https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0qS4ytzPHxc
like true beauty sort of seduces you toward the good. It pulls you deeper into reality. But then there’s this, in these more pornographed forms, the seduction of the art becomes a pull into the abstract. It becomes a pull. In the scripture, techne art, applied science, and not just in the Bible, but also in kind of Greek mythology and ancient thinking, it’s always a dual thing. It’s not clean. There’s a healthy suspicion towards it because, and if you look at how Plato was like, you know, get rid of those artists, because they can make you think something’s beautiful even if it’s not, right? They’re tricksters. They can become propagandists. And in scripture, you can see that applied arts are from Cain, and they bring about the flood. So there’s this very dark aspect of what they can bring, but then God is constantly saving that which is fallen. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello and welcome to Climbing on Mount Sophia. I’m excited today to be here with Jonathan Pageau and David Schindler again. Jonathan Pageau, of course, is the leader of the Symbolic World movement, which is a YouTube channel and a website and I think a printing press now as well, right? Yeah, we just started a press a few months ago with our fairy tale series. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of wonderful things going on there. I mean, so many resources, wonderful people are part of that whole movement. And then Jonathan also is a Orthodox icon carver, an artist. And today we’ll be referencing some things from his video on contemporary art. I’ll put a link here. And then David Schindler, of course, writes under the pen name DC Schindler, professor of anthropology and metaphysics, I think, at John Paul II Institute, and then author of many great works. So David and I have been doing a series on David’s book, Freedom from Reality. And so I’ll post a link to that here as well. But I was hoping today that we could talk about art, art in relation to beauty and how that looks in the modern world today and how that’s part of the diabolical separation from the world that we’re all experiencing. So I’ll throw those out there. And any thoughts that come up initially? Well, Ken, maybe we could start with the question that right before we began that you would raise and we hadn’t gotten into, and I suspect Jonathan would have some really interesting things to say about this, but you mentioned the distinction between techne in the ancient sense and modern technology that shares a root, but there’s a very different sensibility implied. I mean, maybe that would be a good starting point. It’s not immediately art in the sense of painting and sculpture, but certainly related to that. Would that seem like a good, a fruitful? Yeah, it’s a great place to start. It’s like my, actually my intuitions about art, part of my intuitions about art actually came from reading Heidegger’s questions on technology and then reading Ananda Kumaraswamy’s work on art as well. Those are the kind of the two sources that brought me to think differently or to realize just how differently the ancient sense of art just how differently the ancients thought about art and in some ways the sense that they had the idea of idea or episteme and then techne was applied basically. It was just the idea of applying things to the world, right? So you have these principles, you have these patterns, and then you apply them to reality and that application is techne. And so that’s actually been my approach to art in general and to technology. So to me, I don’t totally see a difference between the two. It’s just that, and poesis, for example, like even poesis comes from the word making. It’s this idea of like, you invoke the muse and then you make things, you actually create things. And that’s been my approach to it. And the reason why I take that approach is because I think that that’s also what’s there in scripture. It’s closer to the way that the arts or applied making is in scripture. And it also makes it, it removes it from this weird idea of expressing yourself or of like creating beauty, you know, art for art’s sake or beauty for beauty’s sake and all of these types of terms that came about with the romantics and the later artists and rather brings it back to the idea of, you know, it’s just, it’s a, so Ananda Kurnasamy, for example, says the art remains in the artist, right? Art is actually a skill. Art is not a thing. Art is a skill that the artist has to apply knowledge and principles to the world and to crew and to make things that are artifacts that have a purpose in life and in society. And so technology does that as well. And the arts, the ancient arts, that’s what they did, right? The seven, they say the seven arts are however you want to talk about it. That’s how they did it. And it’s just a different way of understanding, which also breaks that weird duality we have between the idea of like pure techne in the sense of just gains in efficiency, which is the way that we seem to think about technology today. It’s just increasing of power basically and the idea of art in the sense of expression of something. And so to me they’re actually ultimately the same. And when we separate them and we have something like fine art or music or creative arts and then we have pure techne, which is just an increase in means, then we have a monstrosity. We end up with weird monstrosities on both sides. I want to invite you all to the very first Symbolic Worlds Summit. Over three days we will finally meet in real time and real space and everyone from this little corner of the internet will be there to explore the theme of reclaiming the cosmic image. Of course I will be speaking but there will also be Martin Shaw who is an amazing mythographer, Father Stephen DeYoung of Lord of Spirit fame. There will be Richard Rowland from the Universal History Series, Vesper Stamper, Nicholas Cotar and Neil deGray that you’ve all seen on my channel here and there. For entertainment we have everyone’s favorite apocalyptic band, the one and only Dirtcore Robbins. This event will be the chance of a lifetime to capture and embrace our current moment. So join us from February 29th to March 2nd, 2024 in Tarbon Spinks, Florida. Visit thesymbolicworld.com slash summit for more information and I will see you there. Yeah, no that’s great to pick up on a couple of things there. I’d like to tease out a little bit more distinction with technology but I’ll come to that in a moment. This idea of Techne being an application, it seems to me there’s another dimension that’s that I think is in the spirit of what you were saying but it’s formulated a little bit differently and that is that, this again would be a Heideggerian sort of sense that Techne itself is a kind of knowing. It’s a distinctive kind of knowing that would be different from conceptual knowing that then gets applied like in a second moment. You have an idea, an inspiration and you take that idea and then you try to translate it into a thing through paint or tone or color. There’s another