https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3Y2XNfUNeTo
So hello everybody, I am here with Father John Strickland. Father John is a parish priest in the Seattle area in Poulsbo. I hope I said that right, in Poulsbo on the west coast. He is also on his, he has a PhD in history and so on the side he also writes a blog. He has made a podcast called the Paradise in Utopia and he is now publishing books. He’s published a book called The Age of Paradise, which I have read and his second volume, which has it come out yet? I think it’s coming out soon or it? Yeah it came out in November, Age of Division. That’s out. So The Age of Division, which I’m reading at this moment and I think so much of what he is hinting at, the things he’s bringing to the fore, are extremely important at this time to help us understand history and a more global vision of Christian history. This is Jonathan Pajot, welcome to the symbolic world. And so Father John, I just read the first volume, I’m reading the second volume. I’m very excited to see you do the things you do. One of the frustrations that I’ve had is, as I explored the Church Fathers and I explored the history of the East, I realized just how much was lacking in my own historical understanding and how so many movements that I’ve seen in the past have been lost. I realized just how much was lacking in my own understanding and how so many movements that happen even in the West cannot be properly understood, unless we have this more global vision of the East and the West together in this discussion, in this conflict, you know, a mix of influences. So, John, tell us a little bit about what prompted you to want to tell this narrative. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan. Well, um, so I was teaching a university full time before I went off to seminary and became a parish priest and that’s my main work now being a parish priest here. But in Poulsbo, but I’ve always had this really, really strong interest in history and in the legacy of Christianity within the history of the West. I’ve always been interested in that. That’s what got me interested in history initially. And, and so when I decided to study history, you know, at the graduate level, all that, I just, I just, I got to a point where I really wanted to understand, as you say, globally, the history of the West from a Christian point of view. It was always dismaying to me to see how little attention was given to, to the role of Christianity in our culture and in the formation of our culture. And when attention was given to it often it was negative, you know, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials, you know, all those things. So I really wanted to learn about that. And then I wanted to tell the story. And so in the past few years, I’ve had an opportunity to start writing these books that are a history of Christ from its origins, all the way up to the present, which is designed not only as a narrative that’s interesting and just hopefully enjoyable to read, hopefully interesting just to learn about history. I think that’s really important in itself. But I really wanted to contribute to our ongoing discussion we have today in America, Canada, the West, of where we are culturally and why we face so many problems culturally, as almost everyone would, you know, admit today on the left or the right. And so my book series is itself titled The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was, and it’s a history of what I call Christendom, a word that I appropriate from its kind of medieval use. I don’t like the term medieval. We can talk about that later maybe, but it’s recognizable. So that term arose as a term defining action civilization. And I think that even though we live in a post-Christian society today, it’s still a post-Christian Christendom. It’s still a civilization that is fundamentally shaped by Christianity. And so my project, it’s in four volumes. You mentioned the first two of those. I’m working right now on the third volume, The Age of Utopia. That should be out by the end of the year, and then the final volume will be on the 20th century. It’s provisionally entitled The Age of Nihilism. This is an effort to understand how Christendom, first of all, arose and then over the course of time was changed and was altered into what we see today, which in many ways is post-Christian, but it still has, as I say by using that term utopia, it still has a very strong kind of roots in the Christendom of the past. Yeah. So that’s what I’m trying to do. Yeah. I think that it’s very, I was really excited to read the book because, you know, some people have seen that I interviewed Tom Holland recently, and he has a similar position in terms of his discovery that to what extent Christianity is at the core of our value system is at the core of what we understand to be a person. You know, so many things about how we understand reality comes from Christianity, and the fact that it has been so pooh-poohed in the past and it’s been kind of cast to the side, you know, it gives us an opportunity to now tell a better story. And what I love about your book is that, you know, Tom focuses mostly on the West and he himself kind of expressed how he’s frustrated that he couldn’t include the East, but in your series, that’s really the story you tell. I think it’s important for everybody definitely to read the book because it gives you a narrative of history that we haven’t had in the past. And one of the things you want to do, and maybe you can expound on that a little bit for us, is you want to reconnect the East and West story. You want to show us how there is an inevitable connection between the East and the West in the way in which even the Middle Ages developed. Yeah, you know, there’s two things you mentioned there that I think are really important, Jonathan. One is Christendom, as I define it, is not a political system. It’s not a union of church and state or something like that, you know, the loss of which is lamented by reactionary or conservative Christians today. It’s much more than that. The state inevitably becomes part of the scope of the Christian transformation of the cosmos or world, but that’s only part of it. And so I locate the origin of this civilization with a supporting culture, as I define it, that directs its members toward the