https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=baACQD-u3r4
So hello everybody I am sitting here with Dr. Timothy Petitza. Dr. Petitza is a professor of ethics at Holy Cross and at Hellenic College. He is also now the interim dean at Hellenic College which gives an undergraduate level degree of and all kinds of undergraduate degrees. He’s also teaching at the Seminary Holy Cross which is a seminary for priests but I have him here today for a few reasons. One is that for months, for years I would say since about 2015 people have been telling me you have to talk to Dr. Timothy, you have to talk to him. And now recently because I’m making YouTube videos I’ve had people watching my videos saying oh I can’t read this article by him, I’ve read this interview with him, you have to talk to him. And we had a brief chance of meeting at an event in the fall but now I have been into his book which he just published called The Ethics of Beauty and I’m finding in it all the stuff that I love that I’m interested in that you guys who watch this are interested in. He talks about the, how about complexity, how about these new signs of complexity is really bringing science and religion together. You know the inevitability of patterns, how beauty is important in our, in the way we perceive reality and how we engage with it. So I’m really excited to get a chance to talk to him about his book and just about his ideas in general. This is Jonathan Peugeot, welcome to the symbolic world. So maybe Dr. Timothy you can maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, about your position right now and your journey and then we can dive into some of what you wrote in your book. Yes thank you very much Jonathan and I also you know was really looking forward to meeting you at St. T. Conson and heard so much about you and yeah right now what I’m and your talk was so incredible at St. T. Cons that yeah it blew me away. It was so fantastic but the right now I’m the interim dean at Holenic College so it’s the undergraduate school in Brookline Mass and I’m wearing a hat of WVU because my nephew TNOK office goes there and because I’m nursing a head cold and I have to keep my head warm at all times so forgive me for appearing so casual but yeah I’m the interim dean of our undergraduate school. We’re trying to launch a revision of our core curriculum, we’re in the process of discussing what that might look like. I hope we can get it done, we might not but we have a number of good majors, undergraduate majors, it’s an orthodox Christian community. We certainly have about 50 slots a year open to undergraduate students because we don’t want to grow so large that we overwhelm our sister school, our big sister, the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, the actual seminary and it’s a faith really a vibrant campus. There’s a lot of it’s a very holy place actually and in a living sense there’s a lot of struggle there but it’s a holy place. Well I think for people watching these videos, people in their 20s and then also people who are parents and looking at their kids, we’re always looking for opportunities for people to get a grounding, a good intellectual grounding in the Christian tradition, in the orthodox faith. So I hope that people will look into Holenic College, I know I will in terms my kid is just turned 15 yesterday and so we’re starting to think about you know hopefully giving him some kind of ground to face the world with something a way of thinking and this is what I discovered in your book which I love. You know I haven’t gone through it’s very thick but it it reads really well you know it reads very easily because it’s a series of interviews that were done with Road to Emmaus Journal. If you don’t know about this journal it is great as well it is run by mother Nick Teria and here’s one of the ones that Dr. Timothy did. There are interviews in there with Andrew Gould, with Father Silvan Justiniano, all people that I love and I think are really in the right position in terms of reawakening a sense of beauty and a sense of pattern in the world and so it’s done as a series of interviews and it’s very easy to read and very common sense but it also dives into some very powerful ideas you know from the idea of architecture, how architecture is so important. I was in Boston just a month ago at a talk and you know I brought up that exact point that architecture is really the most important art because it is it is it is disappears in a way because you’re living within it it’s the space within within which you live so urban planning and architecture is becomes the frame of your actual lived existence. So maybe we can start there because you use Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs as some of the basis of the things you’re talking about so maybe you can explore a little bit with us the idea of the city as liturgy or the liturgical aspect of reality and how we engage with it. Yeah I do want to give a shout out to you I just talked to Mother Nektaria this morning and she said to say hello and how much she thinks about you and prays for you all the time. She and I are both spiritual children of Father Artemyev Vladimirov in Moscow so so that’s a big connection Mother Nektaria and I have that’s kept us close she used to be a student here and when she was she would chase me around with a tape recorder everything I said and that’s what got into the idea that I would just write the book as if it were a series of interviews with her but we spent so many years editing and you know she influenced you know the questions added new questions and influenced all the answers that even though even though she’s a part as a part author oh yeah she is she is really a huge influence and and I think a basic premise of the book is that you know within these ancient liturgical systems that you know a lot of a lot of secrets are kind of carried waiting to be unpacked you know by later generations and and one of the first one of the ways that I actually started to write this book as a student asked me about a passage in Lars Thunberg which said that from the fourth century east and west west started to drift apart on the question of whether the sensual sins were the place to begin the spiritual struggle or the intellectual sins and I had no idea what that meant that question and why it was that the east chose the sensual it seemed so or why St. Maximus did so I guess before I get to the Jane Jacobs thing just it’s really my I guess