https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Wpwby7KF3nw
All right, so I’m gonna count the people who fall asleep. I’ll remember you forever. Of course I’m joking. All right, so I want to try to, I want to try to, I mean this is gonna be less, way less intense than the first talk, okay? I’m gonna try to bring it down into the level of practical reality. I, as you know, most of you, maybe some of you don’t know, I am an icon carver and that’s my, mostly my job, and I also do this speaking, but most of, mostly my job is to make images and to make objects for the church, for individuals, and so you’re gonna see a few of my objects as we go through this presentation. We’ll show a few things that I’m working on. And one of the things that we’re trying to do is to recapture a vision of art which would be fuller, which would be more encompassing of reality, more aware of what it means to act in the world, what is exactly the power that we have as human beings made in the image of God in the way that Father talked about, how is it that we can understand that. It’s very fascinating because yesterday I was at the, at the, the museum, the Fine Arts Museum, and I had forgotten, I don’t know why I’d forgotten, I should have known this, but, one of the people that has actually helped me to understand Christian art in a more traditionally Christian way is this man, Ananda Kumaraswamy. He’s not a Christian, he was Sangalese, you know, in East Asia, but he was the curator of the Boston Museum here in the 1920s, I think, and he’s actually responsible for their East Asia collection, and he’s responsible for just, the whole study of East Asian art, of Asian art in America is basically due to this guy, and sometimes the funny thing is that sometimes you need someone from the outside to point out to you your precious thing because you can’t see it anymore, you’ve forgotten it or whatever, and Kumaraswamy tried to bring back the notion of art the way that the medievals understood it, the way that the traditional Christians understood it, and art, even in Latin, the word art means well fitted together, something which is well put together, and so when we think about art today, we think of art as objects, right, so that’s art, this is not art, all of that type of attitude, we go to a museum to see art, you know, we buy art, put it up on our walls, that is not at all the traditional way of understanding art. Kumaraswamy always said the art remains in the artist, that is, art is the capacity that a person has, an artisan, to fit things well together, and in the image of what Father told us this morning, that is how you could understand the role of the human being with others, is to have the capacity to fit things well together, that is what we have been given as a capacity, and that is, let’s say, what we’re called to do, and when things are well fitted together, you know, you can imagine this as an image even of the body of the church, that’s exactly how St. Paul describes the church, as the body well fitted together in love, that is how communion exists, that is how the world becomes peace, all of these things is when things are well fitted together, when things are all in their proper place, and are all brought together in love, and that is ultimately what the artist can do, and when we think about it that way, we think that we realize that anybody can be an artist, Kumaraswamy has the great quote, he says, right, the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist, that is that all the things that we do, even in the ancient world, when we talk about, you know, the art of cheese making, or the art of rhetoric, or the art of this, and the art of that, this is what I’m trying to get back to, is the capacity to fit things well together, and so if you’re, you know, if you’re anything, if you’re a baker, you can make, you can put together a cake in a beautiful manner, right, you can bring the elements together and reveal the cake to us, and that, that action, it doesn’t only happen in the thing, it also happens in the people who participate in that thing, so if I’m making a good cake, I’m not just making it for it to be a good cake, right, what does it imply for it to be a good cake, it implies that I’m also pulling you into my cake, right, it’s not just the cake, you are part of my cake, because you’re the ones who are going to eat it, and you’re the ones who are going to recognize that I am a good artist as I bring this cake together, right, so the artisan, the good artist, is pulling the material things together, revealing the essence of something, but he’s inevitably also doing that in a community, it’s a participative act, as you, like I said, as you eat the cake, or as you listen to my speech, as you read my letter, as you, whatever it is that I’m making, it’s a pulling in of people as well, and that’s really, really, it’s so important to understand, because we have been ruined in the modern world to think that the ultimate, you know, the ultimate cultural experience is this, is to all go to a concert and all sit nicely, and to look at someone who’s playing music, and to listen carefully, and to go to a museum, to stand in a museum, and look at things, you know, that used to be somewhere, and appreciate the art, we think, now there’s nothing wrong with doing that, I was at the museum yesterday, there’s nothing wrong with doing that, but there is something wrong with believing that that is the highest form of culture, that the highest form of culture is going into a museum, and seeing these objects that are ripped out of their context, you know, I always say that museums are cemeteries for objects, it’s like they’re all dead, all these things are dead, they used to be part of something, part of someone’s