https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OAKfhyk8zmE
Ok, folks, we need to talk about cannibal babies and how this relates to the resurrection. This is Jonathan Peugeot, welcome to the Symbolic World. So last week on Twitter there is a medieval scholar, his name is Eric Wade, who published a thread. And I don’t even know how it is that I ended up seeing this thread, but somehow someone shared it or liked it or whatever and so it came up in front of me. I have since then followed him because he has some, he is definitely worth following in order to see a certain strand of thinking. And so Eric Wade talked about the problem of cannibal babies. He asked the questions, if our bodies are resurrected in the last judgment, what happens if we were eaten? Now Eric Wade is a medieval scholar who describes himself as a medievalist, helicopter parent to a kitty, queer studying sex, race in OE literature, lecturer at the Universitat of Bonn, I guess. And so what we’re going to see, and it’s going to be very interesting, is we’re going to notice that, first of all, I have some sympathy for him because it is very difficult to understand medieval thinking today. What we’ll also see in his thread is a desire to show his own virtue, a virtue signaling, if you will, and a mocking of the ancients, a way of making fun of their thinking, and his own virtue signaling will prevent him, interestingly enough, from seeing some of the deeper meaning that could be involved in this question of the cannibal baby. And I say this laughing because obviously this is fringe stuff, but it is indeed fringe stuff and understanding the fringe is something that I’ve been doing with you guys from the beginning. And so it’ll actually help us to understand the fringe. So let’s look at what he says. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to read his post. I’m going to post a link to his thread in the comment section. If you want to read the whole thing, I’m going to read his post and you can then read, if you want, later the quotes that he quotes from St. Augustine and from Thomas Aquinas. And so he goes, Now what’s interesting to see here is obviously Eric Wade thinks this is funny and he’s using this as a way to mock medieval Christians. First of all, the first thing that is interesting to note is that someone like himself would spend his entire life studying the medieval world and then would do that. He would spend his entire life basically talking about things that he wants to mock and make fun of. Imagine that life. Imagine a life which is based on studying something, studying only something that you wish to make fun of, but I digress. All right. And so he talks about how that most of the theologians said that God can just make up new matter and he has no big deal. But some of the theologians were very concerned with the question, tried to look at it in a more technical way. All right. And so here he talks about St. Augustine. He says, Now I’ll quote a little bit of St. Augustine here because it’ll help you see something about what he’s doing. And so then Eric Wade says, I want you to notice one thing in what Eric Wade is doing is that he is making fun of Augustine. He is suggesting that Augustine is talking about cannibalism in a normal way, that he is normalizing cannibalism, suggesting of course humorously, not directly, that maybe Augustine is a cannibal. If he thinks that cannibalism is so normal, you know, hey, who amongst us has not eaten human flesh? So he is mocking the idea that possibly Augustine, he’s doing mockingly a way suggesting that Augustine maybe is a cannibal, you know, if he is talking about it in a normal manner. All right. Okay. So this was largely the party line until the late Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas thought a lot about the cannibal baby issue and whether a baby made entirely of cannibalized flesh would just get divided up into its former bodies in the last judgment. So Tom’s view was that if the cannibal had ever eaten anything else, or if their parents had, then God just used that matter. But the baby born of people on a cannibalism only diet presented Tom with the same problem as it presented everyone. If you are a strict cannibal, Thomas argued, but your parents weren’t, then God would just restore the matter that came from your parents. Specifically, your father’s semen, and then supplement it with some extra new matter. But if you’re a strict cannibal and your parents were, then Thomas Aquinas thought that God just fudged it. The part of you made from your father’s semen, even if the semen was originally someone your dad ate, would be restored as your body. So if you’re eaten by a cannibal who then has sex with another cannibal and part of your eaten body turns into the semen that makes a cannibal baby, sorry, you don’t get that little bit of yourself back. It belongs to the baby now. God will replace that matter with new matter. And then here comes the virtue signal. Now pay attention. Now until now, he has been making fun of the idea of the resurrection because it is obviously, and I’m not pretending that I understand the resurrection, it is obviously very difficult to understand what it is that if we’re talking about a final state of the human state, which includes all the elements, which is a, let’s say, a culmination of all its elements, which should also include the body. That is, the totality of your person also includes your body. So if you view the moment of totality of yourself, it should also include your body. And so that is what they’re trying to deal with. We’re going to look at the meaning of what it could mean a little bit later. But until now, that’s what he’s been kind of making fun of. But then here comes the attack. Christians were very anxious about these scenarios. The anxiety went hand in hand with racist projections of cannibalism onto non-Christians, especially Jews and Muslims who were accused of ritual cannibalism. Ironic