https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v92aB64jio4
Welcome everyone this evening to our spring lecture, or our late winter lecture, however we shall think about it these days. And welcome on behalf of the St. Basil’s Society. I’m its director, Cyril Jenkins, and I welcome you all here to St. Philip’s Parish, and we thank St. Philip’s Parish for hosting us this year. Very kindly they’ve agreed to do so, and thank you to Father James for leading us in Vespers just a bit ago. Father Noah sends his regards. He could not be here because he’s at a conference. I said, okay then, if that’s the way it is, Father. And so I welcome you all here tonight, and tonight we’re privileged to have Mr. Jonathan Pigeot. Jonathan is from Montreal. I first heard of him some years ago upon the death of a friend, namely Father Matthew Baker, of blessed memory. Jonathan was asked to do his headstone, his gravestone, which you can actually see pictures of one line, and it is a beautiful piece. And the thing about Jonathan is it’s a headstone that is a carving. And Jonathan is really the only person in North America who does carvings, that is, icons in stone. But that’s not all he does. So even though I had first heard about him then, I had heard about him also because of the Orthodox Arts Journal, which a mutual friend had basically told me about. And so the Orthodox Arts Journal you can find online, it can be delivered to your inbox, and it is a wonderful resource. And Jonathan writes there. And also Jonathan has now taken up video blogging. And so he has a YouTube channel called The Symbolic World. And some of this stuff is great. Some of this stuff you might think, what did he just say? But I came across his video blog because a few months ago, of course I’m in the Academy, which means that, I guess this is being taped, I have to be careful what that means. But I’m always interested in people who are always kind of sticking it to academics. And so there’s this one particular bettenoir, this dark beast out there named Jordan Peterson. And wait, he’s on a video with Jonathan Bichot. What are they? They were talking about Pepe the Frog. Oh my word. But I’ve come to find out that of course that’s not really what they were talking about. What we’re really looking at is we’re looking at in many ways a transformation before our eyes of culture in a revolutionary way. And so tonight Jonathan is going to come and talk to us about this. And talk to us about this with respect to how do we as Orthodox think about these things, think about the world around us. That the world is far more than what we see with our mere eyes. That is, it is a world full of symbols. And they’re just waiting there for us to interpret them. Gerald Manley Hopkins said that the world is filled with the splendor of God. And that Christ plays in 10,000 places. And so hopefully tonight we can understand that a little better. So Jonathan shall speak. Hopefully we shall have time for food. We will have time for food. Because we have a lot of food. So please stay. But also time for questions and answers and then some brief remarks at the end. But Jonathan the floor is yours. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Sorry for the laptop. I basically decided I was going to take on the last pretty much 500 years of history and just duke it out with it. So I was still changing my notes in the plane as I was coming in. So first of all I want to thank all of you for having me here. And I want to thank Dr. Jenkins for inviting me. I’m always surprised when I get invited by academic types. Because I’m not myself an academic. I read and I study on my own. But I took my route out of the university after I finished my bachelor’s degree in painting quite a while ago. But I am very curious about as an artist and as someone who took on iconography and took on icon carving specifically. I’m always curious to see how the imagery in the icons, how it connects to the Bible. How it connects to liturgy. How it connects to the hymns. How it connects to the whole tradition of the church. But then most of all I’m always looking to see how does it connect to our experience today. How does it connect to the world in which we live in. And so the title that Dr. Jenkins gave me for the talk is I think it’s Christ as the center and the principle of the enchanted world. And so that’s actually, it can sound as something that’s quite obscure. And so in order to talk about what it means, what are we talking about when we talk about the enchanted world. We have to understand even where that word kind of originated from. The notion of the enchanted world originated from its opposite. Originated from thinkers like Friedrich Schiller and Max Weber who talked about the disenchantment of the world. As Max Weber especially was looking at how the modern world was laying itself out. He was noticing how things were happening in the modern world. He was noticing that the world was being disenchanted. That the magic in the world was going away. That is as the scientific thinking became more and more prominent. As we had more and more detailed mechanical physical explanations for how things happen. The ancient spiritual reasons which were given. The ancient spiritual stories which undergirded the world started to lose their power and to dissipate. So the forest was no longer this place of darkness and mystery. But the forest became a reservoir of wood from which we could take stuff and then make things with. The sun was no longer this bright light that traversed the sky and gave us light and life like an eye which crosses across the sky. It was just a ball of gas with nuclear explosions whirling around the void. It was just one amongst trillions and trillions and trillions of similar stars. There is absolutely nothing special about that sun. In traditional societies people are connected to transcendent realities. Those transcendent realities are undergirded by stories, by rituals, by identities. Those connections to transcendent realities are what give them their identity. Are what give them their identity as individuals but also their identity as groups. How the individuals come together. And then also identity through time. We think that’s obvious. It is not that obvious that let’s say here in the United States that whatever is here is somehow the same thing that was there when the founding fathers started hundreds of years ago. There has to be a story which undergirds all of that together to make us continue to inhabit a space where those are the same. In traditional societies that’s how they function. That’s how they are connected together. And so now today we hear the type of argument which is the argument of disenchantment. The one that Max Weber was talking about. This argument which tries to destroy, to attack the connection to the transcendent. To attack the value of stories. The value of identities. We see it all the time. And we want to reduce the world to its material substrate. To material causation. And scientific relationships