my my operating idea has been to just treat the church and and really and and other you know repositories of ancient wisdom as if you know they’re smarter than they look there’s there’s stuff hidden in there that it takes a lifetime to um to to sort of before you know it takes a lifetime of getting ready before you can know what they’re saying to you no I agree but I think there’s also one of the problems it’s a problem and an opportunity is that there are some things that were just lived let’s say in the ancient times and were were taken for granted and so we’re not explored intellectually they were just the water that you swam in and so now with the enlightenment and with this kind of alienated mode of being that we’ve had in a one way on one hand we’re alienated but it’s actually an opportunity to now look back into those systems and see them with a with a let’s say a distance which can help us understand them in a different way yeah and and I think you know people really underestimate the importance of uh you know you mentioned Jane Jacobs I think a second ago and city planning and her book the death and life of great American cities I mean people like that book you know to get to this issue of cities for what it says about um you know what it says about urban planning sure but in the final chapter of the book she says hey there’s this new kind of science it’s called you know the science of organized complexity and so in 1961 she became the first person to read reinvent a whole social science you know urban planning through the lens of this new science I mean it was she was so far ahead of her time and um and so that was another major influence in my intellectual life and I eventually you know met Jane Jacobs the last five years of her life we were close and certainly went to her home many times and you know I write about that in in the book and um she had a huge impact on me and um and she thought I was pretty keen too you know so I I say that because it’s it’s important if you’re right if you have someone of that stature who signs off on something well that really that really matters you know that’s the ultimate kind of recommendation so did you feel like for example someone like her do you feel like she was able to perceive the analogies between city planning and let’s say the religious rituals or the the sacramental life that that the orthodox engage in so it was like late 1999 I wrote her for the first time you know I just you can write any author you want just send the letter to their publisher and the author will get it if anyone wants them and that’s when I laid out that I felt I had discovered that in in that book the death and life that cities were really vast liturgies and that there were all kinds of very practical components of city order as she as she discovered it which looked just like liturgies you know being the work of the people cycling through death and life these patterns of death and rebirth the love the wonder the the the emergent character the openness to the the radical openness to the unknown that was crucial for her in cities you know she thought a city that stopped innovating wouldn’t really be a city anymore it would just be an overgrown decaying settlement so when I wrote her that she said I mean in her first letter back she said this is the best you know you’re the best interpreter of my work that I’m aware of and you’re showing me what my own work means and then she did she did something else which was you know so so interesting and that’s why I put it in this book she said um you’ve I was startled she said that you’ve grasped something that I was groping for in my forthcoming book the nature of economy and um or the nature of economies I always forget which it is and I didn’t know what she was talking about it took it took some time you know but she noticed first that if cities were liturgies then we then by extension all self-organized emergent systems look kind of liturgical yeah and you basically have a renee made reconciliation of science with religion and it’s a it’s a gentle reconciliation and it’s it’s sturdy yeah this is something that I’ve been really pushing at least for the past few years is to try to help people understand uh like the inevitability of hierarchy in complex systems and the inevitability of when I say hierarchy I mean the full hierarchy and also the engagement with the margin and the unknown and and let’s say the potentiality on the edge of that hierarchy and how everything is made that way there is no there is no uh exception to it and and that it helps us understand let’s say neo-platinism uh in a certain in a more modern way but then if you now bring the science of consciousness into the realm of also this complexity theory and you see how they interrelate with each other how the inevitability of of the conscious agent as the let’s say the the frame of multiplicity and unity how you know we bring things together in love through our conscious being then all of a sudden you can see how the christian answer to neo-platinism is also there which is the bringing into the incarnational practice what it’s not just these forms in in almost in an abstract way that kind of settle into the world but rather the agent the the incarnate agent is the let’s say the the fulcrum out of which this is happening and so to me it just seems like like you said right now is a critical moment for christians to to be able to expound this for people to understand that this is what we’ve been talking about all along one of my students her name is georgia williams she she wrote a beautiful paper arguing that the that what we call fractal you know the fractal geometry of nature really are the hierarchies and once you understand that the hierarchies are are really fractals then you realize well well marxism collapses because you know marxism is the idea that you know you you could dispense with hierarchy in favor of a pure democracy you know with a small d of this pure equality of of same of sameness and organic order is fractal therefore it’s in other words it’s hierarchical and so you kind of have to junk that vision now of course in platinus and as well as in deonisius what because it is these are divine systems it really is the way besides besides relating to god through the hierarchies up and down we also all relate directly right and and so we have both democracy and monarchy in the church but the idea that you’re going to have just one of those of course is just death