given ritual cannibalism in Catholicism, the Eucharist. Geraldine Heng’s wonderful book, Empire of Magic, looks at these racist anxieties, as well as the actual historical cannibalism that European crusaders did in the Levant and at romances like Emmy Richard, Cœur de Lion, in which King Richard eats Muslims as a joke. Now I want to notice what he’s doing here. And so he’s saying, Christians used to project cannibalism onto non-Christians. And he’s saying that that is, you know, this kind of othering of the non-Christians. And dehumanizing the non-Christians as being cannibals, which is ironic because they themselves participated in the Eucharist, which was a form of cannibalism. Now notice, like I said, notice what he’s doing. I have said many times that if you want to understand the progressive mindset, if you want to understand it, you have to, you can compare it to the traditional mindset. Traditional people, especially like traditional European people, tend to demonize that which is outside of their identity. They tend to dehumanize that which is outside of their group. You know, and that’s an unfortunate side effect of identity. Progressives, what they do is they dehumanize those that were there before them. They tend to see people in the Middle Ages as idiots, as kind of, you know, more closer to apes, closer to those, you know, we’ve now evolved, we’ve progressed further. And so it’s actually the exact same structure. If the traditional mind tended to see the people on the outside as closer to animals, the progressive mind tends to see those that were before them as closer to animals. And so Eric Wade, while accusing, while accusing, saying that the Christians accused the outsiders of being cannibals, he in his own email is suggesting that Augustine is a cannibal. Maybe not directly, but indirectly, he’s suggesting that Augustine is normalizing cannibalism and he’s mocking him because he’s doing that. And so he is doing the exact same thing himself as he is accusing others of doing. And this is just how the thing works. If you look at my work, you’ll probably find that you will find the exact same pattern. These patterns of othering are universal. They are very difficult to avoid. And so even if you watch my videos, you’ll probably find me doing that at some point. But it’s interesting to notice that just as he’s accusing those medieval Christians of being horribly racist and dehumanizing, he himself is mocking those medieval Christians and humorously suggesting that they normalize cannibalism. All right. Now, then he says cannibalism was also associated with sodomites. In fact, Thomas Aquinas calls sodomy a bestial vice that he associates with cannibalism. This may be because sodomy was often associated with non-Christians. Aquinas thought sodomy meant male-male sexual acts, bestiality and cannibalism. Now here is really where this is really where he exposes the fact that his own political tendency, that his own political desires are blinding him to what the possible meaning of this whole cannibal baby situation is actually talking about. Now, all right. So now we need to look at what this could possibly mean. Now I have to first, I have to at first concede that it is extremely difficult to understand some of this stuff because we do not think exactly the same way that the medieval think of. We do not think, we do not think in terms of this eschatological moment. You know, as Christians we believe it but it’s very difficult for us to understand the eschatological moment. And so what I like to do is to help you understand the eschatological moment is to help people see it ontologically, is to help you understand the actual ontological structure of a being and its totality, the totality of its ontological structure and that can help you understand what it is that these medieval Christians are talking about when they’re talking about this final restoration at the end which will be the totality of your being, which will restore the totality of your being. Okay, so let’s look at the problem of cannibalism in terms of this ontological structure. So for those of you who have read Mathieu’s book, towards the end this will be very helpful to you to understand what I’m going to be talking about right now. So now imagine you have the human people, the human nature, right? Human nature and if you read the quotes of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, you’ll see that they talk about the substance of human nature. So human nature does not have manifestation, it’s a principle, it’s a logo, it’s an identity. And so human nature for it to exist needs body, it needs substance. And so the human body is part of that substance and in order to preserve that human body, the human person has to go outside of the human body, take things from the outside and bring them in, join them into their body in order for the body to continue. And so that’s what eating is. Eating is you have the human person, you have the human body and in order for that to continue, you constantly have to go outside of humanity, you have to eat other animals, you have to you have to eat things that are outside of your identity in order for you to preserve that body. Now the problem happens, what happens if you now remain within the identity? What happens if you self-eat? And so a human person, you eat a human body. And so what you’re doing is you’re actually breaking the normal relationship of identity. You’re breaking the ontological hierarchy. You are, instead of you eating something which is outside of human nature, you’re eating something which is already the substance of human nature. So you’re creating this loop within the structure. Instead of it being a nice pyramid where you have the human nature which is eating things on the outside and integrating it into human as the substance of human nature, you’re eating something which is already the substance of human nature. So it creates this causal loop. And that really, that’s