https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=I6ptxOV_opw
What you’re about to see is a discussion that I had with Father Silouan Justinianou. Father Silouan is a hieromonk. He is also a priest in the Orthodox Church. But mostly to us, he is really an artist. In my estimation, Father Silouan is one of the most important artists, visual artists in North America today in the sense that his understanding of traditional iconography, his attention to detail, his mastery of color, his capacity to bring in strains from different traditional arts, but also from contemporary art into a sacred art which is powerful and is present while also being very traditional. And I think that he offers us a vision of what North American Orthodox sacred art could look like. But not only that, I believe that he can also point us to a direction in which sacred art can be a model even for secular art, gallery art, but also popular art as well. And so in our discussion, we talk about visual art, we talk about the traditional doctrine of art as was formulated by an art historian, Ananda Kumrasami, at the beginning of the century. And so we go through much of contemporary art, modern art, and also how it connects to iconography. And so it’s a very rich and powerful discussion, and I’m very happy to be sharing it with you today. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So what I want to do is I mean, definitely want to talk about art. I want to kind of revisit the conversation we had a few years ago that I didn’t record well. This one should be good, because I know what I’m doing now. And so that’s what I mostly want to do. And I want people I want you to talk about your art and your approach. You know, I had Aiden Hart on and I had other people and I’m trying to kind of create communication channels between secular art world and the sacred art. And it’s working. Like, I’m getting it’s crazy. Like, the people that are reaching out to me, it’s nuts. Like in the secular art world and the amount of catechumen that are coming in from the art world, it’s exciting. That’s very important, man, because that what you just described, like the bridge or like the conversation beginning, that’s like we’ve been we it’s been a need that’s that’s that has not been addressed at all, at least in the Anglophone world, as I have come to understand what has been happening in like, you know, late 20th century, you know, 21st century, like orthodoxy, unfortunately, has a treasure of things to offer, but it tends to suffer. From isolation or a insularity that that is counterproductive. And one of my my concerns for many years has been how do you engage in that conversation with nuance, but without compromise? And it’s a hard one is a hard one. And sometimes I think I got it grasped and then it slips out of, you know, out of control. I don’t I don’t it’s hard to to to to to engage it. But one of the key factors that I found that like helps to to deal with the problem is having a cognizance of the historical paradigm of fine art as as we have come down to understand it since the 18th century. If we if we come to an understanding that something shifted in terms of what was what we tend to in our community called the traditional doctrine of art. From that to to the fine art paradigm, then you have a better sort of like feel to to to, you know, to place things into and to to come up with better answers, I think, because if you don’t have that, then you’re more muddled. It’s more confusing. So maybe maybe we can start with that. Maybe you can lay that out for us. I mentioned it a few times on the channel, but I would really love to hear your take on what is what happened. What is the change between the kind of traditional vision of the arts and the fine art paradigm? One one thing that I think. Which. It’s important to keep in mind is that we could. Become a bit too. Abstract in in in sort of like isolating this idea of the traditional doctrine and in separating it from like historical developments that occurred. And I’m mainly primarily thinking of like. You know, the Industrial Revolution, the development of the of the middle class, the development of capitalism, you know, all this technological advancements and like the the the paradigm shifts in terms of like government, political. All these things played a factor in in in creating the environment in which we can which the change occurred. So the traditional doctrine of art, as you’ve mentioned multiple times in your lectures and like in your your channel, basically. You’re dealing with a functional art. You’re dealing with function that is not or symbolism that is not separated from function. And it is. Aspects of or understand an understanding of beauty that is not separated from function either. So it is an art that is meant to address both physical and spiritual needs. And the art. That we’re talking about in a way. Did not. Make a stark distinction between sacred and secular spheres as much as we tend to. OK, so you could have a courtly art that used what we consider to be a sacred theme or vice versa. And you stylistically, there were no distinctions between how you would depict things in the church and how you would depict them in the court or in in the folk context in the village. They were more closely linked. You could have levels of refinement of that art. But but ultimately, it was an art that was geared towards an. Way that I would put it, some people might not like the idea because it comes from a 19th century art critic. It’s an idea is the art. It’s an idea. The idea comes first, so to speak. And then you you embody that idea with representation of the church. And body that idea. With representational forms, but the representation is not confined to an empirical assessment of nature. It’s not based on an empiricist understanding of mimesis or imitation of nature. So so Kumaraswami would at times use a phrase, I think that derives from Aristotle art imitates nature in her method of operation or something like that. So so in other words, are in this case is. Mother nature or actually is is is God creating. OK, so so so the touches on the idea, the Christian idea that the Lord has specific like divine wills or a pattern paradigm. And then he actualizes this paradigm in his creation when he names it, he calls it to being and they are created based on this idea. Yeah. And so the art would be something like there is a purpose for the. Yes, exactly. And that purpose is now embodied in body. Yes, it’s embodied. Body mid is is is aimed at that purpose. Exactly. It’s embodied meaning. OK, and so so that’s that’s a very important thing. And that’s always plugged into a metaphysic because because prior to philosophy, as we understand it, philosophical questions, metaphysical questions were dealt with in a traditional society in terms of symbolism. And so so the art that was created used a symbolic language in order to convey the cosmology or doctrinal meanings that they held to be valuable for the health of the community or for the overall ordering of the community. And so that has to also be kept in mind. So so so there was no separation between religion and art. And so, you know, so and there was no such thing as the art as expressive of individualist ideas. It was expressive of metaphysical doctrines or the meanings that the community held to be of pivotal importance for its well-being. And so that’s one that’s one abbreviated understanding of a more traditional vision. More traditional. Yes. And also bear in mind that this was also the artist worked within a continuity of traditional forms and an iconology. And an iconology. So all traditional forms are iconological insofar as the meanings are contained in specific compositional formulations that convey these specific meanings. And of course, you could never escape yourself insofar as like you will always handle these forms in what in a way that is unique to yourself so that you could trace stylistic differences within a traditional culture. But the stylistic differences are the accidents, not the essence of the art, as Guvayaswami would put it. So so this is so anonymity tended to be the norm where the artists didn’t sign the art and it wasn’t really looked at for the sake of deriving some biographical understanding who the artist was. And so so so these are all important distinctions and the contrast. They say they help to create the contrast between a post between traditional post 18th century paradigm. After the 18th century, you know, during the 18th century, we have to keep in mind we have the development of aesthetics as its own discipline, as