heavenly transformation of the world. That’s my definition of Christendom. I located it at the very beginning of church history, at Pentecost actually, because I think it’s right there in the Book of Acts and in other early Christian documents, which I cite in Volume 1, The Age of Paradise. And for three centuries, it was a vital dynamic element. It was a subculture. It wasn’t a dominant culture. It was a proto-civilization. It wasn’t a full civilization yet, but it was there from the start, continuously acting in this world. It’s exactly what is a traditional Christian cosmology or understanding of the world, because I think that there’s something we’re missing in our contemporary modern debate about Christianity, and that is how very cosmologically affirmative it was and historically was in that first millennium that I talk about in the first volume. And it embraced the world. It tried to transform the world, reject it and run away from it. It really was interested in engaging it, and that’s what we’re missing, I think, a lot of the time today. Yeah, and I think it’s very fascinating because people portray Christianity as this denial of the world and, you know, kind of this weird Nietzschean vision that Christianity is a kind of hatred of the world and, you know, the naysayers. Exactly. But that, like you said, that is not what we see. There is this notion of self-sacrifice. All of this is part of understanding that the Christian, you know, self-sacrificial love is the zeitgeist of Christianity, but the fruits of that are these communities that are bound together in love and that, you know, kind of flow out into reality. You know, you see how literally the saints died in certain places and then geography started to transform around these saints’ relics and how the world itself, you know, pilgrimage places became new centers for civilization. Christianity reorganized even the space of the Roman Empire, not just, obviously it reorganized its ethics and its way of being, but it actually reorganized even the geography of the Roman Empire. I mean, Constantinople is the ultimate example of how Christianity itself reorganized the empire. It was the city, it was the Christian city. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You know, Jerusalem became the center of the world, you know, and understood in the Christian sense. Yeah. And that’s why the Crusades were always focused on it so much. And also we could talk about government politics and how that’s really not the center. It’s an important part of the Christian, traditional Christian vision of the cosmos, but, or culture, but it’s not the main center of it. It’s like you say, it’s the world, it’s the world that’s filled with the presence of a living God. It’s a world that has been penetrated by the kingdom of heaven, which has drawn near to it, what I call paradise, that experience of paradise. But the other thing you mentioned, and certainly I want to give time to this too, if you’re interested in talking about it, is that point that you, you know, you noted that I’m trying to link East and West here. This is a history of the West for sure. Most of my work, certainly in volumes after volume one, like the one that just came out, the Age of the Division, it’s mostly a narrative about the West, so there’s plenty about Byzantium and Russia there as well. And we’ll be going forward, but, you know, it’s really interesting if you look at the history, Jonathan, for the first millennium, you know, we in the West were so used to thinking the West dominates the West, you know, kind of leads the way, culturally speaking, everything kind of comes from the West. And, and if you go back in time, it’s like an onion, peeling an onion, you start to see that there’s no West. There is a West, but it’s not really, it’s not the center. If you go back far enough into the first millennium, you find the center is the East. And one of my chapters in the book, Age of Paradise, is called When the West Was Still Eastern. I talked there about how for two centuries, the popes of Rome, which we think essentially, you know, the kind of symbols of Western civilization at that time, were all recruits from the East, from Syria and especially from Constantinople and eastern parts of the empire at that time. And they came as important fathers of the church, theologians who contributed to our understanding of culture, especially what it means to be human, anthropology, and what it means to what the world is, cosmology, such as Maximus the confessor. They were Eastern. They came to the West, Maximus helped organize a council in Rome itself. And, and these are people that are just forgotten, you know, Gregory the Great, the Pope of Rome. I have a son named after him actually. He was just a fantastic example. Having lived in Constantinople for a few years, he came back and became Pope of Rome. And he’s recognized certainly in the West by Roman Catholics, for instance, as the most important person of his generation and beyond. And so, you know, the very Eastern understanding of the cosmos and the place of culture within the cosmos. But it’s interesting to be recovered. I think there’s a polemic, there’s such a polemic reason why we’ve come to learn history this way, right, there’s a, there’s one of the, one of the, let’s say one of the tools or one of the weapons of the Enlightenment has been to paint this idea of the Middle Ages as this dark, regressive, you know, backwards age. And usually what they mean is basically England and Northern France like that’s that that’s kind of like it’s France and England basically that they’re talking about maybe Germany is the kind of, and it’s only for a few centuries. And if you take into account Constantinople, the very idea of the dark age completely vanishes. There is no dark age. It’s actually that, you know, Constantine sets his capital in the East, and then that capital becomes the cultural center for all of Christendom. And the influence of Constantinople reigns all and even even at the conversion of Charlemagne, you can actually see how Charlemagne takes on the tropes of Constantinople visually in terms of artistic history you can notice how he takes on the imagery that gets from Constantinople. And so like Constantinople had running water and had, you know, education and had all the things of a