between things. And so for example, an easy example is that in the traditional Christian world what we would have talked about someone who was possessed by a demon. But now today we mock that idea. Because we can go into the brain and we can look at the different chemicals in the brain and we can say no this person just has a chemical imbalance of this type in the brain. And so it is absolutely superstitious to say that that person is possessed by a demon. And the ultimate version of this, the ultimate version of this would be to take the blood and body of Christ as it is consecrated and bring it into a lab. To have it analyzed. And you wouldn’t be surprised to know that people have done that. And you wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the conclusion the scientists came to is that it’s bread and wine. It’s not body and blood. And so the atheist type will see this disenchantment as a getting rid of superstition. Because it is superstitious to believe in God or angels. Or to believe that going to church and worshipping some God is somehow magically going to save you. Magically going to make you a better person. What is that magically heal you? How is that? It’s just a superstitious way to see the thing. And the Bible is no different. If you reduce everything to its material substrate, then the Bible is no different than any other book. And you can look at it, you can read it, you can analyze it, you can take it apart in the same way that you can take apart any other ancient or modern book. And the church building is no different. The stuff that’s in the altar, the air, the molecules, the atoms, they’re the same stuff that are in the nave. And they’re the same stuff that are in the bathroom. And so to say that somehow the altar is special, that it is sacred, is a superstition. And as we move down that line, what happens and what has happened is that inevitably we come to question the value, question the authority of all narratives, of all authority. Because in a way there is no mechanical explanation for why one person has authority or why one story has value. It is all superstition. It all seems arbitrary. So that is the disenchanted world. And the disenchanted world, it leads to two extremes. And those are the extremes that we have seen in the modern world. It leads to a form of brutal violence, a form of raw power. This idea of the realpolitik, which was developed in the modern world. This idea that states are only brute forces which are there to impose orders because there is no natural, there is no spiritual reason to believe in an authority. The only thing left is brute power in order to in a way prevent the fragmentation, prevent things from falling apart. We need these totalitarian powers. And we saw that in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. And luckily for us here in North America we didn’t have to go through the totalitarian side of that opposition. But we had the other side, which is the other thing that the disenchantment causes is nihilism. And that nihilism ends up being this lack of centers, this lack of value. And things start to fragment, to lose their meaning, to lose their natural importance you could say. And we end up in a world that is without center and meaningless. So I’m supposed to talk about the incarnation, how the incarnation is the center and the principle of the enchanted world. Now this will stop me from saying heretical things, so don’t worry from now on. Hopefully. Okay. So I’m supposed to talk about how the incarnation is the center and the principle of this enchanted world, maybe this enchanted world that we have lost. But in a way to say that, to put those three together, the incarnation, center and principle is maybe tautological. We might actually be saying the same thing when we say those three things. The notion of a center is itself incarnational. It is a promise of the incarnation. And it corresponds with its principle. And that’s why such a brilliant saint such as St. Maximus the Confessor could take the notion of origin, of purpose, of meaning, and bring them all together in this vision of the logos. In this vision, this expansion of this vision of the logos which we find in the Gospel of St. John. And all of this is brought into the notion of the logos and its incarnation into the world. And we have this notion that the logi in the world, that these manifestations of logos in the world are all gathered together, brought together into Christ. Christ is the summit and the center of all things. And then being the summit and the center of all things as it comes back down into the world, Christ is the logos and the origin of the world, the pattern which is hidden in the entire creation. You see a center is by definition something around which things turn. Something, the center both defines space, but it also binds space together. If you think of it even in terms of geometry. It creates an identity. So in terms of geometry, the point, the center is actually without measurement. It doesn’t have, it is virtual. It is invisible, but it is the thing which holds a space together. It is the thing which binds a circle together. And that’s why churches, temples, are rituals, they are concentric. We have the holy place towards which we all face, towards which we all turn. And that holy place, the altar, acts as a center. And it acts as the point which defines the community of the Christians. It acts as the point which unites the community of Christians. You can go even farther. It’s not just the altar, but it is the cup on the altar and the wine and the bread in the cup. It is this concentric movement towards this now invisible mystery which is hidden in communion, which is real and present, but which is a mystery. But just in general, we have these invisible identities which define us and bind us together. It’s not only communion, it’s not only church, but that’s the shape of the world. We have these identities which define us. It could be our family, it can be our nation. And there are many of these identities, but these identities, invisible identities, act in a similar manner. They bind us together. And then we have these markers of these invisible identities. We have flags, we have heroes, we have leaders, we have special cities, capitals, buildings, things which remind us of this invisible mystery which holds us together. So the center of something, there’s something special about it. There’s something which differentiates it from everything else, which pulls it above everything else, which makes it qualitatively different from whatever it holds together. And in the thrust of disenchantment, in this movement that happened in modernity, in this desire to destroy all superstition, we see this leveling of quality, this notion that everybody is the same, everybody is equal. Because in a material way, that is obviously true. A priest in terms of his body, in terms of his physical existence, is no different or no better than anybody else in the parish. You see that in extreme, let’s say, Anabaptist