life, and now they’re all, they’re all catalogued, you know, like you go to these museums, and see these white walls with objects, it’s so pretty, you know, anyways, it’s fine, it’s fine, go into museums, it’s fine, but it’s mostly to help you understand that this is not, that’s not the highest form of participation, or that’s not the highest form of culture, right, this, this is the highest form of culture, a procession, a parade, a folk dance, right, church service, why, why is it of a higher form of culture? Because it’s, it’s participative, it’s not, it’s just like, you know, when I talked about the problem of the Bible as being this thing that you just sit there, and you read, and it’s out there, and you analyze it as if it’s something outside of you, we’ve somehow created the same problem with culture, you’ll hear people say that you consume culture, have you ever heard that? My goodness, well we do, right, we watch Netflix, we go to the movies, it’s fine, like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that, but entertainment is not the highest form of art, entertainment is not the highest form of culture, participation is the highest form of culture, and so now, so how do we, how do we do this? I want you to read you just one little quote from Martin Heidegger, if you want to also understand this, this vision of art, Heidegger wrote a little text called the Questions Concerning Technology, it’s a great little text, and he used the word technology, but in the ancient world that the word for technology, and the word for art, as we understand it today, it was just the same, the word techne, it’s just, we know when I talked about how applied knowledge, well whether you apply it to making a painting, whether you apply it to building a cart, it’s both art, there is no, the weird difference that we’ve created between art and technology, and the weird difference we’ve created between high art and popular art, all of these distinctions are extremely nefarious for our understanding of how to participate in reality, and these are some of the things that we’re trying to break down, the solution that we’re proposing, I’m going to show you some artists, myself and other artists that are trying to do this, is we are trying to break down the very presupposition of art, the proposition of this pattern that I’m telling you about, the proposition in a way of sacred art, in its understanding as participative art, right now it’s the most radical thing you can do, so I’m going to show you some of the things, and I’m going to encourage some of the artists to think, because we always need more people to get involved in this, so Heidegger talks about how techne, or art, is a form of truth, a form of unveiling, and he says, whoever builds a house or a ship, or forges a sacrificial chalice, reveals what is to be brought forth, so it’s an act of revealing, this revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of the ship or the house, a house at first is not a house, it’s two things, it’s a plan, and it’s a bunch of pieces of wood, so you have something invisible, a pattern, then you can have a bunch of stuff, and what you want to do, is you want to connect those two together, so it gathers in advance the aspect and the matter of the ship or house, with the view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating, nor in the using of means, and here he’s talking directly at the the marksman, the marxist, and also this kind of the vision of technology as production, so that’s not the point, but it’s rather the revealing of the thing that is being brought together, and it is as revealing and not as manufacturing that techne is a bringing forth, so when we talked about this idea of expressing, I mentioned something a little bit about that before, when I said, I don’t think the purpose of the artist is to express himself, and I really really think that, I think the purpose of the artist is to express the thing that he’s expressing, right, to express the cake, express an image, express, ultimately to express the peace of God, to express the communion of the saints, these are the things that we’re expressing, much more than myself, myself is going to get in there somewhere, I mean I can’t totally get rid of myself, it’s going to happen, but that’s not my point, that’s not the purpose of what I’m doing, right, and so one of the things, so there’s a few of us, a group of us, I’m going to start to introduce you to them, a few years ago in 2012, and it’s funny because everybody here, all these people know Father Patrick O’Rourke, it seems a lot of the priests here know him, he is one of the people who founded this journal, and it’s a bunch of us who are trying to break down this problem, and trying to bring back the idea of sacred art, but the reason why we want to bring back the idea of sacred art is not just sacred art, we want to get the highest, the highest possible, so what’s the highest thing you can express? Yeah, not directly, indirectly let’s say, express the glory of God, that’s the highest thing, that’s the highest thing you can celebrate in art is God, let’s say it that way, the highest thing you can celebrate in art is God, that’s the top, the highest form of art is liturgical art, because it is in the service, in the worship, in the communion of all those who are worshiping God, and so it has to start there, and that’s what we’re trying to do, trying to recapture, reinvigorate the sacred art, but what you’re going to see is that we also believe that once that happens, you know I talked about going up to the top and then filling up the world, but you have to get to the top, you have to fix the top thing first, and then the rest is going to flow out of that, so this is a friend of mine, his name