that one of those beautiful images i’ve seen in your book i was i was trying to get through as much as i could you know before our interview but one of those beautiful images that you had in there was this idea interpretation of same maximus and this is something that just comes right into my thinking as well which is that the that when we talk about the logee it’s not as if these logee exist as things or you know it’s more the notion that the logee the logee are christ manifesting himself to in a particular thing so it’s like in my particular reality my own little hierarchy hierarchical being it’s my vision of christ which is my logee it’s the way in which i can interrelate with christ and so it’s the same with things as well all things are a reflection of god are a reflection of an incarnational principle within their specific sphere and so it and so it actually because a lot of people struggle with the idea of these logees existing independently and it’s like it’s not that they exist independently they exist as a communion of multiplicity which is constantly breathing in and breathing out you could say coming into the life of christ and the real reality is the divine logos there is no other reality besides that one we just are able to participate in it you know at at the level at which we can which is what same maximus is always saying and father maximus constas who’s the dean of holy cross while i’m the dean of heleneck he he says i think he stresses the idea that um created things are like mirrors you know which which which which their appearance is really their participation their reflection of the logos according to their individual you know logos with a small l but the thing that really helped me there was actually wendell berry and i think it’s hard to think of um you know he’s this western kentucky farmer and the greatest spokesman for american agrarianism and it was funny i was at jane jacobs house one time and we were talking about him and she didn’t quite get the agrarian the agrarian thing but he really helped me with the low boy because he’s always talking about the ways of the lost ways of farming the lost ways of animal husbandry the lost ways of community and i i began to see that the logo were more like the ways you know it’s about knowing and then on the other side it’s it’s the way in which christ as i say in the book kneels down to wash the feet of every aspect of creation in a way that it can accept it can understand and can you know live too yeah and it’s a perfect example because we always need to remember that baptism is identity forming that’s what baptism is you you wash what’s not part of the thing that which is not you know you wash off the externals and then you name the thing you know the person comes out of the water you name them it’s like it’s it really is an identity forming thing and so the image of christ washing the feet of creation i just thought was it it’s a beautiful image of how of how on the one hand there is this power and authority of naming but at the same time there’s this love and care which is to grooming almost like to make sure that the thing has a form of completeness so it’s a beautiful image really powerful the uh it is it’s great and and you know we have i mean a couple traditions i’ve noticed is i mean just in a living way is people do often take on some quality of the saint whose name they get at baptizing i mean it’s so so obviously with time that like oh of course and and then another tradition at least we have in in the greek orthodox world and i don’t know maybe it’s just universal is that you know when the your godparents put the oil on you that they also give you one of their particular charisms that you you become literally their child you will have some you will resemble them in some way like we do much more so our own parents and i i’ve seen that a lot too so no i think that that seems like it’s something that would be inevitable you know uh and it’s hard for it’s it’s so funny because it those types of things when you say them that it’s very difficult for materialists to understand how how how real and how inevitable these types of relationships are in terms of in terms of identity it’s as soon as you understand the inevitability of identity uh and how identities happen and how these multiplicities kind of this potentiality comes into one and how we participate in that for others and how we all we all coexist you could say all of a sudden it everything kind of makes sense one of the images that you talk about which really hit me is when you talk about post-enlightenment thinking and you know i tend to be very anti-enlightenment in my sometimes in my discourse just because we’ve had to we grew up with the we grew up with the with the arrogance of the enlightenment so we we want to you know we just want to hit back um but i feel like the way that you talk about it as a reconciliation i think is far more fruitful uh you know how in a way the enlightenment created the idea that the human person is outside of nature and is looking at things as this weird kind of disincarnated light and you still hear that today you hear people say things like oh it’s just a social convention it’s just a social construct like okay so where are you standing for it to just be a social construct are you somehow above all of the natural world to to see that these social contracts don’t exist in reality but as soon as you go back into the natural world actually and it’s an interesting move as soon as you kind of even take consciousness and put it back into the natural world all of a sudden all of a sudden these things start to flip around and the notion of identity forming and the idea of communion all of these elements start to make sense once again it is um it’s uh it’s a great moment we’re living in and i i think the book was i wrote the book without an outline without a plan it just you know it just unfolded a lot of things i discovered while writing especially in chapter four about um sort of what is the core of the spiritual path in terms of three concentric phases of healthy shame and i think at the by the end of the book because you know it just reached its logical conclusion in talking about jane jacobs and the science of organic complexity because i realized that that is the beauty first approach to science and and what jane jacobs did in in 1961 there and that really should be that book should guide university curricula i mean it’s that is the book for me um she