or evangelical thinking where it’s like we’re all the same. But the notion of the priest or the notion of the center in general is that something will be pulled up, will be made special, will be made to act as a center. And that is, it’s an invisible quality. It’s not, you can’t measure it. You can’t measure a priest’s priesthood. And so in this disenchantment, any center will start to appear as one more superstition. And it’s a gradual breaking apart. And it’s not necessarily done consciously, it just happens. It’s a natural consequence of the modern world. We see this disenchantment everywhere. Of course, like I’m trying to explain to you, this notion of center can be taken analogically as any identity. But a good way to see the effect of this enchantment is to look at it in space. I mean, I’m an artist, I tend to think in terms of space. And so you can look at how society actually lays itself out on the ground, how it builds itself out. And you can see the disenchantment happening. So if you imagine, for example, a medieval town, how is a medieval town organized? You would have in the center of the town, you would have a church. And the church would be the highest building in the town. So everybody from anywhere in the town could look up and they could see the church as this central point. And then in the middle of the town, you would also have an administrative building, the mayor’s house or the mayor’s building or whatever. And you would have a central place where people would come and could gather together and participate in things which would unite them as a town. Parades, you know, any type of festivities, they would come and they would meet in the center of a town. And in the modern world, these types of structures, and on the edge, then you would have a wall, which would be the limit of what the town, the identity of the town. This is the end of the town which is identified by all of these things together. And the roads in the town would be concentric. If you look at a medieval town from above, it looks like a spider web. You have these roads which leave from the wall and move towards the center of town. Then you have these other roads that connect those concentric roads together. It looks like a spider web. So it is built by meaning. It is built by identity. Its actual layout is based on what gathers those people together. Now in the modern world, this has slowly eroded. It took a while, but it slowly eroded in the last few hundred years. We’ve seen it eroded until we’ve come to the suburban sprawl. I mean, what is exactly a suburban sprawl? These clumps of houses, this grid of houses, just no center. Nothing to bind it together. Nothing to hold it together. No church. No town square. Nothing. The last vestige of a town center is the shopping mall. That’s the last vestige. And it can maybe show you this degrading of value, what it is that we turn around. The last thing left is the shopping mall. And even that is going to go away. It’s going to disappear. Disenchantment will take its course. We can imagine a future very close by where people study online, work from home, shop online, and there is nothing to bring them together. There is no moment where they will come together. They are basically become independent points spread out on a surface. Drips of paint thrown out on a canvas. They are basically a big Jackson Pollock painting. Do you know what Jackson Pollock painting? I mean, who would have thought that Jackson Pollock was actually representing suburban America? I don’t think he would have thought that. This is a form of alienation. This is an image of alienation. Of being ripped away from whatever it is that can bring us together. Whatever it is that can give us common reason, common identity, common purpose. That is alienation. Alienation has been a common theme in modernity. Even the people who were for modernism, who were pushing modernity, could notice it happening. You see commentators and the existentialists and people like that who talk constantly about modern man’s alienation. They know that it’s happening. And yeah, the suburban sprawl is the last phase of alienation. There is a more profound, there is a more original alienation which is at the core of all of this. And we can see it in terms of space as well. We can see it in terms of space. And this is where I’m going to take on the last 500 years of intellectual history. Just like a town was built concentrically, so too the entire cosmos was built concentrically. So too, Earth, man looked up at the heavens and saw the spheres moving in the heavens and interpreted them that way. Saw them as moving around this center of meaning which is man created in the image of God. That is how the world was built. And so the Copernican Revolution is a testimony to the very, very deep change that happened at that time. We often miss what that change was about. We’re often presented with the Copernican Revolution as this notion that people used to mistakenly believe that the sun, you know, revolved around the Earth. And now we know technically that that is not the case. That in fact the Earth revolves around the sun. But that is not really what the Copernican Revolution is about. It was really about a move away from this enchanted centered experience. It was a move away from seeing meaning as the organizing principle of the universe. Of seeing this notion of center not only in terms of mechanical movement, but in terms of centers of meaning, centers of identity as being the way that we look at the world and the way we calculate the world. And I know this one is, it might be difficult to grasp. I was actually expecting maybe a few people to get up and get out after I said that. But luckily that hasn’t happened yet. You see in order to even perceive that the possibility of the Earth turning around the sun, the change had to have already happened. There had been a very profound change in the way we see the world for that to be even possible to be posited. Because in order to be able to calculate that, Copernicus and Galileo had to alienate themselves. They had to alienate themselves. They had to project their mind to some imaginary point out there in space and then look in their imagination at how these spheres were moving. It was a profound gesture of alienation. And it’s important to talk about the Copernican Revolution. Why is it so important? It’s so important because people keep talking about it today. People are always talking about it. It is one of the founding myths of the modern world is the Copernican Revolution. We hear materialist scientific types bring it up all the time as an example of a moment where religion was obscure and science was bright. We see it all the time. That’s how it’s presented to us. The truth is that there is absolutely nothing obvious. There is absolutely nothing obvious that that change would happen. That might seem strange to say, but I can show it to you quite easily. For some reason we’ve stopped there. For some reason we’ve stopped at a point where we say the