kind, it’s kind of interesting and this is, I’m not an artist like you are, I do enjoy painting. At one point I thought I might become one but that never materialized but my experience of art and this seems pretty common is that you often discover the idea as you work with it. That it’s not something you first have an idea and then you apply it but that somehow the very idea itself comes to expression in a way that can take the artist himself by a certain surprise. That it’s still a manifest, it’s not just self-expression. I mean some people will interpret that as just being arbitrary creativity. It’s still truth centered and truth grounded but it’s a kind of truth that is manifest, revealed and manifest in the real thing that you can then think about afterwards. Would you accept that? No, well Heidegger talks about the notion of gathering. So it’s like the way in which it’s an unveiling is that it gathers elements together towards and it reveals, it ends up revealing a purpose as you’re gathering them together. So you can understand it as an emergent, from an emergent perspective and from a kind of top-down perspective where from an emergent perspective you have all these things coming together in love and then it’s then manifesting a hidden reason. They come together and then the other way to understand it is from the top-down perspective which is it’s like a head finding a body or a husband finding a wife. It’s like an idea coming into the world and joining itself with matter. So I think both of those are perfectly good ways to explain it. If you think about like they’ll always be, so let’s say even the way you talk about it which is there’s this modern, it’s a more modern way of understanding art which is this kind of like a you know improvisational approach which then reveals a pattern that you hadn’t thought about, haven’t thought about. It’s almost like a form of divination. It’s like you cast the bones and then you watch the bones move and then you see, oh it’s like there’s something there, there’s some pattern, then you start to draw the lines between the pattern and then you kind of are surprised to find what is being revealed. So in that sense that type of art making is closer to divination in that sense but then you even that you would need to have the art. So if you can’t do it then you’re not going to do anything. You can kind of see it but if you don’t have the skill, if you don’t have that art in you, then even if you have this revelation of some pattern that you hadn’t thought about, you need the skill. So it’s still, even if it’s an emergent thing, you also need that top-down control in order to make it happen. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. This idea that you’re sort of generating order simply from below is incoherent ultimately. It never really works out. There’s always going to be a kind of a from above dimension. I think that’s… The modern artist did everything to attain pure… So I don’t know if you know the process. It’s fun to do. I don’t know if you know the process of a Kadavriksky which came about with the surrealist, which was what you would do is you take a piece of paper, you’d fold it and then we would each start… I would start a drawing and then I would leave just a little bit of the drawing left so that you can see, but you can’t see what I did. And then you would continue the lines and make something and then leave a little bit for the other person. And at the end you unfold it and then you have a kind of hybrid monster. But then what you’re surprised is that you realize that often there’s actually a connection between, a surprising connection that happens between the different elements. And that’s why I mean that it’s closer to the way that ancients would have done divination. That’s similar. Yeah, I’d want to try to steer between that because there’s no governing idea. There has to be a governing idea or else… I think… I don’t know if you recall the TV series from a few years ago, Lost, that kind of… And I remember at a certain point really getting into that. It was absolutely compelling, but at a certain point the compellingness of it just disappeared. I think that was when the audience collectively began to realize that they didn’t know where they were going. They don’t know where they’re going. They were like making it up, and I mean immediately the drama disappears. It’s no longer mysterious. There has to be a governing idea, but what I would want to avoid on the flip side is somehow that you’ve got the concept that artwork is simply a physical translation of a concept. It contributes more than that somehow. There has to be a play between the two. I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty. I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty because on the one hand I remember seeing that kind of platonic idea that beauty is the expression of the infinite, something like that, and I always thought, well that’s a real interest. It’s a good description of beauty, but then I also realized that I had a tendency to describe beauty very much top down. It’s like beauty is when you see harmony. Beauty is when you see order. But I realized that actually, you know what? That’s not true. It’s not actually what you perceive as beauty. Beauty is something like harmony joined to a particular. It’s integrated harmony into the contingency of a particular place, a particular thing, and that’s when you actually perceive beauty. Something that is actually too perfect and too balanced is monstrous, but you need this weird discussion between what the particular material space situation whatever offers and the pattern which kind of comes down and is married to it. It’s like when the absolute shines through the particular that you see beauty. Yeah, but the particular plays a part in it. Right, exactly. If there’s no particular, the absolute can’t manifest itself. And there’s also a way in which the infinite also appears mysteriously in an aspect of idiosyncrasy that is properly there. The idea of, you know, this weird idea like if you read in the proverbs where it says something like the gray hair, like the person’s white hair is his glory. And it’s a beautiful image because on the one hand it’s like your hair turns white so it turns into light, but at the same time it’s you dying. And it’s like actually your dying is your glory. And so it’s like as you settle into a kind of particularity, that’s what kind of shows your particular glory. So it’s an interesting, but obviously it can’t be disconnected from the universal, but it has to, it has both at the same time. Yeah, you know along these lines there’s a, the best, most compelling interpretation of beauty that I have read is from a thinker I think needs more attention on this matter and that’s Friedrich Schiller. And you mentioned play. He has this definition on the surface, the definition doesn’t sound like much, but when he explains it, it really becomes fascinating. He says that beauty is the appearance of freedom. And what he means by that is, Jonathan in a way it’s another way of saying the very point that you made. So he said, you know, imagine just a straight line and a curving line. The curving line he says is more beautiful than the straight line. And why is that? The straight line represents a kind of an order that imposes itself sort of irrespective of the particularity of the matter there. It just mechanically is there and in a way allows nothing of the matter to appear. The curved line is the triumph of order, but it’s a triumph of order precisely in the particularity and the constraints of the matter, where the very constraints of the matter become a means of expressing the freedom. So you get this incredible marriage, use that word marriage, I think is beautiful here, of form and matter, the from above, the from below, the concept and the practice, I mean all these things, universality in the particular. Somehow that’s beauty is where it all really comes together. Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I think one of the most satisfying images for a human person, and that’s why it’s so universal, is a straight line with a curvy line around it. I think it’s hard-coded into us. When we see that line. It’s in the DNA you might say. Yeah, exactly. When you see that caduceus kind of structure, I don’t know, I remember being very young and just drawing that over and over just because there was some weird aspect of it that was very satisfying. I think that when you think of those two together, so Christ on the cross is a good example where Christ is usually actually drawn as a serpentine figure on the cross, but you have the straight, then you have the curve which comes and softens it and makes it a, you know, and is also a kind of dying at the same time. It’s not, it’s not, it’s like there’s no going, there’s no two ways about it. It’s like there’s a kind of letting go, right, of that, of the straight, but also attached to it. It’s like, it’s weird. The cross obviously is hard to describe because there’s too many things going on in there, but I, that my intuition, so what, you know, I remember a good example, contrapposto is a good example, right, so if you have a basic, simple contrapposto that’s not too excessive, then you really get that beauty, but if you have someone standing in front of you that is just like a pillar, right, with their two feet like together and just like, I mean, it’s not a natural position, nobody stands like that, but you would feel, it would be very eerie actually to face someone that way, and so the idea is to find the contrapposto, and if you look at Christian art, there’s almost like a good, there’s a visual discussion about reining in Roman contrapposto, but not eliminating it, so if you look at Byzantine images, the usual, the Roman contrapposto, for those who don’t know, contrapposto is when you have a figure that stands and then is unbalanced, has their leg out in one way so that their body curves, if you look at a Baroque image, you’ll have extreme contrapposto, right, like kind of like that, whereas in the Roman times, it was, that’s how you would always show a figure, right, it would be like one foot out and one foot straight, and it would make the whole body curve like an S, and if you look at Renaissance, the Renaissance, which like recaptured the Roman contrapposto, there’s something kind of, there’s something almost erotic about just the, it depends how much you exaggerate it, yeah, and so like imagine a woman like putting her hip out, kind of like sticking it out, right, there’s something a bit seductive about it, and then the Byzantines kept contrapposto, so if you look at a Byzantine image, you’ll see the figures actually are not standing straight, a lot of people would say, oh the medieval, as an icon, when you say Byzantine, like a Byzantine icon, the figures aren’t standing straight in the late modern period, in like after World War II, some people started discussing medieval art and started saying, oh medieval art is erratic, it’s straight, it’s, everything is brought back to like a kind of, but it’s not true, if you look at medieval images, they do have a contrapposto, they do, they are standing off, but the question is how much, how much is enough, how much is too much, and so how do you find that curve in the body, which is not overtly erotic, but suggests enough particularity for it to be incarnate and human and beautiful? Yeah, no that’s, I mean again, that’s why what I like about Schiller’s notion is that that order is not simply eliminated or betrayed, it’s expressed, but it’s expressed in this precise, this unique way that, that, that in fact makes use of the constraints so that even the constraints become an expression of free, of the inner freedom of the free, and that, that, that sort of thing, so you know, imagine, you know, you can think of a garden, or you can, you can think of it, you know, we find certain movements of animals graceful and other, you know, think of a frog leaping through the air, it’s, I mean, there’s nothing graceful about it, you know, if you watch it in slow motion, it’s, there’s something ridiculous about it, and you see that the weight of the thing is overpowering its own ability, you know, so it’s, it’s violently reacting to it by launching itself in the air, but, but, you know, it’s off center and off balance, and just, you know, as opposed to, you know, a gazelle leaping or something, and there, or a bird flying, there you see that, that there’s a, there’s a, there’s, the bird has a weight, you know, it’s light, but it’s, it has a weight, but that very weight is what gives it the strength to move itself up, and, and, and there’s nothing, there’s nothing in it that doesn’t contribute to, so, again, nothing in it, including its constraints, including the things that, that in a way could, from another perspective be oppressive, those very things become an expression of its own inner life and reality, and we just find that beautiful to see. Because the thing that worries me when I see the, when I hear like an expression of, or how do you say, an appearance of freedom? Yeah, the freedom in appearance. Freedom in appearance. Yeah, in manifestation. Right, is that, I mean, I’m sure, I’m hoping, I’m sure you didn’t mean that, but it’s like, because we see artists that made that move, but did it in a, a kind of, you could say, a kind of classic manner. Right. Right. And so you find, I mean, yeah, to, to qualify, he doesn’t mean freedom in the sense of like arbitrary power to choose. Right. Yeah, you’re meaning freedom in the sense of that, of freedom as, as responding to the call of the good more than, than freedom as an assertion of oneself. That’s right. As in the, in the, in the art world, what you have in the 20th century is people who declare, you know, without thinking twice, that, that art for art’s sake. Yeah. And so what we want is to, we want to liberate ourselves from arts imprisonment to particular crafts or to particular ideology or whatever. So I just reread portrait of the artist as a young man. And you see, right, the narrative arc of that is that Joyce has to free himself from religion, free himself from his family, free himself