said there’s these three kinds of science and they each are good at something so she she she actually rescues and saves the enlightenment because she shows that it surpassed itself in the discovery of organic complexity and you know that’s redeeming and we do need reductive approaches you know in certain cases when we’re making machinery and this and that so all of a sudden you realize well we need all three kinds of science but there’s always has to be that priority for the beauty first way or or as i you know we we ought we are so addicted as a culture to large um large quantity information and high potency information and we have to train that out of ourselves because it’s such a heady drug and and learn to appreciate high quality information yeah um and and that’s what you get through complexity and through the beauty first way so so even though all three kinds of science matter the beauty first way really has to govern your heart and in a way it’s what’s interesting as well about this approach is that it not only is it a way to kind of solve the enlightenment problem or rather re-appropriate the enlightenment it also is a way to deal with the postmodern problem as well you know because it to to to talk about these patterns and to talk about our our us being immersed immersed in this pattern being part of the fractal so we’re not outside looking at the fractal we are also within the fractal and we’re one of its one of its instantiations you could say and an important one because we’re the one who can then see the other instantiations of that pattern that this is also a a an answer to the kind of postmodern deconstruction approach which is which still also has almost the viewer as this weird external thing which is keeps criticizing things for being constructed and tries to to point to the the logo centrism of of things and you know in a way we’re saying not in the same way that did that was saying but we’re saying yeah logo centrism is just inevitable you just can’t have reality without some kind of without without this communion in essence which appears as but but it’s a bottom up and top down approach at the same time and that’s what the complexity science is bringing to us is is a more of a bottom up vision of it you know as as people who like Dionysius or St. Maximus we tend to see it top down but when you read St. Maximus you see that no he talks about the love the love of the church as being the manner in which the logos manifest itself and it’s like yes that’s it the communion of the parts bottom up is the the same thing as the let’s say the the top seed or the name coming down from above it’s the same to to drop a huge name i mean i mean i don’t know how famous he is but he certainly ought to be eric pearl you know the neo-platinist philosopher i think he’s out in in la at a university but he would remind us when we studied with him at catholic u he said remember that for maximus every every um every instance of deification is a further instance of hominification and so that that you know that unity that that of what you just said is there i mean i think the real issue for the west you know is what we now think of the west western europe and that the roman catholic and protestant world is that everything is a war between uh nominalism and realism and at the moment you know we’re trying to let the protestant nominalist movement you know have its full head and there’s not nothing is real everything is somehow imposed by will or politics or oppression or hierarchical blah blah blah and that war between nominalism and realism just cannot it’s fecund in a way i mean it’s it’s it has been fertile for us in many ways as the west but it’s also quite destructive and it’s just not reality and somehow in the east you overcome that division between like you were just saying between this arbitrariness versus this kind of fixedness that’s oppressive yeah and i see that i see that right now even in my discussions with people like there’s a there’s a prof of cognitive science john vervecky at university of toronto that i’ve having quite a few discussions with and i think that he’s also discovered in uh in maximus and eurigena how the top down and bottom up approaches are just the same that that it’s it’s a mistake to you can see them as the opposite even in the sense of perspectives but you don’t want to see them as opposing each other but rather as exactly as just the perspective from above and perspective from below and they’re joining together in in love that’s how reality just that’s how reality works there’s no way around it for every object and for every instance of every instance you can recognize needs to have that pattern within it you know it’s it’s so funny that you mentioned love because you know everyone’s trying to develop a system without without explicitly accounting for love and and when jane jacobs turned her you know her heart towards well from the very beginning she said in in 1961 she said the reason we’ve you know destroyed our cities in the united states and in england to uh to an extent as well is that the people who were writing about cities prescribing for cities trying to improve cities were to a man and they were men people who hated cities and and and she says you know right there in 1961 she says well it turns out with this new kind of science that if you don’t love something you can never understand it and i mean that is so um that destroys the enlightenment that that destroys and then she right away picks up the pieces and the broken pieces and gives them back to you she was really just the thing you know the idea that einstein was you know the great mind of the 20th century forget about it i i would i’d much rather you know curl up with all her writings she understood and and when she wrote about politics in her book system of survival she says explicitly you know there’s this missing ingredient which is love without which we cannot have a civilization and i mean our social justice people don’t say that they’re just so anxious for revenge and you know reform you know it’s just a dead end street that’s for sure it’s a dead end street uh i always say love is is really is really unity and the the balance between unity and multiplicity that’s that’s love and that’s the trinity the the life of the very of the trinity is the infinite instantiation of that that balance between one and many and that’s and you can’t you can’t have any identity without without that you know um and so i would