is Andrew Gould, he’s an architect in Charleston, I would encourage that you check him out, he’s becoming quite famous in the most, in the recent months, there’s a book written about him just last year, published by Yale, by Yale, on, it’s called Charleston Fancy, and it talks about these architects who are trying to rethink the city, and to rethink urban areas, and that’s where we have to start, you know as a carver, you know, and as someone who draws and paints and writes stories, I still have to acknowledge that the highest art is architecture, it is the most important art in terms of human fabrication, because, and it’s so important that we forget it, that’s how important it is, so important that we don’t realize that architecture defines the very spaces of our life, it defines what we consider inside, what we consider outside, it defines the basic categories of human existence are defined by architecture, right, this, just the idea of inside and outside is one of the most basic structures of all human thinking, and architecture is making you participate in that, it’s the highest form of art because it’s also participative, it’s the most participative, you live inside these buildings, you worship in these buildings, you work in these buildings, it’s the very frame of your world, so you go into a building and you look at a painting on the wall and that’s fine, but you couldn’t do that without the building, and so the degrade, the degrading of architecture is one of the biggest scandals, way bigger than Picasso’s stuff or Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades or whatever it is, you know, surrealists came up with, the degrading of architecture, the strip malls, the horrible urban planning, the highways, the electric wires going above our streets, that is the cancer of the modern world, way more than any bad concert that you could attend, because it is the very, very frame of our existence, so that’s what has to be fixed first, and so Andrew has mastered, he has mastered Byzantine architecture, also Western medieval architecture, gothic, but then all Western architecture really, so he makes churches, this is his church in Charleston, he’s made several churches, if you’re ever in Charleston, it’s really one of the most beautiful places, I think, in America, this church, it’s very simple but it’s very powerful, but he also, right, he also makes houses, but if you really want to see my friend Andrew Gould shine, you have to visit the beer store, it’s the most magical place that you’ll ever be, because it really looks like a beer store, he has, he has actually manifested the essence of the beer store, and so it’s this amazing timber frame building, and with turned shelves, and post architecture, and there’s a skylight, and an opening in the floor, and people go in there, and they just, going into my beer, and they don’t want to leave, they just want to stay there, and so there’s something, right, there’s something of actually Byzantine architecture in this thing, right, it’s not a church obviously, no one could confuse this for a church, but he’s gotten a little bit of something, a little bit of something which makes a space special, and he’s adapted it to a beer store, right, and so he has the most beautiful beer store in America. So Andrew and I, we also work together, here is a shrine that we did for the the Holy Russian family, and you can see the reliquary, I carved the icon in the reliquary, here’s one, here’s a project we worked on together as well, it’s a large carving of St. Michael killing the dragon, with stone inserts, there’s no paint on this, all the colors are stones, and the gold is gold leaf. So what we’re trying to do is we’re going to use this, we’re going to use this, we’re going to use this, we’re going to use this, and the gold is gold leaf. So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to, so if you look at this image for example, on the one hand it looks like something that could have been made, I don’t know, in like 1200 or something, but nothing like this was ever made in the year 1200, there’s actually, this is actually completely a, the technique, the use of the materials, the way that the dragon is made is actually not at all something you could have seen in the 12th century, but it’s rather to try to make something which looks timeless, make something which looks as if it could have been made a thousand years ago, but it was made today, it’s not a copy of something that was made a thousand years ago, that is a mistake that a lot of, I would say a lot of iconographers even today make, is they just want to make copies of the old time, it’s like you can do that, but you also want to actually master the language rather than just make copies. If you master the language you can make new objects that don’t, that aren’t just copies, but that look as if you’d seen them before. This is a, this is a crozier that I made for the Catholic Archbishop of Montreal, and with Andrew as well, I’m just showing you things that I made with Andrew because I want you to see a little bit of this teamwork that we’re trying to develop. This is a gospel cover that is here in Boston at the OCA Cathedral in Boston. So this is what, this is what I’m doing most of the time, that’s what I’m doing, but sometimes people look at what I’m doing and they don’t understand, and I understand, I can see why they don’t understand, because I’m also doing this, like I’m doing, I’m also making t-shirts, and iPhone cases, and t-shirts, and bags. Why, why am I doing that? Because there’s nothing wrong with t-shirts, who thinks there’s something wrong with t-shirts? It’s really, yeah, it’s really important, it’s really important to understand this. We have, we really have this weird elitist thing