conscious. We have no idea what obstacles we could overcome and what massive transformations we could undertake if we actually lived our lives properly. God only knows what we could get rid of. We could get rid of malaria. We could get rid of schistosomiasis and the guinea worm. Those are going to be gone soon anyways. Polio. We’re going to get rid of hunger. Maybe we can get rid of death. Maybe we can get rid of hell. Who knows? And I know I’m certainly someone who believes that hell is real because I’ve read enough of the accounts of what happened in the 20th century to know precisely that it’s as real as the most warped imagination can possibly make it. And that’s plenty real enough for me. So, well, so I would say Jung’s vision is very much in keeping as far as I can understand with the central traditions of the Orthodox Church because he believed that it was the highest moral duty of the awake soul to participate in manifestation of the self. And that’s this union of things that Jonathan talked about that’s beyond duality. It’s to bring everything in you together into this kind of harmony that then extends beyond you into your family and past that. It’s musical. That’s what music represents. That’s why we find it so intensely meaningful. That’s what music tells us. It’s an artwork based upon the meaning of pattern. And it infuses everyone. You know what it’s like to listen to music? Even the darkest punk-rocking anarchist atheist is overwhelmed with the glory of God when he listens to his punk-rock music. So, yeah. Just a quick comment on that. Going back to the central part of that question, which is about archetypes and whether they’re the same thing. Same thing. I would largely agree with that point. To the extent to which anyone is in touch with the logos within them, they are going to be in touch with fundamental archetypes. And those would be the same that the Church Fathers refer us to and so forth. The one element that, and this kind of relates to the previous question about can you do this without Christ. The thing which is possibly the unique element of Christian faith, it’s not love. Love is what defines Christianity. In fact, love can be found throughout the world. It’s more hope. And what I know about Jung, which isn’t all that much, but absolutely the archetypes are there. We’ll go with that. Does he come with the same level of hope that we would as authors? I don’t know. Sometimes you wonder whether the catavasis, the descent, kind of leads us to a hell where we inhabit without hope and rather with despair. Coming back to that point about Archimandrite Sophrony. Put your mind in hell, but don’t despair. In other words, have hope. So is it possible to have that hope without ultimately what we have, which is the cross? And the message of the cross as an archetype is that we stare into the depths of darkness and death and we proclaim light and life. In fact, that’s what Jesus himself says when he refers us back to the Old Testament to when the people of Israel were dying in the wilderness, having come out with Moses and they’re grumbling because they said, if only we were back in Egypt where we had it so good, because the reality of Egypt was slavery, but they thought, no, no, we’re just going to grumble and they’re afflicted by serpents. And God says this most incredible thing. Put a serpent on a stick and hold it up. And those people that look at the serpent, look at the source of the suffering and death, will be healed. And so Christ says, Jesus says, the Son of Man will be raised up. So we have to look upon death and suffering. We have to descend into hell with life, with light, the light that is never extinguished to come back to the prologue of St. John. I don’t know whether that’s there and I can be corrected on that, but that’s possibly the point where a purely social science or psychological approach might be lacking. Because as I say, the Christian virtue par excellence is hope, because it’s almost unique in its capacity to look into everything that is so dark and say there is yet life, there is yet light. So one of the things that really affected Jung, who, by the way, worked for the American government and the CIA during World War II, sending them psychological reports on Hitler, Jung meditated for a very long period of time on what happened in Nazi Germany. And Jung’s, the dictum that he derived from his alchemical studies was insturculines invenatur, which I’m probably saying wrong, but it means the thing you want most will be found the place you least want to look. And so for Jung, because one of the questions you might ask yourself is that if enlightenment is possible, let’s say, if union with the self is possible or some sort of mystical transcendence, why in the world aren’t we just all that way? What’s the barrier? It’s like, well, we could be way better. Well, why not just do it then, if it’s just right there ahead of us? But the answer to that is something like you cannot conceive of how good a human being might be until you can conceive of how evil a human being can and will be. And that means to encounter in yourself the Nazi, that the prison guard, the Auschwitz guard, to understand fully that there is no difference between you and the people who were killing children in the Nazi death camps. That’s you. And that’s that encounter with hell. That’s literally that encounter with hell. You’re a denizen of hell insofar as you’re capable of that, and you are capable of that. And there isn’t anything, I think, that can scare you straight, except that knowledge. You can be and are a vessel that can be used for