like to get your opinion on what’s happening now because you know in terms of people who see patterns and see this pattern of civilization and the pattern of how things come together and how things are separate we’re living in a very strange time with this with this virus and what it’s doing to us and i think that we need to be able to to see it with that lens and so i was wondering if you’ve had some insights on what we’re going through right now oh i sure don’t no i mean it is really good because for one thing we don’t know what we’re going through i mean it it’s we’re not sure whether it’s this is an overblown reaction um what i’m gathering is that you know the the full might of western you know industrial power and scientific power i mean it’s it’s like a it’s like a battleship that’s slowly turning on this situation i mean in another month you know we’re going to be drowning in surgical masks we’re going to be self-testing twice a day for you know and we are just going to drown in that our materialistic abundance and you know let’s do it let’s let’s go for it i think that’s great um you know but but it’s such an unknown enemy and i think it’s a good sign that people are are trying to to the extent they can stay home but while also trying to to reach out to others you know by phone or whatever people still have jobs it’s still trying to do it yeah it’s of course of course i the book that of course you know is ringing in my mind is rodney stark’s the rise of christianity because he has a whole chapter about um plagues and epidemics and how they impacted the growth of the church in the first three centuries and another book i have in mind is the grand strategy of the Byzantine empire because in the the so-called plague of Justinian you know some people think wiped out about 50 percent of the Byzantine empire and so much so that it’s one of the few eras of human history where greenhouse gases declined because um you know the the farms grew over to forests and wild animals picked off the livestock and that’s the loot facts you know so so certainly as a church or as a human race plague has been you know with us and is likely to be with us and certainly we’re learning a lot through this we’re going to get sharper we’re going to get better we’re going to monitor things more closely um someone is going to come up with faster ways to create vaccines for these sorts of things um or you know if it if it really gets out of control and you know the half the congress and the once the police all get you know this plague or something and they can’t you know we could just have a total collapse yeah we’ll see which one it is well one of the things that i’ve been noticing in terms of patterns of being you could say with this and you know you can think about it before it happens but when it’s happening all of a sudden you’re in it and so you’re really just seeing it play out is you know when you talk about the fear and the unknown i think that that is really part of it you know it is part of the the notion of an unknown agent or an or uh the idea of a of a subversive agent within a system so you have something that is there and you don’t totally know where it is what it’s doing but you know it’s there and so the fear of the subverted the subversive agent is as important as the acts of the subversive agent as you know the disease itself which is breaking down the bonds of society the fear that it’s causing is also is is part of the disease if you can’t you can’t strip it away from what the disease is it’s not just a biological thing it’s a it’s it stacks up in terms of phenomena and as it reaches the social level it’s creating this this fear and this of this unknown and what it what it’s doing is it’s isolating us from each other and so you can see how in terms of a liturgical thinking if you think of liturgy as communion and think of liturgy as this this balance between you know the the oneness and the many and all of this well this subversive agent within the system is is breaking apart is fragmenting the the system you know and so what what can happen is that either the system can be consumed or the system will oh like you said or the system will then react and will will try to re-impose itself sometimes to the detriment of itself sometimes in a balanced way that’s the question is that how how is the identity of whatever systems we’re part of are going to kind of reaffirm themselves is it going to be a system are we going to find ourselves in a state of more control that’s going to have more control over us are we going to find some balance and then then that’s when if you read some of the accounts that you talked about in terms of of how the plague participated in the rise of Christianity you’d see how the fact that Christians within plague settings continued to demonstrate love and continued to care for those who were sick and those who were suffering that was I think I think it was even Julian the the apostate who had to despite himself acknowledge how the fact that Christians were doing this within plague times was part of the reason why the church grew and part of the reason why it became stronger and so I think that at the same time you know even though we’re doing this kind of weird self-isolation thing there will be as Christians where we will have to transcend that and show the love of Christ within within this this difficult situation in order for the bond of the church to survive and also for the for the system I hate to say the system or the body of the church to thrive we need to be able to to show how the love of Christ can transcend the subversive agent that’s breaking us apart I don’t know if that makes sense it does you know I mean the the thing is though that you know right now the the mark the martyric front line of all this are the doctors and the nurses and I know I’ve heard you know even here in Massachusetts they’re about to start running out of masks and and gowns and things and here we have all these great hospitals so you know you um they are not going to abandon their posts and if if they start to become you know sick then we really will have a huge huge issue a society you know crippling type of thing but they’re the ones asking us to stay home they’re the ones asking us to you know don’t play the hero yeah in a sense now we have to be careful there because um you know we have Netflix now and you know you just stay home and you you know you binge watch or you do whatever um uh some friends of mine