about art, this weird elitist vision of art, that we think that art is this precious thing in museums, that art is this, just this high thing that we look at and that we don’t participate in. It’s like, no, I want you to wear our t-shirt, that’s participative, I love it, I think it’s great. I’m not going to put my icon on the t-shirt, right? I’m going to create something for the t-shirt, and some of the images that I tend to use are images of protection, so a griffin, you have an angel, you have Alexander the Great, these outer images, those are the ones that I tend to use for t-shirts, but all based on the understanding that I gained from the making the liturgical art. The idea is, if you’re going to wear a t-shirt, because you are, you might as well wear a t-shirt that is connected somehow to something higher. I might as well wear a t-shirt that is connected somehow to something higher. And I also, like, I really mock, I’m kind of mocking the entertainment world, but there’s nothing wrong with entertainment. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with entertainment. If you go to my YouTube channel, you’ll see that I interpret movies, I do all that stuff. There’s nothing wrong with these things. It’s only about things being in their proper place, right? Like, if a priest went into the altar wearing one of my t-shirts, I would physically eject them, if I could. It’s only about things being in the right place in the world. Once you start to think in hierarchies, then a lot of things start to break in your mind. So one of the things I’m doing is I’m actually, I’m writing a comic book. I’m making a comic book. I’m making a comic book. It’s based on the story of Saint Christopher, a very, very loose retelling of the story of Saint Christopher. And I took all, like, I looked at popular culture and I saw the kind of things that were there and I said, we have that, right? We have a lot of weird things in the Bible. There are a lot of weird things in the Bible. I said, why not write a story that takes all the weird things in the Bible and all the weird things in our tradition, and you just put them in one story. And then when people read it, at first they think, oh, this is going to be great because it’s going to be so subversive. But then in the end, it’s actually not subversive. It turns it all back. And so in this story, Saint Christopher is a dog-headed man. There’s Saint Simeon the Stylite who is on his pole. There are dragons and giants and monsters and the Leviathan, all the crazy stuff. The Bible is all in this one story. So here’s the first appearance of Saint Christopher. If you don’t know the story of Saint Christopher, I won’t tell it now, but you can you can look it up on my YouTube channel. And it’s the same even with my speaking. I try to do the same. It’s like I, so I have, if you go to my YouTube channel, if you come here, sometimes I talk about, try to talk about the highest things, try to help people understand the power of the gospel, the beauty in scripture, the beauty in our tradition, the beauty in the icons. But I think the whole world lays itself out in this pattern. There’s no exception. Everything is in this pattern. Nothing is outside of the way that the logos manifest itself in the world. So you can talk about anything. So there you go. So I’ve got this stuff too. Talk about Rudolph, talk about this weird thing that happened, this ice cream looking challenge that happened in the U.S. Meaning of goblins and dwarves and imps. All of these things have meaning. If they didn’t have meaning, they wouldn’t exist. We can talk about it. But I wouldn’t want someone talking about that in the altar. Right? It’s just all about, it’s all about place. All right. So, some of the people that worked with us to develop the Orthodox Art Journal, they have started a new organization. I was sadly not able to go to their first meeting, which was a month ago, about a month ago. But I would suggest that you check them out. They’re called Artifact. And what they want to do is exactly what I talked about. They want to help people rediscover the art as participation. And so they are organizing events. They’re going to organize trainings. They’re going to also have publications, which are going to try to bring back. So if you look at their description, they say, it says, liturgy, visual arts, music, literature, architecture, storytelling, craft, and conviviality. And you think, well, that’s odd. How did that? If you listen to what I said, you’ll understand how you can’t have, all of these things should bring conviviality. But that’s what the point of the whole thing. All of this should bring communion. All of this should bring togetherness. That’s what art is actually for. Right? So that when, if I make something powerful and you recognize it and you participate in it, then we are linked together. And so they are organizing singing. They’re teaching classes on how to receive people, things that we used to do, but no one does anymore. How to receive people, how to organize an event, a party at your house. How do you receive people? How can you do that in a way that will encourage people to come together? That’s an art. It’s not arbitrary. How to set a table. You think that we knew these things, but who knows these things anymore? Our grandparents did. It’s all gone. And so trying to rekindle these skills that we used to have that are slowly dying. The skill of singing together, singing folk songs, telling stories, telling folk stories, telling your own story. How do you tell the story so that it’s gripping, so that it’s useful for the person you’re telling the story to? One of the people involved in this, you can see him. Actually, you probably won’t be able to see him. It’s in that picture. His name