a discipline within the realm of philosophy. And of course, is as this is, it’s like a is pertaining to things of sense, but it was like a philosophical inquiry as to what that could be in terms of a form of cognition. And so it was analyzed philosophically. And of course, it also had to do with the judgment of taste. And so how can we explain our cognition of what we consider to be beautiful and or along those forms of inquiry, you have what is considered sublime. OK, so you have like the Edmund Burke’s the inquiry into the ideas of the of the beautiful and the sublime. And then you have the critique of judgment by by Kant. And then you have I forgot the initiator of actually the term aesthetics, the German Baumgartner, I think it was that started. You could you correct me if I’m wrong, but I forgot. I’m not sure. I don’t know that actual last thing, but I think he was one of the first ones. It makes sense that it’s a German, that’s for sure. Right, right, right. It was like Germans were like the forefront of our history, too. So that’s right. So then you have you have that development, plus also the development of the museum, which is very important. And one of the things that people forget is that the museum was partly developed as a consequence of the French Revolution. We know the there were museums before then, if I’m not mistaken, in Austria, if I’m not mistaken, because there were the development actually from the cabinet of curiosities. Right. Exactly. Yeah. The cabinet makes total sense. That’s what museums are, cabinets of curiosities. So so you would have like all this like whatever a king or prince considered to be worthy of his curious attention, you know, chemical things like, you know, like archaeological things like relics, precious objects, jewelry, you know, whatever. I mean, they would have this as a chamber where they could go and pass their time, study manuscripts they would have there. And then it was it was pretty pretty all inclusive. It wasn’t as like, you know, as demarcated as we have it in museums now. And it was a place where you could invite people that you respected to go and talk about these items. But then that developed into a public forum later on. And it takes off really in like the French Revolution, because they basically faced a dilemma. The aestheticians. And people who value this works independent of their political or religious implication, they were like, well, we don’t want to because they were destroying all this stuff. Right. It’s like it’s French Revolution iconoclasm. Right. So they were destroying this as like representative of the old regime. World. Right. Exactly. And so so then they decided I forgot who it was, like called up the attention. We can’t be destroyed or everything. So what are we going to do? So basically, they decided to actually move these items to a museum in a gallery space that became independent. Or was was meant to be independent of any ideological political implication. And so the the the excuse was we are putting these here because of their aesthetic value, not because of its religious or political value. So it was an attempt to inoculate the artwork from its religious and political content and to and to have it be that sort of like a an example of a a social way in which the theory of the autonomous artwork begins to take hold. Right. Yeah. And so then what you have in the fine art context is the idea of the autonomous work of art. You have the idea of the artist as independent from any. Patrons like demands, it takes is more and more hold of that. You know, that becomes more and stronger as we go along and move on from the 18th century on. You have the beauty as a form of taste, as different from beauty as a theophany of the divine. You could perhaps find in aspects of romanticism traces of that, because I think one of the things that you have to keep in mind, sorry to like, you know, digress, is that a lot of these things are are distortions of Christian doctrine. That’s right. Yeah, exactly. And so so you do have aspects in which perhaps a romantic painter considered beauty and the sublime, the sublime, by the way, is the experience of grand jury nature where you feel your limitation and you experience all or your utter like weakness in the face by the forces of nature. Yeah. Standing at the top of a cliff. Exactly. Feeling that. Yeah, exactly. So it’s different from beauty. And so far as beauty is something that is more that you could handle that like or is more is closer to you. And so Burke would say like like the the the soft curve, soft curvature or like soft skin and things like that, that we all usually associate with the sensuous. And it’s not threatening to us. It’s actually comforting for us as compared to to the sublime, which is like actually a storm, the cliffs and the Alps or the ominous feeling of like a forest where you’re like small and you’re like surrounded by this indeterminacy or like you don’t know what’s going to happen when you enter it. And so it’s related to horror or terror and things like that. So it’s like the it’s related to the idea of the divine as the all terrifying, the numinous notions of like Otto. What’s his name? The guy that wrote the ideas of like the of the numinous anyway. So so you have these. And so these are these are like vestiges of Christian ideas, you could say, that are still playing out in like a post-enlightenment context. But they are then channeled in a different direction and they mainly become channeled through an individualistic form of expression. Now, and that takes off on the on the on the romantic period. But we have to call in mind also that the romantic period is a rebuttal of rationalism of the Enlightenment. Yeah. And so what they do is, OK, we cannot go to religion. In its usual, like traditional forms, so we’re going to actually the subjective becomes a realm through which and the imagination becomes the venue through which we actually very privately encounter the divine. And so we are going to rebuttal the limitations of rationalism is mechanistic and kind of like, you know, cold approach to reality. And it’s limiting approach to reality in a way that it emphasizes, they thought, like emotion as related to the spiritual and mainly being an alternative to the religious communal context, as you would have it in traditional religion. And so so then that became the seedbeds of what would eventually become the ideas that gave ground or the foundation for the 19th century subjectivist tendencies that lead up to abstraction. And so so what am I missing? I think there is so. So you do have you do have what I would say is this getting back to the whole thing about bridging the the the the conversation between the Orthodox, the Orthodox context and the the art world. I think some of the narratives that we’ve used in the past. Have been too simplistic in terms of creating to start of a dichotomy between a Christian worldview and a what we think of as a secular worldview. What I mean by that is this if because what could happen is. We create this like box. OK, these are the ideas that gave rise to these forms. So then it becomes difficult to see exceptions to the rule or to like actually see how even within the post 18th century context, you still have vestiges of religion, vestiges of the spiritual, you know what I’m saying? So so what we need to do, in my opinion, is to find a theological way of teasing this out to discern these tendencies that you cannot you cannot do away with because we’re all human beings. And although the the the the main current might be an anti religion current or it might be a current that like actually contradicts a lot of the aspects of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, human beings are human beings and they will. Even inadvertently aspire towards the divine or aspire towards a humanism that is Christian within that context. And I think you’ve done some of that in your critique of some social social, how do you call it? Popular arts. Yeah, I know what I’m saying. Like and you’re you’re you’re doing exactly that with the way you’re like revalorizing the the the the what is it? A graphic novel. Yeah. OK, so so so I think that’s that’s because, for example, I don’t know if you’re familiar. I’m sure you are. The only thing that I heard about, you know, art treating it for the Zafi or as a critique. From a Christian perspective was Francis Schaeffer. How shall we then live, for example, as Protestant theologian, you know, very famous for his critique of Western civilization and like. But the problem is that it became too simplistic. And and the artwork then either was it fell under like, you know, that he would deprecated as either nihilistic or existential or like what, you know, or anti-Christian values. And so so the artwork was not approached as a thing you experience in a participatory way or an opportunity for communing with embodied meaning, even with it outside of the realm of like a traditional context for Christian Christian ecclesial life. But but rather it was considered to be purely a channel for a worldview. And if you didn’t like the worldview, then you dismiss the artwork. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s why the that’s why the art downstream from Schaeffer is just propaganda. It’s just it’s just it’s just really very shallow. All those Christian movies that you see, you know, are are are very weak and they’re weak in their structure, they’re weak in their narrative, they’re weak in their in their visuals. And they they’re just basically a vehicle for a message, basically. Yeah. So getting back to what I was saying about the whole issue of the beautiful, like the like you’ve pointed this out in some of your lectures about how you have now like the the complete separation between function and beauty. But, you know, in the in the fine art in the fine art paradigm. So. So the fine art paradigm is usually, you know, you know, you have sculpture, painting, poetry, architecture, dance, for example, music, you know, so these are all different categories different realms or practices, disciplines within the larger paradigm of the fine art practice. But the thing is that after the 60s, as you know, but but beginning like in the very big, you know, the 20s, the 1970s already in the yeah, already in the early like, you know, with the with the shop, for example, which, you know, I hold dear, although he’s infamous, you know, for because of a specific reason. And these are explained. He basically critiqued the fine art paradigm. So this is Marcel Duchamp. You can look him up if you don’t know who is very important where we are today. Right. So so he basically then like, created like began. He was like the initiator of a questioning of the finite paradigm. So so contemporary art, as we know, since the 60s, OK, with pop art, you know, neo data, conceptualism, all these things, even aspects of like minimalism, you know, all these like, actually all these movements tend to be anti aesthetic. Yeah, they’re not concerned with notions of beauty anymore. OK. And so so we have to keep in mind that that that as well. So so he is an initiator of that that tendency because he says, OK, art till now has been retinal because he’s basically critiquing the 19th century tendency of like, for example, the impressionist and post impressionist. You look at nature and then you have you have a sensation or you you you filter it through your temperament and then what you produce, although independent from nature, is an autonomous object. Nevertheless, it’s based on your sensations. Right. And so so he says, well, but even that has an aspect of idea because they are actually experiencing a sensation and then ideistically. And this is I’ll get back to that. But this is a connection between modern and traditional art. They are ideistically then translating this sensation. So he said, forget it, forget about the forget about the sensation, he says. You know, because art is its own thing, it is a conceptual framework. And we’re forgetting that and we’re so getting trapped, wrapped up in our sensations and beauty and the whole institution of fine art that is not allowing us to actually address what art is or could be the ontology of art, so to speak. And so he begins to explore that. OK. And then that opens up a whole can of worms, you know, that lead into like, you know, the rabbit holes that we, you know, of course, would not, you know, be inimical to, you know, we would be we not agree with. But yeah, well, I mean, just the situation of art now, you could say like the situation of postmodern art, the art market. It’s the most fascinating thing about Dusha is how he was totally recuperated by the system and actually, actually his ideas. It’s like now there’s a massive, you know, Guggenheim, Bilbao that is like this multimillion dollar complex to house all the children of Marcel Dusha, you know, and how expensive all these art pieces are. Yeah. And so the thing is that that he then also inadvertently opened up the avenue for the expanding of the aesthetic, because now people do similar things and they’re looked at for their aesthetic value, or even most people go to the museum and look at his fountain for aesthetic values. You know what I’m saying? And so it’s like so, you know, so things are like all over the place. You know, it becomes more and more like like an amoeba of like, you know, a phenomenon. No, no, and it’s like, it’s because what you have is like, you don’t have a, let’s call it an imaginal, like the imaginal horizon, so to speak. Like in a traditional context, the imaginal horizon was very specific based on metaphysical assumptions. And it ordered based on this metaphysical assumptions, first of all, by default, it was man’s relationship to the transcendent, the divine, the gods or whatever. And then based on that, then how do we shape our lives? Yeah, based on the heavenly pattern as above so below. And so then, but the stories and the art would also be grounded from below at through function. Yeah, it is the fact that you have objects that have to have a function in the world would would connect heaven and earth basically, whereas contemporary art, because you’ve unmoored the ground even. And now you also unmoored the top, you just have this amoeba, it’s a great way to get it. You just have this free floating chaotic exactly, it is just a kind of expression of variation itself, you could say. Yeah. So what you have now is like a, or, you know, another way of putting it is like, you know, how like you have foam, and foam is composed of this little tiny like, bubbles, or like, you know, so you know, of, of either like little cells, composing this. So you can imagine the art world right now as foam, composed of all these little like bubbles, which are like, you know, the the, the, like, they’re independent semiotic, like fields of meaning, like, so, so each artist has to invent his own, his own symbolism, or his semiotic, like, you know, interpretation of reality, or how he engages with the social cultural sphere, or if he’s addressing aspect of like ontology, how he like interprets our humanity or whatever. And so, so then, when you encounter it, you’re at a loss, because you don’t you don’t you’re not part of the same imaginable horizon. And so, what is hard for most people is that by default, if you’re going to engage with that, you have to become versed in history, you have to become versed in art theory, you have to become versed in the specific work of the artist and how he actually plays into this whole foam of cross fertilized meanings. And that’s a very hard thing to do. It’s like, it’s ultimately is an interpretive, critical act that is very difficult to engage with. But it’s, it’s sort of like its own. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s its own. For example, that I like to, I like to compare these, I have to use this contrast. I think, from a Christian perspective, an Orthodox perspective, there is a tendency, we think that it’s easier for a person to go into an Orthodox church and to understand what’s going on than to go to a museum and understand what’s going on. Okay. There is a sense in which this is true and it’s not true. Yeah, because I think I think it, I think it’s, I think it’s true in the sense that the let’s say the, the it’s ramping up is as difficult, that is you have to, you have to kind of gain a worldview. But once you have it, then everything lays itself out. Yes. Yes. Yeah. But, but, but my, what my thing is the initial encounter is initially encounter is difficult because if you are not versed in the iconology, you have to learn that language and you will have intuitions that are perhaps more immediate because, you know, they, they are using, we are using forms that are universally relatable. And so far, I mean, human faces, exactly. Like these things are all right, right. Deeply connected to our experience. Yes. Yes. And so in that sense, it is more accessible. But there is a similarity, although not one-to-one similarity of like the challenge of actually immersing yourself in the theology, in the cosmology, in the symbolic structures and patterns for you to be able to interpret what it is that you’re