earth is revolving around the sun. But that’s not the end of it, is it? That’s not the end of that movement. We’ve moved quite further than that. In fact, with Einstein and general relativity, we have been told that all motion is based on points of reference. It’s not true that the earth is turning around the sun. The earth is turning around the sun and the sun is turning around in the galaxy. And then the galaxy is moving away from other galaxies and then the stars are all moving away from all the other stars. So let’s try to figure that movement out in our minds now. We don’t go there. We don’t go there because once we get there, once we get to the point that if we’re going to calculate things only in terms of mechanical causation and mechanical movement, we should have to take up all these movements at the same time and also realize that the earth is turning around the sun relative to the sun. And the sun is moving away from the other stars relative to each other. They’re not actually moving in themselves. They’re only moving in relationship to other things. That’s Einstein’s theory. That’s general relativity. And once we get there, why not? What point can we give in the universe to calculate all these movements? What point could we possibly give? Would it maybe make sense to give as a point of reference for all those movements the one where we are making those calculations? Wouldn’t it make sense to say that we’re calculating all those movements from the earth? There’s actually a priest, Pavel Florensky, who wrote an essay where he took the notions of general relativity to their extreme. And he said, okay, let’s take general relativity seriously. And let’s take it so seriously that we realize that the best position that we can take to make all those calculations would be from here, because this is where we are. I mean, it makes sense. We’re the ones making the calculations, right? Let’s make those calculations. And he did all the calculations. And those calculations end up being the same as Ptolemy made, you know, 2000 years ago. All right, so I’m playing a little bit of a game with you here. What’s really important… What’s really important is to understand that we are the ones making those calculations. We are the ones not only making the calculations, but attributing value to those calculations. We are the ones saying that those movements, those values, those calculations, those movements have meaning. And that is really the most important thing. What do the movements of the spheres, what do the movements of the planetary bodies mean? And now that’s where we’re at. What do the movements of the spheres, what do the movements of the planetary bodies mean? And now that’s where the materialist type will say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, those movements don’t mean anything, right? They’re just movements. They don’t have meaning. If someone tells you that, if someone tells you that they don’t mean anything, you can right away see that the only way they can say that is to be completely alienated. Because obviously the movements of the heavenly spheres have meaning. The day and the night are the structure by which we live our lives. The seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, all of these movements of the celestial spheres, they are the patterns, they are the processions in which we exist. They are the movements in which we live our lives. Those are the ones that have meaning. And so once we start to view the world through these centers of meanings, all of a sudden everything changes. Now I’m not saying that Galileo or Copernicus, that their calculations are technically wrong. I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that they were wrong in the calculations they were making. What I’m saying is that the real question is deeper than that. It’s above those calculations. The real question is what is the center of reality? What is more real? Is it mechanical causation or is it the world of meaning? Is it the world in which things are imbued with the meaning that they have in our lives? Which one of those is more real? Because one of them, the one where we say that the mechanical causation has more reality, brings about that alienation, the alienation that I’ve been talking about since the beginning. The very alienation that brought Copernicus and Galileo to project their mind outside of the world and look at the world from somewhere else. We see that alienation all the time now. You hear someone, you see, especially when people are trying to study human beings, you see these scientific studies of a culture. You read anthropologists who think that they can stand outside of culture and that they can interpret culture. You meet people who are studying consciousness and they somehow think that they can stand outside of consciousness and study consciousness or that they can stand outside of language and study language. We can’t do that. We are living in the world. We are embodied and we exist in the world. When we do that, we alienate ourselves. One of the best places, one of the places where you see this alienation take on even a moral aspect is if you pay attention to what they call the new atheists, Richard Dawkins and all that clan. If you pay attention to what they are saying, you will see this alienation play itself out quite dramatically in a moral sense. You see, someone like Richard Dawkins, he uses this disenchantment argument to attack Christianity. By reducing everything to the material or efficient causes, he will ask questions like how can a body resurrect if it is totally decomposed? That’s a perfectly legitimate scientific question to ask. How can a body resurrect if it is completely decomposed? The DNA is gone, the cells are gone, the plasma is gone, all is gone. What exactly is it that is going to resurrect? He also says that it is absurd that the bread and wine become the blood and body of Christ because it is still bread and wine. Take it to the lab and you will see that it is still bread and wine. Since we are all material reductionists, his argument is that Christians don’t believe in the resurrection. Christians themselves don’t believe that communion is the body and blood of Christ. But then if you look at Dawkins a little bit longer, you will see that he has a very strong sense of moral values. He has a very strong hierarchy of values. He is actually quite immoralist, quite vehemently so actually. But he is completely blind to the source of his morality. He posits materiality and material causality as the organizing principle of the world. He can’t see that he is in fact motivated by invisible centers, invisible causes. He can’t see it. It is an alienation akin to the ones that I described in terms of the Copernican Revolution. But what happens is that it is very dangerous because the source of morality ends up disappearing. It doesn’t really disappear. But it is as if it doesn’t actually exist. It is taken for granted. He can inhabit a certain hierarchy of values that has centers of meanings