civilization. And so I think that the reason one of the reason why we don’t know about it is a polemical reason is that we don’t want, we don’t that the secular modern secularism doesn’t like the idea that the Middle Ages don’t exist the way that you portray them. Yeah, you know the the term medieval is interesting I’m actually writing about that in the age of utopia as I, as we speak, the whole concept of the Middle Ages of course as you say is a polemical concept it’s a it’s a weapon of the Enlightenment the term wasn’t actually coined and, and then became established in Western culture, only in after about 1700 during the courts of the Enlightenment. And it was really the product of the of the so called Renaissance when first Petrarch, father of Renaissance humanism likened the whole history the thousand years preceded him as a darkness, a cultural that overcame the West from which he needed to escape. Yeah, and his escape was into the secular into the secular non religious non Christian on Christian kind of realm of the, of the pre Christian culture of pagan of pagan Greece and Rome, and others after him, And so when you look at this coin, you know this idea of light and darkness and then this was this became kind of consolidated by the by the Enlightenment. It really dismisses 1000 years of Western history. Yeah. And you can, it’s, it’s funny because in a way if you look at the context you can have some sympathy for Petrarch like because he’s coming out of the plague and so you can understand it. Here he is like no seeing these bodies dead, all these dead bodies and this whole breakdown of, of culture that’s happening because of a disease, and then projecting that back onto history for the for 1000 years you know. And so I mean I can I can kind of have some a little bit of sympathy for Petrarch, but I don’t necessarily have sympathy for those who weaponized his, his vision in in the in the Enlightenment and you know how can you look at a Gothic even like even in terms of the West like how can you look at a Gothic Cathedral and say, dark ages. And I don’t understand how that’s possible. I mean there was a breakdown in terms of these non Roman pagans who were who are kind of taking over for a little while but as soon as they become. As soon as they become Christianized you see the transformation, start to happen and that’s one of the interesting things that you explore I think in your book is that on the one hand you’re not afraid to show the dark side of some of the things that happen leaving in terms of the conversion or Charlemagne and all of these figures that convert, and you can see that that there’s still some elements that they have to deal with that has to be transformed, but nonetheless you can point to actual fruits of the changes which occurred in their even if it wasn’t total. So yeah, Constantine did kill his, his son, and that’s a horrible thing, but in in that change from a pagan world where it was absolutely normal to do that kind of thing it or this constant destruction of the of the hairs and this, you know, these horrible emperors that were doing monstrous things, you can nonetheless see the difference and you can see the transformation even if it’s not, it doesn’t bring us into the Holy of Holies let’s say right away. And it won’t, yeah for sure it won’t in this world and I try to emphasize that you know the age of paradise so called is not an age when everyone lived in paradise and everything was you know just happy and and beautiful and holy and you know good no there was darkness everywhere I mean it was darkness everywhere and there always will be darkness as I understand it as someone who reads the scriptures and thinks about the Christian Revelation seriously, I think they’re always going to be in the dark. There will be that darkness that I spoke of that Tenebrae in Latin. You know, what’s interesting there Jonathan is it wasn’t just as I understand is I, as I do the research and think about it, you know when Petrarch had this reaction to this kind of reaction to his culture it wasn’t, I think, driven just by the, the plague the black which he did live through his, one of his sons was actually perished as a young man from the plague. So he knew it quite well, but I don’t think that’s really the main thing I think what’s going on there. And this is what I, this is what I bring out in the second volume the age of division is that once that that disconnection between the East took place, once the West no longer was rooted in Eastern Christendom. There’s a real, there’s a real change a real shift in in the culture, and I do believe this is extremely important for understanding why we’re dealing with kind of out of control abortion and why we’re dealing with political correctness and all the other stuff that afflicts our modern culture today, because that detachment from a civilization with a supporting culture in the East that directed its members toward heavenly transformation of the world. When that happened, a great pessimism began to seep into Western culture you can see this in what I call the the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the apricot of the show what is turning what is turning frustration in our institutions. And then he turned his. return almost return almost desperate to turn because he was a smart brilliant man and so a smart brilliant man and also enjoyable to read his turn toward what is called the secure toward what is called the second one the secular toward what is called the second one the secularity, the secular world, a world that is on , a spiritually caliberwise figure untransformed a Kunden um become detached from the culture of the East for a few centuries now. That’s really the beginning of what became the Renaissance and its humanism and the enlightenment and the de-liturgification of art. When art no longer had a liturgical role to play and it became an end in itself. The Renaissance being the the classic example of that. Yeah and I think there’s also this you hint at it a little bit also in the book and I have like I said I’m still in the on the first hundred pages of the second volume but you know the problem of the uh the iconoclastic controversy it’s something which people especially as an artist I take that very seriously but it’s something which is it’s very important and and people ignore