https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pTsRnW6baO0
This last spring I was commissioned an essay by Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire journal Which comes out quarterly and they were putting out an issue on faith and film So they asked me to write an essay for it I asked them if I could read the essay for you and they said that it would be fine And so I’m going to read this essay because I think I was really able to concisely Put together my vision of how Culture can be healed or how we can integrate healthy culture and as we just saw in the last few weeks We saw Jordan Peterson reappear We were happy to see that he seems to be doing a little better And so it’s also an opportunity for me to Frame my relationship with him in terms of thought. What are the similarities and especially? What are the differences that separate Jordan and I in our perception of how to? Engage to heal to deal with the difficulty in modern culture This is Jonathan Peugeot welcome to the symbolic world The world is suddenly keen on storytelling after a few decades of the new atheist assault of the postmodern undermining and fragmentation of identities of The venomous insistence that all that makes us human is a social construct as opposed to the objectivity of the sciences A strange post atheistic professor from Toronto has shaken the core of secularist discourse Of course there are those Bishop Barron among them who have been hacking at the question of narrative for a while But as I stood there at a Toronto bus station late one evening in the fall of 2016 I knew that the moment and the character I was facing were different After a goodbye hug and a pause. I looked at Jordan Peterson and said You’re gonna bring back Christianity His surprised reaction betrayed him and he said His surprised reaction betrayed hesitation followed by his secular alternative Hopefully we can get people to understand the psychological significance of these Bible stories. I Wasn’t settled by his answer and it still rings in my ear to this day And now four years later in the wake of Jordan Peterson’s rise to worldwide fame and after a bewildering Cascade of YouTube videos interviews lectures debates and a surprising tectonic shift in the discourse about religion It seems the issue is still playing out Which one of the two options? Jordan’s prediction or mine will come out on top Of course a return to Christianity and a discovery of the deep profundity of its stories are not exclusive to each other Any thoughtful Christian knows of the psychological keys offered up in the Bible Yet to communicate the relevance of our faith It is incumbent on us to celebrate not only the psychological depth of scripture But also its cosmic and metaphysical fullness We should not only remember and reinterpret the ancient narrative But lead our former detractors by the hand into the grand dance of our liturgy our art our Architecture and our pious legends It has been given to us to show the world How all these modern stories these novels we read and these movies we watch are useful But the most powerful stories are those we live and participate in Surprisingly facing the current social breakdown of meaning and identity in the West the Christian story presents itself once again as The only viable solution to the widening gyre the only metanarrative that makes sense of it all Christians should not underestimate the power of our story and the liberation it provides in the midst of a rising nihilism While modern scientists and philosophers are wrestling with questions of complexity and emergence meaning is reappearing as imperative for the world’s existence and Meaning making no longer appears as a superstitious mantle we can discard mind essence and logos But also inter-incarnational principles like story body and image all shine in our strange Historical moment as the very keys to how reality unfolds But before we take on the mysteries of the cosmos The Christian story first has the power to liberate the body of Christ from the yoke of so-called critical scholarship What I call story and what our ancestors called tradition is this golden thread of narrative people Intention and spirit that can free us from the scholars autopsy of scripture Which has culminated into the sterile Jesus seminar and celebrity atheist Bible scholars Let us remember and celebrate the story of Christ Not the story limited to Christ’s red letter statements and to the burden of scholarly approval But rather the story that animated the medieval mystery plays The one that spans from the first word of creation to humankind made in the image the fall the covenants the law the incarnation the death and resurrection The ascension into heaven the sitting on the right hand of the father and the coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead That story is the culmination and condensation of all storytelling Firstly because it is the meta story It is about how meaning Logos is the source of reality and how it fills doubts and questions with a full yet adapted answer It is the ultimate story because it manifests the most pristine example of descent and ascent The universal u-shaped story described to us by modern scholars from frazier to northward fry The u-shaped structure is found in the story of Jesus Christ through death and resurrection But is ultimately a cosmic story spanning from the garden and the fall to the holy city The Personal embodiment of the cosmic story also blends together all the aspects of the human archetype He is the type of all story characters For he’s presented as priest as king as warrior as artisan as servant as pastor as gardener both sower and reaper as prophet as teacher as healer As virgin as bridegroom as judge as victim as outcast as criminal As scandal as descending to the lowest rung of hell and ascending to the right hand of the father He is the creator who becomes the creature. He is adam who allows himself to be overwhelmed by the serpent for our sake He is life that becomes death light that becomes darkness Alpha to omega all in order to saturate the entire cosmos and meta narrative With the fullness of its origin and to change even death into glory To recover the ancient story we must first recover its scope In recent decades we have seen christians attempt to connect to a secular world that has progressively broken from their embrace Popular culture since the renaissance has grown from neutrally secular to openly hostile against christianity as rebellion Individualism and the dismantling of authority had become the main tropes of both the subject and forms of culture In everything from avant-garde art to rock and roll we have seen christians running up to catch up with secular culture Our efforts are usually mediocre In the empty quest for innovation and individual creativity the last century has left us with a wasteland of bad church architecture bad liturgical art bad music But also a slew of humdrum attempts from christians to make secular art as well But as the explicitly christian iconography and narrative recede from the public space Their implicit structures begin to emanate in a strange dim glow which appears stronger as the main light fades And so it is as christianity has set aside We can nevertheless see the story of the resurrection everywhere in popular culture The knockdown hero getting up at the last moment has become such a standard pattern of popular movies and fiction that we fail to recognize what it owes To the synthesis