and engages notions even that resemble the sacred. And he gets offended. You can see Richard Dawkins get offended like a Puritan. Like, how can you ever say that? Blah, blah, blah. It is like where does that offense come from? Where are your hidden centers of morality? But he doesn’t think he has them. And it is very scary. Because then at the same time he goes out and attacks it. And attacks this notion of the enchanted world. This notion of these transcendent meanings which are embedded in reality. He just hacks at it constantly. And so it is really the summit of alienation. But now I say that someone like Dawkins is alienated. We need to take at least a little bit of time and turn the mirror towards us. Right? Towards us as Christians. I mean, do we have an answer to someone like Richard Dawkins and his ilk? Do we have an answer to give him? Do we have an answer to what we are referring to when we say the body and blood of Christ? What we are referring to when we speak of the resurrection. Because in a way, maybe, in a way maybe Dawkins is right. To the extent that we ascribe to some kind of material reductionism. And if we do, and when we do, shouldn’t we agree with him? Shouldn’t we say that it is bread and wine? Do we have an answer to give him? So I wanted to paint a very dismal picture for you. But there is hope. There is hope. There is good news. Because as I’ve already hinted so far, the world cannot, cannot become completely disenchanted. Cannot become void of meaning. It is impossible. For the world to become void of meaning, the world would have to cease to exist. And in the very experience of being, this enchantment, these sparks, these centers, they break through. And we experience them. Even though sometimes we’re blind to it. We experience. There is a path back to the magic garden. There is a path back to communion. So I tried to find some very practical examples. These moments where these sparks shine for us. There’s plenty of them. But I want you to imagine a cup. Your grandmother gave you this cup. And she gave you this cup because it was a special cup. Because when you were young and you went to your grandmother’s house, this would be the cup that you would use. So before she passed away, your grandmother, she gave you this cup. So you put the cup in your cupboard. And it becomes your favorite cup. So when you open the cupboard, that cup, it shines, right? It’s brighter, right? It’s golden. I mean, it doesn’t physically glow. There isn’t a lamp inside the cup. But it’s the best way to describe that experience of that cup. When you open the cupboard, it is the first cup you will see. And even without thinking about it, it’s the first cup that you’ll reach for. And the shine, the glow of that cup, it’s not just in the cup. It’s not physically in the cup. But it is in the story, in the memory, in the history of that cup. In you, in communion with that cup. It is as you enter into communion with that cup. That cup will shine. Now if any other stranger opens the cupboard, they look at the cup. They don’t see that, right? They don’t see that. But it is real. It is real. The other example that I have that I think is, to me, the most immediate is recognizing someone. There is a difference in your experience between someone you don’t know and someone you know. You’re standing in a bus and there is a crowd of people in the bus. And all those faces, they are somehow dim. I mean, they’re not. They’re faces. They’re people. There is a way that we perceive strangers, which is different from the way that we perceive the people we know. Now if someone you know walks into the bus, all of a sudden that person will shine. There’s no other way to say it. That person will pop out and you will see that person. Your eyes will go to that person. And all through, as they’re walking through these dim faces, it is that face which will glow in the bus. That is a real experience. You can experience it sometimes. You can experience it directly. You’re standing in front of somebody and the person is talking to you and you don’t know the person. And they’re talking to you. You’re talking to them and you’re nice and you’re kind and you’re being polite. And then all of a sudden the person says something that makes you realize that, no, wait, I know this person. If you’ve ever experienced it, the face, their face will change before your very eyes. The way that you see them will transform. And all of a sudden from that stranger you see this face of this person. You know this person with whom you are in communion. Now, I’ve used the personal examples because they’re the ones that are the easiest to understand. Because they’re the ones that make it into our own little experience. Even the most secular atheist of us will experience these small moments where the world becomes magical. But this hierarchy is real. It is how the world works. You see, there are too many things in the world. There are too many details. There are too many facts. There are too many aspects to things. And so it is inevitable, it is inescapable that certain things, certain stories, certain images will be more enchanted. There’s no way around it that they will become more meaningful than the others. Or else you couldn’t see anything. There is an indefinite amount of details in this one leaf right here of this plant. I could spend an hour describing every curve, every line, every aspect of this one leaf. The world is so full of details. It fragments into chaos. It moves out and becomes the sand. So it is inevitable that we have to engage the world in this magical way. There’s no way around it. That’s how reality works. Now, in a similar way that my favorite cup shines, and although at another level, a level which is more encompassing, which is grander, which is higher, but still it’s the same pattern, the cup which is used in church, the cup which is on the altar is sacred. It is really sacred. It is sacred. It is sacred because it has been put aside, because it stands apart, because it has been focused, it has been set aside for communion, for the communion of the faithful. And it is with that cup that we all come together and we stand and we approach that cup. All of that is real. That cup is sacred. And so, a Dawkins, new atheist type, will probably retort something like, this is all good and nice, this is all nice because you’re talking about subjective things, you’re talking about human things, but that is not the case for objective science. That’s not how science works. That’s how we engage with things, but that’s not how science works. But once again, that shows the profound alienation. And once again, one forgets their own embodiment, their own embodied experience. This process, this process of the center is as true for science as it is for our engagement with the cup that our grandmother gave us in the cupboard. I told you, there are too many facts. There are too many facts in the world. There are too many aspects of the world. The world is too big. The world moves towards this indefinite chaos. So