how Charlemagne and and the Frankish court is metal is like mixed in with the whole question of the iconoclastic controversy and the solution that the Franks gave and that the the West ultimately kind of arrived to was something which didn’t totally integrate theologically the image which kind of said we have these images but we don’t see them as liturgical we don’t see them as participating in this in the reverence and the veneration and then ultimately kind of moving up towards the worship of God and and I think that that’s that’s like a little I don’t know if you talk about that but I’ve always thought that that’s a little seed which was already planted in the West and then as the Renaissance came and then the Reformation came there were no arguments people didn’t have uh they didn’t have uh Saint John of Damascene’s incarnational argument to be able to explain why we have this stuff in the church and so it kind of this kind of fell flat by the time the Protestants arrived no one I think John Calvin even in his when he talks about images he doesn’t even address Saint John Damascene’s argument he doesn’t talk about the incarnational argument at all so that was all the way back during the time of the iconoclastic controversy where the excess of the East and the and the kind of and the West this strange mixture created this problem which which just continued on right you know the the West never developed a really clear coherent understanding of the image you know in the East of course with um iconoclasm they were forced to and John of Damascus and and Theodore the Studite came forward and and articulated as fathers of the church articulated what the image is you know and like you said it’s it’s grounded in the incarnation it’s grounded in traditional Christianities understanding that the world is not disconnected from heaven from God from paradise but the world is filled with presence sacramentally especially and liturgically the presence of heaven and that’s what the image and the theology of the image does in the in the in the East and in the West Charlemagne’s court you know we’re talking Charlemagne for your listeners and viewers I mean it’d be like about 800 so this is still before the great schism but it’s about 800 this is going on and his Frankish theologians they didn’t get that at all they saw the image as being pedagogical only as being something that’s useful for teaching and that’s that’s that’s that’s fine that’s good that’s part of it but as the fathers of the seventh ecumenical council in the East had said it’s it’s good for teaching but primarily it bears witness to the fact that God became human in the incarnation the world and cosmos is not on its own uh living out its life for its own sake it is now joined to heaven and to eternal eternity and that’s that really is the break I think that’s it and after that you know you mentioned the renaissance boy I mean you talk about what was going on in the renaissance and Calvin’s reaction to it you look at what the renaissance did with art the humanists I mean our culture celebrates Michelangelo and Raphael and and Titian and all these famous you know Leonardo and but if you look at these from a from a deep historically deep point of view it’s an it’s it’s just an aberration it’s it’s it’s so weird to see what they were doing with their art yeah I agree I mean obviously I agree that’s why I’m an iconographer and uh you know I had that this interesting discussion recently with a Catholic uh Thomas you know about this problem of nakedness in art and and why in the West they’ve kind of accepted that and I really I see them to me the the renaissance is a pagan move it’s a it’s a move towards a pagan thinking a pagan aesthetic and pagan sensuality and so like you said there’s a sympathy for Calvin or the reformers who are reacting to this like you’re reacting to a Rubens in a church with all this like naked like orgiastic flesh in the altar and you’re like okay so this is it like this is what we’re gonna have in the church now so there’s a there’s a certain sympathy for for as as you move into extremes sometimes you can understand the reaction to something which is already excessive and then it moves into another excess and then after that it’s the history of the West it’s just from one excess to the other from one extreme to the other all the way into the you know into the utopian age of our of the of the modern world right now but I love like to me I’m really happy that you say that because I’ve been kind of secretly secretly thinking that the iconoclastic controversy and this the relationship between Charlemagne and the conflict that happened and the wars of iconoclasm that happened at the time are are one of the key key moments in the definition of the West and the the separation between the two and how the the problem of understanding the incarnation and the transformational aspect of reality appears very clearly in that moment where you know even today when I talk to to to Catholics and Protestants sometimes when I talk about the transformational aspect of what Christ brought and how we are called to be brought into God and to participate in the life of God you know like the people they they don’t feel good about that they feel uneasy about it but you see an example of that right there in in Charlemagne’s court at that time yeah and that’s simply the doctrine of the incarnation you know that’s why the orthodox east is very comfortable using the word theosis or deification when it talks about its understanding of salvation it’s not just you know release from condemnation escape from punishment it is but it’s much more much more than that it’s participation in the life of God and and that’s that’s really central to there’s a I keep I hate keeping this harp on Charlemagne I mean because I’m French is one of the reasons why I’m so interested in Charlemagne but the fascination of that moment to me is so important because you see even that as Charlemagne is distancing himself from the east and saying I’m the emperor and and he was named emperor after Irene’s deceased husband like in the order of of of uh he wasn’t like emperor of the of the west he was like emperor and after the Byzantine emperor and so as he’s distancing himself he’s taking on all the visuals of the of the east and so you can the Carolingian