is Nicholas Kotar, and he’s an author also. He’s an Orthodox deacon. He’s at, now I’m going to forget the name. He’s in Jordanville at the Russian seminary there, and he’s writing novels. His novels have nothing Christian in them. It doesn’t talk about Jesus in his novels. It doesn’t talk about the church or anything, but his works are some of the most Christian works that I’ve ever read. Because that is where, once you understand the pattern, once you’re inside the pattern, once you understand that this pattern that I told you about, about the garden and the fall and this descent and this ascent, all of these patterns as the patterns of reality, then you can participate in all kinds of ways. You can write stories. You can see that the fairy tales also have the same pattern. You can see Christ in fairy tales. You can see Christ in the ancient myths. You can see Christ in movies. You can see Christ. Christ is the good thing hidden in all, even the bad things. He’s hiding in there. Doesn’t mean that everything’s good. Obviously not. A lot of things, a lot of trash out there, but there’s Christ is that which is good, which is hiding in everything, which makes it exist. So just like Tolkien, for example, if you read Lord of the Rings, there’s nothing Christian about Lord of the Rings, right? So why is it that Christians resonate with Lord of the Rings so much? Why is it that all the Christians, a lot of Orthodox people too, for some reason really like Lord of the Rings, really love Lord of the Rings? It’s because it’s showing you this powerful pattern of reality in a different language and the excitement you have is that although it’s in a language that is completely different from that of scripture, you can still see that it’s showing you that story, even though it’s different. And that I think is ultimately, that I think ultimately is what artists can be, what artists can do is to help people see. Artists are kind of like magicians. Artists, because we can help people see, get that click, because you know, we have this boring world, we have this kind of everyday life, and that what the artist can do is by gathering things together, by enacting the creative act, by being an image of God in this bringing together and showing the essence of something, you can wake something up in someone, kind of wake up their noose, using technical words here, but you can kind of wake up their spiritual intuition so that they realize that the world is not dark, that hiding behind all this dark gray stuff, there are all the fairies are still there and all the angels are there and everything is all there behind. You just have to help people kind of see through the glum strip malls and all that stuff. So that is my encouragement for artists. Not sure that I treated what people expected me to treat, so if you have any questions on art whatsoever, we’re going to, I think we’ll have some time to do that. Hi, I really enjoyed your talk. I practice Buddhism and I work a lot of trauma here as a therapist, and a lot of what you’re talking about helps me to kind of see past, and help people see past things, like past their suffering to see like what’s the real meaning behind stuff. I don’t know what else my train of thought is. Oh, so I was going to ask you about like art, when you’re making art. So like for me as a therapist, that’s my art. I’m making, I’m doing art, so I’m doing therapy and somebody, I’m talking about myself at some point and I start getting counter-transference, right? Like I feel upset, I get angry, right? So like when you’re doing art, like do you feel like depending on what you’re doing, you get like different messages or different like feelings or like free, like I know it’s kind of a complex one, but it’s like do you feel like for yourself like, oh I’m making, this is made and I feel like I made this for God? The whole feeling thing is really complicated because there’s a, there’s an, there’s an aspect of reality, okay, let’s put it this way, there’s an aspect of reality which is, which is just objective in the sense that it actually has nothing to do with me. And there’s an aspect of reality which also includes, let’s say, my own personal spiritual path, let’s say. So a good way to understand it is if you have a priest in the church and he baptized you and then you find out later that the priest was a crook and the priest was cheating on his wife or whatever, that doesn’t invalidate the sacraments, sacraments are valid, it doesn’t matter the priest was an idiot, okay? And there’s an aspect to art which is like that too, which is there are moments in my, let’s say, practice of carving icons where I am, I just feel like I am totally connected and that, you know, I’m in tune and that I’m in communion with the saint that I’m representing and that I’m in communion with the person who is asking me to make the saint, that I somehow feel like I’m making this image for them and that it’s going to participate in their spiritual life and I’m kind of, I can be aware of all of this as I’m doing it and, you know, so there’s, it can really be a short, a very, a little epiphany, let’s say. But the weird thing about it that, that doesn’t mean that those are going to be the best icons that I make. There are some times when it’s the opposite, when, you know, I’m fighting with my wife or I have financial problems and I’m like, and my mind is just turning and I’m not, not at all in a good place spiritually. But, and then someone will look at my icon and say, oh, there’s so much grace in that icon. I’m like, that’s not me, like, that’s not me. And so I think that, I think that it’s both. I think that it, it, it depends. I think we’re vehicles. We can be vehicles for, for God’s, God’s grace, even though we’re not there. And then