seeing in a more in-depth way. Yeah. And so, so, so yeah, so that’s, and then there’s a difference too. Like there’s a difference because, because there is this hierarchy in the language and there’s a communal aspect to it. And there’s a notion of kind of bringing you up towards higher worlds. The, the, let’s say the effort you put into learning the language will lead, lead you up towards virtue, will lead you up towards holiness. Exactly. And that’s my- Whereas in the, in the contemporary art world, you just nihilistically move from bubble to bubble. And, and it’s like this infinite and you’re, you, you have to kind of get used to idiosyncrasy as, as an experience. It’s, it’s like, sometimes you think that people that go into museums get some kind of coherent experience, but they don’t. They just actually are used to idiosyncratic, let’s say collage. And they actually see that as a reflection of the real, which is a deeply nihilistic, deeply nihilistic act in itself. That’s, that’s actually relates to, to, to what I was doing, which parallels away what you were doing when you were in, in art school. So I want to, I want maybe that’s a good time to back up a little bit. Yeah. Because we kind of jumped right into the conversation, which is great, but maybe you can tell people a little bit about your own story. That is how you kind of moved into the contemporary art world and then moving out of the contemporary art world into iconography and ultimately trying to find ways to, to maybe bridge the language as much as is reasonable or feasible. Yeah. Yeah. The, how, how should I frame this? I, I grew up as a Protestant. My, my parents were Pentecostal. And, and so throughout my youth, I pretty much struggled with that because I didn’t really, you know, I didn’t really want to be part of it, but eventually to the grace of God, I, I had to confront what I really believed. And that was during my undergrad during, I went for one year at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. And there, that was a reality check because then it really became like a confrontation between worldviews. Yeah. Me talking to people and like, you know, like for example, I took for granted the existence of the soul and I would go to a party and talk to people that like were totally denying the existence of the soul. I’m like, you must be crazy. And then I stepped back and I said, all right, I’m trying to argue for something that I’m like, I’m like rejecting in my parents. What does that, what does that mean about, you know, why do I really believe, you know what I’m saying? And so that precipitated a whole process of like, you know, at that time I like, I encountered for the first time, like that little treatise by Vasily Kandinsky considering the spiritual in art. That was like a big eye opener because I didn’t really know that there was a slice of the modern art world that dealt with spiritual matters. Right. You know, the question what that means, but you know. But at least an effort too, like, yes, like Moldria and Kandinsky. Yes. A lot of these artists were actually, were actually spiritualists, were involved in philosophy and all these kind of fringe spiritual things, but it, but it wasn’t just pure materialism. That’s exactly, exactly. So, so then, you know, moving forward, I decided to commit my life towards following Christ and his gospel. And, but that was before I came to orthodoxy. My dad bumped into an Antiochian priest in his high school, with the high school where he was working. And then that precipitated a conversation. My dad told me about it. I went to visit the Antiochian church. And that was my first instance of like, actually looking at a liturgy and like, and the incense and the icons. And I couldn’t really, I was, all I know is that I was like, I was digging it, but I don’t know. I couldn’t really put my finger on it intellectually. It took years for me to like, actually piece it together. But I was like, I would go to the, to the Bible studies Wednesday nights in the Protestant church where we attended. And I was like, I want to go to liturgy this Sunday, man. I mean, I want something more like, you know, experiential, you know, anyways. So eventually when I went to grad school, then I became orthodox. I was received into the church. And so during undergrad, I was doing, you know, abstract expressionist kind of work. And then towards the end of my undergrad, I shifted focus and I started to do more like geometric based work from collage compositions that I would put together. So, so which relates to what you were saying about the fragmentation thing, right? So I would take clips from magazines and, you know, and, and evocative kind of like suggestive kind of like imagery and then combine it in a, in a grid like structure. And then I would execute it in oils. Then that- This was in the mid 80s, right? This was in the, no, man. No, 90s, sorry. Mid 90s. Yeah. This was in 1994. Okay. 96, I went grad school. You’ll be a combination of death of the author, a critique of Greenbergian modernism and the ideas of the simulacra, Baudelaire. Yeah. And, and the pivotal influence for everyone at the time was Gerhard Richter. Yeah. I was looking at like, so I was, I was basically doing what you could call conceptual abstraction. And it was, it was related to pop too, because they, given that it was a critique of the author, it was predicated on appropriation. So, so I was taking, taking images from, from popular culture, fragments of photography. I would even photograph a TV screen of garbled channels. Yeah. And then I would, I would put these images together to resemble computer screens, but it had a dimension of illusionism because it was photorealistically executed and it had a condition to geometric abstraction. So, so it was both geometric, organic, illusionistic. It was, it was sort of like impure painting, impure abstraction, which was a, the critique of Greenberg, because Greenberg had this idea that for painting to become his true self, like, or, or to, it was a, modernism was sort of like a gradual progression towards the culmination of the true identity of painting. And part of it involved like the rejection of illusionism, the inherent properties of painting as flatness. And so- Which ended in absolute nonsense. It ended in like rolls of canvas with like- Right. Like those flashes of color on it. Exactly. Right. Right. So, so I was, I, I actually, I was into color and, and, and so I was, I was playing with all these ideas. And, but the thing is that, and by the way, digression, which I think I have to mention my, my, my professors at, at Hunter College, where I was going for graduate school, where there were a very interesting school. They, they, they were colorists. They, they, they’re, if you look it up, you know, they’re like, they’re, they’re, they’re considered the Hunter color school. Right. So, they, but, but their work, it influenced my work, but I was also rebelling against it. Yeah. Because there was, I used this very thin stripe kind of like surface for, for my images where it created an optical effect. Yeah. The images hovered, so to speak. And so, because I would, I would put contrasting colors, hues, like green, red, like orange, you know, and blue. And so given that there were put together in very close proximity stripe like forms, you know, structure, it would create a hovering effect and a vibration, but this was partly related to what Sanford Warnefeld was doing. He was the chair of the art department at Hunter. And he, he, he, he had a course called the color seminar that I took that was very important. And, and, and I derive a lot of, you know, good influence from that, but I, I thought that their approach was too scientific and it was still part of like the continuation of what was happening in the late 19th century with Surat and like, you know, the, the color theory that was happening at the time, they, you could, you could say that they are a current form of that or the continue, they, they’re closely related to that history. And my, my advisor, my thesis advisor was Robert, Robert Swain. And he also did work based on color very much about finding a, a system, a color system based on the color wheel that, and so he has, you know, developed a color system that he very systematically arranges. He’s got like 400 and maybe like, I don’t know if it’s 400 or 4,000, I mean, thousands of colors that he has arranged and he has a systematically numbered in his studio and he moves these around in like to create compositions and like, so to me, it was like, you guys are too crazy, too, too, too, too, too, too