renaissance is basically a kind of westernizing of Byzantine imagery and you see it in the in the in the in the ivories and the imagery and the mosaics all of this at Aachen like this kind of golden look that he’s trying to imitate so it’s a weird it’s an interesting like I’m separating myself but I’m also being completely influenced by this this society that’s it it’s it’s very strange it’s almost you know uh schizophrenic because there is this total identification with the Byzantine example the emperors of Rome were the Byzantine emperors and um and Charlemagne now assumes that because he’s conquered so much of the west and he wants to integrate a big powerful imperial state now pope of Rome has gotten fed up with the east because of iconoclasm and and it’s Irene I mean I mean uh the empress and I have sympathy for them as well I would like what would you have done if you were pope and then you know this empress is is killing you know her own children and like okay what do we do here declaring herself emperor and like okay this is not going well oh it’s intolerable what was going on at the Byzantine court in the east was just intolerable over and over again and and it was heroic for the papacy to try to find you know to stand up against that and and and as I say the the papacy played a very heroic role in much of the first millennium and even beyond um trying to you know correct uh mistakes that were being made by political authorities especially emperors you know like that but back to you know to Charlemagne what’s interesting there is that on the one hand he totally identifies like you say he builds his new temple in Aachen uh famously built and modeled on on Byzantine architecture he assumes this almost caeseropapus kind of um he’s he’s almost like a priest he couldn’t you know he was really interested in theology had theology read to him Charlemagne be sitting at his dinner table in his palace hall and he would order his servants to read the city of gahad by a gust into him while he’s munching on his dinner you know I mean that’s that’s the mind that Charlemagne that Charlemagne had but his theologians these frankish theologians were so I mean they’re like the the first um cultural activists you might say they were shock troops of a new western identity that is distinctly and by definition not eastern you see and that’s the break that’s where it starts of course nothing’s done in a single generation in history but that’s where it really starts you start to see the formation of an identity we call the west distinct from the east or the greeks so so I think what what happens after Charlemagne is you get this different culture which defines itself against the east not with but against the east then the great schism comes a couple centuries later 1054 is the excommunication then after that all these changes start to happen under the influence of the papal reformation of that time you get papal supremacy you get um you get the um the the crusade starting within about 50 years of the great schism um beyond that you get doctrines like purgatory which projects um the experience of paradise for someone you know living in that culture purgatory is this tremendously you know um intimidating process of punishment after death post-mortem punishment that that the effect its effect on the culture of the of the west is is profound that culture becomes inherently you know very deeply penitential pessimistic um the experience of paradise that I tried to document in the first millennium and my first book gets put off until after that purgatory you know plays out uh thousands of years whatever a year isn’t beyond this world and and so you you get all these you know the the um the paintings of geoto as beautiful as those are in the 14th century those paintings you know are intensely um um they’re designed to create an intense uh reaction or response of of sorrow and penitential um uh kind of doubt and and and and introspection um that itself contributes to a growing pessimism and and so this this tendency in in the west after charlmain and the great schism is more and more to to lose that incarnational culture that was so strong in the east and so strong in the west too during the first millennium but now after the great schism and that great division it becomes much weaker that’s what happens with petrarch and the uh and the renaissance so-called the humanists come forward and they say you know this is and they’re not they don’t put it this way petrarch almost puts it this way but they don’t quite put it this way but what they do is they seek they seek um they seek human fulfillment no longer um in a world that’s been transformed by heaven they seek human fulfillment in a world for its own sake a secular so-called secular world and that’s their contribution that’s why renaissance painting is so naturalistic and so fleshy and and so focused on the artist as genius you know Michelangelo signing you know the story about his pieta that famous statue of the virgin mary holding the dead christ that gets put in st peters he he he finishes the the uh the carving of it in one of his most famous works and it’s put you know for everyone to come look at and he stands back in the shadows we’re told by a contemporary account to see what the reaction is because artists are very very competitive then and for commissions and all that and some bumpkin comes in from the countryside and says that’s beautiful who did that and some guy some bumpkin standing next to him says i think it was a guy named rafael i don’t know what he says exactly it’s not mickle angelo mickle angelo recorded that he became infuriated he went home that night and came back to the church with the hammer and chisel and he chiseled right across the strap of the virgin mary’s chest this is the work of mickle angelo and that’s the there have been autographs before that but that’s the origin of the artist’s art autograph that’s so necessary in modern art you know the artist is is is pushing the limits has radical things to say and to reveal or mickle angelo’s decoration of the sistine chapel you talk about like revolutions and liturgical life this is a chapel with an altar and over the altar you see the sea of naked bodies right it’s it’s it’s the last judgment too it’s not even what you would see the incarnational icon in the east