have been joking they’re actually gaining weight you know they stockpile all this food and then they’re just nothing to do but eat it you know ahead of schedule but um you know they’re the ones asking us to stay home and and yet at a certain point like you said we will have to just throw caution to the winds to minister to a neighbor or or someone else and that’s what that’s what I mean I would say that’s what Christians have always done but I know that now those Christian values the hospital itself was invented in the fourth century in Asia Minor it’s a Christian artifact yeah now it belongs to all civilizations everyone has those has you know when a new value emerges in the world you know through divine inspiration in a sense it immediately becomes the common birthright of all yeah the extent they’re able to live up to it and so those are you know those are our Christians and our martyrs are these health care workers and um other people in that yeah well one of the ways I think that that I think that at least for now I mean we’re not there’s no there’s not the crisis isn’t here totally yet but I think that for now some of the things I’ve seen people do and that we’ve tried to participate in as well in my home is to identify the elderly people in our community that are really self-isolating more than everybody else and who are trying to stay in their house and to see if we can be of service to them to see if we can get groceries for them if we can if we can do things to to avoid them having to come to be in public where they’re more in danger let’s say of of getting it or of being affected by it that seems to be a simple way to kind of help preserve the bonds like I think that that’s the way that I see it is that is to try to identify the way in which we can counter the fragmenting effect of of the subversive agent and rather preserve the bonds you know I think the way a lot of people have been criticized I’ve seen people criticize you know streaming the services and everything people have criticized that and I can understand that ideally that is not the best thing to do but we need to do with what we have and try to to help people like I said stay connected in the manner in which we can at the at the moment and always be and if we’re attentive to that and we’re trying to look around us instead of spending our time criticizing everything looking around us and seeing what are the practical ways in my life and then the people around us where I can try to preserve those bonds then we’ll be doing the healing we’ll be doing the healing that we can as the as the body of Christ I mean it’s it’s so crucial you know the the thing that you know of course the great paradox of you know the ethics of beauty here just to show it show it again is that you know it starts off with a discussion of trauma and the way in which trauma you know disrupts liturgical communion the way war is kind of an anti-liturgy and really it just always comes down to just what you said of strengthening those bonds of finding the excommunicated and re-communicating them and in her one of the final books she completed Jane Jacob’s Dark Age Ahead she writes with great pain the Chicago heat wave of I don’t know what year it was late 90s early 2000s and the discovery so many people so many elderly died that the CDC was tasked to figure out what happened and one of the things that was noted was that elderly who were socially isolated to begin with were much more likely to die in the heat wave when the power went out and they were afraid even to open their doors for let’s say a social worker or someone who came to help them so so she wrote about that with great pain and we have to figure that out and I I follow the email I’m on the email list of this Mrs. Frugal Woods she’s a an apostle of frugality up in Vermont and I recommend her her email it’s really good and she describes what in her Vermont town of 400 people how quickly they organized to have the volunteer drivers volunteer organizers and when someone needs something call the organizer hey I need this the drivers go pick it up at the store they leave it on your porch there’s no you know you can let it sit there for an hour till the you know the sunshine blows off the virus or whatever but so it’s it’s very important that we that we try to stay connected we are about to launch in today we’re launching into our our experiment with distance education with our students at Holy Cross and Hellenic so we’re going to be very connected to our students trying to figure out hey you didn’t hand in your work yet getting all that organized yeah that is that is a huge that is definitely a huge step and we’re seeing everybody do that it’s it’s it’s all it’s all it’s a weird mix of frightening and you know it’s in a way we’re happy that technology is permitting us to do this right to even have this discussion and to do this and uh let’s just I just have the fear that we’re creating permanent patterns we’ll see I hopefully we’re not hopefully that as as these as this wave kind of we ride this wave then we will be able to reconnect in more direct ways the danger is that it’s so convenient that there might be a lot of residue of this kind of weird disconnected connection that we we said that we’re setting up I I hope that for what happens for universities you know because you could just have the world’s greatest lecturer give a lecture and then you don’t need the other 20,000 professors of that topic but I hope what that will you know create in us as professors is is an ability to use the classroom time in ways that are more personal and challenging and problem solving we try to do in my social ministries class we do a an annual simulation of of a kind of broken society and the students have to fix it and it’s um it’s those kind of things you know the university should be stepping up their simulations their war games their their internships they’re on the you know the professor instead of giving a lecture should just come in and write a problem on the board and and you know so I think this could help us be better teachers well interesting take it take it as a take it as a challenge for sure um and so how do you because you know I’m an icon carver and so obviously my interest in this question of beauty and the question of the relationship between the very pattern of reality and in these these systems that we create that we engage in I’d like to get a bit of your sense of let’s say the state of liturgical art as you kind