from, from his nation in order to become an artist that can focus now on beauty, as if beauty expresses itself outside of these constraints and outside of these frames. Yeah. Right. Fly past those nets, he says. Yeah. No, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s a very different, I mean, that’s why you realize these, these questions about what beauty is involve, I mean, a fundamental interpretation of the, of the meaning of the world, the meaning of being, you know, it’s not just a question of taste. Yeah. The, the meaning of order. And speaking of the meaning of order, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Christopher Alexander. Yeah. He’s, he’s expresses some of these things really, I find, in a really compelling way that, you know, this, the contrast to art for art’s sake would be this notion of the integration of life and art. This is a principle you talk about in that, that one video, but, but a healthy integration where there’s, you know, there’s nothing that beautiful, that’s not useful and nothing useful that’s not beautiful. And, you know, you, you don’t have like mechanistic use on the one hand and then try to add superficially onto a completely meaningless ornamentation to, to, to sort of heal the, the violence of the, of the, you know, Of the mechanical world. Exactly. Yeah. They heal them, heal the violence. That’s a beautiful way of saying it. I think that that’s exactly the, that’s the good diagnostic of what happened in, in the 20th century is that art and it, what it did is it also made everybody ultimately alienated because the, the art that was born, the high art that was born out of the, the modern period became so abstract and so difficult that it left everybody behind. And so nobody really ended up caring. So, I mean, let’s, let’s say it like James Joyce, portion of the artists as young man is actually really fun to read. It’s beautifully written and it’s amazing, but read Finnegan’s Wake and you just want to pull your hair out at every page because it’s just, it’s just inaccessible for people. It’s just a complete, I mean, it’s, it’s dense and it’s, and it’s full of patterns and numerical symbolism and it’s all that, but it’s like, it’s impossible to read. You know, and there’s a connection between this is something I’ve been thinking about recently, the marginalization of art and, and even philosophy from the, the public square, you know, I mean, it used to be the case that the thinkers and the artists were figures of authority of a certain sort. And they spoke right at the, in the center of the, of the public square and they, what they said and what they made then gave ordering to life. There was something that, that communicated itself in terms of the public horizon, but now, you know, we have this completely abstract sense of what politics is on the one hand and the, and the public sphere is again, sort of a mechanical order that has nothing to do with human life. And then, then we have to, in a way, champion these extreme expressions of life and subjectivity on the side. And then you get this strange dialectic between the two. Yeah, where nobody is. And then the, the, the arts that are available to the public, public square are basically just like, you know, like a hit of cocaine. Like they’re just, basically like, it’s just the beat. Well, they’re just pornography. Yeah, it’s basically pornography. It’s like, it’s just a beat, you know, a beat that you dance to, or like, you know, a lit up advertisement that you look at. It’s like, it’s like everything has been reduced to immediate pleasure and to mechanistic, to mechanistic, to mechanize, kind of mechanize cold reality. So we don’t have the, you know, and that’s why, like, that’s why I tell people go to church. One of the reasons, obviously, I want people to go to church for their own spiritual life, but for their own salvation. But there’s also the idea that the church is one of the only places left in the world where you sing for a reason, right? Where you move for a reason, where you could have beauty for a reason, and that you can be inside and participate and that we all are in this dance. And it used to be that all of society had some aspect of that dance to it, but it’s broken down so much that there are few places except for maybe your home, your family, and the church where that is still accessible to us. Yeah. You know, it makes me think about, you brought up the notion of seduction before when you’re talking about the contrapposto. And it seems like, like true beauty sort of seduces you, like in the Socratic sense of seduction, like it seduces you toward the good, it’s a, it pulls you deeper into reality. But then there’s this, like, in these more pornographed forms, there’s the seduction of the art becomes a pull into the abstract. It becomes a pull away from that healing of the mechanistic wounding. Like, Yeah, but it’s always, art is always a dual, it’s in the scripture, techne art applied science, and not just in the Bible, but also in kind of Greek mythology and ancient thinking. It’s always a dual, it’s a dual thing. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not clean. It’s not just simply, there’s a healthy suspicion towards it because, and if you look at how Plato was like, you know, get rid of those artists, because they can make you think something’s beautiful even if it’s not, right? They’re tricksters, they’re propagandists. And in scripture, you can see that the applied arts are from Cain, and they bring about the flood. So there’s this very dark aspect of what they can bring, but then God is constantly saving that which has fallen. He’s constantly kind of covering the elements. So man develops technology, develops cities, and God’s like, all right, you know, and then he’s like, okay, I’ll give you a pattern for the tabernacle, you know, and then I’ll give you, then we’ll found Jerusalem, and we’ll have, so it’s like there’s this covering of the, but it’s always dual, even though, even if, and the bronze serpent is a great example because the bronze serpent, in the story of the bronze serpent, you get the two, right? It’s like God tells Moses, put up the bronze serpent, and this will become like an image that everybody can look at, and then it’ll heal the nation. And then later in the Bible, it’s like, cut it down, burn it, because it’s become an idol. The very same object. Yeah. I like how you said Plato’s concern that these artists can make something that look beautiful that isn’t. I think that formulation is really crucial because I would want to hold on to the idea that it’s not that beauty is morally ambiguous and there’s good- No, it’s art that’s morally ambiguous, but not beauty. Right. No, but that’s a really crucial point because I think people miss that. I mean, that in fact, beauty itself, and I think one of the reasons that it’s, as you say, it’s not clean, it’s not sort of obvious, is I like to say that beauty has something of an invitational character. It welcomes and opens up and invites, but that appeals to freedom on the recipient side. One has to respond properly to it, and