we thank God for all the moments that we can and we can really participate in that, in that process. So. Thank you. I, I, I like your, your real about architecture because one of the things that’s so nice about living in Boston is that there are a few places in the United States where the architecture is still beautiful. But my question is about the ways that our ideas about art are reflected in our social structure. So we are in a hyper democratic country culturally in Plato’s sense right now, like the kind of, the kind of democracy that’s about two steps away from slipping in a dead tree. That’s right. But so many of the cultures have produced immensely beautiful architecture, like the Byzantines or the Ottomans after them or much of, much of the world have been, have represented the hierarchy that they have in their minds about the structure of the universe in their social hierarchy with slaves and the bot almost universally. Right. And we don’t want that. No. But where’s, it seems like there’s two attractors bases, right? There’s like slavery and like beautiful architecture and stuff. Right. And then there’s like, like Philistine democracy. Yeah. And strip malls. So can strip malls. Which sucks, right? Yeah. So how do we do it? How do you walk this very narrow path between these where we don’t need to have these really impressive social structures, but we do have hierarchy? How do you do that? I mean, no, I, you’re right. Your question is the best question. It’s a great question. I think that, I think that the best version of Christianity, that’s what it’s supposed to be. Right. The best version of Christianity is supposed to be that hierarchy is always that which is above loves that which is below and that which is below submits to that which is above. But those two things have to cross each other. And so, and so in the, in the structure of the church, for example, that’s what we see. And so the priest, although the priest is, you know, is up there and he’s up there in the hierarchy and the bishop is up there in the hierarchy, there’s a very special, there’s a very real concrete way in which the priest is also supposed to serve the people. Right. He’s there also to serve his, the people who come, right? He listens to their confession. He, he, he pastors them, he marries them. So it’s not, so it’s not just an authority in the sense of this, you know, of this top-down thing, but it’s rather this exchange of love and authority that, that will give that world. Now, obviously there, you might say, and maybe it would be true that it’s never happened completely and there’s always been a, you know, it kind of, it’s always kind of goes up and down and manifests one more or the other. But I do think that that, that is what Christianity is supposed to be. And I think that, I think that the church architecture and the liturgy represents that. Because for example, in the Orthodox tradition, we, we can’t have a priest who says the, the mass alone. There has to be amen. If there’s no amen, there’s no liturgy. If there’s no yes, there’s no, there’s no annunciation. The mother of God doesn’t say yes, there’s no enunciation. There’s no incarnation. Right. And so that is the, you know, when we talk about the call and response, Father talked a little bit about that in terms of antiphonal singing. That’s also a part of it. There’s this, we, we still have it now in the Procumenons and all this, where it’s like, there’s this call and this response and it’s this, this back and forth between the authority and the people are, are dancing together in this communal manner. So I think that that’s the, that’s the answer. But like I said, doesn’t mean that it happens a lot in the New Jerusalem. Yeah. Yeah. I really enjoyed this part of the talk. I’m really looking forward to this one. I did, in my opinion, like theater. So I’ve done that a lot, like kind of, you know, all musicals, whatever, improv, all that stuff. And you touched on it a little bit, but I was wondering if you could like, maybe talk a little bit more about how you balance, like using your imagination, right? Because writing books, like song of this year, like all these things, obviously he’s using his head. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And using, having Saint Christopher with a dog head, like, that’s fantastic. You know, like, how do you balance imagination with faith? Yeah. Like, so you’re not going all imagination and like maybe going a little too far one way or the other? No, I think, I think that it’s just about, it’s, I hate to say it’s hierarchy again, but I have to tell you it’s hierarchy again. It’s just about having things in service of other things, you know, so our human capacity, the imagination included is something which can be put to the service of God and manifest higher things, or it can also be prideful and want to, to show its own genius and to show its own capacity to be smart and to be witty, you know, and so it just really just depends on how it’s used, on how it’s, which way it’s directed. That’s what I would say. Do you think there’s any art that’s like so far outside of the Overton window, like as far as how it’s structured, that it shouldn’t be, that should always be dismissed? I’m thinking of stories with like maybe like sympathetic kind of anti-heroes. Yeah. Or like, gratuitous violence. Yeah, no, I, well, okay, so this is, this is, the good example would be horror movies, right? So I don’t think you should watch horror movies. I don’t think anybody should watch horror movies, but I think that horror movies are an expression of a very deep truth, even though I don’t think you should watch them. And I think a lot of people have actually understood that recently. In the past 20 years, people have actually