of see it and uh and maybe also how you see the the capacity for orthodox liturgical art to affect our culture or modern culture right now big question but yes this that is a it seems like we’re we’re undergoing a renewal and it seems like it’s been a long time you know it’s been a very slow growing renewal and I think that um I think the momentum is certainly on the side of better liturgical art and people more and more aspire to that there’s much less aspiration for the the completely un-patterned novelty of of the 60s and 70s so what we’re really missing is just enough practitioners enough um education and then sometimes the money because because a lot of times what what’s going on is that it’s the small parish that is kind of insight rich but resource poor and they know you know that if you can get Andrew Gold to build your church then you know you’re cooking with gas now I mean that’s the way to go but they can’t afford it and or they can afford him but they can’t afford to build the church and so it we’re just waiting it would be nice you know to borrow from the page of the um you know for the Italian Renaissance you know it would be nice to have some deep pocket patron who would say look if you build with one of these guys you know if it’s Peugeot you’re you’re working with you know I’ll pay half right yeah you’re saying we need Russian oligarchs is that what you’re saying I would prefer Italian bankers there you go you prefer Italian bankers that’s hilarious no I agree I agree and I think one of the things that needs to happen and and I think this is kind of falls back in your court as well and not just your court but the the all the seminaries in the United States is also the future priests need to have that’s part of their education this is what I believe I think that part of their education has to be a capacity to understand the importance of liturgical art and the the capacity it has to affect our our being especially in a modern world of strip malls and you know in electric lines and all this horrible ugly stuff it seems like if the if the clergy as they as we get more clergy if the young clergy is at least attentive to that and cares and knows that it’s important then we’re slowly going to it’s not going to happen you know tomorrow but we’re slowly going to build a culture of beauty back into you know because we we have to also understand the the madness that we’re coming out of you know we’re coming out of the communist regimes we’re coming out of the the fascist states we’re coming out of you know a church the orthodox church was beaten to the ground and so it’s not just everything is is now taking life taking life again and so the arts also have to find their place in that and in America in a world of practicality and in a world of of budgets and thinking in terms of the bottom line it’s it seems like it’s a it’s a tougher step to take to really consider the liturgical arts as part of what we need to to bring into our communities as well you know Jane Jacobs sort of sort of bring her into everything but she’s just so great she said you know beauty is the most great she said you know beauty is not to be had for the asking you know you you you try to build beautiful things but sometimes it’s not evident for you know a generation or so you know whether you’ve hit the ball out of the park or or kind of kind of whiffed and and so so it’s you know it’s there is some dimension of which it it really is a miracle when some any whenever anything beautiful um but but but she also she also and I think Alexander was was like and Wendell Berry too I think probably the answer for a lot of churches is to is to build a really beautiful small chapel somewhere because that does not have the same you know the same complications of fire escapes and whatever whatever in your main church and if you’re if your parish isn’t ready financially or or educationally to build its parish church the right way at least if these small side chapels off in the country or even just across the street or in a different part of the city can be done well that’s that’s enough I think that should be counted as a giant victory I mean enough for now a parish priest is essentially I mean besides everything else that that he is he’s the mayor of a small village and uh and he’s got to keep that that community together as you said and then quoting maximus to the extent that it’s able it’s possible I don’t I think a beauty first way you know is accepting of you know limitations and you know we’re doing the best we can yeah but but it’s we’re not that good right now but I think also the the easy accessibility of the cheap option is is also hurting us in the sense that one of the things that I recommend people is to don’t get everything right away you know everybody they want Hagia Sophia you know right away and so if you want that then of course then you’ll get prints all over the church and you’ll get these massive prints that you just glue on the on the wall and everything because it’s because you can get all the icons or you can buy a series of all the icons and it’ll cost you a few hundred dollars and you’re done um and so you you have to think more simply that we need to start get one good icon get the get you know and and if you’re going to buy an eye a painted icon get a good one and then just slowly build from there you know instead of going all out and getting all the cheap stuff you know um it’s it would be worth studying Saint John the Baptist the um the uh the the Rokor parish on 17th street in Washington DC I mean that is it is such a perfect church inside and you just wonder how in the world did that happen I don’t know the history I’m sure it’s recounted on the website but um how they were able to but but it’s it’s it’s it’s a challenge I mean I I certainly can I certainly know bad art when I see it and and bad architecture but I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten a lot less you know critical and judgmental of it and partly because we know that you know the bad stuff won’t last you know that’s right will not be you know the next generation will not preserve that thing and that’s a great thing about understanding complex systems as well is that you realize that there’s an actual natural process by which ugly things get eliminated and beautiful things get get kept you know it’s like when they decide which building they’re gonna they’re gonna make a parking lot out of in the city they’re not gonna destroy that you