scientific anyways, but that was, yeah, so there was the environment and so, but at the same time, I was like, really appreciative as, as to, to me they call that painting based on one folks, like a theory, they called it presentational painting instead of re-presentation, it was presentation, right? Presentation, it was presentation, right? A presentation of a color phenomenon. And to me, that was very evocative, very, and, and has a lot of potential because in my view, it’s presenting a phenomenon that is offered to us by God, but the, the, this painters are like actually focusing on it and bringing it to you so you can experience it. And to me, that dimension, getting back to what we were saying about how we could interpret something as having a theological implication, although people who did it might not even have that in mind, to me, if you look at that work along those lines, you could actually interpret it in a very fruitful way. In any case, so I was surrounded by all this stuff and I was doing sort of like a partly a critique of that and partly going along with the spirit of the times in terms of postmodern painting, conceptual painting. And my thesis was a look into the mechanics of visual pleasure. So given that I was by default, always interested in the spiritual dimensions or dynamic in modern art, I was continuing to do that. So my view was part of the fine art paradigm is you’re redeeming things by decontextualizing them. You bring them into the realm of art and by default is a higher, a higher context, okay? In this cultural sphere, okay? So you experience it as somehow in so far as it is no longer part of the real world, it is higher, right? So in my mind at the time, I was like taking all these advertisements, decontextualizing them, putting them in a context of geometric abstraction, which was by default in its history related to aspirations towards the transcendent and creating what I called a pseudo spirituality within the realm of contemporary painting. And I was using fragments of, visual fragments of culture that in my view were a materialistic spiritualism, if that makes any sense. Because when you look at advertisement, they use, for example, they use color, light, notions of purity, and they try to exalt the object they’re selling towards almost making it into a saint or make it, putting it in the realm of the transcendent. So I was basically using that kind of reference material, bringing it into painting and questioning aspects of the transcendent value of painting and how ultimately if it is a commodity object, it is playing into the whole pseudo materialistic spirituality of the market. That was in my mind, part of what was going on. But that was at the same time of me becoming orthodox, finding out about monasticism. And so there was a transition that was taking place. And I was getting closer to the probability of entering into the monastic life. And I was like playing with the idea and I didn’t know. Meanwhile, I finished up graduate school. I’m just one question. At any point, did you experience a kind of schizophrenia in the contemporary art world and this movement towards orthodoxy? I say that because I was experiencing that during my degree in art, which is at some point I was doing these things here and I was doing these things here and it was just ripping me apart. I don’t know if you had that experience. Yes, that was definitely part of it. Because it was not to down the Protestant brethren out there. But I was like, at a time I was thinking to myself, our world is Protestantism. It’s like you have different denominations of doctrines. In me participating in this, I’m trying to come up with ideas that for what purpose I was asking myself. I have the orthodox faith and so that already is all encompassing. It’s like everything is put in order. There is a structure of meaning that I don’t need to be in reinventing the wheel. But meanwhile, I’m doing this artwork that it predicates always reinventing the wheel. Because you have to always come up with an idea that moves the ball ahead somehow. Whatever that means. Right. Then I was in a dilemma. Do I want to just create beautiful objects for people to be gratified? But what does that really mean? Even if I come up with good ideas, are they even that good or helpful in the ultimate goal of our existence here in this world? Then when I looked at things in terms of priorities, I was like, well, in terms of priority, I have to say that in liturgical art is by default higher than the paradigm that I’m experiencing. I was thinking in graduate school because it leads man towards his intended ultimate goal, the ultimate good. It’s more all-embracing because it’s functional, it’s symbolic, it’s got aspects of beauty, but it’s not solely predicated on beauty and it’s leading man towards God. So what else should I, I mean, why would I do anything else? Right. But what you’re saying is so interesting because there and I think this is going to lead us towards the way in which we can bring some of this back in. What it feels like is that there’s an aspect of a lot of the contemporary art world and a lot of modernism, which is almost like a hyper focusing, as you said, that they’re hyper focusing on color, like a hyper focusing on the sublime, a hyper focusing on these different aspects of experience. Whereas the liturgical experience has it all there. Right. And so it’s like, if you think there’s no sublime in communion, you’re not paying attention, my friend. It’s like, it’s there. And if you think that, if you think there is in beauty, all of these things are there. And so, but there’s a possibility, interesting possibility to look at these hyper specializations in almost as like these in their heresies, but see how they can, they teach us something about that aspect also. Right. It’s like the work on color that was done in the modern, the modern era, it’s something that the ancients didn’t have access to, which is amazing work. This is important. What you’re saying is very important that we have to, I think as orthodox Christians, learn how to engage with the contemporary art world in an honest way, but in a more nuanced way, I think. Taking into consideration exactly what you’re talking about. For example, I was looking at Donald Judd, I was looking at another documentary, an interview of the daughter of Donald Judd was interviewed for the occasion of some big exhibition of his work. He’s a like one of the greatest minimalist, right? So, or he probably wouldn’t have liked that term, but in any case, and as they’re talking to her, they have this footage of like some of his sculptures and it dawned on me, the guy was total empiricist. He was like totally non-religious atheist. And I was looking at his work and I was beginning to notice myself tracing his ordering structure and experiencing myself in a way contemplating the ordering system that he brought into this and how sometimes you almost grasp it, but then it slips out of your grasp. And I’m like, this has, you could analyze that in a way that actually you could do an interpretation that is exactly what you’re seeing. Looking at this hyper approach to cognition or our mind’s capacity to order reality in a way where it brings out of the viewer, a contemplative experience of an object that in a way serves as a parallel to prayer. It is a gathering experience because you become aware of like, you know how like you have seen the Enesia Ziarapagat, he’s got the linear prayer and then the circular prayer and then the spiral prayer, right? So I think some works can be seen in partly even if inadvertently, even by people who don’t even believe in God, they create a situation in which you become aware of your capacity to have a higher level of cognition. And to me, that is like the same thing with the color painters that I mentioned that I’m indebted to from Hunter College. So I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind because if we just always approach it as this work is illustrative of this false idea or illustrative of this decadent period in history or illustrative of a worldview that is destructive to man, it’s like the reality is as Orthodox Christians, we have been given the capacity to see Christ in everything. And we have to not forget that the Logos is always playing in fields and places that we don’t expect his plane. And so let’s just look for him and have more of an openness to not ignore when things are clearly spiritually destructive, but also realize that things are not always so starkly black and white. Yeah. And the way the Christians, what they did to Roman art, they