https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WedCkywNYCU
I wanted to find out a bit more about your personal religion, because Jordan Peterson is often asked about what you actually believe is the truth, or do you believe God exists, and he’ll often say things like, well, it depends on what you mean by a truth, it depends on what you mean by exist, and he’s such a high resolution and multiple perspective sort of guy that he often doesn’t give a real straight answer. One of the things that really helped me along was I listened to the podcast you were on recently, and I forgot the name of the podcast, but it was a similar conversation to this, and you talked about the fact that when you go to a church congregation, everyone there has a different way that they’re seeing Christianity and their experience of God, and they’re visualizing things in a different way, and that’s really stuck with me, especially since I started church and just giving myself permission to have my own particular way of conceptualizing God and Christ and the fabric of the universe and the meaning of existence, and I wondered if you’d be willing to share a little bit about your own, as an artist especially, your own sort of conceptualization of it all. I think for me, I don’t think for me it’s not necessarily the idea that everybody develops their own way of seeing Christianity, but rather that there’s really a hierarchy of capacity to understand these things, and so the way that religious stories and the way that religious rituals, the way that religion is set up, is set up in a way so that the most illiterate farmer or illiterate person on the street can get something from the experience and the highest doctor of theology can also get what they need to get from that experience, and so that sometimes accounts for the way that it’s presented, and the way that it’s presented with stories and metaphors and very visual, it shouldn’t be just an abstract thing, but I think that, for example, if you take the idea that, you know, do you believe that God exists, you know, that’s a problematic question. It’s a problematic question because if what you mean, I’m going to play Jordan Peterson, I guess, but if what you mean by exist is that God is phenomenological, then no, God is not phenomenological. God is never, no classical Christian thinker has ever believed that God is on the level of phenomena. God is not quantifiable. God is not measurable, and so in that sense, God does not exist. God is the source of being, and so in that way, you can say that if only one thing exists, God exists. You could say that, something like that, in the sense that it is the true root of anything that exists, but because the word exists now has come to mean almost only, you know, anything that can be measured and quantified, then no, God doesn’t exist in that way. And so if you read the early, early fathers, you read the early, early church fathers, they all say God is infinity. God is absolute. God is beyond all name, all description, all capacity to formulate anything about his essence. There is nothing that you can say that can capture the infinite, unbounded Godhead. Like, there’s nothing you can say. Now, having said that, everything, because God is the source of being, everything in the world also is showing us God, right? So there’s this idea, in orthodox theology we call it apophatic theology, which is, we understand that you negate all God’s qualities until you reach, you know, beyond being and non-being, beyond all possible descriptions, and then there’s what’s called cataphatic theology, which is that you then see God in all things to the measure in which that thing can manifest God, okay? And so that’s how God becomes the absolute in every way, because he’s both, cannot be seen in anything, and at the same time, everything is an image of God to a certain extent, okay? So I’m trying to kind of show you how high, let’s say, or how high the understanding of just talking about God, really what it is we’re discussing, you know, especially in people who are rationalists, they don’t understand that even in, like I said, even in the very first, like third century, you can read Church Fathers talking about how every time it says that God is like this in the text, like God is in heaven, or God has hands, or God is, obviously those are not descriptions, direct descriptions. They’re only metaphors which discuss something that cannot be described. So that’s really important to understand because you always hear the atheists say something like, do you believe in God? And then they’ll say, well, which God? And they’ll go, oh, do you believe in Thor? Do you believe in Diana? The Christian God is not the same, because even when Christianity appeared on the scene, the Romans said that Christians were atheists. That was the accusation against Christians, that they were atheists because they didn’t believe in the gods, because they seemed to believe in a god that didn’t exist, that it was beyond all possible being. And so that’s really the root, let’s say, of the god in the Christian and Jewish and even in the Muslim tradition. So it’s really important to see the difference, let’s say, between the paganistic god and the god as being, like we say in Christianity, the undivided trinity. It’s quite different. So I have no problem with the creeds at all. I recite the creeds and I feel it’s important to do that. But it’s true that if I probably, if you ask me what a lot of the things in the creed mean, I wouldn’t give you the same answer as a person who is uneducated, who doesn’t know theology. But it’s fine with me, but I feel very comfortable with the creeds. Yeah, right. So I think one of the core ideas in Christianity that is unique from other religions is the personal relationship with god aspect. And of course, as far as religious practice goes, for somebody who just looks at things in a fairly simple metaphorical way or accepts the metaphors as literal truth and just goes, is a father in the sky that I can have a chat with, that’s how they can pray and sort of reach out to god. And that will work for them in their understanding of it. But there’s many different ways to do that. And I wanted to ask you about your art making and your carving, and is that a spiritual process for you in the way you sort of commune with god? I hope so. Let’s say in my better moments it is. I mean, I carve all the time, so sadly I wish I could be always praying when I’m carving, but I would say no, obviously not, if I just had a fight with my kids or something. I’m probably not praying when I’m carving. But hopefully so. I think that if you see prayer or if you see the spiritual life as a whole thing in terms of every action that you pose can be posed in view of this infinite, let’s say. That everything you do can be submitted to god, you could say it that way. Then I think that for me carving has been a great opportunity to kind of bring things in my life together, my work and my interests and my focus into these objects that are there to be in communion with god and in communion with the people. It’s like it participates in my communion with people in the church, and plus it is this kind of movement towards prayer. So yeah, for me it’s been an amazing thing. It’s hard to even believe that I can do this. I pinch myself every day that I’m an icon carver. It’s like, who’s an icon carver? It doesn’t make sense. You’re an icon carver. That’s right, I’m an icon carver. It doesn’t seem like it should be, or it doesn’t seem possible, let’s say. That’s fantastic, yeah.