there must necessarily be a way for special facts to stand out. Now, when you do a scientific experiment, you have a theory. And that theory, what does it do? It makes certain facts shine. It makes certain facts glow. Because it becomes the center around which facts are organized. If I’m studying fungus, the facts that I will see are the facts that are related to fungus. I will not spend my time describing the facts that talk about cosmological principles. I will focus on the facts which prove or disprove my theory. The facts will appear as, sorry to use the word, but they will be something like sacred in the context of that scientific experiment, in the context of that scientific theory. And I will even organize the facts in a hierarchy of facts. And there are certain facts which scientists will call, they call them outliers. Because they don’t totally fit with what the other facts related to this theory are saying. And they will leave those facts aside. Those facts will be more dim. They won’t shine as brightly as the ones which are right there, right in the right place to either prove or disprove my theory. Okay. Now I keep talking about this notion of the center. Of this mysterious qualitative difference in something which makes it stand out in a way. Or at least makes it stand apart. And it acts as a, to call it an anchor in the world. And this vision, I would say, we could call that an incarnational vision of the world. I don’t think there’s anything weird about saying that. You see, the world is a place where these sparks, where these meanings, where these centers, these essences organize all of these far too random facts, gathers them, gathers this multiplicity, from this multiplicity gathers them together into these possible unities, into these unified beings. All beings have parts, right? So a cup has parts. Why do we think that those things come together and make one thing? A cup has a handle, it has this, why do we, how, what is it that makes it bring, bring it together and say that it is one thing? The United States is hundreds of millions of people on a vast, vast land. Why do we think that this is one thing? What makes us say that this vast sprawl of people on a vast, vast land is one thing? Right? That’s what essences do. They gather things together. And the pattern for this is set. It is set there already in the book of Genesis. We find God who gathers the dust, gathers it into a body, and then blows the spirit into that body. And that is how we have man. We have the notion that Christ gathers the lost sheep, gathers the sheep, brings them together into one body and blows his spirit, right? Creating one church. And so too the mystics will tell us to gather yourself into your heart. Because you also have all these parts. You have all these thoughts. You have all these desires. You have all these passions which could pull you in all these directions away from the center, away from the thing that makes you in the image of God, that makes you in the image of Christ. And the mystic tells us to pull all that together, to enter into the heart so we can encounter and become like Christ. And even just our experience of consciousness, just our experience of being a locust, where all of these sensations, all of these things that we see, all of these people are gathered into one person that holds that together and makes out of all this multiplicity one thing. All of that is following the same pattern. And then by analogy we quickly realize that that is also the structure of all the things I talked about before. It’s the same structure as a functioning town. It’s the same structure as a family, as a country. It’s the same thing as a church. And it’s also the same as the patterns of time. The days, the months, the years, this cycle, this procession around this center of time that we participated in. All of these have the same pattern, the same pattern that was set right there in Genesis that is brought back through Christ and through our experience of Christianity. And of course the most complete vision of this is Christ himself. It is the incarnation itself, of course. It is the anchor of everything. It is the pattern of everything. And that’s why in the descriptions of Christ we find all these analogies that Christ is a center, that he is an authority. Christ is portrayed as the origin of value and meaning in his story, in the story of his life, or in the way that the Bible and the fathers have described him. We say that Christ is priest. He is king. He is judge. He is shepherd. He gathers the sheep. In this example we see Christ as the leader, as the authority. And Christ also tells us these amazing stories. He tells us the story of the pearl, which is hidden in the field and gives the field its value. We have the story of St. Peter, who Christ says to go out to the water. As he goes out to the water, he reaches in and he finds this gold piece in the mouth of the fish. It is this hidden center, this hidden value. And that’s why, one of the reasons why Christ himself, he appears in his story as hidden. So many times he appears as hidden. Appearing in the most humble circumstance, in the manger, in the cave, he hides himself among fishermen and tax collectors. And that is really important because this incarnational principle follows the model that I’ve been talking about since the beginning. The reason for things, the center of things, the identity of a person, the reason for my favorite cup in the cupboard, it is hidden. It is real, but it remains hidden. Those reasons are contained in the communion that we have, in the way that things come together. That is how they reveal themselves. So we use the word Christ as if it is a name. But of course, the word Christ is not a name. The word Christ is a title. It is a title which means the anointed one. And in that image of the anointing, in that image of the anointed one, we can find everything that I’ve been talking about from the beginning. The key to what an incarnational world would look like. I always have this image in my mind of the story of King David. So the prophet Samuel is sent by God to find the new king. And God sends him to a family, to the family of Jesse. And so Samuel arrives and asks Jesse to bring out his sons. And so Jesse brings out his sons. And Samuel looks at each son and he says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. None of these are the king. But you see, Jesse had a hidden son, one which was not obvious right away from the beginning. He is the smallest son, the youngest son, the one which is out there in the field, like this pearl hidden in the field. And so Samuel chooses David and he anoints David. And then David is king. But after David is king, you couldn’t have been able to say that David was king. His kingship remained hidden. It remained hidden until the death of Saul. And in that we can see this notion. An anointing is the revealing of a center. It’s a sign from above. The finger of God which comes down and says, that one. You are my son. Today I have become your