did exactly what we’re talking about, which is that there’s a, say in Roman and Hellenistic and Roman art, there’s a kind of, there’s a kind of glorious human that is put on in front of us. And that tendency tends to become excessive in the sensuality, in the kind of sexual aspect of it. And, or even in the extreme of the warrior, like there’s these extremes that appear in Roman art in the desire to kind of to lift up man. And so the Orthodox Christian said, okay, we can take that. This is the stuff we’ve got to work with. That’s fine. Let’s work with that. And then keeping all the positive aspects of Roman art, but then taming them, reorienting them, having some contrapposto, but not the excessive one we see both in Roman and in the Renaissance, post Renaissance time, having, emphasizing this kind of beautiful face or these kind of simple, beautiful faces. All of this is something that we ended up bringing back in. And so you can trace Roman art right up to the post-Iconoclasm work. Like if you look at those carvings, I love those ivory carvings that come after iconoclasm. I mean, all the tropes of Roman art are there, but they’ve all been reoriented. The clothing has all the same forms, but all very, the sensuousness is kind of tamed in. And so why couldn’t we do that again, like you said, with some of these powerful modern contemporary artists that have been investigating some aspects of human experience? That’s a very interesting problem. And it is one that I think is unavoidable and important. One of the things we have to remember is, I think we have to take this back, Jonathan, to the revival. And I think we are heirs of the revival of icon painting and the sacred arts in the Orthodox Church. That’s really important to understand that the iconography almost died. It didn’t die, but it came very close. People tend to think that Orthodox iconography is just this thing that blazed on since the beginning of the church, but that’s not true. Starting in the 18th century, 19th century, and then by the early 20th century, it’s a trickle. It’s almost gone. And so we have to understand that we are the children of a revival in the post-war period of iconography. And we are the heirs of that for all good and ill that it had within its seed, you could say. Right. And that’s the important thing, because I think it hasn’t been until recently that the problematic dimensions of the revival have been considered. I know when I first became Orthodox, it was by default, that the work of Ospensky and Kanteglu, for example, it was considered by default to be the authoritative traditional perspective on iconography. And they have served a very important cathetical role in bringing people to a cognizance of the importance of traditional iconography. But at the same time, it has suffered from oversimplification, the way people have taken their thought. And also, they themselves, I don’t think, I don’t think they have been themselves, I don’t think addressed or whereas honest, no, that’s not right to say. They were not as upfront about how important their modern context was to them being able to even frame the questions that we frame. But do you think maybe they were more, they’re actually just unaware? Because they’re often not, we are unaware of the frame in which we say yes, we exist. And that frame becomes apparent as time goes on, then we can look back and say, oh, okay, this is what was going on. And so I think that we don’t have to blame them in any way, but also understand that they were doing a monumental, insane work that we need to be eternally grateful to them for, but that in that desire to lift a mountain, they were bound to frame things a little off, to make some mistakes, to overemphasize certain things, like this is what’s bound to happen. But you know what, to give credit to Ospensky, remember that article I wrote about, I mentioned where he in one of his lessons mentions Matisse. Yeah. And so he was aware of how the icon played into modernism, and he did not, and he referred to Matisse in a positive way when he was teaching his students. So you know. Yeah, you also mentioned how close he was to Maurice Denis and that whole kind of neocatholic art, modern neocatholic art that was happening in the early 20th century. That was the context. That was totally the context. And you know, what was that article? The Autonomy of the Icon. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Where I basically tried to show the parallels between the symbolism of the 19th century that was articulated by Maurice Denis and how it pretty much, I mean, it’s when you look at, when you hear him speak and then you hear Ospensky speak or Cantigou speak, you’re like, oh, all right, so they’re coming from the same attitude towards the capacity of painting to embody something more than meets the eye that is related to an inner experience of nature. But in the case of Ospensky and Cantigou, it’s like, given that they’re orthodox, they place that level of cognition above mere feelings. They place it in the realm of the noetic apprehension of things. Okay. So anyway, so, but I say that to say that there, we have to look further into the interesting convergence that existed as, you know, as the revival was happening between the revivalists and modernism. Yeah. And so, if we look at that, honestly, then we realize that we cannot escape our own moment. Yeah. And just like the iconographers of the Byzantine period felt like they were in continuity with the Hellenic past. Yeah, with the Roman art. They felt completely like they were continuing Roman art. Right. And so, they did not see themselves as in any way or form breaking away from it. They saw themselves as take, like you described, taking aspects, revalorizing them for the purpose of ecclesial function. And so, similarly, what we need to do is take whatever it is within our context, revalorize it, and re-employ it for the function that we have liturgically as iconographers. Right. So, but the thing is this, and this is where I think it’s important to make a distinction between iconology and stylistic form, because the iconology is a more complicated matter, because in a way, you’re dealing with formulations, visual structures that convey specific semiotic meanings, if you want to call it that way. Yeah. I might not be using that. Not being technical about it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, but what I’m talking about is the formal aspects of the icon that are in the realm of experiential connection with the art object. Yeah. So, color, lines, shapes, proportions. Exactly. So, all these things either will complement, augment the iconology, or it will actually work against it. Yeah. Distract us from it. Distract. Exactly. Call attention to itself. Right. So, the key is to, there is in that sense, a lot of freedom within the formal dimension, because by default, when I’m going to paint something, I have to start making decisions. I have to, you know, it is a false understanding that traditional iconography is predicated solely on mechanistic, slavish copying of older prototypes. Yeah. Okay. Well, there are some people that do it that way, but it’s a dead end. Exactly. It’s ultimately, it’s definitely a dead end. Yeah. So, there is a value in it, there’s a value in it in the training process, but eventually what we want to do is that actually create works that come from a living experience of the prototypes that we are handling. The final work has to be a witness to our living encounter with what it is that we’re depicting. And if it is not, then we’re not actually witnessing to the continuing life of the Holy Spirit in the church. Yeah. And what we’re doing is that we’re creating environments that counter our call to spread the gospel, because people are going to look into their churches and they’re going to be like, all right, so these people are like, they’re stuck in the middle ages and they just want to just basically perpetuate this like romantic, like, you know, idea of themselves. Nostalgia, right. Mastiche. That’s not. I always say tradition without nostalgia. That’s my motto. No, because tradition is, it’s, that one thing that also goes into the fact that something is old doesn’t mean that it is traditional. No, exactly. But also I want to bring something up just like, because I think we’re right there is that I, what I’ve said until now is something that I believe in all the things that I’ve said, but I think there’s also a caveat, which is that I also notice another tendency in the kind of the world of iconography, which is a desire for the experience of novelty itself, right? The