was the the virgin mary of the sign with christ you know being born into this world of from from a human mother now it’s the last judgment and all of its terror um you know the the famous uh creation of of adam yeah in the system example he modeled his image of of of god creating adam uh he modeled him on zeus yeah if you go back and you’ll get statues of zeus this highway you know this like he’s been to you know gold’s gem or something is really you know the phoenix chest and he just looks with a white beard and all that stuff i mean that’s just it’s beautiful and it’s in a you know worldly sense but it no longer has any liturgical or sacramental significance at all yeah there’s so many things wrong with that painting i can’t even start i would like why the naked like all the naked babies and why is there like a naked teenager next to him and it’s just very disturbing michael angelo’s paintings are very are very disturbing um look at or afael think about you know the famous sistine madonna um you know that’s one of his many madonnas um by the way rafael was writing about this in my new volume the age of utopia it’s accounted by by a contemporary his name was vasari about the history of the wives of the painters you probably know about it he he said that rafael was like a total womanizer yeah and he would you know he would he would seduce his uh his female models that were sitting as models for him and modeling is a totally new thing too um and when he was painting they would they were they were modeling the the madonnas for him but in assisting madonna he’s got those two little what are they angel thingies i call them at the bottom yeah they they changed they had these figures in roman art which were called putti were like these little domestic gods you know like these little babies with with wings uh and and then they they somehow changed the cherubs into these putti and so the cherubs which are these like flaming you know flaming glories of god with like multi multi eyes and wings became these cute little uh naked babies with wings you you want to poke them in the belly like the pillsbury doble and they become totally insignificant and powerless and that i think jonathan is the sign of the shift in culture now for the secular transformation of the world from a heavenly one the heavenly powers you know the archangels angels seraphim cherubim may stand about the throne of god you know we can quote the divine liturgy um these no longer are relevant so they become these two little bored looking cutesy little um angel thingies at the bottom of the painting and that really becomes the image in in baroque painting as you know better than i yeah of what an angel looks like like it’s just a cute little powerless unintimidating baby because there are no demons to worry about because man is autonomous you know that’s pico delamere andola’s argument um in the dignity of man during that during the renaissance that man is autonomous he’s in control of his own life now and and you just get this demonization this diminishing of the heavenly presence in this world and angels are now represented even as christ how do you pray to christ when he’s a naked little baby you know i mean you know with his forgive me but it’s janet alya exposed that’s not a liturgical image anymore yeah it’s interesting though is something that i’ve been thinking about in terms of art is that there’s something like for example michael angelo’s work it never landed right it never landed it never created a tradition it never created so nobody copied his images nobody copied those paintings and made them into other whereas i think that there’s a there’s still an implicit thing in the catholic tradition there’s still the possibility of so there are still images which appear later which become almost iconographic you know in their use let’s say so if you have someone who has little saints cards with a prayer behind it you know there’s something about that which even though they don’t have the theology to explain it there’s an intuition that people have about their connection to the saint and the way that say that these little saint cards that that are cheap and you can buy at a at a little gift shop the way that they’re framed even though they’re still western and they still have a kind of photo a photo type realism to them they’ve been sobered up they’ve been brought into a kind of more frontal pose all of these elements of iconography nonetheless kind of persist in this folk in in in a kind of into intuitive folk world that continues to exist even though in the big churches in the high churches there’s all these diagonals and all this madness and all this these floating vestments and all of this kind of craziness you know for the for the humble pilgrim and the little person who has a the card of a saint in their in their house it’ll still look something like an icon there’ll be a little bit a tinge of of a remembrance of that of that world because it is more connected to how we actually engage people we the type of you know you don’t meet naked people and you you can’t you can’t pray i mean i don’t know like have this like kind of sensual naked person in front of you and you’re supposed to you can’t look at them in the eye and then invoke them or you know ask for their prayers whereas these little saint cards where you just see the figure looking at you with a bit of a glow in the back it’s kind of tacky but nonetheless it has that it has a little bit of the iconic memory let’s say. Yes you’re right about that and i think that’s just instinctive it’s maybe intuitive there’s also of course this revival of eastern iconography you know that you see in a lot of western churches these days yeah but i think that’s that’s what people are seeking i think that that’s what human beings were paid for was a connection with heaven and and and that’s the way we we make it you know we don’t make it by looking at a fleshy image even if it’s in a church even if it’s over an altar it doesn’t do any it it can it it keeps us locked into this world into the secular it keeps us in the secular and man was made for more than the secular and and so that’s why people are trying i think especially today to find a way out of this i think it’s a it’s really a cultural dead end artistic dead end and i mean look at the 20th century you