because one has to respond properly to it, there’s built into that the possibility of betrayal, of taking it, interpreting it falsely, taking it as immediate gratification. I think there’s no such thing as impure beauty, in fact. Beauty always, even in impure cases, there’s a glimmer of something that’s true that can, in fact, lead one out of the impurity. Yeah. There’s a crazy story from the Desert Fathers of these monks that are walking down the road, and then all of a sudden this young woman, naked on a, I think she’s on a donkey or something, walking towards them, and all the monks are just diverting their eyes, don’t look at it, and this one old monk is just looking at her, and then when they go by, the other monk’s like, why were you looking at her? And we’re like, she was so beautiful. And it was just like, for him, he was beyond the desire. He was just seeing a beautiful creature of God. Because it’s always just- Well, for most of us, it’s probably best not to engage that way. But it’s just like, which side of it you’re on almost? Can the Eros that, because I think of that and the problem of the erotic, this problem of the erotic in a downward sense, like I’m trying to consume, I’m trying to have, I’m trying to take, versus Eros in a higher sense, that this is becoming a way for me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s, I mean, and it’s not that Eros is two-faced or something, but that Eros in principle is a call to what’s higher, but it’s a call that can be falsely interpreted or betrayed. I mean, I think that’s, but I mean, the interesting thing, and this is, Plato is so fascinating on this, the good- Jonathan, you were talking about how modern art doesn’t speak to people. It speaks only to experts. And then the masses, Christopher Alexander is really good on this. There’s a kind of, the masses then go along with it because the experts tell them that this stuff is beautiful, even though it makes them feel sick or anxious when they get it. That goodness, the idea of the good has a certain kind of inaccessibility and a kind of a perfection that might make it seem a transcendence, might make it seem out of reach. But there’s no human being on earth that doesn’t respond to beauty. Truth, we can ignore, goodness, we can, but everybody responds to beauty. There’s a, if you think of, to use a kind of Christological image that beauty in a way is goodness leaving its transcendence in order to enter into the very depth of the material, of the flesh, the incarnation, to the very ends and in that place able to speak and call one back up. There’s something really profound about the Christian understanding of that, I think. I think so. In the Book of Revelation, the image of the heavenly Jerusalem is one of my favorite ones to kind of understand the relationship between techne and let’s say human civilization and its relationship to God. One of the descriptions of the heavenly Jerusalem, it says that all the nations bring their glories into the city and it says that all the kings offer their glory into the city. The idea is that all these externals, they have to be offered up and that’s the way for them not to become dangerous. It’s like you said, it’s like the Eros, if the Eros is transparent and Eros pulls you through things into the presence of God, then that’s the right way to deal with it. But the problem of course is that because it offers certain pleasure, then it can seduce you to stay at the level of the appearance or to stay at the level of the first, you know. I like the way that the church fathers, not the desert father, but like the monks in the Philokalia, how they talk about say, hezikastic fathers, like this spiritual tradition in terms of, because Philokalia means the love of beauty, but then in the tech they’re saying, they say weird things like they’ll say ignore all spiritual experiences, right? It’s like if you have a vision, ignore it. If you see a miracle, ignore it, ignore everything and you think like what a weird thing to say. Like why are they doing that? And you think, are they against beatific vision? Are they against? And you’re like, well obviously not because the tradition is full of them. They’re not against it. They’re saying, it’s almost like if you ignore it, if you don’t attach yourself to it, you’ll actually have more of it. And then you’ll actually be, you’ll be gathered up higher. So it’s like, yeah, you’ll see miracles, you’ll see all that stuff, just don’t attend to them too much because then you lose the purpose of them being just a kind of pull into the higher states. Yeah. It’s the same as the monk walking down the road, right? Like if it’s more obvious to everyone that there’s some sort of shame associated with, you know, you stopping at the level of the naked woman. But if you stop at the level of, hey, I had a great vision. I had this great transcendent experience. It’s similar. You’re still doing the same thing. It’s just, it’s more acceptable. Yeah. I like this principle though, that that doesn’t mean then losing the pleasure of it. I mean, paradoxically and ironically, it’s deep in like the example that you gave from the church fathers, but in Plato too, you know, the philosopher, I wish I had the exact number. He says that the philosopher in a way compared to the one who’s seeking pleasure ends up actually having something like 529 times the pleasure. The pleasure. He does the calculation. Yeah. Precisely because he sees it in relation to its ultimate source, its origin, its first principle. Yeah. I’m always asking people in some of my talks whether who has the most pleasure, a millionaire at a banquet or a monk that’s eating bread and has fasted for three days. It’s like, it’s pretty sure that the monk is having more pleasure than the millionaire, but he’s not looking for it, right? He’s doing, he’s kind of trying to avoid it, but then it’s coming to him. Like there’s no way to avoid it. Yeah. This reminds me a little bit of Jesus’s parable of the talents, right? Because those guys, like it’s the ones that give it away, that they get more of it. It’s like, great. I got it. I got a talent or, you know, now I’ve got two talents or whatever, but every time you get it, you give it back away. Yeah. Losing your life is finding it. It’s, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s why the question of beauty in Christianity, it’s like, it’s a weird, and sometimes, how can I say this? Like I think the Orthodox, I think sometimes get it a little off because there’s something about Christianity and beauty, which is paradoxical because there’s a sense in which we’re meant to see beauty in the extreme of its ugliness. Yeah. Like we’re kind of asked, it’s almost like we’re asked to be willing to go to the end of what we consider to be pain and suffering and ugliness and all these things and to, and to, and to how, and that there’s some glory, there’s some hidden beauty in that. And obviously it’s dangerous because I don’t want people to think this is a kind of masochistic thing. I don’t think it is, but there is something about the cross, which is weird. Like it’s a terrible