desire to be titillated, you could say, by novelty. And I think that that, and so, so I think that there are some iconographers that want to use this freedom that we talk about to, let’s say, because what you’re saying make, what we were saying until now makes total sense if we are focused on the basic idea we mentioned at the outset. So it’s like, I can integrate this or that aspect of Matisse if I, my purpose is to create objects with a specific teleology that are there to exist within the community of the church that are there to bring us, to not call attention to themselves in a disproportionate way, all this stuff. Okay. But that the flip side is also true where there’s also people, there’s also some iconography that I’m seeing around that seems to want to almost idolize the novelty, that as if the idea of wanting to be in line with the traditional forms is somehow useless, it’s boring, it’s not interesting. And even that language of saying, like, we want to make it interesting. We want to make art that is contemporary in a very kind of vague way. And so I think it’s inevitable we’re going to make art that’s contemporary, but it seems like we always have to subject that to the ultimate purpose and the participation in the life of the church and the liturgy and all of that. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that as well. I think that is always the thing to keep in mind. It is a crucial point to not like ignore because I agree. I mean, there are, and I encountered this myself because it’s the temptation is that, you know, I don’t want to do this because it’s boring because it’s been done so many times that like, you know, after a while, it’s like, how many times are you going to do it? You know, but the reality is it serves a function and you have to do it. But then at the same time, it calls you to be more creative. If you’re sick and tired of like, you know, looking, but be creative in a way that is a service to the community, not self indulgent. I want to have some fun. So you have to like you’re saying, keep in mind the telos, the function, the purpose of what it is that you’re doing is ultimately, as I like to say, for aiding people’s process, their struggle towards deification. And if, if that is kept in mind and you’re using your discernment and you are actually harmonizing with all the various voices of the tradition, then you will produce something that is authentic and something that is within the spirit of the church that will have a creative dimension to it, but it’s not going to be like excessive in its affirmation of either yourself or the art objects for its own sake. And so that’s so, but my, my, my contention, my, my fear is on the other side of the same coin that you’re, which is, which is less not having Aiden Hart has also pointed is that let’s not be scared. And in being scared, like very our talent in, in this, in this very, you know, crucial like process of, of creative discernment in the creative process, you know, on top of what we’ve been saying about the viability of using things that have come out of modern painting. I think it’s also important to not ignore the parallels that exist between the iconographic tradition and other forms of traditional art. For example, Persian manuscript illumination, the work of the Indian miniaturist, like the Rashput painting and, you know, the Hari painting and things like that. And the Tibetan Taka tradition, for example, the, the Chinese and Japanese painting traditions. And when you really start looking at this, you realize, okay, man, this is my hubris speaking, right? I look at some of our icons, and then I’m like, come on, we have to, we have to step up. We got, we got, we got to do something better, man. And so I’m like, you know, when I think like, I think that anybody, when we look at your icons, I think this is like my greatest compliment, maybe not my greatest, one of my compliments of your work, which is that when you look at an icon, one of your icons, for most people, they get just this, this sense of wonder and beauty. And then for someone who knows, is like, like I know where he’s pulling these threads in from, but they don’t, they’re like a tapestry. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t call attention to themselves as threads. Like they don’t jar, like you see, I’ve seen some kind of very kind of subversive type of, of icon painting, you know, where you, it’s like, we’re not subversive, but like, but it just looks like a Japanese print. Like it’s just a Japanese print with the halo. Okay. I mean, yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I mean, somewhat interesting, but I definitely wouldn’t put that on iconostasis, but there’s a way to, to pull in some of the patterns in Japanese print, some of the composition, some of the line work, for example, that is, that is, that is subtle enough to not call attention to itself as a, as a weird string that’s poking out of the tapestry, but integrate itself in a, in a way that creates that sense of wonder. I’ve watched people like Father Shiloh, like I’ve never told you this, but I’ve watched people stand in front of your, your icons and I watched them and, and they just, they like go into a trance. They’re just like standing there and they just look at it and you, and you, and you’re trying to like figure out what’s going on in their mind. Like what’s happening, but I don’t think they even know, like most people don’t even know what’s going on. But I think that, that I think touches on what we were saying before about the, the importance of form having an effect that is experiential, that people will not necessarily, you cannot, you cannot codify it or quantify it in a, in a semiotic way. You experience it. It, it, it aids, it aids the function of, it can aid if you- You can, yeah, there you go. That’s great. And aid to augment the function of the icon as a support for contemplation. And that, and, and, and what I like to say is that this contemplation embraces both feeling and intellect. And when I say intellect, of course we mean like, right, right. So, so, so you have, you have the doctrinal message that elevates you intelligibly but you are also experiencing through aesthetic, through the aesthetic form, also an elevation that puts you in the frame of mind that contributes towards stillness, towards contemplative, entering into a participatory connection with the work. And so, and so this, this, I think I partly have, I’m indebted, I believe, from looking at, at modern painting because to me, like, okay, for example, like Ad Reinhardt, man. Yeah. I mean, some of Rothko’s paintings, some of, even, even Kenneth Nolan paintings. I mean, Kenneth Nolan, it’s like bordering on getting a little bit too factuous. You know what I’m saying? But in his best moments, you’re encountering a color experience that you’re like, how did this guy come up with this vision? And, and, and, and it puts you in, like you’re saying a zone, you know, right? So, but this zone has to be actually brought, it has to be something that brings you towards the ultimate, like it’s a vehicle for higher things, not for- And the zone is not enough. It has to be in service of God. Exactly. No, no, totally, totally. But that’s the, that’s the key. But that is very important because otherwise I think my, my, my concern is that unfortunately, there is perhaps, I’m exaggerating, maybe not, you tell me why you feel about this. There is a tendency of using iconography for philatistic purposes. What I mean by that is given that orthodoxy has experienced trauma after trauma historically, collapse of Constantinople, Turkish, the, the communist revolution, you know what I’m saying? All these various instances that have contributed to it’s like, like, you know, the tendency is then for people and also other, other issues of like during the Turkish Yoke, for example, like the, the Patriarch became a, an ethnic leader. Right. So, so, so the, the, the, the, the, the Ottoman authorities used them as a legislator of the specific ethnic group. And so then, then orthodoxy became closely linked to your ethnic identity. And also the whole issue of patriarchates throughout the history of orthodoxy have inculcated a sense of like a ethnic identity and the almost like undiscernible or undifferentiated like, you know, connection between ethnicity and orthodoxy. Right. But that’s problematic. Yeah. And it seems to me that in the realm of iconography, what happens is that local churches tend to fixate on specific forms visually that they deem to be appropriate in embodying their sense of ethnic identity. Yeah. And