of that pattern in the story of christ Watching rocky or thor or neo get beaten down for several minutes until it becomes unbearable Only to see the hero rise in victory at the end Has become a permanent pattern of storytelling Even beyond the acts of a protagonist what imposes itself In the modern hero is a christian knight who sacrifices himself to help the weak and the helpless The heroes and gods of old like hercules or achilles like odin and thor acted out of a desire To obtain riches and glory To defend their own clans or at best to acquire wisdom for themselves Although there are some hints or prefigurations of self-sacrifice in antiquity The death of socrates could be seen through that angle It is truly in christ that this trope becomes the narrative pattern for our modern heroes In the conclusion of marvel’s avengers epic The series finds its climax in the moment where tony stark succeeds in using the power of the infinity gauntlet The weapon wielded by thanos in order to turn it against thanos and thereby annul the power of death We had seen this moment before in modern narrative The power of the gauntlet is the power of the one ring in tokeen’s epic Forged by the evil lord sauron the ring holds untold power In the lord of the ring several important characters are tempted to use its power for good Yet we discover how the absolute power of the ring would corrupt the user and turn them into the very tyrant they wish to oppose Why then is it different for tony start to take the gauntlet from thanos? What narrative change made the avengers climax so successful? The answer is a christian one It is because the act of wielding this absolute power Was also an act of self-sacrifice It is because tony stark consented to die so that he could defeat death by death The story of tony stark A selfish arrogant billionaire reaching the end of his narrative arc by sacrificing himself to save mankind Is a story that is impossible without christ The story of christ is everywhere It fills our novels our movies our comic books and tv shows it fills our political and family narratives And it even frames our self-perception A world view without christ is one that can barely be imagined anymore Only maybe in the guise of its inversion The anti-hero and anti-christ who cannot help despite himself to point at what? Is inverted Although it may seem like an aporia to some And it’s very erasure from the common discourse Even as it is being shooed from the public sphere We can see how the story of christ will inevitably return in its fullness I Say this not as a vague prophecy or a sentimental desire But rather as the inevitable playing out of a pattern as common as the waning and waxing of the moon of the moon Or the setting and rising of the sun The meta narrative embodied in the crucifixion will also play itself out in the story of christianity As the cosmic body of christ christ reaches the resolution of its own story In february of this year the film director and universal geek kevin smith tweeted out something fascinating Religions quote religions have been founded on the bible resulted in millions of people deriving inspiration and moral strength From amazing stories about fantastic feats of faith Hundreds of years from now our descendants will find divine inspiration from the story of cap wielding mjolnir end quote He was referring to a scene in avengers endgame Where captain america picks up thor’s hammer and uses it to fight with thanos something which is supposed to To happen only in the hands of a god worthy of the weapon The tweet exposes many things simultaneously First it shines a light on how there is an explicit attempt in recent large-scale movies to use highly Mythoreligious language in their storytelling Second it suggests these stories are on par with the ancient ones and are set to replace them For someone in the comic book and movie industry to proclaim this so explicitly Something that had been a nebulous speculation on the part of us watching culture Simultaneously exposes the shallowness and impossibility of such a proposition It is one thing to see the analogy between these entertainment ventures and the stories that really matter It is another to declare the disney-owned comic book characters will replace religion May seem that i’m snubbing my nose at popular entertainment, but that’s not the point The problem with the superhero movie is not in its capacity to embody Or not the cosmic patterns it is in how there exists a fundamental difference Between entertainment and active life The story of christ and even the ancient myths were not just stories people told to entertain each other To make people think or even to inspire action Certainly these ancient stories could do all of that but mostly the ancient stories were our stories The stories of who we are why we are here where we are going The story of christ is what we are meant to enter into to be baptized into christ to put on christ to become the image of christ The communion of the saints and the tradition of the apostles are an actual thread of people and stories that link us to christ and to our ancestors Their stories are our stories we’re not We not only speak Them but celebrate them Not on not naming our cities and our children after these people The saints are present to us We ask them to pray for us and with them we celebrate and worship christ in whose story we are all called to be glorified And so when we point to the new stories And enjoy how they embody some aspect of the great pattern how they embody this or that aspect of christ Everything flows in the right direction But when the opposite happens And we suggest that these new stories could act as a replacement for the christian story Then all the superficial qualities of these new stories come to the fore and they appear as empty vessels None of us can live in the trademark and copyrighted marvel universe Even if disney builds a theme park for us None of us can point to the place where iron man was martyred or display the hammer picked up by captain america In the famous battle of endgame These fictional stories are only liminal their power on us can only awaken a desire to live in our own story But the story of christ and his saints The very cosmic story from creation to the eschaton Is the one in which we live every day It is the story that we celebrate during our liturgies that marks our space through sacred sites that marks our year with feasts and processions The secular world has tried to replace all of this But its efforts only feed the fragmentation and leveling tendency of modernity And so we all teeter on the shore of deep nihilism as the waves get higher and the storm comes closer And finally We should not take lightly the powerful shift in culture that has taken place Since a then unknown professor in toronto spoke out against mandatory speech requirements Yet in the wake of the quote jordan peterson movement As I pray for the health and recovery of my friend. I feel it is nonetheless my role to say We must reach further It is not enough to understand stories psychologically And it is not enough to be upstanding individuals It is not enough to live by stories. We must live in them The stories must be a path we walk part of the glue that holds us together And individuals must unite themselves to a body Well formed in love so that we grow up into the logos himself who is the head of the world Without that extra step We will ultimately be dispersed like smoke Like wax before the fire