father. And so it is, if we think of this anointing, we can use it as a model. We can look at how we can engage in this world. The church has given us the sacraments. And the sacraments, that’s what they are. They are forms of anointing. They are showing us these centers. They are the finger of God that says, this one. This one is my son. That’s what baptism and chrismation is. It shows the hidden center. That’s what marriage is. You have these two people. Why would you think that those two people are one body? There is something hidden. And the sacrament of marriage is that showing, is that pointing to that hidden unity which exists between the man and the woman. Think of priesthood. It is the same. Priesthood is an anointing. This man, this priest, this bishop. And the same with confession. Confession is more as we move away from the center, as we move away from this image of Christ in us, then it is this bringing back. And the same with Holy Unction. This bringing back towards this invisible center. The spark, the Christ hidden in our heart, hidden in our communion. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, he gives us in the life of Moses this image of Moses who ascends the mountain. And as he ascends the mountain, as he reaches the top of the mountain, think about everything I told you. Think about a mountain. It goes up towards a top, towards a center, towards a summit. And as he reaches the top of the mountain, God gives him the pattern of the tabernacle. And the tabernacle is that very concentric space. It is the Holy of Holies and the Holy and the courts moving out like that. And he tells us that the tabernacle, that the pattern of the tabernacle is Christ himself. He tells us that what he saw, what Moses saw really is Christ. That’s what he saw in the image of the tabernacle. And so we have everything we need. The sacraments, they are not arbitrary. The way the church is laid out, the art of the church, the architecture of the church, our liturgy, none of that is arbitrary. It is the very shape of the world. It is the pointing to how the world works. Our liturgy, our sacraments, and our communion, that is the same pattern as the sun that rotates in the sky, the weeks, the days. It is the same pattern at whatever it is that can unite us and that can make us into families, into nations, into anything that binds us. And even the scientific experiment, it is the pattern of reality. So although we have come to a disenchanted world, there is hope. There is definitely hope because the enchanted world is inevitable in a way. It is maybe more hidden now. Maybe people can’t see it, but it is the heart of creation. It is the heart of reality. It’s the very shape of the world. And so as we ourselves engage our life in Christ, as we enter into our heart to the measure that which we are capable of, as we move away from those passions that pull us apart, that pull us away from the heart where Christ shows himself to us, we are engaging and we are part of reigniting this shining world. And obviously we don’t totally have access to the fully shining world. At least I don’t. I know that I don’t. But I have these glimpses, right? We have these glimpses. We have these moments where all of a sudden something, we see the grace of God pierce through in these small moments and we can trust. Now, we can trust the story of the saints when we read the story of the saints and we read the fathers who tell us of their illumination and describe this transfigured world where all things are full of the presence of God, where the grace of God flows through everything. We can believe it even by these little sparks that we encounter in our lives, in our daily lives. So that is my encouragement to all of you today. So thank you very much. Applause Should I, I think that we’re going to do questions or? Yes, so we have time for a few questions. I shall save mine for when we’re in the dining hall. But the floor is open for anyone who wishes to ask questions. So raise your hand. I’m sorry if sometimes I sound like a Baptist preacher. I actually did grow up in the Baptist Church. So sometimes I try to try to hold it in, but sometimes it comes out. So apologies for that. I’m going to posit something to you and see how you respond. As we, as one, if one doesn’t center themselves in Christ, I think perhaps the center becomes themselves, right? So everyone is given certain gifts that God, you know, everyone’s unique and they have their own special gifts, right? And traits. And so if you center yourself around yourself, then as you say, we have filters, kind of a filter, I think it’s a pre-thought filter, and we have feelings for things. If you’re centered on Christ, you have a feeling for something that points to Christ. If you have something that you still, I think you still have a feeling for things because you have to filter things out, right? So you have a feeling for things, and through this pre-thought feeling, you accept or reject things that come at you or transform them into something that you find pleasing that pleases the center. So you’re kind of enchanted, one is enchanted with themselves, and their feelings become kind of corrupted as they are. Yeah, I think that that sounds absolutely right. I think that sounds as, you know, when you, you know, it’s often described as being if you’re possessed by a passion, especially pride, obviously is the first passion. That’s what it is. And when I talk about the story of Christ as being the ultimate version of that, and that’s where you can see that for Christ to become the, for Christ to be the incarnation, right, there he had to die, and he tells us to take up our cross. And I think that in order to, and this notion of entering into the heart, entering into our heart, it happens through this removal of the garments of skin as the Fathers talk about, as this sacrificing of our passions and of our little idiosyncrasies that we hold on to so much. So I think what you said is quite right. So I spent a lot of time in the last couple years reading James K. Smith’s How Not to be Secular. So it’s essentially kind of a popular presentation and then somewhat of a response to Charles Taylor’s massive secular AHA. And one of the things that, I haven’t read Taylor’s book, maybe some, but one of the things that he says in there is, we’re now in a point of cultural aware. And you kind of alluded to this, which is what made me think about it, where our daily experience of the world is so imitantized, it’s so material, it’s hard for us to even conceive of a different way of experiencing it. It’s just, it’s not plausible, right? And he says that the difference between the way that, and he’s talking specifically about Christian heaven, Christian can live within this versus someone who essentially says that the material is all there is, is what Taylor calls the difference between an open tape on reality versus a closed tape on reality. And at least the connection that I made as you were speaking was you’re talking about paying attention to certain