understood that that horror movies, despite their grotesque and disgusting appeal to our very base senses, are actually morality tales, that they actually follow a structure of fall and punishment, and that’s actually how the horror movie sets itself up. And the thing about upside down stories is that upside down, like, again, I don’t think we should indulge in upside down stories, but we, they’re upside down for a reason. If you still recognize them as upside down, you’re already not so bad because you know that they’re upside down and that they should be right side up. It’s like, if you recognize something which is making fun of something else, if you recognize it as making fun of the other thing, then you’re already not completely lost because you’re, you know, you’re putting something, if you put something upside down and you say it’s upside down, then you know what it looks like to be right side up. Does that make sense? Right. So, so even in the, even in the most, like, even in the most like heavy metal, satanic, you know, all that stuff, it’s like, if you look at their aesthetic and you look at what they’re saying, if you understand them as being upside down, it makes total sense. They’re actually embodying the upside down and like you want to give them a prize. Like you’re actually, you’re actually embodying the upside down quite well. Like then I can tell them my parishioners, you want to see what it looks like? There’s right there. That’s what it looks like. Don’t do that. Yeah, exactly. Of course, heretic can be useful. Oh man. Yeah. No, I don’t think that, I mean, especially like evangelize. No, I don’t think that’s necessary. I think that especially right now, also the art that does that is usually pretty bad. Most of it, a lot of the movies, like the Christian movies, man, they’re so bad. They’re so bad. It depends. You can do it by explicitly referencing God, but it has to be part of a coherent narrative. If you, you can reference God in a way that’s not necessarily a part of the narrative, but it has to be part of the narrative. So, you can do it by explicitly referencing God, but it has to be part of a coherent narrative. Right? If you, you can reference God in a way that’s not necessarily a part of the narrative, but it has to be part of the coherent narrative. You can reference God directly if the story is related to that, if that’s what the story is about. But you don’t necessarily, if it’s not, then you don’t have to. And when I talk about, like when I talk about art, if you’re painting beautiful borders in the church, those beautiful borders, I’m not showing you Christ, even in the church. If I put a, if I put a griffin on the outside of the church or on the iconostasis, like that griffin is not directly showing us Christ. It’s, it’s, like there’s a hierarchy and depending in which place it is. I think that a lot of fairy tales and a lot of folktales are closer to showing us Christ than a lot of the Christian novels and, and because they actually embody the pattern in a very organic and understood manner. So no, I don’t, I don’t think so, but you can, you know. She said, do we need to, do you think that Christian artists should explicitly reference Christ in their art in order to be Christian artists? And my answer was no, not necessarily. It just depends what you’re doing. But if you can, and if you want it, like a good, if you read some of the Russian novelists, for example, we’re talking about novels. Like if you read Dostoevsky, like, yeah, my goodness. I mean, he does it with supreme excellence. I mean, he can write a story where, you know, there is direct reference to Jesus Christ and direct reference to the mystery and talking about the incarnation and talking about the problem of evil and all that. And he does it like that. There’s no criticism, but not, not everybody can do that. You know, not everybody does that too. Yeah. Yeah. We see images that represent the majority or people who are empowered. We don’t really see Jesus represented as how he was or is in the body. I think the way that I could answer that is that the way that the church works is that the church, the church receives the tradition and the church says yes to a tradition. And in the beginning of the church, there was actually several ways of representing Christ. There were really two. There was one which was to show Christ as a kind of Apollo figure, like curly hair and kind of Adonis looking figure. And then there was a tradition to show him looking like a Nazarene, which is, and he’s directly described by Eusebius as this idea of looking like a Nazarene, which is long beard, long hair. And that’s the tradition that was received and accepted by the church. And so now when we show Christ, we show him in that manner from, I would say, the first tradition persisted a few centuries, but for sure, I would say by the seventh, eighth century, it was pretty much everywhere in the world. Christ was represented the same way from Spain to Syria, to Ireland, to wherever Christ was represented with having a beard, longish hair, wearing two vestments, one vestment on top and one vestment underneath. And that really became kind of the universal tradition until maybe the Renaissance. Yeah, there are images, it’s crazy, there are images from, Syrian images from the fourth, fifth century. There’s that famous image in the sixth century, the image of Christ at Sinai. Have you ever seen it? You see one of Christ’s eyes kind of looking to the side. That image was isolated, like it was in Sinai. It’s not like everybody could see it, but you see an image from the 14th century in Constantinople and it looks like they copied that image. Like how did that happen? It means that there was a language, there was a language that was preserved