the problem of the margin. That’s the problem of the breakdown, one of the problems of the breakdown of identity is when there is this circularity, when there is this causal loop. And so if you eat human body, at some point you are going to run out of body. You are going to exhaust the body. It’s hard to understand it in terms of cannibalism. Let’s look at it in terms of self, if you look at it in terms of incest, it’s probably a lot easier to understand. And so if you have a father who has a daughter and then has a child with that daughter, and then the same father would have a child with his granddaughter, at some point the causal loop has been completely broken. And so there is no more a normal distribution of identity. The father is both the father to his daughter, the husband to his daughter, but then also the husband to his granddaughter. And so the granddaughter’s grandfather is both her husband, her father, and her grandfather. And so the normal levels of causality have been completely broken. And this self-eating, this remaining within the same group, constantly within the same group is going to exhaust the body. Now if you don’t understand it ontologically, if you don’t understand it metaphysically, you can at least understand it if you look at those phenomena in the world today. That is, that if we know that if mad cow disease, with cows eating other cows, at some point those cows become insane and they break down, the cows break down when they self-eat at some point because they run out of body. The same thing happens with incest. In communities that are too tight and are too close together, then those communities will at some point run out of body. The genetic material will be exhausted. You have to be getting potentiality from the outside all the time in order for a system to remain healthy. If you shut down the system, at some point you run out of body. And so if you understand it that way, you can understand why the problem of the cannibal baby was so important because it was trying to understand this problem of identity and substance and what happens if you just self-consume. And it really is, if you think of the Ouroboros and the snake eating its own tail and this being on the edge of the world, this being the image of chaos, that is what cannibalism is the problem that it is talking about. And so there is also, in the Bible, there is also a way for this problem of causality to act as a strange restoration. That although it is this breakdown, it also in some cases can become a form of resurrection or a form of restoration. And so that is why communion, that is part of why communion has an aspect of cannibalism to it. Communion is not cannibalism in the strict sense, but it takes some of the symbolism of cannibalism, joins it with the symbolism of productive eating, of eating normal food, of communion and all of that, and by bringing all those things together, that is what creates the totality. That is what creates the resurrection. You see the same in the Bible with the laws of the Leverit, which is that you are not allowed to marry your brother’s wife, because if you married your brother’s wife you are breaking this problem of causality, but when your brother died, then you could give a son to your brother by marrying his wife. And so by using this self-causality, it acted as a kind of resurrection. We talk about trampling down death by death, of flipping death on its head. Now it is really important to understand that it is not that the forms of that regular cannibalism or that incest was obviously always an unacceptable thing, because it does create that breakdown. But symbolically, within a very strict context, in the context of communion or the context of the Leverit, it was a manner to use this death, to use death to flip it back on itself and to create a new life, let’s say. And so now if you look then at the last quote that he talks about, sodomy and sodomites, that he says it is probably because sodomy was associated with non-Christians, if he could only understand what I explained to you, then he would understand why cannibalism is associated with sodomy. Because just like sodomy is self-love, it is the love of a man for another man, it also runs out of body. It is a sterile relationship. It does not produce bodies. The same way that if you self-eat, cannibalism at some point exhausts body. And so if he had only understood that the ontological discussion that is happening and not only looked at it generously, instead of only looking at something to make it possible for him to virtue signal to the world about how woke he is and how horribly stupid those medieval Christians were, then maybe he could understand something about the nature of reality and how these things work. So I know this was a weird post in terms of cannibalism, but I always like when I see something very strange coming out of the Christian tradition, I always like to explain it in order to help you understand how these patterns work. And so as usual, please go ahead and comment below, get involved in the discussion. There is, like I’ve told you before, there’s also a Facebook group in which you can discuss these things. And yeah, guys, I promised you a video on credit and it is coming. But it’s very difficult to think about this stuff. So I will put it together soon. And I thought that in the meantime, this small video on cannibal babies would be interesting. So I’ll see you soon. If you enjoy the Symbolic World content, there’s a lot of things you can do to help us out. If you’re not subscribed, please do go ahead and share this to all your friends. If you can get involved in the discussion. We have a Facebook group in which people can talk about these subjects. I will put all those links in the description. And also, if you can, please support us financially by going to my website, www.thesymbolicworld.com slash support. And I also have a Patreon and a Subscribestar. So thanks again and I will see you soon.