thing, but then it’s also, we say the life-giving cross, we say that it’s the, that Christ on the cross is creating the world, that he’s the Garden of Eden, that he’s the, that he’s a flower, like all these images that were used even in the Middle Ages of the rose on the cross or different types of images. And the same thing with martyrdom and relics and all of these things that happen in Christianity, which is this strange paradox of beauty in the least expected place or beauty in the, so that’s a, that’s a number one to integrate. The, there’s a, Benedict XVI has an address to the ministers of culture. It’s available online. It’s just a short address that he gave, but he speaks about that paradox and the Christian appropriation of the ancient sense of beauty and eros and how it acquires this paradoxical character precisely in the cross. It really is moving. You know, I don’t want to be sort of, seem obsessed with Plato here, but even- I’d expect you to be. I mean, Plato has a, has an anticipation of this. I mean, it’s amazing that he, you know, he presents Socrates himself, sort of notoriously ugly, this stuff, those Socrates, you know, as when he opens up, you know, in the symposium and you see that the, he’s like the statues that have the statues of gods inside of statues of gods. And when Socrates, you open them up, you see these glories that are, you know, it’s spellbinding. So there’s something about that, the paradox of a more radically transcendent and glorious beauty in the, in the most extreme. I think, I think precisely because of the, you know, Augustine says that, that one of the things that constitutes beauty is, is contrast. And I think we all find things like paradox striking for that reason, that, that I’m going to actually use that as a way to tie into an earlier point that we made right in the beginning of the conversation, you know, unity and difference that we might think that, that collecting different things under a unifying idea is, is the essence of beauty. And that’s, and there’s something really true about that. But there’s also something about the differentiating of unity that’s also beautiful. And I think in something like paradox and contrast, and then, you know, the ultimate example is the, the glory of the Lord, as Hans Urs von Balfazard would say in the cross. Here you have what would seem to be an, an absolute difference, an absolute difference, you know, moving all the way to nothing suddenly itself reveals itself to, to, to be the deepest unity. There’s something about that that’s, that becomes unspeakable. And it’s, and you have to avoid, you have to avoid the sadomasis. I mean, right. One can get reverse readings. It’s also because, because like if, as an artist, I think as an artist and someone who’s interested in art, it’s the kind of question you have to ask yourself, because, so let’s say, if you look at Francis Bacon, as a painter, let’s say, he’s a good example, where, you know, his most, one of his most known works is called crucifixion. And it’s like a, it’s like these broken monsters really is what’s going on in that image. And the question is, what is, so what’s the difference, right? So it’s the same, like, for example, I’ll give another example. I thought, like, I thought that Mel Gage was like, I thought that Mel Gibson’s passion was over the top. Like, I like Mel Gibson and I like his movies, but that movie, I just, I watched it. And I thought that it was indulging. It was indulging. There you go. It was indulging in violence in a way that I thought was, was not useful. But it not, for some, a lot of people had a different reaction to it, but it’s like, and so if I look for, like, late, like, kind of Spanish or like Mexican crucifixes, you see Christ, you know, his knees are laid and, you know, it’s like, he’s got, he’s just like, his whole body is just ripped apart. And it’s like, this is the crucifix in the church, right? It’s, so I, like, what’s the balance? How do we find the balance where we’re showing the scandal of the crucifixion, but we’re also trying not to indulge our fascination for something that is, you know, our dark fascinations, let’s say, for death. And it’s the same with music too, right? No, these are delicate matters and require real prudence and spiritual discernment. I mean, because there’s a drama in this, you know, it’s problematic if you simply rule certain things out. It’s problematic if you kind of automatically affirm them. There’s a real discernment, is the best word, that is essential at every moment. Yeah. Yeah, and there’s also like a shock, like there’s a sense of shock that is dangerous in the realm of beauty because it’s like the popcorn version of beauty because it creates intense experiences, but it usually fades very quickly. And so you can create, you know, it’s like watching a horror movie, right? You can create intense emotion, aesthetic, it’s intense emotions in people, but those are not, you know, they’re not very deep. They don’t transform you. Yeah, that’s the word. Yeah. Yeah, and so it’s like, it’s important, especially if we’re in a world now that we’re kind of struggling. I think a lot of the churches are struggling to figure out how to deal with the question of beauty and the question of music, the question of participation. You know, I have, weirdly enough, like I have Protestant pastors who want to meet with me and talk to me about how do we find this balance between the entertainment kind of flashy light show rock and roll culture that so many churches have fallen into. And then, yeah, sorry, I don’t want to interrupt. Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, just, I mean, there you see that’s beauty that’s being used as a kind of strategy for recruitment or proselytize, or we’re going to use this to communicate a message and that’s, you know, technology in a way. Yeah, right. There you go. We need to come back to that technology question in some way. Yeah, it’s sort of a technological use as opposed to, I would say, as opposed to something that would be like a genuine tech name. That would be an interesting way into that. Like, so what you mean by technological use is something like pure utility. Yeah, for me, it’s where you separate means from ends and you kind of perfect means as a kind of a power. It’s increase in power. Yeah, that can be then used indifferently. So it’s defined as neutral in itself and then it can be used indifferently for good or for evil as opposed to tech name was always understood as doing something useful. I mean, so it was always a means that’s appropriate to the ends that it seeks to. I’d push back a little bit on the idea that it used to be understood as completely useful. That there’s this weird tradition about, for example, the Asclepius, right? So Asclepius creates this medicine and the way he does it is that he takes blood from the right side of the gorgon. So he takes this dead gorgon and he takes blood from the right side of the gorgon. So he takes this dead gorgon and he takes blood from the right side and then out of that, he creates the medicine. And what is suggested obviously by that myth is that the blood from the left side of the gorgon is the poison. So you have the venom of the snake and then you have the pharmacons. Yeah, and so the question of the pharmacons I think was already quite, and if you read in my mind, in Plato’s, when he talks about writing, what’s the name of the dialogue? Yeah, the Phaedra. He seems to understand it, which is what Derrida kind of jumps on in his text, but he seems to understand the duality of externality, the duality of application, the problem of that. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the duality, but it seems to me that there’s a difference between, so there’s always, you know, one of the best examples too is Sophocles, I think it’s the second chorus, I believe, from the Antigone, I want to say. Heidegger made a lot of this, but this celebration of man’s ability, but it’s a celebration that very subtly, ironically, with that kind of Sophoclean tragic irony you realize there’s something also awful about it and destructive and terrible, but those things are mixed together. I mean, I think that that is always there. I mean, from the beginning with the Prometheus, you know, in a way that the arts are divine, but they’re stolen rather than divine gifts, in fact. I mean, so there’s always a kind of ambiguity. So I think that that’s always there, but for me, technology, it’s not just that it’s more ambiguous or something. I think it’s of a very, modern technology is of a very different nature. It’s actually a different kind of thing. It’s an extreme version of what Technet used to be, even though it used to be, in more ancient times, they would have been more integrated, but people could perceive through even their integration the possibility of the dangers, but now we have something like a microchip that will increase your processing power by so much for a medical machine or for a missile. It doesn’t matter. It’s just increase in power and it can be used to whatever, pointed in any direction possible. And people see that as a good though. People see just increase in power as a good. Or they say that it can be good. Right. So that’s the problem. Once we get the power, then we’ll figure out how to use it. And there’s a disorder that’s built in, but Ken, you keep wanting to jump in here. I don’t know if we’re cutting. Oh, no. Well, I kind of got distracted there because that brings us back to this whole notion of freedom. I mean, as soon as freedom takes the place of goodness as the ultimate telos, as soon as that becomes our goal and becomes defined as power to make choices, then as soon as that’s, I feel like it has to do with why you’re doing the thing. If you’re doing the thing, because it’s actually ordered to a real end, that’s really good. Right. If you’re trying to build a house, it’s actually ordered to something. And so you’re going to build a hammer that has a use in relation to something beyond it versus just building a bigger hammer just so you can have it because you never know when you might need it. But there’s even the trickery in terms of increase in power, especially now, because we still live in a kind of post-Christian world. There’s like a weird trickery that’s put up to us, which is that the technologies that are the most destructive will be the most destructive. They’re often presented to us at first as beneficial. So it’s like Elon Musk, let’s put chips in your brain and people can walk. I mean, think about it. I mean, are you going to say no to that? How can you say no to helping people who can’t walk? It’s a total Martin Bailey. And it’s the same with so many of these, especially these crazy new technologies, especially the biotechs. It’s like, oh, all this stem cell research is great because all these diseases we can cure. And it’s like, you don’t see that there’s also some very dark things coming down the line in terms of transhumanism and transformations of humans into who knows what. Well, that’s yeah. No. And I think that that problem is a profound and subtle one that requires real reflection, because I think we come to such quick judgments. But the supposed neutrality, you get the neutral technology and then you get afterwards the exhortation to use it for good ends. But we can’t help that there’s going to be some people. I mean, but the very neutrality of it is already a departure from reality. It ends up substituting. It creates, I mean, this is why I use the language of the diabolical there. It creates a kind of a substitute for an engagement with reality that then can try to justify itself by pointing to all of these discrete good uses. But in a way, there’s something really deceptive about the whole thing. Then you look at the Mennonite communities or the Amish and you look at how they do it. And it’s interesting because people always think that the Amish are these communities that they’re against technology, but they’re not actually. All they do is they take every time they’re presented with technology, they ask themselves, what effect will it have on our community? And then they integrate it or they don’t, depending on what effect it’ll have on their community. That’s an interesting approach. Obviously, on the one hand, it makes them constantly in danger of vanishing, but on the other hand, it might make them more resilient than us in the long term. When we’re all gone, the Amish will still be there. No, it is. In fact, my wife and I just took our kids to a Mennonite community a couple weeks ago to a hymn sing that they did. Yeah, these four voice. I grew up there. That was my upbringing. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Beautiful. But yeah, that was the Luddites too. They get sort of a bad rap and people misunderstand. They weren’t against technology either. They just said that technology is good in so far as it helps humanity and it’s bad when it stops doing that. It seems to me an eminently reasonable. Now, one can debate about where that line is, but it’s a reasonable judgment. It seems to me, yeah, we need to recall it. Yeah, but it’s too late now because the AI question is the one that is exposing all of this radically, which is that this famous poll that they put across the people that are developing AI and a large chunk of them believe that there’s a chance that it will destroy humanity. And it’s like, well, what? That it’ll destroy it all, just destroy humanity completely. And the question is, how is it that they’re still doing it? How do you go to work in the morning there? Because they think that it’s inevitable. And so if we don’t, if they don’t, if I don’t know what somebody else is going to write and write. Well, and this brings up the question to me always is like, it’s probably once a month that I sit and really think honestly about ditching a smartphone and going back to a flip phone. And ultimately, I haven’t done that because there’s, it would basically would disrupt my life enough that I won’t do it. But I mean, when it comes to personal application, like, I don’t know what to make of this sort of question. Like, where do we stop? Like, if I don’t, if I don’t participate with