and was transmitted and this image of Christ is the one that was received by the church. So how would you represent him? I don’t know if that’s how Christ is described in Scripture. I don’t know which aspect, which way you’re referring to when you say that, but I think that… Can I add to what you’re saying is that if you say there’s an image of God and the only image a black person sees of white image, that affects that person’s mind. I’m not going to add into a fight, I’m trying to fix it, is that we should be looking like you said. If I got baptized by a priest and he ended up penetrating a boy, I still got baptized by God. So if I got God but somebody wants to colonize people, I still got God. I’m saying… Well I think that the question, like you have to understand it, the idea that Christ is white is very odd, it’s just an odd way, it’s just not the way the ancients thought. They just didn’t think in those categories. So it’s a very modern problem to think that Jesus was white. Already for the Romans, I mean Jesus was a Jew, he wasn’t a Roman. He looked Syrian. If you look at the images of Christ, the early images, he looked like a kind of Syrian guy. And people just didn’t think about that. If you go to Ethiopia and you look at Ethiopian traditions of representation of Christ, their pigment is darker than the pigments that are used by Byzantines or by Northern Europeans, and that’s fine, it’s not a problem. But it’s also not an issue for the Christians. It’s a modern issue. It’s not an ancient issue. It’s something that comes with modern politics and modern problems that are real. I’m not saying that they’re not real problems, they’re real, but it’s just not the categories that were used by the ancient people. They just didn’t think in those terms. That’s how I see it. Yeah. Thank you, God. The idea of timeless art, is that the highest form would you say? Timeless? Yeah. Well, the longer it lasts, the better it is, right? In terms of terms, the longer it lasts, in terms of the longer you can recognize reality in it, it means it’s coming closer to something. You know, because it’s just that’s just for art. It’s the same for everything, right? It’s the same. It’s like if you make a shirt and you can wear that shirt for one season, and then if you wear it next season, you look like a complete idiot because it’s the fashion is gone, then you’ve missed the major pattern. You might have rode this extreme kind of excitement of the titillating of the new, but you’ve missed the basic pattern. So you can create something which was still recognized as having value in a hundred years and means you’re closer to something real. Does that make sense? Yeah. Sorry. When we talk about patterns of reality and these things where you’re finding sort of the Christian pattern in various phenomena, all those phenomena seem to be human things, things in culture and politics, all of those kind of things. I’m wondering what you would think about maybe some of you respond by saying that there’s a difference between nature and convention and that we find this pattern again and again in convention, but that’s just because it responds to some sort of human longing and that’s not necessarily a reality. There’s no reason to think that our desire for this sort of thing which might be best expressed by the Christian story corresponds to something that you could actually find in that side of convention. Well that whole idea of convention is a really funny concept. I don’t know how people come to that concept. Where does the convention come from? If you’re a naturalist, like a real naturalist, and you think that everything is explained out of these naturalistic patterns, then you can’t stand outside of the pattern and then declare a convention. That’s silly. How can you stand outside of the pattern? Are you in the pattern or not? But if you’re in the natural world, then you can’t just say these are just conventions. They’re not just conventions. I don’t know. No more than peacocks putting up their tails are just conventions. They’re things that happen. Now try to understand how they happen and in what pattern they happen. And then that will usually get rid of your problem right away. One of the problems of a lot of the naturalists is that they somehow still can’t apply their thing to themselves. Once you flip that back, it’s really interesting by the way, once you flip it back, once you take the scientific perception and you actually turn it back on the human on yourself, then things get really wobbly, really fast. Things start to get very strange and what comes out of it ends up looking more like a traditional worldview than the kind of, let’s say, kind of usual scientific worldview where the scientist somehow stands above the world somehow. And then the question is not in phenomena and can analyze it without being in it. It’s like, no, you can’t do that. You’re in phenomena too. And it starts to turn. So to me that question is meaningless. It’s totally meaningless when someone says it’s just convention. It’s like, okay, well, why do we have those conventions? Let’s keep pressing. Just so that society would work better. Yes. All right. So society would work better. Because then we’ll last longer and we’ll, yes. All right. So is it still just a convention if it actually provides the pattern by which you do better? It’s not just a convention. It’s the way that you, it’s the pattern by which you live that makes you live better life. Anyways, that’s my thought. I think we’re done, huh? All right, guys. You guys have been, I mean, I’ve asked your attention from this morning until like three o’clock in the afternoon. So you guys have been amazing. It’s like a whole school day. So thanks for coming and paying attention. I appreciate it.