know Picasso the disintegration of the human figure you know that just you know i think humanism as it was expressed by Michelangelo like you said he never he never really created a tradition that followed him i think humanism just spent itself by the 20th century you know it was seen more and more by first Nietzsche but then artists of the movement and the the the dolly and the the surrealists and others Picasso for sure it was seen as a counterfeit as something that was just you know didn’t have substance and it’s interesting because even if you look at the history that there’s a little microcosm which happens in the renaissance but people don’t like to talk about so much because by the end of the renaissance there was a movement called mannerism and you see it even in in in Michelangelo’s late work where it’s as if this kind of glorious realism and this kind of glorious sensuality of the beginning of the renaissance quickly turned into this strange exaggeration the stretching of figures the the accessing color and and so you have this weird manneristic painting which happens at the end of the renaissance which is only broken by the council of trent and this kind of this kind of glorious baroque but you almost see a microcosm of what’s going to happen in the whole story right there in the renaissance by the end of it you have a disintegration of form and then if you if you take a bigger loop all the way into modernism you have the same move which moves all the way down into because as you kind of explore the sensual aspect of of something as you fall into the passions those passions have no limit right and they start to turn into weird things right you know the weird you know and that’s you can see that in the madness of pornography today which like it goes into all these weird little uh like fetishisms and stuff and so it was already there like right in the renaissance at the end of it and then the whole modernism that like you said you can see like by the time you get to francis bacon you’re like you know that you know a portrait by francis bacon was promised to you in michael angelo already at the beginning post-modernism yeah francis francis bacon is a good good example of where this all goes yeah exactly exactly um and so one of the things i like francis bacon though he he passed away i don’t know a while ago i think so yeah very dark figure in his himself like he he himself manifests a lot of the of the darkness of of what the nihilistic 20th century is you know in his in his story as well in many that’s what that’s what the artist of the post renaissance post michael angelo chiseling autograph is all about is self-stimulation um you know driven to to create um not to reflect heaven or anything else but to be the center of creation and radical breaking from everything that preceded it and and and sadly that is i think just creates a maniacal kind of personality the modern artist yeah exactly but you look at you look at traditional iconography as you well know jonathan i mean the the standard the way of life for an artist of Byzantium was to fast to fast you know to pray to receive the sacrament on a regular basis and then to hand on tradition um through the image that has been already preceded you and you don’t radically alter that image yeah and there’s been an there’s been uh an effort to now we have some iconograph some iconographical saints you know saint andre uh has been recognized as a saint you and you can get an icon of of andrea rubeliev and so there is this this and and his you know he was a monk his whole life was a was a was a transfigured life and so it showed in his in his painting um so i one of the things that i really like about the book is how you you also you it’s really what i like is that although you have a perspective you you’re careful not to fall into polemics as well where you show the promise for example like we talked about charlomene you show the promise of charlomene like how this could have gone like it could have been it could there there are some positive aspects which could have gone well and then showing how no this is how how things happened you know you do the same with constantin a real like there’s a certain amount of realism in the way you approach it you show the positive aspects of the papacy the negative aspects also even of how the moments when constantin opal was in heresy and was completely off the off the chart and so there there isn’t it isn’t just like a it isn’t just a it’s not a polemical work in that sense it really is trying to tell the bigger story right so that people can have a east west vision of this christian culture which if you just show one side of it you you you lose out on so much of of how the world ended up uh and and so i don’t know have you seen someone else do something similar to what you’re doing because i haven’t really seen that on the horizon i haven’t no i haven’t jonathan that’s that’s what motivates me i i guess you know is you know i mean i love the west i i mean well we’re westerners like we are really yeah yeah i mean i do and and i mean um you know we were talking before we started uh we’re just chatting a little bit and you mentioned something about i think some positive things about the west science and such i i i would i would really be at a loss i can’t even imagine you know what i would be i mean i can’t but without classical music and i can’t access classical music without modern technology you know i mean i’ve listened to i’ve listened to tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony like probably well of course that was his last let’s do something early like his whatever his uh violin concerto i’ve listened to tchaikovsky’s violin concerto a hundred times or a thousand times more than tchaikovsky ever listened to it i mean that’s one of the incredible things about modern technology is you know we can access things like that i can just play that you know as i’m driving or working or whatever and there’s so much that’s good yeah but um the back to your question what’s happened is is that there really is it’s it’s maybe polemical it’s maybe just a buy an unconscious bias but there is this sense that there is no ease someone knows something about there’s a russia and it’s always associated with a guy named putin you know and that’s kind of it maybe there’s some