facts and not others. And it seems to me that this idea of open tape is really about where do you choose to put your attention. If you decide there is nothing transcendent, then you’re not going to see it. And you see, you know, you read in the Fathers when they tell you things like when you did not to judge others, that has to do with that idea that you engage the world with a certain perception where you’re not out looking for the other person’s fault, because you can find them. Everybody has them, right? Everybody has the fault. We can spend our time nitpicking at everybody’s faults, but to engage the world in a way where you have this open generosity towards others, where you’re looking for Christ in that person, right? That’s what you’re searching for when you engage them. And that, you know, that’s what you said. Then you end up paying attention to certain facts. You end up looking at that person through a certain lens and that will transform the way you engage the world. I’ll have to look at that. You maybe can remind me later with the book. I’ll look at that. I had a quick question. You’re certainly by the grace of God, of course, but also, depending on your method of transport, by the grace of scientific discovery, application, you can be the drone or flu or transported. So there’s a certain grace to the academic discipline, and I just wanted to see your view of what the proper centered scientific development is. Well, I think that what we would need is a hierarchy. I mean, it’s a hierarchy where all things are ordered and in their own place. Nothing in the world is bad in itself. There’s nothing that is in the world that is bad in itself. It’s always bad because it is not in its proper place. And I think that what has happened in terms of we could not not science itself, but let’s say scientism or the kind of scientism that someone like Dawkins would have is that he is trying to make the material world into all that there is. And I think that the proper way would be for just things to be in a normal hierarchy is to understand that spiritual realities come first, moral realities come second, and then physical realities come third. Let’s say it could be could be said in another way. That’s a way to see it. And so when that happens, then the material world becomes subject to the higher laws. It kind of happens on its own. Right now, let’s say doing that would eliminate a lot of the problems, let’s say, all the problems of bioethics and the problems of creating massive and massive weapons of destruction that are more and more destructive. Like if things were ordered in the normal hierarchy, then we would pay attention to certain facts. We would want to use the discoveries to serve those higher purposes rather than whatever other nefarious purposes we can find for them. I don’t know if that makes sense. And I’m sorry if it sounds like I have animosity towards science. I just sounded like the very process of standing outside of myself, outside of the center of understanding and discovering a new reality was in fact alienating and not a preferred state. So I just wanted to see how you’d reconcile that. Well, it’s definitely not a preferred state in the sense that you don’t live in that world. Nobody lives in the world that you’re currently describing. We don’t live in the world. We don’t live in the world where the sun rises and sets. We can accept the technical importance for flying airplanes or doing different things of the old model and it’s fine to do so, but we always need to remember that we don’t live in that. We live in the world where the sun comes up and the sun in the sky manages your day and the night manages your sleep. And we’re moving away from that. It’s not arbitrary that we’re moving away from that. It’s not arbitrary that we don’t follow the cycles anymore that we have actually kind of ripped ourselves apart and that’s what we’re arbitrary about. There’s a description in the Bible. I think it’s the best way to understand, let’s say, this idea of where science could fit in the whole thing is that in the fall when Adam and Eve fell, you actually see that the fall is a series of falls. It’s not just the one fall. So Adam and Eve fall and then Cain kills Abel and then there’s another fall and then it goes all the way to the flood. It’s like this fall after fall after fall. And one of the falls you could say is that Cain goes out and he’s the one who founds the first city and then he develops technology. You can read it in the Bible. His descendants develop different technology. So it talks about music making even and it talks about metallurgy and the different technologies are developed. And so you get the sense that this kind of technification is part of the fall. It’s this moving away from the center. Okay. So you can say, well, that’s really negative. That’s very bad. Technology is bad. Science is bad. But no, go to the very end of the Bible. Go to the very, very end of the Bible. The last vision we have is a vision of this city. And you have in the center of the city the tree of life and the river of life. You have the Garden of Eden basically in the center of this city. And so in that sense, God redeems this whole process, this whole fall, this whole moving away from the center all the way to the flood. God in the end redeems the whole thing and creates this giant massive picture of how everything is laid out. And in the end there is this technical world that is there on the edge of this garden. And so if you think of it in terms of that kind of hierarchy, then I would say that would be the divine vision of what science could be for us or what technology can become. So maybe that’s my last vision for you. So I hope all of you enjoyed the discussion. I’d like to thank Dr. Gary Jenkins for organizing the event. Andrew Rodriguez who filmed everything and also Father Stephen Dammick who recorded it. And I’d also like to thank Ancient Faith. You can find the audio version on Ancient Faith. I’ll put the link to that below. For those of you who have been following the whole story of the symbolic world, you’ll know that I finally reached my kind of goal of 2,000 that I'd put as a sign that I need to take this to the next level. And so we have reached that goal. It's pretty exciting. And that means that I have started putting up a podcast and I've also started doing patron only videos. I will do one probably once a month and the one that I did was a Q&A that lasted about an hour and a half. I will take questions from Patreon, from people who are giving at the 10 level. But then the Q&A itself will be available for anybody who’s giving. However, so if you give $1 a month and you have access to that Q&A or it might also be another extra video on a subject like a folktale as I’ve talked. It depends on how many questions I have and how interesting the questions are. I will also have the chat going during the Q&A’s. And so if there are some good questions coming up there, I will probably be answering those as well. And so yeah, so I will see you soon.