know 300 200 year old neo-gothic church they’re going to you know get that ugly building that ugly block of cement I say that but it’s happening in Europe sadly as well they are because the cost of whole of of uh maintaining these buildings is difficult there are some churches in Europe that are getting they’re getting bulldozed so right I mean and if you lose the faith entirely I mean it’s hard to keep you know beauty it’s it’s um and of course there’s something in the west a kind of um and Mark saw this and he and he he condemned it you know he saw that you know in a bottom line culture that you know nothing was sacred and nothing was going to withstand that and um you know his his answer was you know a kind of violent rejection of of just everything that had led up to that point and um I mean my point is that just the quality of our own if you can fall in love with a beautiful account of the life of saint sarah you have changed imperceptibly and invisibly the world’s uh situation yeah you’re different and you you know that’s going to radiate out and change the world it’s going to impact the world at any rate yeah I agree I agree and I think that and I think I think that we need to see that also that that acts of beauty um just like acts of of love in an interpersonal way that that it is like these little stones that fall into a pond and you don’t know the the ramifications of what they have and so we need to do kind of just advance you know I just make one icon at a time and uh and I send them out into these families into these parishes and it’s uh to me it’s a it’s such a great joy to know that I’m going to be that I’m actually participating in someone’s life through this act I’m creating something which is part you know I’m I’m communing with them in a way by giving them an object that they will have in their prayer corner that they’ll part they’ll give to their niece who’s getting baptized or whatever it is they’re going to do with this icon that it’s not it’s not just an object of of consumption it’s not just something that you consume but it’s something that you participate in so yes and you know it’s better to make you know one good one than you know five bad ones I mean of course I think I think in orthodox cultures or just in in in in in just any mature culture anywhere in the world that um I saw an interview with a Dalai Lama as I pronounced the Dalai Lama and they had opened a disco near the base of his um and they asked him at the close of an interview what he thought about that and it took him a while to understand the question and then he just laughed because he he understood that you know these these insubstantial things they they serve their purpose they have their place it’s it’s just it’s just not it’s just that we those of us who are called to do something more enduring have to work a little harder and do the do our jobs and and you know they can coexist because like I said the one is transitory and the others you know it’s forever yeah and that’s one of the things that once you understand hierarchy properly you understand that there’s always a fringe you actually shouldn’t get rid of the fringe is there it has a problem it’s problematic it’s but it’s not going away it’s just part of how reality unfolds there’s a narthex there’s a fringe there are gargoyles on the outside of the church it’s just it’s just part of of the pattern you just don’t want to confuse which place things have right right what we try to do is take those lower things and elevate them to the supreme value even that was interesting for a while but I think it’s it’s important when we are moved to create those higher things to to to marshal the support financially and politically and whatever perish politically and do those higher things and let them endure yeah um all right dr dimitri this great conversation I’m I’m going to finish reading your book and I’m hoping that if you want to I would like to to to engage on some other aspects of it once once I get through and uh and I think also we’re going to see some interesting discussion in the comment section and I really encourage everybody to to uh to get it like I said it’s it it looks really thick but it’s it’s very it’s very nice to read because it it’s not it’s not a it’s kind of a in between between a conversation and a scholarly book it’s not just totally conversational but it’s also not uh it’s not it doesn’t have all these footnotes and it’s not constantly you know it’s not technical and so it’s it’s very it’s very much it follows the pattern of what it’s talking about which is the idea of beauty and the idea of narrative and pattern and how this is related to communion and relationship and so the fact that it’s an interview also participates in its meaning so I I looking forward to diving into it even more and uh check out Hellenic College everybody for yourself for your kids because we need good places to learn and with Dr. Timothy there you you know that it’s going in a good direction at least that’s what I think for my kids so oh and I’m just the tip of the iceberg you should see how holy some of our professors are but but I will say and if we talk again well then I mentioned it in the book but we can talk about what Jane Jacob said about icons so okay yeah definitely it’d be great to look at and she wasn’t a believer so so I trust her more because you know she just she had that immediacy in her she wasn’t constrained by some something else yeah right she had it she just had an intuition of what this was so yeah we’ll definitely dive into that thank you Jonathan I think that it was great to talk to you all right thank you to your listeners and viewers and all that all right hope you enjoyed this interview with Dr. Timothy Petitza you can check out the description I will put a link to his book also to Hellenic College and Holy Cross as well as other projects in which he is involved as you know everybody who supports me monthly on Patreon on Subscribestar or on my own website you get a free patron only video every month there are all kinds of videos in there where I think there’s like nine or ten already and they keep getting more and more there’s some on some fairy tales some on witches and this month there’s going to be a video going deep more deeply into the story of the golden hemorrhoids and mice related to the question of an epidemic and so I hope you all enjoy that thanks for your support everybody stay safe in these strange times and I will see you very soon