ballet maybe you know there’s tolstoy like that’s kind of the end of it and um there’s a you know the star track didn’t use a character called tchaikov or something like that’s like i mean it’s so minimalized and nothing’s known about it and and that’s what i was trying to do a lot of people who are today of which francis bacon that we just spoke of might be a good example of that is to say the problem of art um and and morality and stuff like that a lot of people who are concerned with the the the issues of today trace those back if they trace them at all a lot of people just talk about them i think that’s why trump was such a big deal because people don’t really want to think about history they or the past or origins of anything they just want to solve the problem in an immediate sense but if people think historically about where this came from you know i think it’d be interesting to do a kind of a survey but i think i think probably the majority people are going to say it’s the sexual revolution the 60s yeah yeah 60s you know that stuff um those who are maybe a little bit more like you know formed educationally might say oh no it’s more like the enlightenment did that to us and then others might go further back especially if they’re roman um they might go back to the protestant reformation there’s a brilliant book out there by um by a guy named brad gregory he teaches at noter day called the unintended reformation yeah how a religious revolution i forget how the rest of the subtitle but it’s essentially how the reformation out of control and produce the pluralistic of the world culture yeah and it’s really interesting and some would say that’s really when it happened but but what i’m trying to do is say you know what if you go back even beyond that you find that it’s really the great division that you know can be marked at 1054 although that’s not really everything yeah and and rachelle maine and and that’s really when we see the change that began to accumulate and uh and and and and meet to where we are today and no one again to answer your question my knowledge in the west i don’t know what they’re doing in russia or or greece i mean jan eros is a famous greek orthodox lay scholar and he’s written stuff like about kind of with historical kind of insights into things um some others have as well but no there’s almost i mean there’s nothing that i know of that’s out there right now tom holland is someone that you mentioned i loved his book dominion i i really loved some of his other books as well um but you know he’s it’s just not on his radar and having grown up in orange county you know i mean at you know in the 70s i was never told anything about the east i mean i wasn’t told that there even was an orthodox church there was roman catholic and odyssey churches and those are the two christian traditions that are you know behind the the civilization we live in and and um i don’t think anyone’s doing that right now no and i think i think like i’ve seen some people i was thinking while you were talking about if i’ve seen some people do that but sometimes it’s done in a way that’s so polemical that it’s almost it just turns you off right and so if i think that it’s important to be able to see for example in the the conversion of the north northern people and to understand that there were some positive elements in the franks as well there was this this desire to be christian and you can see it in the art you can see it in in the architecture that there is a positive element to it but that nonetheless there’s a seed which is planted and you can kind of see the seed being planted and it starts to grow and grow and grow and at some point the fruits of that start to appear and it doesn’t mean that within that there wasn’t also some there weren’t saints there were saints there there were people who who were in embodying this paradisial reality even though even though kind of let’s say the current was going against them but that it that we can nonetheless notice that the change was planted quite early in the in the history of the church and just kind of took form as as time went on and so it’s hard to say because i’m a french person and so like i i don’t like going against let’s say my own my own tradition and that’s why i also want to be able to see the the also the energy of the north let’s say is something which i think is important because it also happened in russia too it didn’t just happen in the in the west it happened both in the east and in the west and so there are positive elements of that energy that came down from the north and created some of the great kingdoms you know the norman kingdom of sicily and all these kind of these magical places which have a lot of strength to them but nonetheless that seed was planted and you can’t avoid it yeah no you’re right and and there was a lot you know that’s really admirable about franquish civilization and it’s spread in anglo-saxon and celtic you know i end the age of paradise on on the an island of the furthest the westernmost island of christenedum which is a scalig michael you know off the coast of ireland with the celtic monks there about the year 1000 praying and um and the kelts you know would have this tremendous tremendously cosmologically affirmative um uh piety that that really is so consistent with everything that we see in the first millennium and and and beyond that the the papacy played heroic a heroic role and it really was trying to you know edify and increase the the the quality of western civilization for centuries when the protestants came along they were doing a lot and have done a lot for for modern civilization that’s for sure yeah and so father john i want i want to thank you for your time and i really want to encourage everybody to go and get his book his books now and also check out the podcast which is is a kind of longer spoken version of some of the things that are in the book and also his blog on his website i’ll put all those links in the description so you can uh follow follow father john in his musings and in his thoughts about history so fire the john thank you for your time and hopefully you know once i finish your next book and maybe the other one we can have another conversation about how all this unfolds you bet jonathan yeah thanks for having me it’s nice talking to you all right