AI? Am I just jumping off the boat? You first of all, have you tried Chad GBT? I’ve done minimally. It’s amazing. Like, well, I had like, you have your own research assistant, like full time research assistant. That’s what it is. I had it. I had to analyze all the videos on my YouTube channel. And I asked it, you know, what, how, what would you talk about? You know, what would you say can Ken Lowry is doing with climbing Mount Sophia and what it gave me back was significantly more thorough and profound, I think, than, I mean, what I could have, what I could have put together in, you know, half an hour of typing. I have to say somebody sent me a chat GBT little essay on one of my books just to see what I would think of it, you know, and I was astonished, first of all, that, that it was as sophisticated. But I have to say, I quite honestly had the experience that I often have reading some of my grad school, grad student papers where you see that they’re saying things that they, they heard you say in class, and they can put them together in interesting ways, but the thing that never really got the point. No, that’s why they’re your research assistant. That’s right. Right, right, right. That’s why you don’t want it to write for you, but you use it as a research assistant. It’s quite astounding. But as I, I can see it, like, I’m not, you know, my, it’s weird because the first time I used chat GBT, it lied to me the first time. Oh, really? You don’t know that, right? I mean, it totally lied to me. And then what, like, what happened? It was, oh, yeah. So I would, my son had been using it and he said, you got to try this. I’m like, and I was being just like a grumpy old man. So I’m like, like, fine, whatever. I’ll try it. And so I just, one evening I logged into the chat GBT and I asked him if he knew about St. Christopher, because that’s obviously what I was going to ask him about. And if he knew that St. Christopher was a dog-headed man, and at first he was like, no, he’s a giant, and kind of argued with chat GBT for a while. Finally, he admitted that St. Christopher is sometimes a dog-headed man. But then I asked him, oh, I said, has anybody ever written a graphic novel about St. Christopher? And he said, yes. And I like, really interesting. And then he gave me the name of two authors and the name of a book that doesn’t exist. And so then I said, that book doesn’t exist. And he says, yes, it does. And I said, what’s the ISBN? He gives me an ISBN that doesn’t exist. I said, where can I find these? He said he could find it on Amazon, you can find it on this or that. I’m like, can you give me a link? He gives me a link that doesn’t exist. It was very weird. It’s very strange. Anyways. Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing is, yeah, I don’t think we can give up on these questions. And I think that the challenge that this poses, I mean, you know, that, Jonathan, you mentioned the sanity of going to church and having a genuine experience of some of these human realities that we don’t have elsewhere. Some that, yeah, I mean, this sounds like just sort of superficial exhortation, but, you know, somehow that has to penetrate into the shape of the world, too. And I mean, you know, that’s, I guess, the big task. Yeah. So the only things we, I think the thing we can do is really just, because there’s also a certain faith that true beauty will survive. You know, and it’s not just a, how can I say this? Obviously there are accidents, but it’s not just a kind of blank statement of faith. It’s also that people care about beautiful things. And when they decide to destroy a building, usually they’ll destroy the nice building last. They’ll destroy the ugly buildings first. And then so there’s a sense of beauty has a evolutionary advantage, right? In terms of preservation. So I think that making beautiful things and beautiful art and beautiful music is a good strategy in terms of our current situation, because ultimately I think that will survive the popcorn, like the superficial advertisement culture. Yeah. At least as an artist, that’s been my, and also like for me, it was aim high. It was like, okay, well, where’s the place where this is still true? And the answer was it’s still a church art. That’s the place where it’s actually true. It’s where all of it comes together, where you can make beautiful things that are integrated into people’s lives, integrated into, and also directed towards God and directed towards the highest things. And so it was still, it seems still possible. You know, I even, I had a good friend of mine who was like, he was more, he’s an atheist and modern person. And he said, he said, he said, you know what you’re doing is also kind of just nostalgic. It’s just nostalgia. It’s just pastiche and nostalgia. And my answer was, well, it’s not nostalgia for the person that buys an icon for their nephew that’s getting baptized. I don’t know what to tell you. It just isn’t. Like if I, if it gets, if I make a chalice for a church and there’s wine in it, it’s like, there’s no, it’s not nostalgia. You can say what you want. It’s a real, it’s a real thing. It’s really happening. It might seem retrograde to you, but it’s not nostalgia. It’s a real thing. And, and if it’s genuinely beautiful, we always experience genuine beauty as still alive. Um, if it’s simply a repetition of an old form, I mean, people sense that too. It’s not. Yeah. When it’s too, when it’s too much of a, I always say, I actually say that I think tradition without nostalgia, which is that, learn the language from the inside and then create things you can copy at the beginning. Obviously you have to start by copying. But once you’ve mastered the, the, the language, you have to be careful not to just make pastiche images. Yeah. Kierkegaard’s idea of tradition is recollection forward. That’s a great, that’s a great way of saying it. The recollection forward. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this may be a good, a good place to, to bring it, bring it to a close, but, um, any final thoughts or anything you wanted to say before we close here? For either of you. I’d say thanks. Yeah. It’d be great to have another conversation. Yeah. So hopefully, um, I, John wanted to come to this one, but he wasn’t available. So hopefully we can get another one on the books. Um, that’d be wonderful. Yeah. I’m gonna, I mean, I still need to have my conversation with John Reveke about AI because he made, he made a half prophetic, half scary, half who knows, like that video he made on AI was, was profoundly surprising and disturbing. And so I haven’t, I’ve been gathering up my, just my thoughts to talk to him about it. Uh, I would love to be in that conversation if you do it. So maybe so. Yeah. It’s, it’s definitely, it’s definitely something that he’s thought a lot about and that is worth engaging with him about it. Cause he’s definitely, he’s not a, he’s coming at it with, you know, years and years of, of thinking about these questions, but he doesn’t, definitely doesn’t come to the same conclusions I do, but it’s worth, like, I think it’d be worth exploring it.