my advantage is I’m not Greek. Russian. I’m not Puerto Rico never had a patriarchy. Right. Or America, you know, right. You have the OCA, but then there’s, that’s just the working progress. Right. Yeah. It seems to be like the Adesephile and things like that. So, so we are in an environment or I am in an environment as you as well, like we live in a world that is more, uh, it’s not- You have less of that, of that temptation, you could say. Exactly. You have the less of that temptation. So we have, we have access to all this wealth of visual reference material that we could use as a means to strengthen, like uplift, like make iconography more flourishing. And, and instead of thinking that if I don’t do it this way, that I’m betraying my nation where I’m betraying, you know, the church, because I have such a close, like I make such a close connection between ethnicity and religion, you know? So, so I think, I think it’s important to emphasize that iconography is not Greek iconography. It’s not Russian iconography. You know, one of the problems that Ospensky and Kantaglou had when they were having their conversation, the letters they wrote to each other was, all right, what are we going to consider to be the classical form, the best to follow? And of course, Kantaglou thought it was Cretan, you know, folk, like, you know, 16th century Greek works. And while, you know, it was the, you know, the 15th or 16th century, you know what I’m saying? Russian, right? Russian stuff. And so, and they didn’t, they didn’t agree. But the thing is iconography is not set in stone. We follow a tradition, and the tradition is there to keep us focused on primary concerns, meanings that we are trying to embody through the iconographic tradition, that kind of graphic form in music similarly, you know, and so architecturally similarly, right? So we have this, this, this variety of things that forms aesthetic tendencies that we have received, that we have to work with, that we don’t cast out because they work. And they already serve as a context where people come in and they already know where they’re, what they’re inhabiting. And so we are to take this and elevate it more and more and more and more by our putting our contribution, not out of like some like selfish kind of like, you know, self anger-dising purpose, but as a service to the community. And so that means that your talent, my talent, Aiden Hart’s talent, you know, Corda’s talent, Tordor’s talent, whoever it is around, we have been given a very unique capacity, and we use it for the service of the church. We have to use it for the service of the church, but to try to somehow stomp it because we interpret it as being self-assertion or buying into the self-expressive theory of modern art, I don’t think it’s that simple. I think there is a room for the uniqueness of the person. And this is one pivotal critique that I don’t think has been addressed, has been made before with the work of Kumaraswami because Kumaraswami was excessively platonic. Yeah. And his notion of tradition was predicated on the Hindu Vedanta philosophical tradition, which completely denied the importance of the hypostasis. Yeah, the person. There’s no sense of the person in that right of the gun. And so for him, when he sees us at the tendency in traditional art towards anonymity, he interprets it from a Vedanta’s point of view, an excessively platonic view where like, we will shed our bodies and we will shed our personalities and we will identify ourselves with the one and or the Atman, the self with a capital S. And so all the illusions that the suffering caused because of us constructing this false notion of self, we will be done away with and we have bliss. No, we like saying Macari is the great, I think it is in his Mahamalits. It’s, you know, St. Paul remains St. Paul, St. Peter remains St. Peter, all the saints remain who they are, but they are there. They reach their true identity in Christ without completely losing their their person. And so and so that’s an important distinction to make. And I think the contemporary place in which we find ourselves today as iconographers is one in which we have to make that that distinction and clarify that in emphasizing the personal dimension of iconography is not buying into self-angradizing self-expression in individualistic sense. If anything, is a way of rebuttaling tendencies that could be excessively platonic or excessively Hindu that have come through the amazing help without him even realizing of people like Kumar Swami. Yeah, and I think that it’s like it’s similar to the when we talked about in terms of national imagery, that you just have to find a balance. There’s a balance like we love Russian iconography. We love Greek iconography. We love Serbian iconography, Georgian. It was beautiful. It has its wonderful particularities that we celebrate and maybe the same also in the sense of great iconographers who have some particularity that we celebrate. We just have to find the balance between understanding how that coexists with this move towards unity. And that really is the Christian story in the end. It is this balance of unity and multiplicity which we find already in the Trinitarian theology and ultimately in the way the church exists. It’s the story of Pentecost. It’s because it’s a continuing Pentecost. I think that’s that Aiden Harra has put it before one of his articles where like each nation has something to contribute. Each nation is united in Christ. They don’t lose their identity, but the catholicity of the church presupposes that it is the healing of the confusion that happened in the Tower of Babel. And so they will come together. And even if each person has a flame on top of their head, each apostle, so it’s like individual tongues of fire, but it’s still the same Holy Spirit, the diversity of gifts, but the same spirit. So similarly with different temperaments, different capacities artistically, these are prophetic. The prophet prophesies like St. Paul says, but their spirit is not taken away from them. They’re cooperating with divine grace. And so we are to cooperate with divine grace. And that means that whatever is healthy, good, will flourish. And what is not good that we could put aside, we will for the service of the church. But the individual and the temperamental uniqueness that each person or nation offers is for the wealth of the church. And so it makes a manifest and witnesses to the catholicity of the church in the Holy Spirit. I think that was an amazing way to end our discussion with that last encouragement. And so Father Silouan, thank you so much. As you know, I love your work so much. I have one drawing from Father Silouan we did an exchange several years ago of a drawing, which is one of my favorite things in the world. It’s in my living room now. But I’m also very fortunate to be able to receive, hopefully soon, an icon from Father Silouan. And so I’m really excited to show everybody when I receive it. So I would say go to his website. We’ll put a link in the description to the work he’s doing, to his articles. He is a shining light in the world of American iconography, but honestly also I think in the iconography in the world, period. And so Father Silouan, thank you for your time. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. We tried to do this a while back, but I’m glad we finally got it. And it’s been actually, you know, providentially actually worth the wait because it was a good conversation. And thank you for giving me the opportunity. As you know, the symbolic world is not just a bunch of videos on YouTube. We are also a podcast, which you can find on your usual podcast platform. But we also have a website with a blog and several very interesting articles by very intelligent people that have been thinking about symbolism on all kinds of subjects. We also have a clips channel, a Facebook group. You know, there’s a whole lot of ways that you can get more involved in the exploration and the discussion of symbolism. Don’t forget that my brother, Mathieu, wrote a book called The Language of Creation, which is a very powerful synthesis of a lot of the ideas that explore. And so please go ahead and explore this world. You can also participate by buying things that I’ve designed, t-shirts with different designs on them. And you can also support this podcast and these videos through PayPal or through Patreon. Everybody who supports me has access to an extra video a month. And there are also all kinds of other goodies and tiers that you can get involved with. So everybody, thank you again. And thank you for your support.