absolute evil, and you would participate in it. You would participate in it. And so for Jung, the pathway to, it’s like Dante, you don’t get to paradise before you go to the lowest levels of hell, right at the bottom where betrayal lurks. For Dante, that was the worst of all sins. And so it’s a terrifying process. I try to teach my students in my Maps of Meaning class, which is the opposite of a safe space as far as I’m concerned. And I mean that technically. I truly do mean that. I try to convince my students, I try to get them to meditate on the fact that they’re the damn Nazis. Really. Because what is it? It’s, what is it, the Germans? Like, come on, really? No! Obviously not. It’s people. And so the pathway to paradise is through hell. And that’s, it’s no wonder no one goes there. I mean, who wants to go there? No one. Well, if you don’t go there voluntarily, you’ll go there accidentally. So it’s better to go there voluntarily, because then you can go with hope. You can say, I can withstand this. Maybe I can find a light at the end of the tunnel. A question for Mr. Pajon. You have spoken in the past about the supposedly contradictory nature of symbols. For example, water represents both healing and dangerous chaos. Can you speak about how we can resolve this apparent contradiction? And to follow up, how does this apply to the relationship between the internal mental world and the external material world? You might have to repeat the second part of that question after I answer the first part. I think, I mean, I’ve been, one of the things, as you said, that I’ve been thinking a lot about is the duality of symbols. Every image, every symbol has like a dark and a light side, and you can see it when you read the Bible, when you read the stories, or even when you look at icons or when you look at images. And it has to do with this idea of ascent, this idea of moving up, because what’s important when we’re on the spiritual journey is the direction that we’re facing. It’s not so much where we are, like if you can imagine the ascent of the world or of ourselves up to God as a ladder, which is how often it’s represented in Orthodox icons, as this ladder that we ascend towards God. You could be pretty high up the ladder, but if you fall, there’s no point, right? The idea is to ascend. And so all the symbols that we see in the Bible have those two sides, and water is a perfect example. In the Old Testament, all through the Old Testament, water is an image of death, the flood, and then the crossing of the Red Sea, the crossing of the Jordan, it is constantly this symbol of death. But the key to resolving the duality of symbolism is Christ. He is always the key to all the stories, I believe. And so when you look at the story of Christ and you see how he takes, let’s say, the dark side of a symbol and he flips it over and then makes it into something else. So that’s the mystery, let’s say, of baptism. Why would we have to be baptized? I mean, it’s very strange that this flood, this Red Sea that the Egyptians were drowned in, why would we have to be baptized? Well, it’s because Christ takes this death and changes it into a process of, let’s say, washing or a process of purification. And so the same symbol, which is death, can also be a symbol of washing. So it’s the same with fire. Fire is the perfect example. I mean, we look at icons, you’ll see fire in hell, and you’ll see fire coming from the sky as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So, how does that mean? And so it’s the same thing. Let’s say you see fire as division. Well, there’s a negative division, which is the division in which we scatter ourselves and we’re consumed. But there’s another type of division, let’s say the division of Pentecost, which is the division which embodies the multiplicity of how God manifests himself in the world. And so it just depends on which side you take each symbol. So I hope that answers that question. What was the second part again? Something about the inside? Okay, yeah, I think I understand what that means. I think it is my belief that symbolism is anchored in experience. And I don’t think that most symbols are not just these abstract things that float above us. So, for example, a good example would be, for example, the mountain. We see in the Old Testament, we have this sense that Moses ascends the mountain and then encounters God. And we see it repeated over and over in the patterns of the stories where Christ ascends a hill or ascends a mountain and then something happens. There’s a revelation on this mountain. And you think like, well, that’s strange, right? I mean, why would you want, what does a mountain have to do with anything? So I think the key is to understanding a lot of symbolism is to kind of see it as an experience. And so if you ask yourself, for example, what happens when I go up a mountain? Just physically, what happens? Well, as you go up a mountain, the base of the mountain, which is the large, this huge thing, starts to refine itself. And then it starts to become smaller and smaller and smaller, and that up to you get to the point, and then everything is one. And then if you stand at the top of a mountain and you look around, when you’re at the bottom of the mountain, all you can see is the trees that are right next to you. And you can see a very particular part of the world. But if you ascend to the top of a mountain, then you have this vision of everything. And so the symbolism of the mountain, which is found in the Bible, in the gospel, in the icons, is akin to the phenomenological reality of that thing. So we often, it’s difficult for us to get that because we’re so caught up in the scientific vision of the world that it’s difficult to understand the symbolism. But if you just put yourself in the position of someone who does something or someone, like water is the same. I mean, water, what do we do with water? We wash ourselves with water. And what is washing? Washing is removing all the external and dead things that we have on our hands so that we’re purified. Well, that’s one of the symbols of baptism. So yeah, I hope that explains that question. This question isn’t addressed to anyone in particular, so anyone willing to answer can do so. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the concept of free will. As many of the modern atheists believe that free will is an illusion according to their belief in materialism. How does one reconcile free will with an ammunitioned God who knows the end from the beginning, who knows your future, and created you such that you were compelled to realize it? So, believe it or not, we get this question all the time. We get this question from teens, believe it or not. It’s the perennial question. If God knows what’s going to happen, because he does. If God is everywhere and fills all things, he is past, present, and future, then how can you have free will? And then, of course, all those other implications, right? So if I don’t have free will, or if God knows what I’m going to do in the end, then does he create some people to go to hell, or to be away from him, or to not reach union with him and others? And if so, then how can he be loved and all these other things? So I think the fundamental misunderstanding is, I would say, the concept of time, of creation itself. So the idea that God, we think as human beings in a linear way, right? We have no other way of thinking. So we have a beginning, we have a present, and then we have an end. And this is the way the world works. It moves in one direction. We have no concept of God’s reality, the idea of being outside of time. We have no concept of that. We wouldn’t even know how to begin to think about that if we tried, and people have tried. The easiest analogy, I guess, or example that I could give would be the idea of perspective. And what do I mean by that? Let’s say I’m the camera person here, right? And I’m watching this kind of whole event unfolding after it’s happened. So it’s been videotaped, right? And then the other males can watch this, and they can watch this event, and they can forward, and they can go back, and they can go back to see something that they really liked or something that they forgot, or they can fast-forward to the end and see how it all turned out. The person who is watching that, who is removed from that reality, they can see what’s going on and what’s not going on. They can jump ahead in the past, but they don’t cause it. It’s just their perspective is different. So this idea, and of course this is kind of a crude analogy. Of course it’s much more complex than that, and it’s much more nuanced than that. And of course we would believe, at least as Orthodox Christians, that God is much more permeates all things and is working in people’s lives. But there is a strange paradox between free will, the idea that we have the choice, whether we want to follow God, to believe in him, or to believe rather in ourselves. And I think, as Professor Peterson said, the reality of the hell that many of us live in and the reality of the hell that has been created by societies and civilizations all over the world is a proof of the reality of free will. It’s a proof, at least for people who believe in God. Now if you don’t believe in God, it’s a different story. Then you would say, well that’s not a proof of anything except that we’re just animals living on this planet and there’s no meaning to anything. But if there’s a God and there are still horrible things happening, well either that God is an evil being, or rather that we have the free will not to believe in him, not to follow him, not to do his will. And that may seem like a horrible thing for God to give to us, this idea of free will. And yet it is also the greatest thing. Because it’s not only the idea of us avoiding suffering, or us avoiding sin, or us avoiding the evil that we create within the world, but it is the idea of the you, the idea that through our own sin and through our own difficulties we somehow find meaning and we come up on the other side. So I don’t know how much better I can try to explain it. It’s a complex thing. So in the mythological world, I would say, there are three continually intertwined causal elements. One is consciousness, you could say that’s the logos. One is the interpretive structure within which that logos exists, and that’s the framework that you use to organize yourself. And then there’s the other thing, the other thing that I would say, that the concept of the world is the concept of the world itself. And that’s the framework that you use to organize yourself, cognitively within the world, your point of view. And then there’s the world itself, the natural world, let’s say. Those three things are always in interplay, and they’re each given causal primacy. You see this echoed in popular culture motifs, and I think Pinocchio is a very good example of that, that Pinocchio is a creator, and he’s a puppet, so a very deterministic sort of creature. And he has a mother, and that’s the blue fairy that comes down from heaven, who’s really a figure of the vitality of nature. And so Pinocchio is portrayed in the movie as child of nature and culture, which is of course how we’re portrayed scientifically. But there’s a third element in that movie, which is really what drives the plot forward, which is Pinocchio’s capacity to make choices. And that’s his consciousness, and that’s also what elevates him above the status of deterministic puppet. Now, you might say, well, there’s no evidence that we’re not deterministic, and I could say, well, that’s fine, because there’s also no evidence that we are deterministic, so we can leave that as a draw. But we certainly treat each other as if we have free will. We treat ourselves as if we have free will. We, even those of us who regard each other as deterministic believe that, or as determined believe that, in their own actions, they’re going to be perfectly irritated at whatever choices you make that happen to infringe upon them, and they’re going to act towards you as if you’re an agent with free will. So they can say they regard people as deterministic, but they don’t act it out, so I don’t believe that they believe it. And I also don’t believe that you can produce a functional society without having something like that at its basis, and I’ve never seen any evidence of a functional society being produced with that, without that as a metaphysical presupposition. So, but there’s something more crucial involved here too, is that in order to accept the inevitability of determinism in human action, you have to accept the presupposition that consciousness is nothing but an epiphenomena of a deeper material reality, and first of all, we do not know that. We certainly do not know that. What we know about consciousness, scientifically, you could put in a thimble and we still have enough room for another thimble. We know nothing about it. It’s a mystery we have not cracked at all. And people have been beadling away pretty hard on it from a scientific perspective for the last 40 years since it’s become in vogue again, and I don’t think we’ve moved forward a little bit. And then finally, so it’s a mystery, and I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that it isn’t. I read Dan Dennett’s book on explaining consciousness, and it does nothing of the sort. It explains it away, and that’s that, and many critics have made the same comment. But I also think that phenomenologically speaking, it is the case that we seem to encounter the world as a field of possibility from which we extract out choices. You know, you think, well, when I talk to you about your future, I mean, you know what your future is. It’s a branching set of pathways which you can envision, because you can envision the future. It’s one of the very strange things about being human. It’s a branching set of pathways, of possibilities, and you can pick from among them. And I do believe that’s what you’re doing. I do believe that the world is a well of possibility and potential, and that you interact with it by choice and transform it within your limited power into what you want it to be. And I don’t think there’s any evidence to the contrary. And besides, determinism is a scientific philosophy that probably lost its vogue in about 1850. So, you know, there’s just no reason to, from a scientific perspective, to describe human beings as deterministic creatures. There’s no evidence for it. So we’re partly determined, obviously, because there’s lots of things we can’t do. But that does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean we’re fully determined. So… Can I just add to that that, first of all, that’s a thoroughly orthodox answer, I have to say. We only can deal with what we have in front of us. Picking up on Jonathan’s point earlier about experience and our own going forward. What the Church Fathers tell us, I mean, contrary to this, you know, scientific notion of, you know, time moving forward at a kind of regular rate or anything that we might have conceived in our minds, that actually each infinitesimally small moment of our existence is pregnant with infinite possibility. And so it’s precisely what has just been said, that we have that within our grasp. If only we have the eyes to see it, if only we have the hearts and minds oriented to that, the logos guiding us, then, I mean, the Church Fathers talk about the fact that we can actually experience infinity in the tiniest of moments. That’s what theosis is all about. That’s what coming into contact with uncreated energies is all about in the Eastern spiritual tradition. That time and space are elastic. We knew that before Einstein ever even was born. And that’s what we have in front of us. So let’s not get into philosophical arguments about how God works and how he sees. It’s precisely Father Ted’s point. I mean, that’s irrelevant. What we know is that every tiny, tiny moment of every day and every space of this macrocosmos is the possibility of encountering the infinite. And that that’s what we have to reach forward and grasp. And that’s what our whole tradition is about. And so absolutely is our position on that point. So we don’t get into debates about predestination and not. It’s irrelevant to us. We just need to grab hold of God where he is, which is right now in this moment, in this space, as we are. Thank you very much, Father. And thank you very much to each and every one of our panelists. Could I just get a round of applause for all of you? And with that, I’d like to conclude this night. Thank you to absolutely everyone for coming. I hope we’ve managed to learn a lot. This has been recorded. So just in case this was too much information to take in, which it certainly was for me, it will be available at some point or another. So once again, thank you all for coming out.